Power in the Blood: Interrelating Philosophy, Faith, and Science

By Richard Porter

Power in the Blood (revised version) is an adventure in ideas that explores many interrelated aspects of philosophy, faith and science in order to highlight the true dimensions of human nature and of the Magnum Mysterium (thus called in mediaeval times) in which we are embodied and imbedded. Those dimensions of body and soul, of science and spirit, are revealed by a nonreductive philosophy of broader reach than what any gospel of godless oblivion as the ultimate arbiter of human fate would have us to believe.

Power in the Blood is a metaphor referring in part to the transformative mysteries of Nature, especially shown in life science of whose strangest marvels, many gleaned from sources rare and obscure, plentiful examples are offered. These biological puzzlements tend to support rather than contradict a faith (as the book seeks to explain) that our full human nature has not only sprang from abyssal depths of evolutionary time, but also flowers in Eternity.

There are many multi-associative ideas, such as the subjective/objective dichotomy, that Power in the Blood examines on a journey whose pursuit may encourage readers to entertain a deeper measure of existential meaning in all its aspects, real and ideal, objective and subjective. And that measure may also urge their concluding, for example, that consciousness is not simply a magic trick of blindly impersonal physics. To affirm such concepts, that surely favor better than their opposites the long-term continuance of our self endangered species, provided one motive to construct the most promising and least prejudicial world view, enlisting philosophy, faith and science in a trinity of mutual support, that for the author seemed humanly possible.

An enriching, immersive experience for anyone interested in exploring the foundation of life.

Kirkus Reviews.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491725559

Book preview

1. TALKING POINTS

In the vast land that extends from gray, forbidding seas of quantum physics and relativity, towards lofty ranges of the psycho-spiritual enigma of consciousness, there dwells biology and its key organizing principle that is called evolution, and that opens more sweeping and colorful vistas on the world and human nature than any other science. For what philosophical resonance might be sought in physics is muted by the bafflement of questions as to the ultimate nature of substance and of time and space, questions that present the stark austerity of a virtual nothing that is something, or vice-versa* And all explanatory pursuit of consciousness is fated to be caught by the gravity of a lonely star that revolves around its axis of the Vedic riddle, how can the knower be known? But the issue of how and from what beginnings the kingdoms of Life have uncoiled like a serpent from obscurest depths of geologic time, affords an intimidating yet instructive challenge not rightly dismissed on religious grounds, nor trivialized by simplistically reductive theories, without committing intellectual dishonesty—an evasion which makes perfect psychological sense in the face of overwhelming odds.

For those unfavorable chances are that the same challenge cannot be accepted with any better hope of fully comprehending the subject or even what it actually constitutes, than in quantum physics where science still struggles to answer key questions for assessing the true nature of quantum reality.¹ Nonetheless, those issues both small and large, that obsess biology and evolution have a manifold philosophical significance whose balanced assessment can only end by expanding, not diminishing, our view of human nature and its

*Although not only is interstellar and all of space not really empty because it contains both energy and every property required to support the visible reality of stars, planets, and the biosphere, but the no-thing-ness that is called in Sanskrit sunyatta or in Tibetan, tongpad³ is rather than just a bleakly alienating vacuum, an inviting region where the personal self and all its fussy concerns can be laid aside and its place in the Universe, despite that scrutiny may lead to lesser certainty and greater bafflement than before. Hence, whatever truth may endow the Socratic saying that the unexamined life is not worth living the more we examine Life itself and its worlds within worlds that are also within ourselves, the more of power, magic, and glory it seems to contain, and thereby nearly render moot any debating what significance attaches to that collective stream of lives wherein but tremulously subsists our own, self-endangered species. For every scrap of melody in the choir of changes that resounds within the curving horn of Time, encrypts no plainer secret than of what overarching mystery imbues the mighty river out of Eden that ever bears us onward.

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For example, when the cub of a South American anteater rides on its mother’s back, a stripe on its coat matches up with another on the mother’s fur so as to form the appearance of a continuous band, as if the two creatures were one. And as the small passenger grows, and changes its riding position accordingly to maintain the best weight distribution, the mother’s marking shifts in order to preserve the illusion of a single unbroken stripe. Thus, to a predator, the pair can resemble just one larger animal, discouraging attempts to snatch the baby before its parent—whose digging claws can be lethal weapons—could respond to prevent the abduction². How did the suite of requisite mutations arise? Did extraordinary serendipity cause every separate feature of this phenomenon to occur at once? Or could each one, the mother’s stripe, the baby’s, and the shifting of the mother’s stripe as the baby grows and changes its riding position, have happened by itself and then been retained in subsequent generations?

But simply to claim that this adaptation was selected as indeed it must have been, provides no better explanation than to say that bubble gum or the Beatles achieved success because they were likewise selected by the favor of popular opinion. Nor does ascribing the various mutations presumably involved in producing the anteater’s camouflage either to chance, or to a Supreme Being’s having written the entire sequence of genetic changes into the overall scheme of how Life was meant to evolve, provide any real information or understanding.

Thus any possible solutions for the various evolutionary enigmas that involve the irreducible complexity most notably attributed to the black box of intracellular biology—wherein protein molecules are somehow endowed with knowing how to maintain cellular metabolism and assist in cell division—cannot escape that biology is inherently more difficult than physics, whereby the system of a cell inhabits a higher rational order than the system of a star. Nor can issues presented by living Nature be clarified either with mantras like intelligent design or by saying that vital forces guide biological activities whose underlying rhyme and reason might only be explicable in language even harder to interpret than the genetic code. The single celled parasite Toxoplasma is able to reproduce only in cats—a restriction whose evolutionary logic could scarcely be surmised, although perhaps appropriate to the narrow world wherein these creatures live. Thus when finding itself in the body of a rat, the parasite somehow alters the rodent’s psychology, making it hyperactive and fearless enough to erase its normally instinctive fear of cats.⁴

On the other hand there is no shortage of ideas that rhetorically substitute for whatever any so-called real answers might amount to. For example, one could say that our ignorance concerning how thoughts are accomplished in the brain, is logically equivalent to ignorance of how a parasite like Toxoplasma manages to change the behavior of its host. And those same ideas are often relevant to myriad issues where the word answer is most unfortunate and misleading. For within the subjective context of human thought that has long struggled with the existential riddle of which evolution constitutes a significant portion, apparent vulnerabilities of the Magnum Mysterium to rational conquest often prove merely the deceptive allure of a mutable veil, whose parting simply exposes thornier obstacles heretofore concealed. Accordingly, amidst the fluid immensity of illusory Maya that reason and language ever strive to negotiate, there drifts a flimsy lattice of loosely connected talking points whose associations and meanings are open to pursuit within the relativistic mental palace of whomsoever may desire to thus be occupied.

Hence, a vast variety of said talking points can be generated through contemplating the staggering proportions of terrestrial life. For the latter’s sweeping multiplicity, that beggars metaphor, is combined with its temporal extension into abyssal geologic Time, where dwells Life’s origin from tiny seeds of molecular magic already imbued, as it were, with all powers of subsequent transformation. And in every epoch of that history, that has unfolded in between those global disasters that typically have marked the end of each grand evolutionary era and beginning of the next, Life has burst kaleidoscopically into a swarm of wondrous new creatures for most of which their time has come and gone. For example, the once ubiquitous trilobites whose eyes uncannily utilized crystals of calcite to form lenses, that in some cases also included a lower half of chitin that served to correct for optical aberration in a manner identical to that proposed… by Descartes and Huyghens half a billion years later. In so doing, they solved an elegant physical problem involving Fermat’s principle, Abbe’s sine law, Snell’s laws of refraction, and the optics of birefringent crystals with no clue as to by what mechanism did these ‘primitive’ creatures’ discover how to incorporate calcite crystals, align them precisely, and protect them with a cornea?

Yet continuous between the old and new, those durable species and orders fundamental to every ecology succeeding their advent, such as plankton, grasses and pollinating bees, have ever since their first appearance underpinned the entire scheme of Life, represented today by the 26 basic body plans or phyla that emerged in the Cambrian seas of several hundred million years ago⁶—not long before the trilobites themselves—and shall doubtless remain until in the throes of a dying Sun there shall perish all Earthly life.

But whether humanity keeps its privileged place at the summit of a process that in us has gained the social and cultural vehicles for progressive self-awareness, is dependent not only on natural but on moral law as well. For the flower of human consciousness, having crowned all prior evolution, must yet prove its worth. And that proof means not only establishing a global vision for survival—which demands the critical value of reverence for life in avoiding further environmental destruction—but also social justice for the poor and working classes, while consigning to the past all mindless conflicts involving national and religious identities. In the post-Darwinian world of psycho-spiritual and social evolution that is now unfolding, there is cause to examine what relevance to issues of knowledge and destiny is borne by the nature of Life throughout its entire history, not only scientifically, but philosophically and spiritually as well. For out of that examination can emerge a whole realm of ideas, ranging across all fields of understanding and reaching into every corner of the mind. And within that world, whether gazing on its vistas or searching far horizons, one can more fully appreciate the human place and meaning in a Cosmos not merely outward and external, but of timelessly inward time and space.

Accordingly, just one such talking point can address the nature and scope of knowledge itself, in terms of how it relates with subjective human psychology. As part of science, evolution, like the fact of Earth revolving around the Sun which itself, in turn, orbits the hub of our Galaxy, has been established to the high degree of certitude inherent to those assertions on which evolving knowledge is grounded, in similar fashion to how any progressive society depends on moral truths that are held to be self-evident. But precisely how evolution happened is far less obvious than what factors were likely involved in forming the Solar System or Earth itself. That question only surfaced in the wake of the true astronomical pattern of the Heavens having replaced the mediaeval concept of Earth being the center of the Universe. Of course, if the Universe has a center, Earth remains as good a candidate for that distinction as any other world whose inhabitants might thus regard their planet. But the debate on issues revolving around the general theory of evolution has often thrust aside into obscurity many curious living phenomena, that can be so immensely problematic that they seem to define, more than all other questions in science, where the limits of human understanding of the physical world—which includes the brain itself and its role in creating or enabling awareness—may reside. And these limits themselves, that can but roughly be drawn across the face of the vast unknown that lies beyond them, may in turn reflect upon the character of those inward and subjective kingdoms of human consciousness, whereby the quality, value and purpose of knowledge itself is ultimately determined.

In other words, endless discussion can be generated along the many paths pursuant of topics concerning biology and evolution. And that is especially true with regard to the relevance of such issues to human nature and self-awareness,. That connection may be ignored by mortal minds seeking to take measure of timeless truths, but cannot be rationally denied. Thus, whoever sets forth to explore these intertwining pathways should not expect to ever reach a conclusive destination. For the origins and the multifarious nature of consciousness in all its degrees and kinds, along with many other so-called eternal questions, are no less inseparably bonded with evolution per se than organic life with non-living matter-energy. Nor can the latter hardly derive from any source other than what ultimately is our own as well. And all of these issues converge in a kaleidoscopic splendor akin to that of Nature herself, reflecting how the wonder of Life’s mercurial multiplicity is magnified by its fathomless complexity, whose challenge to facile reductionist dogma underscores that any philosophical concerns regarding human nature, or that of a Cosmos wherein we are imbedded, need bow to no lesser mystery.

That is because issues as to whether we have, or are, a soul or spirit that abides when the body falls away, or whether the whole Universe is no less pervaded with vital awareness than those who talk about it, are inseparable from questions regarding the core dynamics of Life and its deeper history. For the same Gestalt, whereof all terrestrial and presumptive alien biology is part and parcel, must also be the ultimate ground of our own spiritual essence and provenance if these are anything better than rhetorical flounces or metaphor. Yet either way, whatever kind of light could truly illumine the subject might well, like that of Blake’s Tiger, tiger, burning bright blind our vision more badly than intricate shadows of Nature’s magic already baffle and obscure it In the forests of the night.

2. BIO-EXISTENTIALISM

For while to say that Life ascended by instinctive twists and turns, from complex chemicals to the interactive proteins of single cells, and thence to human self-awareness dwelling in the folds of Earth’s ecological garment that evolution has happily provided—a view somewhat opposed to that of physical stirring and shaking of molecules having simply jiggled them up the ladder of biological complexity until they finally began to emanate the dreamy glow of consciousness—may seem, in positing Life itself as a force ever working through all Creation, less rational than rhetorical, Life has done so within a greater existential context no less exalted and arcane than what endows the Universe itself, whose primal origin is comparably obscure to that of living things upon our own and likely many other worlds. That context can be called existential because it consists of being-ness, or potential for all regarded as being, in every degree and kind of freedom and activity.

Moreover that same context, hypothetically, has room for a Deity (to which or to Whom it then might correspond) and room for spiritual existence, including what humans may realize in some transcendent state from where we came and whence may well return when mortal experience has run its course. That is not to claim that such a state must needs exist, for in coldly rational objectivity the metaphysical parameters that should define a supernatural Cosmos may or may not obtain. Yet in reality such issues were decided long before they became a topic for endless disputations, whose significance is incidental amid the starry savannahs of a Cosmos that together with its subjective aspect of consciousness, remains not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.¹

However, if such metaphysical condition does inhere to any true accounting of the world, then it certainly cannot be detached from physical phenomena, including biology and the neurological underpinnings of human thought. Thus, for example, in asking how parasites such as the lancet fluke evolved the ability to program the behavior of their hosts—as the fluke does by steering an ant to the tip of a blade of grass to be eaten by a sheep, in whose body the fluke then continues its life-cycle²—the answer could be that while genetic mutation may have helped to forge this clever parasite from some earlier and cruder ancestor, the change was not random but instead, came about through some talent of living Nature concerning which we cannot, nor ever could, possess the slightest conception. And that same facility, despite being incapable to demonstrate scientifically, then should resonate with greater domains of spirit—the more ideal, as ir were, grundlagen of the real. Moreover, those domains include the many mansions wherefrom derives a fuller interpreting of human psychology and purpose, the ultimate nature of human awareness and its destiny in this or worlds to come, than are able to be taken from scientific knowledge of a biological kingdom presumed as lacking any transcendental factors—a presumption tending to impoverish all consequent explanation to the point that the role of any knower is nearly nullified.

The spiritual-metaphysical account, however, does not compel belief that the Darwinian evolutionary scheme is wrong. Instead, in a context untellably vast even absent those dimensions proposed by faith, no better explanation is scarcely possible, for mutation and natural selection are both clearly true and cannot be otherwise. Generic mutation reflects and is reflected by somatic change, whereas without natural selection evolutionary change could not be progressive. Furthermore, the rough Darwinian outline lacks any alternative save direct creation of new species, by Divine or angelic agency or else by species themselves somehow precipitating out of some ethereal domain.

Moreover one could say, in reference to natural selection that the principle of order, basic to the existence of anything, when once established to some degree as expressed, for instance, by molecules whether of DNA or so-called inert matter, can hardly backslide to square one, but instead is bound to keep ascending the ladder of complexity. For what rational cause may have provoked whatever sort of order, from the subatomic to cerebral, to have arisen in the first place is hardly going to disappear, but remains apt to promote further change towards deeper ordering and complexity. Otherwise there would have to be some preferred point where order should begin to fade away and life retreat towards the primordial slime (or further, given that production of literal slime as by bacteria that exude it when they coalesce into a single collective called a slime mold is already a marvel). Of course, for persons, planets and societies that point is known as Death, or the onset of dying. But there is no point in the overall history of Life where that reversal could logically have been anticipated. Every step achieved thus far has been equally improbable, whether from fish to lizards or from the insignificant shrew-like mammals of the Cretaceous (and somewhat larger ones as well, according to recent discoveries) to creatures as diverse as bats and whales. The latter took only around ten million years to evolve after the unleashing of mammal evolution by the cometary cataclysm in 65 million B.C. that apparently consigned all dinosaurs, but inexplicably not most members of other animal groups, to oblivion. Even that seemingly straightforward event, however, is shadowed by perplexity as to why even small dinosaurs, unlike reptiles, mammals and birds, could not survive what harsh conditions must have prevailed for decades or centuries after the comet had fallen, thus raising for example a question as to whether the impact alone was responsible for the dinosaurs’ obliteration.

In any event, bio-existentialism simply means that existence, in its purest abstract sense, implies order that in turn fosters life, or material order in its highest form. For the principle of existence, per se, requires no lesser law that should deny for life to exist. Meanwhile organic life by its very nature is bound to evolve, having come about to begin with by progressive change from inert to living matter, a shift inherent to change itself being an irreducible dimension of existence.

3. FATE AND RESPONSIBILITY

There is no clear and simple way to describe, much less explain, how and why all the wondrous adaptations of living Nature have happened to arise, and thus now distinguish Earth as exceptional, perhaps even uniquely beautiful in the entire universe. Countless biologically active planets may indeed abound in the Milky Way and other galaxies, but of these the great majority might be ecologically barren and austere compared to Earth—even, in fact, the natural homes for what are called extremophiles that on our world, inhabit those dauntingly harsh environments where until recent discoveries the existence of any viable organism would have been deemed impossible. And continuing degradation of the natural world by a feckless human species could also convert our planet into such a place, a grim transformation that could happen swiftly, if as in words of a Hopi prophecy Earth could belong to the ants after the gourd of ashes that Western civilization has created, nuclear fission and fusion weapons, was shattered to release an apocalyptic ending of the human experiment.

Indeed. similar tragedy may have played out time and again throughout the Cosmos, as one civilization after another failed the moral test imposed by high technology, while but few managed to advance the evolutionary principle into the broader than merely biological dimensions represented by brotherhood, creativity and social justice. (These broader dimensions, however, while not strictly biological are of Darwinian significance since attaining them globally is key to continued human survival). Then again, those who became the chosen and whose planetary homes remained unspoiled could be few only as compared to the vastly greater number of civilizations who by their own misguided hand were consigned to perdition. Thus the absolute number of fully successful and sustainable societies in the Cosmos that grew from primitive beginnings by the same natural process that led from single-celled animals to the primates that became ourselves could be large though also eclipsed by vaster ranks of intelligent species who had no sooner attained some shape of civilization than they perished like baby turtles, many of whom after hatching out from eggs laid in the sand of ocean beaches are seized by voracious birds before they can scramble into the waves, where of course piscine predators will gobble many more. And it remains to be seen if humanity shall securely join that lucky minority, assuming it exists, because the kind of choices that could open the gates to Earthly happiness—that is our only alternative to either extinction or what at best, amidst ecological ruin, could amount to a mongrel subsistence—have as yet been simply put forward in the marketplace of ideas but not by every government acknowledged or confirmed. The business of the world is still a sorry business that keeps unraveling the ecological web whose irreplaceable wealth far surpasses any man-made artifact or technological invention. Thus proper appreciation of that wealth, a reverence for life which clearly must also embrace the lives of hungry children and other wretched of the Earth, is vital not only to sheer human survival in Darwinian terms, but to realizing the vision once expressed by novelist William Faulkner in saying that Man will not only survive—he will prevail.¹ And significant towards furthering that sort of appreciation is to fully grasp the overwhelming scope and the sheer depth in both complexity and abyssal time of organic evolution, whose temporal dimension of progressive change is no less enigmatic than the nature of Time itself as fourth dimension of the space-time continuum. For if truth is beauty, then that truth is found supremely in the realms of Nature—of course including human nature—that to cherish and protect is essential towards whatever kind of truth can be attained in our mortal human existence

4. CH-CH-CHANGES

Then again, to comprehend the evolutionary process and fathom its workings may surpass all powers of intellect beyond the rhetorical power to seize on talking points and argue them endlessly, for the simple reason that biology is incalculably more involved than other sciences, where the hardest riddles like that of so-called dark matter, whose currently undetectable mass is thought to somehow account for the improbably rapid rotation of the galaxies, remain unsolved. In fact, Darwin himself seemingly allowed as much in confessing his bafflement regarding how macro-evolution could have bridged the major gaps that separate fish from their amphibian descendants, or mammals from the cold blooded reptile lineage that evolved into whatever warm blooded ancestors we descended from even as dinosaurs were likely dining on the slower and less wary of those diminutive creatures. In grappling with the method of these grand transitions, Darwin described himself as feeling helpless as an ape pondering on a book of Euclidean geometry.¹

Yet his great discovery was primarily that evolution has generated the whole panorama of life, rather than any precise formula to explain how the evolutionary process has applied in specific cases. For those cases, of which such miracles as eyes and feathers are not the most problematic, have mainly scientific implications. But evolution per se bears social, philosophical and religious relevance as well, that is more significant than any particular theory which could be factually demonstrated, concerning how some species turned into a radically different creature—exactly how did scurrying insectivores take flight as bats, or sluggish marine invertebrates transform into agile octopi. Even with the aid of a time machine, such evidence could be hard to obtain, for while there have been found the fossils of walking lungfish whose subsequent lineage presumably acquired features, like better lungs and longer legs, that led to the emergence of mammals, live examples in the sequence still might fail to disclose exactly where, when and why whatever genetic changes had to have occurred had actually done so.

After all, to say that these mutations were random leaves open the possibility that they happened for some inscrutable reason whose function of biological ordering eludes the investigative capacities of science. Thus the actual theory remains little more than the obvious principles of mutation and natural selection which are clearly as inescapable as to conclude that a crater inside a ring of ejected material indicates that a meteorite has fallen from the sky. As an aspect of Change itself, genetic changes are bound to happen, and in so doing are bent by selective pressures in favor of the increasingly well-ordered complexity whose acme is the human brain. Otherwise, without the ratchet effect of natural selection, evolution could just as easily go sideways or backwards and so lacking any preferred direction, would never occur. These nearly self-evident and general truths can be stated again and again in endless variations, but the vitally particular essence of how Life and evolution really operate still evades human understanding no less than any grasp of the great Gestalt enfolding them, whose quintessential truth dwells largely beyond the conceptual horizon of any creed, religion, or philosophy, excepting insofar as pre-Christian philosophers like Heraclitus or the Vedic sages did perceive that kind of truth as flowing through every fiber of Creation.² The price for recognition of what amounts to the virtually infinite complexities accessed by science has been to lose sight of the great equation of the All, whereof all lesser lives are ever partaking

5. MADE TO ORDER

Of course the principle of order, while abundantly expressed in living Nature, and elaborated to its highest potential through Life’s ascending to what in humans (and perhaps in alien minds on other worlds) has become self-awareness, is proclaimed by so-called non-living matter-energy as well. And in that primal medium order is ineluctable because the idea of substance without form, a pure chaos from which the physical Universe might have sprung through injection of order into a formless, yet substantial void is scarcely conceivable. The original, undivided unity of a god-particle whose explosion could have initiated the space-time universe would constitute minimum entropy and thus maximum order, rather than chaos in the figurative sense of rampant randomness or total confusion.

Even energy, radiation, all by itself has an invisible pattern because it is made of standardized particles or quanta called photons, not to mention the yet undetected gravitons that hypothetically mediate the force of gravity, plus the so-called virtual photons said to carry the force of magnetism,¹ (that unlike heat and light is clearly not carried by detectable photons). That pattern would seem grounded in some hyper-spatial region, whence perhaps there sprang the space-time continuum with all its inherent laws, that engendered the visible order of the Cosmos, if that continuum has not always existed. And if space-time itself thus had a beginning from some unknowable state of pre-existence—a beginning of, but not within, Time itself which could then only be regarded as having precipitated from an indescribable Eternity—then its laws and their implicit order also began to manifest from that focus of origin, bearing in mind that in physics, the patterns of Nature also represent an increase in entropy, or disorder, as compared to the hypothetical state of undifferentiated Being that may have obtained before Time began at the point when Space first started expanding.²

These laws, however can be and are both real and abstract, the former shaping the real reality and the latter only approximating whatever features of that shape may be apparent within the vastly lesser existential field of corporeal minds who, if the glass is half-full, are more gifted with knowledge and understanding than ever in recorded history. If that glass is half-empty, on an endless path of discovery human understanding has covered only some fragmentary portion of what remains an infinite distance in between those minds—human or alien—and what ultimate Truth may itself be infinite and thus unknowable in any rational or finite sense.

Then again, the half-full glass can seem half-empty if we happen to reflect that modern scientific knowledge has brought us to a place of peril just as much as opportunity, where to practice the art of living may face difficulties even greater than confronted many ancient peoples. And the half-empty glass looks considerably fuller upon considering that if the journey were finitely destined to attain some core Cosmic secret, thenceforth forever enshrined and admired by humanity, to have reached that ending would