But before that I should outline my ideas on how biological organisms came to rely on visual forms of information — on how the eye was born.
The Cambrian era saw the emergence of sight. It was during that massive explosion of biodiversity, it is said, that life first came to observe its external world. The Cambrian era also saw the advent of the hunter. It was through hunting and feeding on each other that life forms diversified. The division of the sexes and sexual reproduction are also thought to be extensions of this development. According to the principle of natural selection and survival of the fittest that form the backbone of the theory of evolution, sight gave hunters a powerful advantage over their prey, therefore guaranteeing the proliferation of the genes that allow sight.
This explanation, however, is too hackneyed. Sight would undoubtedly give the hunter an advantage. At the same time, however, it would also give the hunted an advantage by making it easier to escape.
Overall, the theory of evolution seems to be correct, but there are points that call for doubt. I will go into this in more detail shortly, but once we have brains that wield language, the fundamental precepts of evolutionary theory no longer stand firm.
Now, let’s consider how one’s perceived environment changes through the gift of sight. For an animal without it — an earthworm, for example — the world is not three-dimensional but rather a surface that is knowable through skin contact. Gaining sight is an incredible leap akin to adding a further dimension. It opens the door to a new world on an order fundamentally different from emerging from the sea or learning to fly.
I conceive this miracle of a development as a mechanism in reciprocal relationship with light. Let me offer an analogy.
I once watched a movie that my daughter rented called The Poseidon Adventure. When a luxury cruise liner is capsized by an enormous wave and slowly begins to sink in this adventure story, a clergyman leads a group of people up to the now inverted base of the vessel. A rescue helicopter lands on the base of the upturned ship and waits to see if there are any survivors. The ragtag bunch that makes it through the final hoop and gets to the hull starts banging against the steel plating to alert the rescue team. The presence of survivors confirmed, the team uses a burner to cut away a circular hole in the base of the ship, providing a route to safety.
The evolution of the eye goes similarly. It wasn’t just about the brain, not simply a case of nerve endings extending from the cranium; the route to sight only opened with outside help. The acquisition of the eye was an immense feat accomplished at long last thanks to the cooperation of interior and exterior. What was outside guiding and aiding the nerve endings was the light of the sun.
Light yields information. From that perspective, I cannot help but think that the reciprocal relationship with light was also responsible for the birth of our planet’s first life forms.
Although the exact mechanisms for the development of life remain unknown, the theory that black smokers served as the wombs for primordial life is gaining traction. These form when seawater flows downwards through rifts in the earth’s crust, is heated by the magma below, and blows out as from a nozzle. The theory is that in these crevices of the world at the bottom of the sea, cells steeped in hot water began to organize themselves by chance. But did light reach there? If there was none, or only a tiny amount, then the black smoker was not fit to be the cradle of life.
So what other possible explanations are there? Let me share a hypothesis of mine. It has been my belief that interaction with sunlight was an intrinsic factor in the emergence of life, but there are two apparent contradictions in this argument.
Firstly, if it is true that life developed by chance, then one would expect to see both left- and right-spiraling DNA, but the strands all spiral towards the right. What force determined that they only spiral in one direction?
Secondly, the various species that the Earth is teeming with today are thought to have evolved from life that emerged simultaneously at a single point 500 million years after the birth of the solar system. Why has such an emergence been limited to a single point in the system’s history?
Contemplating what phenomenon, limited in time, could endow a right spiral, I thought of the disappearance of a black hole. Light and particles are released in that event. If a black hole vanished in the vicinity of our solar system 500 million years into the latter’s history, and life on earth was born in relation to the emanating light, then the point of emergence would be limited. Furthermore, since a black hole spins, it could transfer directionality to its surroundings.
The momentary brilliance of a dying black hole drove the birth of life. The power of zero. This resembles the becoming of matter via distortions in the vacuum.
The birth of life is synonymous with the birth of information. Three of the four chemical bases ATGC combine to form an amino acid, and a chain of 200 amino acids is required to form a protein that is relevant for life. That amounts to information, in the language of ATGC. Life equals information. What conveyed the information? Light, of course.
In Genesis in the Old Testament, the first words spoken by God are: “Let there be light.” God created light, and interacting with it life was born.
At this point I’d like to touch on the extinction of the dinosaurs. It might seem that I’m digressing, but that is not the case.
The sudden demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago is a major event in the history of evolution, and there are many theories as to the cause. The one currently favored: their fate was affected by the impact of a giant meteorite that altered the climate. There is apparently a large crater in the Yucatan Peninsula that dates back to this.
But we must not fall into this trap. In trying to accurately describe nature through language, there are two kinds of approaches. One is simple and beautiful and clicks immediately when presented. The other subconsciously sponges on the trends of an era, comes off the top of the head, and is mediocre and hackneyed. The Copernican heliocentric hypothesis and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity are examples of the former approach, while attributing the extinction of dinosaurs to a meteorite collision is without a doubt an instance of the latter.
The meteorite theory was first raised in the 1970s. What trends obtained then? The world was in the middle of the Cold War, when the idea of an end immediately brought to everyone’s mind images of devastation in the wake of a nuclear exchange. Powerful bombs raining down and putting an end to everything. How very simple.
Its subconscious application is the meteorite hypothesis. A meteorite may very well have fallen, but that this drove the dinosaurs into mass extinction is forced. No matter how drastic the change in climate, some specimens are bound to survive. I believe that the extinction of the dinosaurs was biological, the result of the flipping of a switch across their species. They left the stage due to some internal factor to allow mammals to prosper. A pan-species interaction with light flicked an extinction switch that had budded within the dinosaurs.
Much later in time, just around 50,000 years ago, something similar occurred. The baton passed from the hand of the Neanderthals to that of Cro-Magnon man, or Homo sapiens. At that point, both species had spread out of Africa and could be found on the European continent. Then, after a watershed around 50,000 years ago, the Neanderthals began to drift into extinction while Homo sapiens began to flourish; the two species could not interbreed even if they mated. The Neanderthals are said to have possessed larger brains than Homo sapiens. Despite living in the same environment, why did one perish and the other prosper?