To Combat Absolutism, Scientists Must Explain Life

I’m a scientific origins of life researcher and a psychoproctologist researching the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of absolutism. Folks don’t know what to make of that combo. What do the origins of life have to do with absolutists? It can make me sound like some woo-woo pseudoscientific blowhard wannabe posing as God, declaring the grand meaning of life and calling people I don’t like evil.

To me, origins of life and absolutism are deeply related, and here’s why. We don’t currently have an explanation for the origins of life. That creates a gap that god-playing absolutists can fill any way they want, declaring the grand meaning of life and calling people they don’t like absolutist jerks.

People would do that anyway, but lacking a scientific explanation for what we are makes it way too easy. “Science doesn’t explain us, but I can. We’re created by a higher power to do whatever I think is right. The higher power likes what I like, which proves that I’m eternally right and righteous. Anyone who disagrees with me is evil.” That sort of thing, though it doesn’t have to include a higher power than the absolutist themself.

Many scientists are so convinced that they have an explanation for life that they’ve stopped looking for one. They assume genes and natural selection explain us. Genes and evolution are crucial to understanding how life evolves, but, no, they don’t explain how life emerged from chemistry.

Genes are molecules. They’re not alive, not trying to do anything, not struggling for their own existence the way we living beings do. Natural selection is just the universal condition of nature: Entropy increases. Things fall apart. Natural selection isn’t really selecting anything. It’s a lousy name that makes it sound like God, selecting the fittest. Claiming that natural selection explains life is like saying that a mountain creates the people trying to climb it and chooses which ones get to the top.

Other scientists admit that we don’t have an explanation for life but that it’s not much of a gap in our understanding because we’ll have one soon. Once we can explain how RNA molecules replicate, which all sorts of molecules do anyway, we’ll have life, which gets ornamented with bodies since it’s good for the molecules, even though nothing is good or bad for molecules.

Most scientists rightly dismiss religious and spiritual explanations for the origins of life as fanciful myths that don’t explain anything. But that puts the burden on science to explain us, and so far they haven’t.

That may not seem like a big deal, but it is. The gap between the physical and life sciences is huge. A physicist can’t talk about molecules trying to do anything, but down the hall, biologists and psychologists can’t help but talk about living beings trying to stay alive. Why the double standard? For all that science has uncovered, we still haven’t known.

The explanatory gap between matter and mattering is like an open wound in our understanding of ourselves, a hole where absolutism festers, know-it-alls claiming they know the meaning of life and imposing it on everyone. It’ll be the death of us if we don’t watch out.

I’ve been working for 26 years with scientists on filling that gap not with supernatural or philosophical abstractions, but with continuity, a strictly physical explanation for how the simplest beings struggling for their own regeneration could emerge anywhere with nothing but chemistry. No gaps. We’ve got a hunch. It could be wrong, but it does inform my sense of what we are.

Must fundamentally we’re struggling for our existence, which Darwin himself admitted he couldn’t explain. Struggling because it’s not guaranteed. The most disappointing news from Darwinism isn’t that we descended from apes or that we don’t need God to explain our existence. It’s that there’s no surefire formula. Yoda was motivating but flat-out wrong. There is only try. The living try to stay alive It’s guesswork, work to keep ourselves working. We’ve evolved some great adaptive traits but they don’t always work. Life is iffy. A-holes pretend it isn’t—that they’ve got the surefire formula.

Plants and the like struggle for their existence without concepts or feelings. Nonhuman animals feel but, lacking language, lack the capacity to generalize abstractly. And then there’s us. We’re driven far more by feelings than by concepts. We’re prone to wishful thinking, which isn’t really thinking at all. It’s feeling with a thin overlay of self-soothing word sounds.

Cognition Essential Reads

How to Shift Your State of Mind

The Psychology of Disliked Music

With language, we can imagine so much more than can other critters, which means we worry about more, too. But language also enables us to self-idealize pretending we’ve got the formula.

It’s a simple circular argument anyone can employ: Because I’m eternally sweet, it’s my duty to cheat. Since it’s easy to beat by cheating, I beat. Beating, I’m eternally sweet. That is what I believe is really going on with dark triad personalities.

Darwin proposed his theory as the initiation of one long argument. He expected debate about what’s true and good. I would go further. Life itself is one long argument. Humanists have long accepted this. Culture evolves by trial-and-error revision. The truth isn’t set in stone, not in a sacred text, not in the heavens, not in the mind of an a-hole who claims to have found the surefire formula.

But Darwin’s theory, which depends on the creatures struggling for their own existence, remains ungrounded in physics. The gap in our understanding of us enables absolutists to proclaim their word as the last word. That will remain the case until we have a physical-chemical explanation for the guesswork organisms must do if they are to survive. Without a physical explanation, we are at greater risk of being overrun by absolutists and thus, failing to survive.

That’s why I think origins of life and psychoproctology are important coupled research topics for our times. The burden is on science to explain us.

This article as a video: