Shakespeare has an unsettling habit of mixing nobility with tomfoolery, so that mad King Lear shaking his fist at a thunderstorm has no companion in the pouring rain but the poor fool who served him at court. A grinning death’s head is always around the next corner in Hamlet. Hamlet utters high-flown sentiments like “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty!” Meanwhile, the First Gravedigger (sometimes listed as First Clown) cracks jokes about how fast a corpse will decay when the ground is wet, including the corpses of great men. His jesting throws Hamlet into a morbid mood. In the end, what good are noble thoughts? he asks: “Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.”
In science, physics is Hamlet and biology is the First Gravedigger. Physics expresses itself in elegant equations while biology deals with the messiness of life and death. Physicists dissect space-time; biologists dissect flatworms and frogs.
For a long time physics wasn’t concerned with the mystery of life. Erwin Schrödinger wrote a small book titled What Is Life?, but his colleagues generally viewed it as an eccentricity, a piece of mysticism rather than science—at least not the science of relativity and quantum mechanics, which was the business Schrödinger was trained to attend to. Actually, he was trying to connect genetics with physics, but at that time, 1944, the structure of DNA was still unknown. Even after the discovery of the double helix in the following decade, physics remained aloof from biology, a situation that has changed only gradually in the last few decades.
Equations and theories, scientific data and results, are faraway things; life is with us here and now. One of the most peculiar things about being alive is that we don’t know how it happened and when it did happen. If you look at any living thing—a cold virus, T. rex, tree fern, or newborn baby—it was preceded by another living thing. Life comes out of life. Clearly this doesn’t tell us where life first began, and yet the transition from dead matter to living matter somehow occurred. In biochemistry this pivotal moment is explained by setting inorganic chemicals on one side and organic chemicals on the other. An organic chemical is defined as a chemical that appears only in living things—organisms. Salt is inorganic, meaning it is not based on carbon, for example, while the flood of proteins and enzymes manufactured by DNA is organic.
But it’s not clear that this time-honored division really helps if you want to know how life first began. The separation of organic and inorganic chemicals is valid as chemistry but not as a definition of life. Some amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, may be present on the surface of meteorites. In fact, one theory about the origin of life holds that the first spark came from such meteorites landing on Earth.
To be brutally frank, life is a major inconvenience for physics. Biology doesn’t fit into abstract equations. If you consider what the experience of life feels like, even biology may be inadequate to explain it. Life contains purpose, meaning, direction, and goals—organic chemicals do not. It isn’t tenable that chains of proteins somehow looked around and learned to do the things associated with living organisms. That’s like saying that stones in a New England field looked around and decided to become a Yankee farmer’s fence. And even if salt is “dead,” life cannot exist without its participation—every cell in the body contains salt as a necessary chemical ingredient.
The fact that life comes from life implies that living things want to keep going. Unless extinction becomes total, evolution is apparently an unstoppable force, but why? Eons ago—to be precise, some 66 million years ago—we are told, a giant meteor struck Earth and wiped out all the dinosaurs, probably because the collision created so much dust in the atmosphere that sunlight was blocked and the planet became too cold for dinosaurs to survive, or else because plant life withered away and the entire food chain collapsed, making the survival of very large creatures impossible. From this mass extinction, the creatures that survived, tiny and insignificant as they were, didn’t remain tiny and insignificant. The age of the mammals became possible. A new blossoming took hold, and the post-dinosaur world now looks far richer and more diverse than what came before.
The surge of life is both obvious and mystifying. The blue-green algae that form on the surface of ponds haven’t evolved for hundreds of millions of years; neither have sharks, plankton, horseshoe crabs, dragonflies, or a host of other life-forms that lived alongside the dinosaurs. What causes some creatures to stay put while others gallop ahead on the evolutionary track, as pre-hominids did, creating Homo sapiens in record time, a matter of 2 or 3 million years instead of tens or hundreds of millions?
It’s an axiom in science that the relevant questions are about “how,” not “why.” We want to know how electricity works, not why people want bigger flat-screen televisions. But the evolution of life keeps bringing up issues of why. Why did moles abandon the light to live underground? Why do pandas eat only bamboo leaves? Why do people want children? Some kind of purpose and meaning had to enter the picture. Or did a conscious universe contain the seeds of purpose and meaning since the beginning? As matters stand, such speculation is met with considerable resistance by the scientific community. The standard view holds that the universe has no purpose or meaning. So before offering a new model for how life began, we must dismantle conventional thinking first. In a conscious universe, everything is alive already. The observation that life comes from life turns out to be a cosmic truth.
GRASPING THE MYSTERY
The chemicals in the human body are the reason the body is alive. At the head of all organic chemicals is one, DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), which contains the code of life. Yet if you stand back, this seems like an awkward, perhaps infeasible, way to unravel the mystery of where life began. Carbon, sulfur, salt, and water are supposedly dead, while at the same time being totally necessary to life, so why should organic chemicals be considered privileged?
What any living thing does, whether it’s a microbe, butterfly, elephant, or palm tree, isn’t the same as what it’s made of. No shuffling around of chemicals will cause a piano to write a piece of music. Like the human body, the wood that encases a piano is composed entirely of organic chemicals, primarily cellulose. Nothing about cellulose explains the music of the Beatles, or any other. Likewise, jiggling around the chemistry of the human body doesn’t explain any living activity a person performs. Genetics would seem to be on wobbly ground.
You might make a special plea for the chemicals in the human body as opposed to the lifeless chemicals in seawater and a piece of wood, but there will always be a hidden fallacy, a weak link that snaps. One way to illustrate this is through an aspect of every living cell known as nanomachines, microscopic entities that function like production plants to manufacture the chemicals a cell needs in order to survive and multiply.
Our cells don’t need to reinvent the wheel. DNA isn’t made from scratch every time a new cell is created. Instead, DNA splits itself in half in order to form a mirror image of itself, and that becomes the genetic material for a new cell. (How this act of self-replication comes about has no explanation, but we’ll leave this mystery aside.) The cell doesn’t want to make other chemicals from scratch, either. Evolution has led to a host of fixed machines that persist intact during the life of a cell. They are like coal and steel plants that never close down or get dismantled no matter how much change occurs in the city around them. A particular zone in the cell, known as the mitochondrion, which provides the energy for the cell, is so stable a nanomachine that it gets passed on unchanged generation after generation. You inherited your mitochondrial DNA from your mother, and she from her mother, as far back as human evolution can be traced. In one form or other, the mitochondrion has been stable in every living cell as its energy factory. The traffic of air and food inside a cell is constantly swirling and changing, but nanomachines are immune to this traffic. In fact, they guide it in many ways.
THE MACHINERY OF LIFE?
If we want to get at the very beginning of life, nanomachines sit at the very heart of the mystery. But first, like Alice, we have to go through the looking-glass into a world where the tiniest things, atoms and molecules, loom large. They are in control of reality at the microscopic level. Whatever happens in nature, whether in the center of a supernova, the gas clouds of deep space, or a living cell, is happening through the interaction of atoms and molecules. Nothing else is germane to how life began in material terms. If atoms and molecules cannot accomplish the job on their own, it can’t be done. This is what current biology holds. For the moment we’ll exclude quanta, although we’ll return to them later.
Atoms interact with each other almost instantaneously. You may have heard of chemicals known as free radicals that exist in the human body, being involved in many processes both destructive and constructive. Free radicals therefore are double-edged swords; they are associated with aging and inflammation, for example, yet at the same time they are necessary for healing wounds. The basic thing that free radicals do is quite simple, however—they steal electrons from other atoms and molecules. Their own count of electrons is unstable—because of exposure to radiation, smoking, and other environmental factors or from the body’s own natural processes. The immune system creates free radicals to steal electrons from invading bacteria and viruses as a way of neutralizing them. The most common atom involved in electron stealing is oxygen. When its electron count becomes unstable, oxygen latches on to the nearest electron it can steal. Therefore, free radicals are highly reactive and usually very short-lived.
For living organisms and their cells, this is a life-or-death matter. It boils down to the paradox that life requires stability and instability at the same time. Life also requires that vastly different timescales, from nanoseconds to millions of years, somehow be tied together—a cell operates in thousandths of a second but took tens of millions of years to evolve.
The meshing of opposites that makes life possible isn’t theoretical. Inside a cell, some atoms and molecules must be freed up to do various jobs by bonding with other atoms and molecules, yet, having done their job, stable substances must persist without ever changing. But which atom goes where? They don’t come with address labels. To compound the problem, some of the most important organic chemicals, chiefly chlorophyll in plants and hemoglobin in red-blooded animals, carry the tricky balance of stability versus instability to amazing extremes.
Hemoglobin sits inside a red blood cell, constituting 96 percent of the cell’s dry weight; its function is to pick up oxygen and transport it through the bloodstream to every cell in the body. Blood gains its red color from the iron in hemoglobin, which turns red after it picks up an oxygen atom, exactly as iron turns reddish when it rusts (and for the same reason). When the oxygen atoms reach their destination and are released, the red color fades, which is why blood in your veins is bluish. Venous blood is on the return journey to the lungs, where it will start the process of oxygen transport all over again. The ability of hemoglobin to carry oxygen is seventy times greater than if the oxygen were simply dissolved in the blood. (All vertebrates contain hemoglobin except fish, who pick up oxygen from water through their gills instead of breathing air and therefore employ a different process.)
As a molecule, hemoglobin is a miracle of construction. Since we’ve gone through the looking-glass, let’s imagine walking into the hemoglobin molecule as if entering a vaulted building like a greenhouse with spidery chains of smaller molecules forming the girders and beams. At first it would be hard to even see the iron atoms that are the whole reason for hemoglobin’s existence. Ribbons of proteins form helixes, and other chemicals link the helixes, functioning like welded bolts. With an eye for pattern, we discern that the protein chains hold a specific shape. There are subunits within the units or proteins, each bonded to the only thing that isn’t a protein, the iron atoms formed into hemes—these are rings of proteins encircling the iron. In structural terms there are also specific folds and pockets that need to be in place.
Think of rich people living in huge mansions that rationally speaking are a waste of space for one or two people to rattle around in. The hemoglobin molecule is built from 10,000 atoms, creating a vast space that exists so that exactly four iron atoms can pick up four oxygen atoms for transport. These 10,000 atoms aren’t some kind of luxurious waste, however; they are recombinations of simpler proteins also necessary for the life of cells. Besides containing hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and sulfur, the structure of hemoglobin contains oxygen. So the actual task that faced inorganic matter billions of years ago on planet Earth was as follows:
Oxygen had to be set free into the atmosphere without getting gobbled up by greedy atoms and molecules around it.
At the same time, some of the oxygen had to be gobbled up to form complex organic chemicals.
Those organic chemicals had to be structured into proteins, of which hemoglobin is one of the most complex.
Hemoglobin had to be arranged internally so that it encased four iron atoms, which are absent from hundreds of other proteins, including those that resemble hemoglobin in their working parts.
The iron atoms couldn’t be inertly encased, like locking diamonds up in a safety deposit box. The iron had to be charged (as a positive ion) so that it could pick up oxygen atoms. But it wasn’t permitted to steal any of the oxygen already being used to build proteins.
Finally, the machinery necessary for constructing all of the above organic chemicals had to remember how to do it the next time and the next and the next, while other nanomachines sitting nearby in the cell had to remember hundreds of different chemical processes without interfering with the machine that makes hemoglobin. Meanwhile, in the nucleus of the cell, DNA has to remember—and put into motion with precise timing—the whole enterprise.
No matter how you cut it, this is a lot to ask of atoms, whose natural behavior is to bond instantaneously to the atom next door and stay that way. And this natural behavior hasn’t gone out of fashion; the countless sextillions of atoms in stars, nebulae, and galaxies are acting as they always have. So are the atoms contained in the solar system, the sun, and our planet—aside from the atoms in living creatures. Those atoms manage the trick of behaving naturally while at the same time pursuing a creative sideline, namely, life.
As animal life was humming along creating hemoglobin, natural processes on the vegetable side of the operation created chlorophyll, which sustains plant life along a different route, photosynthesis. We won’t conduct a tour of the chlorophyll molecule except to say that it consists of 137 atoms, whose sole purpose is to encase one atom of magnesium rather than the iron in hemoglobin. This ionized magnesium atom, when it comes into contact with sunlight, allows carbon and water to form a very simple carbohydrate. How photons of light from the sun can create this new product opens up new mysteries, but once the simplest carbohydrate molecule was generated by plant leaves, an evolutionary breakthrough was made. The machinery that manufactures chlorophyll took a separate track from the machinery that manufactures hemoglobin, which is why cows eat grass instead of being grass.
(Note: In photosynthesis, chlorophyll only needs the carbon atom in carbon dioxide, releasing the oxygen atom into the air. You may say, aha, that’s where the free oxygen comes from that isn’t stolen by other atoms. But unfortunately, chlorophyll needs a cell to live inside, and that cell required free oxygen for its construction before chlorophyll could start to operate.)
Now we have a context for asking the right question. The mystery of how life first began comes down to the transition from “lifeless” chemical reactions to “living” ones. Is life simply a sideline of universal chemical behavior throughout creation? Any answer will also have to include why only some atoms and molecules engage in this sideline while the rest continue on their merry way.
THE JOURNEY FROM SMALL TO NOTHING AT ALL
It turns out that getting around “life comes from life” is no easy feat. Absolute beginnings don’t seem to exist. But the urge to go smaller and smaller is irresistible to scientists. The oldest living things were microscopic in size, much smaller than cells, which didn’t evolve until hundreds of millions of years later. The most recent finds indicate that 3.5 billion years ago, only a billion years after Earth was formed, complex microbial life had already taken hold. There may be fossils of bacteria detectable in very old rocks, as some microbiologists believe. But every time one is discovered and dated, it gets challenged. It’s extremely difficult to know if you’re looking at a fossil or the traces of a crystal.
Perhaps the secret lies at a level even smaller than bacteria and viruses, so we could knock on the door of molecular biology, the field that has revealed everything we covered about hemoglobin and chlorophyll. The scientist who answers the door would only shake his head if we ask where life came from. “The organic chemicals I study already exist in living things,” he says. “No one knows where they originated. Chemicals don’t leave fossils.”
We could remind him that evidence of amino acids has been found on meteorites. Other people speculate that life may have existed on Mars before it evolved here on Earth. If a big enough asteroid hit Mars, it could have blown chunks of rocks into space, and if one of those arrived on Earth and the life sticking to it survived the journey through outer space, maybe that’s how organic chemicals began here.
Our molecular biologist offers a dismissive remark as he shuts the door. “These kinds of speculations are closer to science fiction than science. They have no evidence to back them up. Sorry.”
And so it goes, like a bad dream in which an endless corridor leads to one door after another, endlessly. No matter how small you reduce the problem, there is always a smaller level, until the whole thing—matter, energy, time, and space—vanishes into the quantum vacuum and leaves us with a very frustrating situation, because there has to be an answer—after all, life is here, all around us. The journey from living things that takes us to nothing must be reversible. “Life comes from life” doesn’t let us off the hook for explaining how, to begin with, life entered the picture.
In a curious and very clever way, one of the originators of the multiverse, physicist Andrei Linde, uses nothing to show why human life must have come about. When asked about the most important recent discovery in physics, Linde picked “vacuum energy.” This is the finding that empty space contains a very tiny amount of energy. We’ve touched upon this fact, but Linde works it into the reason for life on Earth.
At first glance the amount of vacuum energy looks quite trivial. “Each cubic centimeter of empty interstellar space contains about 10-29 grams of invisible matter, or, equivalently, vacuum energy,” Linde points out. In other words, invisible matter and vacuum energy are fairly comparable. “This is almost nothing, 29 orders of magnitude smaller than the mass of matter in a cubic centimeter of water, 5 orders of magnitude smaller than the proton….If the whole Earth would be made of such matter, it would weigh less than a gram.”
The importance of vacuum energy, tiny as it is, was vast. The balance between the energy in empty space and the invisible matter in empty space gave us the universe we inhabit. Too much of one or the other, and the universe would either have collapsed upon itself soon after the big bang or would have flown apart into random atoms that never gathered into stars and galaxies. Here is where Linde finds the key to life on Earth.
Vacuum energy isn’t constant, he believes. As the universe expands, the density of matter will thin out as galaxies fly farther and farther apart. As this happens, the density of vacuum energy will also change. Somehow, human beings happen to live at the perfect point of balance—and we must live there. We sprang up—life sprang up—at a place that has to exist. Why? Because as vacuum energy is tipping the scales one way or the other, all possible values come about. One might imagine a family’s home movies of the kids growing up. Most of the movies got lost accidentally, but there’s footage of one baby being born and then the same child at age twelve. Even with missing footage, it must be true that every stage of growth between one day and twelve years existed.
Linde’s origins story for life on Earth is the best that anyone has to offer, he says, and the story takes an optimistic turn. “According to this scenario, all [vacuums] of our type are not stable, but metastable. This means that, in a distant future, our vacuum is going to decay, destroying life as we know it in our part of the universe, while re-creating it over and over again in other parts of the world.”
Sadly, there’s a fly in the ointment. “Metastable” means that areas of instability get canceled out if you stand far enough back. The carbon inside a dying person’s body is just as stable as the carbon in the body of a newborn baby. Standing back, nothing counts that happened between birth and death. That’s fine for chemistry class but useless in real life. The vacuum state is stable as galaxies are born and die, or as the human race emerges and then meets extinction. This says nothing about where life came from, only that the stage was set for it. Linde does an elegant job of setting the stage—perhaps the most elegant job anyone has ever done so far—but he doesn’t take us from nothing to the origin of life.
ARE QUANTA ALIVE?
The multiverse hasn’t really solved the mystery of life, and there’s a better clue, which relates to ordinary energy, like heat and light, rather than the exotic species of vacuum energy. The behavior of ordinary energy is to even out, so when energy starts to clump up, it immediately tries to escape the clump and reach a flat state. That’s why a house where the furnace goes out in winter gets colder and colder until it’s the same temperature inside and outside. The heat evened out.
This dissipation of energy is known as entropy, and all life forms resist it. Life consists of energy clumps that do not even out until the moment of death. When you wait for the bus in winter, unlike a house where the furnace burned out, your body remains warm. This isn’t because you are well insulated by wearing a thick coat against the cold. Instead, your body extracts heat energy from food and stores it at a constant temperature, around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Every schoolchild is taught this fact, but if we knew how organisms first hit upon the trick of defying entropy, that might be why life exists in the first place.
Almost all the free energy available for life on our planet comes from photosynthesis. Besides needing their own supply of energy to grow, plants are at the bottom of the food chain for all animal life on land. When sunlight hits cells that contain chlorophyll, the energy in the sunlight is “harvested,” almost instantaneously being passed along for chemical processing into proteins and other organic products. This energy transfer occurs almost instantaneously and with 100 percent efficiency. No energy is wasted as heat. By comparison, if you go out for a morning run, your body’s efficiency at burning fuel leads to a lot of excess heat as you sweat and your skin gets warm; there is also much chemical waste that must be carried away from your muscles in the bloodstream.
Chemistry couldn’t explain the near-perfect precision of photosynthesis. In 2007 a breakthrough was made at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory by Gregory Engel, Graham Fleming, and colleagues, who came up with a quantum-mechanical explanation. We’ve already covered that photons can behave like either waves or particles. The instant a photon makes contact with the electrons orbiting in an atom, the wave “collapses” into a particle. This should lead to a lot of inefficiency in photosynthesis. Like shooting darts at a board, there will be a lot of misses before the bull’s-eye is hit. But the Berkeley team discovered something quite unique: in photosynthesis sunlight retains its wave-like state long enough to sample the whole range of possible targets while simultaneously “choosing” which one is the most efficient to connect with. By looking down all the possible energy pathways on offer, the light won’t waste energy picking any but the most efficient ones.
The details of the Berkeley findings are complex, centering on long-term quantum coherence, which means the ability of the wave to remain a wave without collapsing into a particle. The mechanism involves matching the resonance of both the light and the molecules receiving its energy. Think of two tuning forks vibrating exactly alike; this is known as harmonic resonance. At the quantum level, there is a similar harmony between the oscillations of certain frequencies of sunlight and the oscillations that the receiving cells are tuned to.
Quantum effects are known to exist in other key places where micro meets macro. Hearing is stimulated in the inner ear by oscillations that are quantum in scale, being smaller than a nanometer (i.e., a billionth of a meter). The nervous systems of some fish are sensitive to very small electric fields, and our own nervous system generates very tiny electromagnetic effects. The exchange of potassium and sodium ions across the membrane of each brain cell gives rise to the electrical signals transmitted by the cell. An entire new theory posits that living things are embedded in a “biofield” that originates at the electromagnetic level or perhaps at an even subtler quantum level, yet to be explored. As you can see, quantum biology has a real future. The breakthrough with photosynthesis was a turning point.
Yet as intriguing as all of these discoveries are, declaring that quanta are alive won’t tell us how they acquired life. The snake just winds up biting its tail again. If human beings are alive because quanta behave in a totally lifelike way (i.e., making choices, balancing stability and spontaneity, efficiently harvesting energy, and so on), all we’ve proved is that life comes from life. This is something we already knew.
Quantum effects in biology are important, nevertheless, because they introduce behavior that isn’t predetermined the way oxygen atoms are when reacting with other atoms. A word like choice implies that determinism has been loosened up a bit. But is this enough? As green leaves flutter in the trees, sunlight is used to build a carbohydrate thanks to a quantum decision, yet this isn’t enough to tell us about the decisions being made up the line, where a single liver cell performs dozens of processes in coordinated fashion with trillions of other cells. In building a house, knowing how to mortar each brick is important, but it’s not the same as designing and constructing the whole house.
GETTING FROM “HOW” TO “WHY”
With science stymied to explain how life originated, maybe we’ve been asking the wrong question. If someone throws a brick through your window at midnight, you can’t see who did it in the dark. But that’s secondary to asking why they did it. Clearly our lives have purpose, while nature, we are told, has no purpose—it just is. Being without purpose brings no sleepless night to quarks, atoms, stars, and galaxies. Why go off on a tangent and create living organisms that are driven by food, mating, and other reasons to be alive?
We believe that the absence of purpose is inconceivable. As long as you are human, A leads to B for a reason. There is no other way to use the brain. Without purpose, no events exist, at least not as perceived through a human nervous system. Let’s say that you’ve been marooned on a desert island for sixty years. One day out of the sky a package parachutes to earth, and when you open it, there are two objects inside, a smartphone and a desktop computer. Both run on batteries. It wouldn’t take you long to figure out that the smartphone, even though it looks nothing like the telephones you knew from the 1960s, works as a telephone. Because you know why it exists, you have a fairly easy path to using it. You wouldn’t need to know how the smartphone worked once you made the connection between punching in numbers and hearing a voice answer at the other end.
But the computer is another story, because in the world you left behind around 1965, computers were in their infancy, and nothing about a desktop computer looks like the massive IBM mainframes you saw on television. Fiddling around, you would need hundreds of hours to figure out by hit and miss what you’re dealing with. This strange machine isn’t the same as a typewriter or a television, even though it has both a keyboard and a screen. Let’s say you are mechanically inclined, and you are able to open up the inner workings of the computer. Inside you see a wealth of parts that make no sense to you. Is it conceivable that on your own you could grasp how a microchip works? Even if you did, would that information tell you how to run the computer’s software?
The answer is most likely to be no on all counts. Unless you know why a computer exists, the same way you know why a telephone exists, taking apart the machinery won’t get you from how to why. Many airline passengers don’t know how an airplane manages to fly, but they get on board because they need to travel somewhere; the why of the airplane is enough. A plane exists to take you places faster than a car or train. So why does life exist? It certainly doesn’t need to. All of the chemical components and quantum processes that interact to create life were sufficient on their own already.
Like Frankenstein’s monster being jolted with electricity from a lightning storm, it would be very helpful if some basic physical trigger—the spark of life—automatically made life happen. But no such trigger exists. Looking out over the vast panorama of living organisms, we are stuck with the undeniable fact that life always comes from life, not from dead matter. Even in laboratories where new forms of bacteria are being engineered, so-called artificial life is still a recombination of DNA being sliced and diced. (If the manufacturer wants to design a specific micro-organism that feeds on petroleum, which would be very useful in cleaning up oil spills at sea, devising this new life-form has a chance of success only by working from preexisting organisms that feed off oil in some form. Without a goal in mind, tinkering around with DNA basically goes nowhere.)
Nature, however, wasn’t so lucky. It had to build living organisms blindly, without knowing in advance what needed to be built. Nature wouldn’t even know if it made a mistake along the way, because unless you know where you’re going, no choice is right or wrong.
Billions of years ago, oxygen atoms had no inkling that life was around the bend. No one told them that sunlight was going to be harvested, or that they’d be necessary in organic chemistry. Life brought about huge adaptations on our planet, and yet oxygen atoms don’t adapt. Most scientists would shrug their shoulders and insist that blind nature created life through automatic, deterministic processes. The bonding of atoms leads to simple molecules; the bonding of simple molecules leads to more complex molecules; when these molecules are complex enough, life appears. As far as mainstream science is concerned, this wholly unsatisfactory story is basically all there is.
To arrive at a better story, we must explain why life was needed in a system—planet Earth—that was perfectly sufficient without it. Knowing the how isn’t useless; we’re not claiming that. But imagine that you want to buy a house. You go to the bank, and the loan officer presents you with a stack of papers to fill out. He explains that each piece of paper is necessary. You can’t skip any, and if your application is found wanting at any step of the way, the deal collapses. Millions of people have gritted their teeth and filled out every piece of paper for one and only one reason: they want a house. Having a goal in mind, they are willing to endure the necessary steps to get there.
Nature had to go through thousands of linked steps in order to produce living organisms. Do we really buy the story that this happened without a goal? It’s as if a customer came into the bank, filled out dozens of forms at random, and one day was told, “You own a house. We know you didn’t come in for one, and you had no idea what those pieces of paper were for.”
Now we know what is lacking if we want to understand where life came from. Without a why, the whole project is too incredible ever to happen. Knowing that life is the goal, rather than having to rely on random change, would make everything a thousand times easier to explain. But suddenly a new mystery has opened up. If life was part of the cosmos from the start, what about mind? At the instant of the big bang, was the human mind inevitable? The reason we are forced to ask it is simple. Unless the universe is mindful, it’s impossible to create mind out of a mindless creation. As Sherlock Holmes liked to remind Watson, once you’ve eliminated every other possible solution, the one that remains must be true. In this case, a universe that is thinking all the time sounds incredible, but every other answer, as we will see, turns out to be wrong.