In evolutionary explanations for humanity, ethics and morality, it is inevitable that inhumane, unethical and immoral individuals will occasionally develop in much the same way that individuals will be born with physical genetic abnormalities. It is an inevitable consequence of the way that evolution proceeds. No human personality behaviour has yet been discovered that is entirely due to genes, so genetic make-up should not be used as an excuse to justify antisocial behaviour.
A priest once told me, as I was pondering my faith as a teenager, that God worked in mysterious ways when I asked him why suffering and evil existed. I didn’t buy it, and as I read around evolution, I realized that it worked in understandable ways. Suffering and evil, although unpleasant, are an inevitable feature of our chance existence. My personal view is we should do what we can to help people who live with debilitating genetic mutations, but we shouldn’t tie ourselves in knots trying to understand why these people exist. And of course, their lives can be as fulfilling as those of people who developed more typically.
It does appear that religion has moved on over the last few decades. When I asked a vicar friend whether an evil Neanderthal would have gone to hell, he said he didn’t think hell existed, and he was even a bit vague on the definition of evil. He was also adamant that he didn’t believe in a god of the gaps. If I am honest, I left being a little bewildered by what he did believe in, but he did acknowledge that some of his congregation did believe in a god of the gaps. It is a concept I struggle with.
The ‘god of the gaps’ argument states that science has made great progress but hasn’t been able to answer all questions concerning our existence. I agree with the bit about science. There are some scientific hypotheses, such as the Many Worlds theory, that experiments may never be able to test. However, the gaps have been getting smaller. Deity advocates used to argue that something as complex as the human eye could never evolve, but through careful study of how the eye develops, and of more primitive eyes in other species, biologists have been able to describe the evolution of complex eyes from much simpler light-sensing cells. The human-eye-is-too-complex-to-have-evolved argument has been discredited, and one of god’s gaps was bridged.
Current god-of-the-gaps advocates choose to focus on traits like the love of art, music or literature, or feelings of love and empathy, or even the feeling of being special. But it is a risky game. Once the ability to see, hear, smell, taste and touch evolved, life was able to avoid things that could cause damage while seeking out things that helped it thrive. In the presence of danger, life evolved flight-or-fight hormones such as adrenalin to help it escape, while chemicals associated with well-being such as endorphins attracted it to safe havens. It is these chemicals that make danger feel bad and safety feel good. These feelings are expressed in species with even a small degree of sentience, including shrimp and potentially even flies.
As our ancestors evolved to communicate more effectively, language and art developed too. Homo erectus may have had language, and Neanderthals certainly did, so our distant ancestors may have sat round fires at night describing where food had been found that day, or where dangerous animals had been seen, or how they had avoided death through deeds of derring-do, and the path was laid for story-telling. Adding a cadence to oft-told stories proved a great aide-memoire, and the first music was produced. Our ancestors, and Neanderthals, also created rock art. Recent research has shown how markings around pictures of animals represented a calendar, explaining when migratory beasts were present in the locality providing a source of food. Some of the earliest art had meaning, and being able to appreciate it would have offered a survival advantage, as it provides cues as to when to be in a particular area. Although an appreciation of Picasso or Rodin does not provide any individuals any evolutionary advantage these days (unless of course you met your partner in an art museum), the roots of our love of the arts may well have done.
As scientists research to fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge it is inevitable that there will be some speculation. That is how hypotheses are posed, and is an early step in any scientific endeavour to gain understanding. As we learn more about the ways our ancestors lived, and when language evolved, the existence of the phenotypic traits that are currently argued to be evidence of gaps will be bridged. That will not persuade many to stop believing in deities. Some people will always believe in gods, I won’t change their minds, but that shouldn’t lead them to dismiss science. There will always be individuals who feel special and that their existence on our planet has been given a purpose by a higher power. My advice to them is to not make that purpose trying to undermine science, as it is constructed on very strong bedrock and it has changed for ever our world and our understanding of why and how it came to be here.
That application of science has created an astonishing road map of the history of the first 13.77 billion years of the universe, and this road map is humanity’s greatest achievement. There is still a lot to learn, particularly in the domains of biology and consciousness, with advances being published every day. Technological advances also mean we can conduct studies on scales only dreamed of by researchers of yesteryear. In mid-2022 the James Webb Space Telescope sent back photos of galaxies that formed 200 million years after the Big Bang. The light left these galaxies over 13.5 billion years ago and has been travelling at 299,792,458 metres per second since. Astronomers are gazing back at the very early universe, and the photographs from the world’s most powerful space telescope will allow scientists to refine our understanding of the universe from the first days it became transparent.
At the other extreme, physicists are planning future particle colliders. One group proposes to construct a collider with a tunnel that is nearly four times longer than the 27-kilometre tunnel at the Large Hadron Collider that could create energies seven times greater than those produced by the LHC. Such energies would refine our understanding of the early universe and how matter formed and, in time, we may even detect properties of dark matter, and possibly dark energy. I suspect we are never going to be able to produce energies to create new universes, which is probably just as well, as where would we put them?
Observations of other star systems are also helping astronomers estimate how common Earth-like planets and gas giants are, and even what their atmospheres look like. The technology is still limited to studying star systems relatively close to Earth. At the time of writing, the most distant exoplanet is a gas giant called OGLE-2014-BLG-0124L,13,000 light years away, less than half the distance to the centre of the galaxy. Although astronomers have yet to detect a planet with an atmosphere like that on Earth that would be a clear signature of extraterrestrial life, this lack of discovery is not surprising given the first exoplanet was discovered only in 1992, and only a tiny fraction of star systems have been examined. There are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, yet scientists have looked for planets around less than 4,000, while the study of atmospheres around these planets has been conducted on many fewer.
The discovery of life on planets other than Earth would arguably be science’s greatest achievement. Nonetheless, discovering life is not straightforward. An oxygenated atmosphere would probably suggest life, but a paper published in 2021 reported a model that showed chemical processes independent of life could result in an oxygen-rich atmosphere on water worlds. We may need another way to detect life on other planets. A number of other remotely detectable chemical signatures of life have been proposed, but it is also possible that inorganic chemistry could also produce such molecules.
The discovery of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus demonstrates the challenge of detecting life on other planets. Phosphine is a byproduct of anaerobic respiration of some organisms on Earth, and it is difficult to make without life. Small amounts can be created by volcanic activity and weathering of some rocks, but the amount found in Venus’s high atmosphere in 2021 hinted at life. The scientists who made this discovery were honest about their findings, but some of the media got overexcited. Reanalysis of the data using methods that corrected for potential sources of error suggested that concentrations of phosphine were lower than originally reported, suggesting a volcanic origin may be possible after all. Although unlikely, we cannot rule out microorganisms living in Venus’s atmosphere and are unlikely to be able to provide a definitive answer until we send spacecrafts to collect atmospheric samples. Indeed, the best way to detect life on other planets will be to visit them. We have sent people to the moon, and ground rovers to the moon and Mars, but the exploration of other planets is still in its infancy. Our best bet on finding life on other planets is discovering signs of either extant or extinct microorganisms on Mars, but we have only scratched the surface – literally – in our search. Proving the absence of life is potentially harder than proving its presence.