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Edward Jayne
April 12, 2001

God was described by Hegel as Absolute Idea, by Lichtenberg as personified incomprehensibility, and by Emerson as a pantheistic oversoul that pervades all nature and human experience. Today, most worshippers adhere to a simpler, more traditional vision of God as transcendent authority that created the universe, then life on earth, and finally the human soul worthy of eternal salvation. They expect God to reward sincere worshippers with heaven, as opposed to the fate of unrepentant sinners consigned to hell and the prospect of total oblivion for lower animals (dogs possibly excepted). They realize that a future life cannot be verified by science, but they remain certain that it is both true and finally more important than anything either seen or heard in the world about us. It does not matter to them that miracles and epiphanies no longer provide visible proof to confirm God's divine plan, since the very absence of this evidence can be treated as confirmation of a life hereafter beyond the physical universe. This is their firm expectation, and nobody is going to convince them otherwise.

Skeptics and materialists reject this vision of God on the assumption that whatever exists can be verified by empirical evidence, and, vice versa, that whatever defies verification probably does not exist. As first proposed by Democritus, it is their belief, simply enough, that naught is immaterial but what is naught (de nihilo nihil)--as explained by King Lear's warning, "Nothing will come of nothing." In other words, if there is no hard scientific evidence to confirm God's existence, they feel justified in making the inductive leap that God is myth, not reality. As recommended by logical positivists early in the twentieth century, they take it for granted that any idea or opinion that persistently defies empirical verification is to be rejected as "pseudo-statement" without sufficient referential validity to justify the pursuit of its emotional appeal. They apply this principle to God, eternal life, grace, redemption, and everything else granted supernatural truth by religious worshippers. Even the human soul fits this category in their opinion, since modern brain physiology offers no data whatsoever to demonstrate that any portion of consciousness bears an immortal essence that escapes the process of death shared by all other plants and animals.

Of course numerous supernatural experiences have been recorded to demonstrate God's existence, and numerous historic figures have experienced miracles and divine epiphanies supportive of this ultimate truth. However, as Hume first argued, the very emphasis upon a miraculous suspension of natural laws justifies increased skepticism. This has always been the stuff of magic and hearsay chronicles, and its prevalence has dwindled now that cameras, news reporters, and an educated middle class have demystified supernatural experience. Transcendent claims that elude scientific confirmation can likewise be extended by reductio ad absurdum to an endless number of bizarre delusional phenomena such as friendly angels' voices, the universe perched on the back of an enormous unseen turtle, or a multitude of invisible ears jutting from Satan's forehead, as might be suggested by the surrealistic imagination of Bosch, Blake, and countless others susceptible to paranormal visions. As weird apparitions, they also elude verification--are they likewise a higher truth of transcendent profundity? How can one tell the difference? Which of the ineffable truths are true? Who is the prophet, who the crackpot?

Aside from its providential assurances, its teleology (getting into heaven, etc.) and its obvious anthropomorphic appeal, modern religion nevertheless benefits from three so-called miracles that continue to resist full explanation: (1) existence itself (non-existence makes better sense, if you think about it), (2) the principle of life, and (3) human "soul" superior to animal intelligence and thus presumably able to survive death. The first of these three, the existence of the universe (in the broadest sense, Heidegger's "being" as opposed to "nothing"), has been addressed by cosmologists in their investigation of the big bang and a possible big crunch--a final cataclysm equivalent to the big bang--as well as all the intermediate forces and events that advance cosmic duration from one to the other. The second miracle, the principle of life, has been addressed by biologists in their investigation of the origins of life and the dynamics of evolution linked with variations in DNA (deoxyribose nucleic acid). Both the creation and termination of life may be considered biological equivalents to the big bang and big crunch, since they seem to involve swift, even abrupt, transitions between existence and non-existence that are difficult to explain except as the will of God. And the third miracle, transcendent human intelligence that possibly survives death in a life hereafter seems more of a settled issue at this point for those familiar with brain physiology and physical anthropology. Nevertheless, the issue deserves to be revisited to emphasize the parallels involved with the other two miracles.

The first of these miracles, the universe's creation as an instantaneous transition between infinite void and tangible existence, is commonly described by cosmologists as a "singularity" on the assumption that it is unique as the edge or terminal point of existence. In 1971, B.G. Schmidt offered an authoritative explanation of singularity as the point beyond which the "spacetime manifold" cannot be extended because of infinite curvature. However, the concept has come to be simplified to mean the very edge of non-existence, when curvature almost totally flattens out. A singularity is thus unique in the sense that it stands at the brink between all and nothing; everything else is non-singular in the sense that it both follows and precedes something else. On the assumption that the universe did in fact begin with a big bang, this concept of singularity has become one of the principal issues in the defense of creationism on a scientific basis. Religious proponents are able to ask how else the universe might have erupted in such a dramatic fashion except by God's choice. For absolutely nothing preceded the big-bang except God, and it was God's decision to initiate the universe at exactly this particular moment described by modern physics as a singularity.

From a secular perspective, Heinz Pagels has explained that the big bang was a singularity since it occurred as "a state for which the universe has collapsed into a mathematical point." However, he proposed that a better mathematical description is needed in order to discourage "singularity mysticism," which he explained consists of "the idea that even scientists must give up the attempt to rationally comprehend the origin of the universe." Alan Guth, on the other hand, concedes the validity of the simplistic explanation that a singularity marks the beginning of the universe, but he emphasizes that apropos of big-bang theory the concept of singularity bears a strictly scientific relevance to density, pressure, and temperature according to standard calculations. In 1976 Stephen Hawking took a more sweeping position: "Because all known laws of physics are formulated on a classical space-time background, they will all break down at a singularity." Twelve years later, however, he joined Guth in emphasizing B.G. Schmidt's standard definition of singularity as a point in space-time at which its curvature becomes infinite. Hawking probably did this to avoid the implication of an absolute point of departure between existence and non-existence. In other words, he wanted to limit the meaning of singularity to its function as a mathematical event that occurs when existence ceases to be measurable--just as vital signs go flat on television monitors in an intensive care ward when a patient dies. Suddenly existence either erupts or levels off (in the latter instance when a big crunch occurs), and this is the point at which singularity happens, but without suggesting that existence either totally begins or ends. Either way, with existence's perimeter either front or back-loaded adjacent to the void, no god or supernatural force need be involved.

As a Christian apologist, Paul Davies drew upon Hawking's 1976 definition and in doing so took all the liberties warned against by Pagels and Guth by defining singularity is a "non-place where all known laws are suspended." In other words, he argued, it is an "instantaneous suspension of physical laws, [a] sudden abrupt flash of lawlessness that allow[s] something to come out of nothing." Here there is plenty of room for God, a Zeus-like figure able from his own particular "non-place" in a transcendent realm to initiate sudden and abrupt flashes of lawlessness whenever and wherever He pleases. Thus occurred the creation of the universe, but also soon enough the performance of the other three miracles important to my thesis, the creation of life and the human soul, and the achievement of immortality after death. Davies did not go so far as to spell out these implications, but these and other religious issues obviously present themselves, much to the consternation of Hawking, Guth and other cosmologists who share an essentially secular viewpoint.

With similar flexibility but altogether different intentions, I myself take the liberty of dealing more specifically with the concept of singularity relevant to all the miracles listed above: life, human soul, and death as the final outcome of life when one either terminates (thus obtaining singularity) or goes to heaven (thus escaping singularity). In my opinion, the actual moment of transition between the existence and non-existence of an individual human being, or, in more general terms, between life and obliteration for all species on earth, deserves to be examined as a singularity no less definable than the big bang and big crunch. However, I want to explore these possibilities in order to reject their application as any kind of demonstration of God's existence. In fact, what I want to demonstrate is that, contrary to religious dogma, the individual experience of death is the only singularity in which mankind may have any confidence (if it might be called that), since the probability of an afterlife is remote. When we die, we die--singularity occurs relevant to our feelings, memories, and global sense of identity that has accumulated since childhood. On the other hand, as Hawking, Guth, and many other cosmologists have concluded in recent years, the big bang and big crunch are best interpreted to lack absolute singularity. They approach it, but without ever quite reaching it, in the sense that the universe did not erupt from a total vacuum, nor can it be expected to return to one. I also want to demonstrate that the same applies, albeit on an entirely different scale, pertaining to the creation of life and the dynamics of evolution that culminated in human intelligence. All of these must all be understood on a strictly gradualist--hence non-singular--basis as explained by recent advances in the particular sciences relevant to their investigation. My assumption is that the absence of singularity eliminates any possibility of God as a creator able and willing to make it happen.

I want to conclude this paper first by exploring religion's anthropomorphic misrepresentation of these singularities and then by suggesting a more credible secular perspective that emphasizes empirical inquiry. For I am confident that, regardless of their relative achievement as singularities, all three miracles that might seem to justify current religious belief--existence, life, and the immortal status of the individual soul--will eventually cease to bear mysterious implications useful for this purpose.

1. The Universe minus God

Orthodox Christians assume that God created the universe as a cosmic arena in which he could test the souls of mankind toward their future destiny in heaven or hell. In seven days God manufactured first the universe, then mankind, then sat back to judge human behavior in order to separate the saved from the damned. The basic question remains, however, why existence exists. Why even God? Imagine absolutely nothing--no God, no existence, not even a vacuum. The mathematics involved would be exquisitely simple. Everything would make sense, no questions asked, none to answer. But what we have is entirely different, and within a cosmos whose proportions are too enormous to imagine much of a role having been allotted either to mankind or to the supposedly infinite God many of us hope and expect might be in charge of things. Modern astronomy discloses that we are surrounded by an enormous cosmos that totally dwarfs Biblical mythology. Nothing in scriptures even remotely suggests the vastness of existence presumably created by God--far too big and impersonal to have been created specifically to accommodate mankind's destiny.

Recent astronomical observations indicate, for example, that the measurable universe is now at least thirteen billion light years wide (each light year consisting of the distance that light can travel in a year) and includes a hundred billion galaxies, each of which, like the Milky Way, includes perhaps a hundred billion stars. Moreover, all these galaxies are grouped in clusters and superclusters that reduce the relative magnitude of any particular galaxy to less than a speck in the larger whole. As an average galaxy, the Milky Way alone is between 85,000 and 100,000 light years in diameter and with an average thickness of between 10,000 and 20,000 light years. Shaped like a flattened spiral, it thickens at its galactic center located in the direction of Sagittarius perhaps 30,000 light years from the sun, and it is large enough that the sun and its satellites have completed not more than eighteen or twenty orbits at a speed approximately 150 miles per second since their origin four and a half billion years ago. As a slightly larger than average star, the sun is one million three-hundred thousand times the size of the earth, yet it is too small to explode as a nova comparable to the perhaps twenty-four novae that erupt each year in our particular galaxy. Instead, when the sun's nuclear conversion of hydrogen to helium has played out less than four billion years from now, its combustion can be expected to flare up to as much as 5,000 times its present level, enough to incinerate the earth before the sun at last expires to become a white dwarf star. Perhaps a half billion years later the Milky Way itself may collide with the nearby Andromeda galaxy (which is roughly half its size), bringing even further cataclysmic possibilities for what is left of the solar system. Right now the two galaxies are travelling toward each other in a collision course at approximately 300,000 miles per hour, and the distance between them is roughly twenty times the diameter of the Milky Way. When they converge, many stars can be expected to collide, especially toward the centers of the two galaxies, whereupon it is speculated they will probably fuse, then spread into a bigger combined galaxy shaped like a floppy donut.

Christian apologists find solace in the notion that the entire universe seems to have been launched with a "big bang" that could have been produced by God, as suggested by Fred Hoyle when he argued that "a common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature." And in fact there is general consensus among today's cosmologists that such an event probably occurred between ten and twenty billion years ago (thirteen billion years now seems the favorite estimate), long before Adam and Eve were supposedly tempted by knowledge. However, there was absolutely nothing Biblical about the Big Bang. It consisted of an initial explosion of sheer energy (or "superforce") that in cooling soon divided into four more specific modes of energy--gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces. Matter was generated first through the production of quarks and gluons, later protons and electrons. At the core of stars, hydrogen has converted to to helium through nuclear fusion, and this in turn has converted to carbon and the rest of the heavier elements. Only in novae and supernovae has a final explosion occurred powerful enough both to produce and scatter such elements as iron and the rest of the metals, whereupon these have gravitated into the orbits of nearby stars (for example the sun) to gather into planets (for example the earth). What began as sheer energy at the time of the big bang has thus gradually evolved into an interaction between mass and energy supportive of life and just about everything else we take for granted in the world about us.

A plain and simple inflationary model of an "open" universe from the moment of creation to the end of time necessarily involves entropy as a perpetual breakdown until the total reservoir of energy has converted to matter exclusively dominated by gravity. At this point, paradoxically, all is matter, but the density of matter throughout the entire universe approaches zero because of its infinite dispersion. In the words of Isaac Asimov, nothing would be left except "a vast, incredibly thin cloud of gravel, dust, and gas growing endlessly vaster and thinner." Gravity would still exert its influence, but it would be offset by a universe too stretched out for it to be able to draw the universe together again. The overall temperature of the universe would approach absolute zero, much lower than the present micro-wave temperature of the universe (about 2.7 degrees above zero). All in all, the cosmos would have completed its transition from extreme heat to extreme cold, from sheer energy to sheer mass, from unbelievable concentration to unbelievable dispersion, and from a pre-existent to a post-existent void characterized by absolute infinitude. The eighty billion year transition from sheer energy to sheer mass might be suggested by Einstein's equation, e = mc2, if in fact the superforce released by the big bang (e) ultimately converts into final mass (m) by a fixed ratio equal to (c2), the speed of light squared (186 thousand miles per second times itself). Such a disproportionate conversion between energy and mass can bear a cataclysmic impact, as already demonstrated by the once inconceivable destructive power of an atomic bomb produced by splitting a single atom. In reverse, with total energy converted to total mass, results could be even more dramatic once the process finally completes itself. Scattered, absolutely cold, and deprived of all non-gravitational energy, the universe would stretch into infinity as a totally uninhabitable environment.

Theological speculation linked with big-bang creationism is further clouded, however, by the possibility that the the most inclusive realm we inhabit-thecosmos, or "mega-universe"--was not created from a total void, as might be construed based on the theory of singularity, but has endlessly advanced from birth to death for an infinite succession of particular universes, each of them dying only for its "stuff" to be gathered up and thereby reborn in one or more entirely new universe(s). God might play some kind of a role in such a universe, but neither as a creator nor terminator (at least not for the universe we presently occupy). This is not a new concept. Aristotle insisted upon absolute infinitude, and Kant, early in his career, while he still adhered to the principles of the eighteenth century Enlightenment (or Aufkläung), compared the universe to a phoenix that "consumes itself in order to rise rejuvenated from its ashes":

Worlds and systems of worlds perish, and are engulfed in the abyss of eternity: meanwhile, creation is ever active to erect new structures in other regions of the heavens and to replace the loss with profit; and if a system of the world has, in the course of its duration, exhausted every variety of life of which its constitution will allow, if it has become a superfluous link in the chain of being, then nothing can be more fit than that it should now play its last part in the drama of the successive transformations of the universe--a part which is but the due of every finite phenomenon--that of rendering its tribute to mutability.

In other words, each world system is born, lives, and dies. When it reaches its terminal phase, it dissolves into its surrounding medium, soon to be followed by the birth of its successor.

Of course much has been discovered in the universe since the mid-eighteenth century, little of it anticipated by Kant, much less by the authors of the Genesis said to have been inspired by the word of God. It would be difficult to adopt either model to explain such discoveries as neutron stars, white dwarf stars, pulsars, quasars, black holes, white holes, worm holes, giant radio galaxies, dark energy, dark mass, the false vacuum, quantum gravity, quantum tunneling, interstellar gas, and background radiation, among other such celestial exotica that dominate the attention of cosmologists today. Nevertheless, there seems to be unanimity that stars run on atomic fusion through the conversion of energy into mass (with strong, weak, and electromagnetic energy finally supplanted by gravity), and that the final extinction of stars involves a collapse into white dwarfs, neutron stars, and also perhaps, at even more intensive levels of concentration, so-called black holes of pure mass so intense that nothing can escape their gravitational field.

Speculation about the linkage between black holes and the possibility of a cyclical universe remains hypothetical, but, if true, all the remnants of dead and dying stars would very likely be drawn into "galactic black holes" located at the core of galaxies(ours in the Milky Way right now might be the size of our solar system), and finally, with a "big crunch," into a "supermassive" black hole that draws all matter into itself, whereupon the universe we inhabit can be expected to cease. Total extinction and thus singularity would occur by a final cataclysmic gravitational implosion by which the whole universe folds into its own black hole, presumably with increased acceleration toward the very end. Suddenly everything would suck in upon itself like water down a drain, and nothing would be left. In the words of Heinz Pagels, "Conceivably, the entire universe is in the process of becoming a giant black hole, and we are living inside it--a universe that someday will stop expanding and collapse upon itself."

But this would be only half the story. Just as every cell in one's body simultaneously partakes of both growth and decline, every event in the universe manifests "anabolic" expansion derivative of the big bang as well as "catabolic" thrust toward big-crunch extinction that, unlike the fate of the individual human being, just might set the stage for another big bang. If black holes play such a role in this final stage, a terminal implosion would suddenly liberate sufficient energy to set into motion an entirely new big bang perhaps sixty-seven billion years from now (approximately eighty billion years after the big bang first occurred). Singularity would be limited to the moment of transition from one universe to the next, thus falling short of its current definition as the boundary between sheer existence and sheer non-existence. Infinitude would be skimmed without being entered.

The basic idea of black holes was first proposed by John Michell in 1783 and then by Laplace just a few years later. In 1928 the Indian physicist Chandrasekhar revived the concept, and at about the same time the Russian scientist Lev Landau extended its application to the formation of neutron stars. In 1939 Robert Oppenheimer suggested that light waves might be trapped along with mass in collapsed stars, and finally in 1969 John Wheeler first offered the term "black hole" to suggest what happens when everything drawn into the vortex of a collapsed star, including light, is unable to escape. Since the sixties the concept of black holes has been a popular cause in astrophysics, led by the mathematician Stephen Hawking, who has established or confirmed, among other things, that black holes--if they exist--are actually white hot, that their shape tends to be perfectly spherical, that their content is homogeneous, that they are concentrated in or near galaxies, that they grow as they ingest everything that surrounds them, that they merge when they collide, that some rotate and others do not, and that they radiate particles--now described as "Hawking particles"--just beyond their boundaries (described as "event horizons"), thereby emitting sufficient light to be detected by astronomers, if without disclosing their full size.

The theory of black holes remains hypothetical, since, as described, they are almost impossible to observe. Black holes absorb far more light than they emit, and their size as mass converted from energy is tiny compared to the stars and other such celestial bodies that they presumably devour. Yet their gravitationa attraction can be enormous. When any kind of a star veers too close to a black hole, patches of its surface are increasingly detached and sucked into the black hole until finally, after a few hundred centuries, the star is devoured in its entirety. Even light is sucked into its vortex. As a result, the existence of black holes seems best confirmed by the secondary effects of just a few of them, for example through their impact upon twin stars. These candidates for status as "visible" black holes include Cygnus X 1, LCM X-3, NGC 4151, possibly the core of the M 87 galaxy (with a mass of about five billion suns), and a similar galactic black hole, roughly the size of our entire solar system, located at the core of our particular galaxy in the neighborhood of Sagittarius A West.

The possibility cannot be discounted that dark energy (something akin to Einstein's hypothetical suggestion of a "cosmological constant") might accelerate the expansion of the universe to such an extent that a culminating implosion would be impossible. If true, black holes might fall short of playing any kind of a final role as "cosmic vacuum cleaners" with gravitational powers qualitatively different from the intensification of neutron and white dwarf stars. If, on the other hand, we do occupy a "closed universe" that culminates with final engulfment in a black hole, the cumulative gravitational power of this process might achieve sufficient critical density to produce what can be described as a "fractal," "pulsating," or "oscillating universe," such that a big crunch liberates sufficient energy to initiate another big bang either at the same spacetime location or close nearby. As explained by Lloyd Motz:

One can argue that as the implosion of the universe continues into the black-hole stage and beyond, the quantum fluctuations . . . will impart such violent motions to the particles in the black hole that some kind of violent rebound of explosion will again occur [i.e., a new big bang], and that another expansion phase of the universe will begin, leading ultimately to another cycle of star-building, synthesis of elements, and, finally, planets and life itself.

Hawking has offered his own model of such a universe, "not having any singularities [i.e., beginning or end] but being completely self-contained and without a boundary." In other words, whether or not black holes play a central role, our perpetually recycled universe was never created, nor shall it ever end. Instead, it completes its expansion-contraction cycle over perhaps eighty billion years, then closes in upon itself with such culminating violence that it surges into a new big bang, leading to the creation of entirely new stars, planets, and other such astronomical events. Singularity is approached but never fully realized, thus eliminating the necessity of any kind of a God either to begin or end things.

A compromise also seems possible between the expansionist and cyclical models, such that particular universes coexist in a more inclusive cosmic field, each of completing itself to set the stage for the creation of nearby universes without necessarily bringing black holes into full play as the source of new big bang episodes. Like boiling water in which an incessant succession of bubbles leap into existence at the surface, an overall mega-universe might give play to numerous smaller universes each of which does its big bang, then dissipates. Of course water soon boils away, but for the universe the process would be unending, and the role of God, if He exists, would be even more attenuated. In 1972, for example, Edward Tryon proposed one version of this compromise based on the hypothesis that our universe is nothing more than an enlarged "vacuum fluctuation" of energy similar to those obtained at a sub-atomic level in quantum physics. As Tryon explained:

Quantum electrodynamics reveals that an electron, positron and photon occasionally emerge spontaneously from a perfect vacuum. When this happens, the three particles exist for a brief time, and then annihilate each other, leaving no trace behind. . . . The spontaneous, temporary emergence of particles from a vacuum is called a vacuum fluctuation, and is utterly commonplace in quantum field theory.

From this curious phenomenon of quantum mechanics Tryon suggested a principle that might be enlarged to explain the creation of the universe as a far bigger spontaneous combustion:

If it is true that our Universe has a zero net value for all conserved quantities, then it may simply be a fluctuation of the vacuum, the vacuum of some larger space in which our universe is imbedded. In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.

By "zero net value for all conserved quantities," Tryon referred to the perfect net symmetry between positive and negative energy levels in our universe, necessarily equivalent to that of the vacuum in which it is imbedded. Also, he emphasized that the scale of vacuum fluctuations is not limited by the laws of physics, so they can be as tiny as the electron and positron (which occur as quickly as ten seconds to the negative power of twenty-one) or as big as the universe itself. But he warned, "There is no known mechanism by which the Universe might bounce back from a contraction." The extinction of our particular universe would be just as final as that of an electron or positron produced in a vacuum, though of course taking as many as billion years rather than a fraction of a second before it completely dissolves into its medium. Tryon also suggested that recurrence occurs despite the lack of a closed oscillation. Like the quantum fluctuation, the universe is surrounded by a chaotic field of other such fluctuations also to be identified as intact universes, all of which coexist in a more inclusive universe whose "vacuum" apparently seethes at the sub-atomic level as a "perpetual tempest" forever vulnerable to new big bang creation events that might produce many universes additional to our own.

In his recent book, The Inflationary Universe, Alan Guth tries to justify and extend Tryon's hypothesis by proposing an inflationary phase in the big bang through a "phase transition" that produces sufficient acceleration to launch an entire universe from a subatomic vacuum fluctuation. Guth suggests that such a massive eruption might have been possible if the big bang included an inflationary phase swift and vast enough to have occupied a time interval as short as ten seconds to the minus thirtieth power while the universe expanded by a factor of ten to the twenty-fifth power. In other words, very, very quickly. If this can be demonstrated, Guth argues, the probability is excellent that our universe might have erupted into existence as a vacuum fluctuation--in his words, "the ultimate free lunch," something obtained for the price of almost nothing. It would also seem probable, Guth suggests, that our universe is not unique, but exists as a "pocket universe," or, more specifically, the "minute fraction" of one particular pocket universe in a more inclusive "full universe" that "existed long before our pocket universe and that will continue to exist for eternity," exactly as Aristotle proposed twenty-four centuries ago. Guth suggests that all pocket universes begin with something like a big bang, then "recollapse into a crunch or dwindle away," each of their oscillations coexisting with others in a more inclusive energy field.

Guth also proposes a model by which one universe might produce or give birth to another by dynamics that fall just short of the black hole's final demolition. By the creation of a "false vacuum bubble" too complicated to explain here, what might seem the beginning of a black hole serves as a "worm hole" ("quantum tunneling," or cosmic "umbilical cord") that produces elsewhere--perhaps in a distant quasar--a "child universe" whose origin can be understood in retrospect to have occured as a "white hole," in other words an entirely new big bang. The entire process would occur in a flash--ten seconds to the power of minus twenty three--after which there would be two coexistent universes, mother and daughter. Implicit in this model is the existence of a more inclusive field, a balanced and permanent mega-universe whose regularity absorbs and gives rise to abrupt divergences equivalent to cataclysmic detonations at smaller and more specific levels, for example nebulae, black holes, novae, supernovae, solar flares, and even the relatively miniscule celestial phenomena of lightning, cyclones, and the Brownian motion of suspended particles. At every level the cosmic symmetry between thrust and repose would be perpetually operative short of singularity.

True, a personal God might yet be pulling all the levers (Hawking himself does not deny such a possibility), but if any of the cyclical models of the universe is valid, God did not "big- bang" the universe from a milieu "without form and void," nor is he able to big-crunch a final judgment day. His authority must be recognized to occur on a far bigger and more inclusive scale than was ever conceived before, even further exaggerating the importance of mankind in the infinitely bigger universe as a whole. In one sense there would be opportunities galore for a billion gods (the "ultimate" polytheism), but in another there wouldn't be work enough for just one god, at least in giving a beginning and end to the entire process. Even if Christian teleology is accurate in depicting our own big bang as a cosmic singularity, this inception preceded by from ten to twenty billion years the creation of mankind, and its final big crunch can be expected to occur as many as seventy billion years beyond the destruction the solar system inclusive of all life on earth. Even the most liberal projections of the transition in Biblical time between creation and final judgment day fall short of the cosmic infinitude taken for granted today by astrophysicists. Too little is given too big a role.

Hawking tells of having first proposed his theory of a "self-contained universe without singularities" in a paper he delivered at a 1981 Vatican conference upon big-bang theory in which he and others were granted a final audience with the Pope. Perhaps without realizing the full implications of Hawking's argument, the Pope expressed his support of big-bang theory, since it granted the possibility of creationism more or less as explained by the Bible. However, the Pope also emphasized the caveat (not too different from those imposed on Bruno, Galileo, and others in earlier centuries) that no physical cause should be speculated preceding the big bang: "It was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God." But this was an impossible demand. Hawking had been able to reject both creation and a terminal phase that might be identified with judgment day precisely because he extended his speculation into a more inclusive non-ending universe in which growth curves into decay, then further growth.

The Pope was absolutely correct in his assumption that this kind of inquiry can only be dangerous to orthodox religion. What he did not realize (or was unwilling to admit) was that the primary threat lies in the discovery there is nothing to probe--no absolute singularity (creatio originans) produced by God and preceded by God alone--that the total universe, whatever its final size, has existed forever just as Aristotle explained three centuries before Christ. God's role, if indeed God exists, would be limited to an "unmoved mover" that gives purpose and structure to what has always existed without beginning. But to what effect? A strictly impersonal god might have initiated the universe with a big bang more or less in accord with the inflationary model of the universe, whatever the magnitude of its process, though the possibility of God having been created by a earlier agency would remain a serious issue. All arguments to the effect that God alone escapes the necessity of creation seem specious, since the "x alone" principle can and probably ought to be displaced to the universe itself. This would afford a much simpler model, just as Ockham's Razor suggests, since the universe without source makes more sense than a God without source who thereupon creates the universe. On the other hand, the cyclical and multiply-eruptive models of the cosmos, both of which involve endlessness, would deprive God of His dual role as initiator and terminator. There would be no major singularities, nothing either to begin or end relevant to the universe as a whole. God's task would be reduced to providential intervention--miracles, essentially--when and where these seem needed, but this divine intrusiveness defies empirical verification, since almost nothing in the universe--including human conduct--can be interpreted to escape probability rooted in cause-and-effect determination. When has God stepped in to bring to pass what was not already in the process of occurring? What hard data do we have to confirm such a likelihood?

2. Life minus God

If the whole universe can be explained as a vacuum fluctuation in transit between energy's initial big bang and its final disintegration swallowed up in black holes of one sort or another, it remains to be understood how organic life might be playing any kind of a role in this total process. Obviously, there has been a "bottom-up" evolutionary advancement from quarks to atoms to molecules to carbon compounds to unicellular and multicellular life and eventually to human intelligence. Instead of God as an agent of pure intelligence having invented the entire universe with "top-down" decisiveness, energy has invented mass, the two combined have invented life, and life has invented conscious thought. Each phase has produced conditions in response to which improved complexity has borne a better chance of survival based on the principle of natural selection, which comes into play well before the advent of organic life. In other words, evolution has been operative since the big bang occurred perhaps thirteen billion years ago, having advanced into its organic phase only within the last four billion years on earth and its human phase within the last three million years. But the question remains why and how this might have happened independent of God's authority. For evolution may be explained either as one particular mode of entropy that accelerates disintegration through heightened biochemical activity which features the survival of one species at the expense of others (humanity's final productivity primarily consisting of its garbage, excrement, and carbon dioxide), or as the best resistence to this process of disintegration by refining and thereby postponing--at least getting the most out of--the otherwise irreversible transition from energy into mass. In the latter capacity, evolution affords a bigger bang for the buck, a better and more refined use of the energy consumed by the inevitable march into entropy. Or perhaps evolution plays out just one more symmetry--the most exquisite of all--between two countervailing vectors of thrust and absorption, much as Nietzsche implied with his binarism between Apollonian stasis and Dionysian frenzy.

But first things first. How life began has never been fully explained as a singularity except on a creationist basis. We have repeatedly been told by our fundamentalist friends and relatives that God created life--period, end of argument. In the first chapter of Genesis, God resorted to grand imperative edicts ("let there be," etc.) first to create plants (1.11-13), then in sequence the sun, moon, and stars (1.14-18), then living creatures (1.20-25), and finally mankind (1.26-27). What else need be said? By the touch of his forefinger as depicted by Michaelangelo, God immediately produced organic viability in whatever species He chose to create. The concept of evolution first suggested by Anaximander in the sixth century, B.C., was inconceivable, and the unique convergence of favorable circumstances on earth for the survival of life seemed irrelevant, including the appropriate balance of twenty-six elements as well as a sufficient amount of water between boiling and freezing temperatures, a sun the right size, the earth's location the right distance from this sun, the earth's hot metal core, its plate tectonics, the presence of large nearby planets that draw lethal asteroids showers to themselves, and a number of other cosmic, chemical, and biochemical circumstances favorable to life. Also ignored were life's more specific biological "building blocks"--amino acids, sugar molecules, fatty acids, RNA (ribonucleicacid), and a favorable sequence among bio-supportive environments. Life as we know it would have been impossible on earth without this fortuitous assortment of benefits that seems to have been more likely the product of chance than God's design.

The earliest secular theories of the creation of life emphasized spontaneous generation, a theory that may be defended today on grounds far more complicated than anything imagined in ancient times. The pre-Socratic philosophers Thales and Democritus suggested such a possibility, followed by Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Lucretius. During the seventeenth century, the Belgian physician Jan Baptist van Helmont proposed that all life is chemistry, and an experimental approach was undertaken to demonstrate that such advanced creatures as mice and maggots could be generated on a spontaneous basis. When microorganisms were first discovered under the microscope in 1774, the issue shifted to the creation of much smaller microorganisms in a sterile environment. In Critique of Judgment, published in 1790, Kant renewed Anaximander's notion of "a real kinship by descent from a common primordial ancestor," such that mankind's lineage could be traced "back to the polyp [jelly fish], and from this back even to mosses and lichens, and finally to the lowest perceivable stage of nature, to crude matter." This remains the primary assumption even today among biologists who seek a scientific explanation of life's origins. Other eighteenth century figures such as Buffon and his friend John Needham conducted extensive experiments to confirm the occurrence of spontaneous generation. Critics hostile to such a possibility sought to demonstrate that it resulted from the lack of adequate sterilization in their laboratory equipment, and in 1862 Pasteur finally established under rigorous laboratory conditions that the spontaneous generation of small creatures cannot occur in a totally sterile environment. However, an entirely new line of inquiry had already begun in 1828, when Friedrich Wöhler established that urea could be artificially produced from inorganic compounds. In 1863, a year after Pasteur's demonstration, Mathias Schleiden argued that life first originated in a unique environmental different from today, and 1866 Ernst Haeckel ventured to describe its milieu as a prebiotic broth. Two years later, Darwin suggested in a personal letter, "we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc. present, that a protein compound was formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes." By the turn of the twentieth century the effort to explain the origin of life focussed on the spontaneous synthesis of organic chemicals essential to life in a friendly antediluvian environment.

In 1913 Walther Löb produced glycine, the simplest component of protein, from inorganic compounds, and in 1936 the Soviet biologist, A.I. Oparin proposed the "heterotrophic" creation of organisms through a synthesis of prebiotic organic compounds within a "reducing atmosphere" such as might have existed on earth four billion years ago, without significant traces of oxygen and dominated by methane as well as hydrogen, ammonia, and water vapor. A major theoretical breakthrough seemed to occur in 1953, when the famous Miller-Urey experiment obtained dramatic inductive results supportive of this hypothesis by synthesizing four of the twenty needed amino acids for life to occur through a discharge of artifical lightning into a laboratory chamber that contained a modern equivalent to such an atmosphere. Later tests in so-called broth theory inspired by the Millery-Urey success obtained thirteen additional amino acids. In response to criticism that the atmosphere Miller used for his experiment was excessively "reducing," successful experiments were conducted with lowered reducing densities perhaps more similar to the earth's original atmosphere. Yields were lower but more diverse, including ten of the twenty amino acids needed by the proteins of present-day organisms. Since Miller's initial success, he and many others have conducted numerous successful experiments that produced most of the prebiotic compounds necessary for the creation of life, including all four chemical bases of both DNA and RNA, which Miller was able to synthesize in sea water. However, life itself has not yet been launched into existence by prebiotic broth experiments, and the question remained how organic compounds produced in one friendly environment might be advanced to new levels several times over again by a sequence of entirely different environments. Most, if not all, of the organic compounds needed for the creation of life could have been spontaneous products of the earth's early environment, but the crucial issue remained what event or events might have delivered them into a new and more inclusive synthesis that can be identified as life. In other words, exactly how and why did life come into existence as a singularity equivalent to the big bang?

The crucial ingredient for life to be able to replicate itself (in fact the most essential condition of life) would seem to be a concentration of nucleic acids sufficient to produce the DNA and RNA that both provide and put into effect the needed code for the production of proteins among ribosomes located outside the nucleus of a cell. In the simplest possible terms, DNA produces RNA, which thereupon produces all the necessary proteins for life to occur. DNA enjoys priority in the eukaryotic cells of all species today both in the plant and animal kingdoms, since its full code within the cell's nucleus produces shortened segments of RNA coding that travel beyond the cell's nucleus as messengers for telling the ribosomes exactly what proteins to produce. However, in the phylogenetic evolution of life almost four billion years ago, it would seem RNA first emerged with the double function of both coding and producing proteins. Only much later did DNA and ribosomes come into existence to specialize their particular functions, thereby limiting RNA to the relatively limited task of transmitting messages from one to the other. Preceding this specialization, RNA is seen to have played such a crucial role that Walter Gilbert was able to propose in 1986 the existence of an "RNA world" in which life was nothing more than RNA molecules that catalysed their own synthesis: "The first stage of evolution proceeds, then by RNA molecules performing the catalytic activities necessary to assemble themselves from a nucleotide soup." With evidence supportive of this thesis, Stephen Sowerby, et al., have demonstrated that the ingredients of RNA readily adsorb (or gather) on the surface of graphite and other inorganic solids in an aqueous medium, and Christian de Duve has estimated that the first RNA genes need not have been more than from seventy to one hundred units (or nucleotides) in length. All that was needed was exactly the right combination of nucleic acids at the right temperature, and takeoff occurred in the creation of an RNA environment, after which life could evolve through mutations resulting from inadvertent modifications in the RNA and DNA codes.

Without denying the importance of RNA, the German biochemist Günter Wächtershäuser has rejected Gilbert's notion that its spontaneous synthesis initiated life. Instead, he argues, there was an earlier stage that consisted of sheer metabolism without the involvement of nucleic acids. This singular achievement occurred, Wächtershäuser claims, through the accumulation of what might be described as iron-sulfur parasites, adhesions of prebiotic carbon molecules upon metal surfaces (probably iron sulfides) that sufficiently benefitted from the catalytic activity of these surfaces to be able to produce their own internal environments. Wächtershäuser thus accepts the concept of an initial RNA world, but as a product of an earlier "iron-sulfur world" during which these molecules acquired cell envelopes (exterior surfaces) that permitted a closed-surface metabolism to produce an accumulation of nucleic acids for the production of TNA (tribonucleic acid), ultimately leading to the creation of RNA in an intricate fifteen-step sequence. With this emphasis upon prebiotic iron-sulfide adhesions, Wächtershäuser succeeds in shifting the primordial-broth environment emphasized by Miller into the cell interior itself, where the synthesis of purines and proteins could be catalyzed by the metal surfaces to which these cells were attached.

As Wächtershäuser explains in a later paper, life originated "in a deterministic chemical mechanism, which increase[d] in complexity by a process of self-expansion . . ." The earliest cell organization was through adhesion as a "surface metabolist, whereby the constituents of metabolism (metabolites) were bonded to a mineral surface which constituted a two-dimensional flow-through reactor." Primordial organisms produced in this fashion were autotrophic in the sense that they fed on inorganic substances beginning with carbon monoxide. The mineral surface's catalytic action provided free access to these substances as well as an unobstructed elimination of waste products as long as the organism was bonded to this surface. This piggy-back dependency eliminated the need for the necessarily complex input-output transport systems crucial to the very earliest stages of evolution. The simplest possible "autocatalytic cycle" (or "alpha cycle") could thus occur, letting food be absorbed to permit the further absorption of food, thus providing the necessary metabolism for growth to occur at more advanced stages of advancement.

Recent experiments seem to confirm Wächtershäuser's hypothesis. Wächteshäuser himself has demonstrated that an iron-sulfur surface serves as a catalyst of carbon monoxide into more complex carbon molecules, and it has now been demonstrated that pyruvate could likewise have been synthesized to become a crucial ingredient of the citric acid cycle as well as sugars and other carbon-based molecules. With this explanation, eight steps can be accounted for in the conversion of carbon monoxide to peptides as short amino acid chains in protein molecules. Metabolic feedback would have advanced on a serial basis in "reaction cascades" that led to more complex variations including the creation of nucleic acids needed to produce RNA. This biochemical inevitability would have been substantially different from the prebiotic broth assumption of Miller and others that life suddenly and accidentally emerged from random juxtapositions in a sequence of perfect environments, each a unique version of Darwin's warm pond appropriate to the next level of synthesis. Wächtershäuser argues instead that his "iron-sulfur world theory" involved a more deterministic sequence, "order out of order out of order." The creation of life occurred in stages, as Miller himself takes for granted, but these were closely linked within the prebiotic cell, each the product of the last in transition from iron-sulfide adhesions to an RNA world followed by the eukaryotic cell and all multicellular life that later evolved.

The ideal environment for life's initial catalytic interplay turns out to have been not at the surface of the earth, but at levels deep enough underground for anaerobic metabolism (no free oxygen was necessary) to have been obtained under conditions of extreme heat and extreme gravitational pressure. According to George Cody, et al., this environment essential to the creation of life would have occurred between 200 and 300 degrees centigrade and with 200 MPa (megapascals) of weight, corresponding to pressure at the bottom of a 20-km water column. Even today, Wächtershäuser suggests, life might continue to be generated under these circumstances, such that primitive microbes feeding on carbon monoxide "might still be tracked down in hot pressurized spaces that have previously been inaccessible to exploration." In 1981 John Corliss, et al. first proposed the probable site for this process in deep-sea hydrothermal vents where hot subterranean enclaves are continuously flooded by water containing carbon and sulfur in iron-sulfur clusters, and with sufficient pressure and temperature to produce the necessary biochemical fusion within cellular iron-sulfide adhesions. Instead of a stable environment at the surface of the earth, either as a broth or liquid environment as respectively suggested by Haeckel and Darwin, what was needed was a continuous rapid exchange within a suboceanic interface between cold water and subterranean metals under extreme compression and at temperatures well in excess of boiling point.

Wächtershäuser's theory also seems to be supported by the recent discovery of an enormous population of unicellular microorganisms identified as Archaea has been found to exist at depths as much as two miles beneath the surface of the earth. With a total bulk and number probably well in excess of all species on the earth's surface, archaeons are both anaerobic and autotrophic in the sense that they thrive in an environment without air and with only inorganic compounds available as food. As "extremophiles," they survive in an environment once considered hostile to life--i.e., without light and under extreme compression (for example inside rocks and deep in the earth's mantle). They can endure at temperatures well below freezing, but also at temperatures that can double or triple water's boiling point. Traces of some have actually been found in one particular meteorite from Mars discovered in 1984 (ALH 84001), suggesting they might have been the agents of panspermia, the introduction of life on earth by meteorites containing both carbon and amino acids. The extra-terrestrial source of life can therefore be considered a serious possibility, since there has been a steady shower of meteorites from elsewhere in the universe, billions of which have reached the earth from Mars alone since the earth's formation four and a half billion years ago.

However, the arrival of Archaea from outer space does not preclude their production on earth as well, and Wächtershäuser's theory applies in both instances. From the very beginning it seems archaeons have been discharged from the core of the earth into the ocean in deep-sea hydrothermal vents, most notably those located at the mid-Atlantic Ridge that extends down the center of the Atlantic Ocean from Greenland to South America. Visible to the naked eye as "snow" on the surface of the magma that erupts from these underwater vents, this hot white precipitation seems likely to have been an early stage in the evolution of life and to have provided the very bottom of the deep oceanic food chain supportive of more advanced species that finally include those on the earth's surface as well. As single-cell prokaryotes, Archaeons lack a nucleus containing DNA, but they are sufficiently advanced in evolution to possess a single strand of DNA adjacent to the outer cell wall. The product of hydrothermal eruption, they may be treated as a crucial link between subterranean iron-sulfide adhesions and the later introduction of the eukaryotic cell that set the stage for multicellular life as we know it today.

The later evolution of life seems relatively easy to decipher in classical Darwinian terms despite the rather hollow insistence of recent creationists (especially in light of Wächtershäuser's contribution) that the theory of evolution cannot explain "irreducible complexities." Approximately two billion years ago, the eukaryotic cell seems to have come into existence with a nucleus that includes both DNA (deoxyribose nucleic acid) as its genetic code and RNA (ribonucleicacid) limited to a new and smaller role as the messenger to regulate the production of protein from amino acids. Approximately a billion years ago, eukaryotic cells began to join together in multicellular species that gave each a special role to play as determined by its DNA code. DNA, for example, predisposes a particular cell in the tongue to behave appropriately for its function, as it does a cell in the ear, the lining of the stomach, etc. Identified as a genome, the DNA molecule is located in the nucleus of each cell, and it consists of an elongated strand coiled with another of its kind identical to it in a crumpled-up double helix. For the human being, each genome comprises about three billion code units (or nucleotides) whose unique linear arrangement is grouped in genes to provide a genetic code that differentiates the needed structure and function of each particular cell. DNA incessantly replicates its pattern in shortened RNA strands to inform ribosomes of the proteins needed to perform the various functions of the cell. In the simplest possible terms, DNA makes RNA makes protein, and of course protein organizes and gives substance to life.

According to the latest data, the fruit fly genome contains thirteen thousand genes, the roundworm genome contains nineteen thousand genes, and the human genome, at the very top of the evolutionary ladder, contains a total of between thirty and forty thousand genes, only twice as many as the roundworm, suggesting that there is further interactive complexity to be taken into account both within and among genes. Also fascinating is the fact that most genes are shared by various species. One hundred thirteen human genes, for example, have been borrowed from bacteria and only three hundred human genes--one percent of the total--have no counterpart whatsoever in the mouse genome, thus supporting the likelihood that humanity shares a common ancestor with mice perhaps 100 million years ago.

It has been speculated that humanity's superior genetic complexity derives not from its possession of more advanced genes but from increased "combinatorial complexity" among particular genes that compounds their interactions. Strictly in accordance with Darwinian evolution, errors in the transmission of DNA from one generation to the next have led to modifications in these genes, and these in turn have produced the mutations essential to the dynamics of natural selection. Less is involved in this process than it might seem, however, since each genome's active "coding region" comprising as little as from one to one and a half percent of its total size. As much as seventy-five percent of the rest is "junk" DNA, much of which seems to have lost its relevance to the function and existence of its host body. However, some of this junk might play a more important role than now recognized. DNA's parasitic Alu element, for example, might accentuate the impact of nearby genes, thereby giving better plasticity to the entire genome. Junk DNA might also be useful in providing the material for future mutations, new combinations drawn from the residual leftovers of older combinations.

In any case, it is the "survival of the fittest" among code mutations that produces the evolutionary advancement of DNA, and, beyond that, of the species as a whole. Just as biological evolution is inexplicable except for the participation of DNA, the complexity of DNA is inexplicable except as the product of evolution. In the most inclusive sense, the two can be seen as being symbiotic. The ability of DNA to revise itself from one generation to the next provides the basis for mutation, thus evolution, and evolution through natural selection makes the best immediate choice among mutations produced by revisions of the DNA code. DNA makes evolution possible, and evolution in turn both consolidates and gives scope to the advancement of DNA--survival rooted in flexibility rooted in genetic complexity.

Much of the mystery of life has thus been explained, and much of what continues to elude full disclosure has been submitted to scrutiny in recent years on new and more productive grounds. Moreover, now that the human genome has been isolated and completely mapped, almost anything seems possible in recombinant genetics both within and between species through the transposition of genetic fragments from one chromosome into another at the time of conception. Since nucleotides which provide the unit symbols of the genetic code are identical both between species and between individuals within the same species, their inclusive pattern need only be displaced and reorganized in order to produce different genetic results. This freedom remains limited at this point, but it seems only a matter of time before extravagant variations can be produced. It would seem feasible, for example, to borrow DNA segments from chimpanzees or any other form of life (grass, for example) in order to reconstruct the human genome. All that would be needed is for code to be recoded. An exact clone of Hitler or Einstein could also be reconstructed once his DNA or that of family members can be obtained. Many of the hybrid creatures produced in this fashion, especially in exchanges from one species to another, would undoubtedly abort or perish soon after birth, but others can be expected to live, and recombinant genetics can in time be refined to minimize its failures of this sort.

The presumably singular role of God as mankind's creator thus loses much of its mystique, since any talented recombinant geneticist will be able to replicate, if not surpass, God's successes within the next couple of decades, for example by producing Nietzsche's superman with double or triple our intelligence as well as double or triple our physical strength. And the unthinkable seems on the brink of realization within the next century--the creation of prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells under laboratory conditions followed by their effective combination, thus putting the creation of life from inorganic compounds (sometimes described as abiogenesis) entirely in the hands of mankind. The total synthesis of the human being from dust, as depicted both in Genesis and Gilgamesh over twenty centuries earlier, would fall into the same category as the transformation of lead to gold, obtainable through human ingenuity but not necessarily worth the effort.

3. Human Soul minus God

The average human brain is extraordinary in its own right as a biological "miracle" quite aside from any of the spiritual pretensions linked with the concept of the human soul. The brain is by far the most advanced evolutionary innovation since the origin of life perhaps four billion years ago--also the most intricate and finally most powerful organ to have evolved proportional to its size. With the consistency of peanut butter, the brain occupies approximately one twentieth of a cubic foot, and its average weight is approximately three pounds, having evolved to almost four times its size in well less than three million years. This gives it perhaps the fastest rate of growth for any single organ in the history of life--too fast for its own good according to Arthur Koestler. The adult brain is responsible for twenty percent of the body's metabolism, though it comprises only two percent of body weight and lacks valves, muscles, and other such moving parts. Most remarkably, it includes as many as a hundred billion brain cells (or neurons). Including dendrites, the elongated filaments that extend among brain cells, almost a trillion neural pathways provide remarkably complex circuitry among neurons each of which exercises the simple rapid-fire choice when to act as an electrical conductor. All these neurons are limited to the either-or function of all the rest of the body's nerve cells, in their case by enacting the simple decision from one moment to the next whether to transmit a tiny electrical impulse toward other brain cells with which they are connected. This might seem insignificant, except that tens of millions of neural circuits can be brought into play with substantial redundancy in order to produce a compound synaptic interaction far more intricate than the ideas it generates in human consciousness. One is able to remark, "I'm hungry--let's eat something," or "You gotta believe," only because countless brain cells have almost simultaneously fired or not in the production of such a relatively simple idea.

Contrary to arguments otherwise, this mental capacity is more or less proportional to brain size as a measure of how many neurons can be brought into play. The brain of a flea, spider, or worm functions on the same principle as the human brain, but at a more primitive level because of its reduced size on both an absolute and relative scale compared to body size. From the very beginning the brain served as a steering mechanism away from danger and toward the satisfaction of biological need. At the simplest and most obvious level, for example, tiny earthworm brains are smart and pragmatic enough to seek out the best directions conducive to their survival. But worms risk death when their puny collapsible brains make wrong choices, for example by deciding to escape to the sidewalk in order to avoid wet soil during a rain storm. Unfortunate creatures, they drown because their neural reflexes are insufficient to their survival. This inevitability might seem self-evident in the case of worms, but it bears upon all levels of neural behavior, and in fact it dominates most human enterprise as illustrated by the intricate pursuits of lawyers and Wall Street brokers. These too exercise their brains toward favorable ends, and at times with no less catastrophic results.

It is also important to recognize that both absolute and proportional brain size are relevant to intelligence, and that any fixed measure of intelligence must necessarily combine the two. The average human brain is one-fiftieth of its body size, whereas the brain of a chimpanzee is one-hundred and fiftieth, the brain of a gorilla is one-five hundredth, and the brain of an elephant a mere one-thousandth. On the other hand, a hummingbird has a bigger brain relative to its body size, but too small on an absolute scale, just as the elephant's brain is too small compared to its body size. This double variable of relative and absolute size likewise applies to the difference between men and women. The female brain is smaller in absolute size, but it is larger proportional to body size and with neurons more tightly packed. Because these differences offset each other, intellectual parity is obtained between the two sexes.

Other important variables include cortical thickness, fissure depth, and the proportional size of different lobes. However, combined absolute and relative size differences are sufficient in and of themselves to establish the human brain's dramatic superiority to the brains of all other species. Just as advanced generations of computers contain more megabytes than earlier models, our brains possess a good deal more neural circuitry than animal brains on an integrated quantitative scale (both absolute and relative), therefore faster, better ideas. In other words, greater quantity translates into improved performance levels, animal instinct into mind tantamount to soul, but with the caveat that transcendent awareness is strictly a biological accomplishment. In this sense the human brain's performance is not less but more animal, affording a bigger and better use of bestial thought than the comparable mental capacity of creatures handicapped with smaller brains. This linkage might be demonstrated by recent experiments in which the fetal stem cells of unborn piglets have been injected into the brains of patients with Parkinson's disease in order to augment their neural capacity. These stem cells from an animal join the human brain and rejuvenate dysfunctional brain tissue because they are acceptable to the body's immune system and with exactly the needed biochemical ingredients. Again, quantity translates into quality, improved cranial capacity into better human intelligence.

Mankind's quantitative, hence qualitative superiority to the rest of the animal kingdom should be understood to result not from God's benificence, but from our singular evolutionary history distinct from all other species on earth. God might be involved as a final cause, but the efficient cause has been our unique evolution distinct from all other species. As opposed to other animals, humanity evolved within 150,000 generations from arboreal primates to lawyers and mathematicians. How was this possible? How is human development unique in having so quickly produced bigger and more complicated brains and therefore superior intelligence? The answer, simply enough, seems that our simian ancestors too big to scurry along the tops of branches resorted to brachiation (the use of front paws as hands) in order to swing among branches from below. Those with opposable thumbs had better mobility and were more likely to survive, thus advancing the evolution of the hand as an instrument of need gratification complementary to locomotion by means of the feet. The work-performance combination of feet and jaws thereby expanded to include hands as well, and this addition encouraged the acquisition of entirely new capabilities. More complex tasks could be performed, and the better the intelligence of our primate ancestors, the more complicated the tasks.

A second major breakthrough thereupon occurred that separated our ancestors from other primates, and this seems to have occurred between five and seven million years ago, probably when the climate of portions of Africa turned arid and replaced forests with savannahs. Those of our ancestors that later evolved into the species identified as Homo habilis (roughly two million years ago) descended from trees and engaged in uninterrupted bipedalism on their hind legs, limiting their hands to an entirely different order of performance. Still later they evolved into Homo erectus (between 1.6 million and two hundred-fifty thousand years ago) and finally as early as two hundred thousand years ago, Homo sapiens, or modern humanity, the single mammal today with totally differentiated functions for its feet and hands. As a result, we alone possess hands with opposable thumbs as well as the ability to walk on our hind legs over long distances. This is absolutely unique, separating us from birds, monkeys, and all other creatures. If an ordinary dog could splay its front paws and retain a vertical posture on its hind legs for three million years, it too might be blessed with something akin to human intelligence. Certainly the chimpanzee, with its opposable thumb as well as a 98.4% DNA resemblance to the human being, could "stand tall" and make the transition with relative ease, since only six chromosomes differ and since Chimpanzee chromosomes exceed those for Home sapiens by only one resulting from two of their smaller chromosomes having fused together to form a larger one in the human genome. As already indicated, recombinant genetics might be able to produce a chimpanzee brain with human intelligence within a few decades; evolutionary trends could do the same within a couple million years under favorable circumstances.

The brachiation/bipedalism combination might seem a modest advantage, but in fact it has been of crucial importance in the evolution of humanity, since it permits the enlargement of the human skull well beyond the size of the mother's pelvic aperture within the first five years of life. Because hands can cut or tear food before it is eaten, and because the head is fixed on top of the neck instead of in front of it, both the jaw and neck muscles attached to the skull can be much smaller, thus reducing pressure on the skull and thereby permitting wide-open skull sutures and fontanelles at birth that let the brain expand to almost fourfold its size by the age of six. In other words, free of powerful neck and jaw muscles, the skull remains sufficiently soft to be able to grow to four times its size. Feedback also occurs in the sense that the increased intelligence of parents resulting from their enlarged brains improves the likelihood of adequate care for their infants with relatively undeveloped brains compared to other species. As a result the brains of these infants are granted time enough to increase in size sufficiently to be able to repeat the cycle through later generations. On the other hand, chimpanzees and lower species on the biological ladder are born with brains closer to their mature size. They gain mature skills much sooner, but at a relatively primitive level, insufficient to accommodate thinking comparable to human intelligence. Paradoxically, the smaller their brains, the quicker their achievement of maturity, but also the greater their loss of more advanced skills at a later age.

An auxillary benefit of bipedalism has been the reduction of smell (better suited to the ground than air), resulting in the atrophy of olfactory brain centers and thus permitting the enlargement of prefrontal neural regions devoted to cognitive intelligence. Likewise, it seems that a larger variety of sounds could be produced by the vocal cords once the human body assumed a vertical posture, creating the preconditions for language. Resulting from this liberation of voice and hands compounded by the obligation to nurture small children for several years after their birth (decades even!), the brain's improved capacity has become a crucial variable for the survival of individuals, groups, and indeed the species as a whole. In effect, a complex incremental feedback has quadrupled the brain's size to accommodate these combined behaviors, and these in turn have played a more significant role because of the brain's improved capacity. As earlier indicated, this evolutionary multiple-feedback interaction has persisted for about three million years. At first brain size increments were relatively modest, but once takeoff finally occurred in the middle Pleistocene age half a million years ago, the human brain enlarged more rapidly than any other organ in the history of animal biology, giving us a combined absolute and relative brain size advantage that has permitted the unique advancement of the human species as compared to the rest of the animal world.

Unfortunately, the human brain remains no different from the animal brain in its termination upon death. Theologians inform us that, unlike animal consciousness, the human soul survives death and journeys into one of three supernatural realms created by God to accommodate the human species after death--heaven, hell, and purgatory. But just as animal consciousness ends once an animal dies, so, it seems, does human consciousness inclusive of the soul, whatever that might consist of. The principle of "singularity" of such importance to the universe as a whole, and with obvious relevance to the origin of life, bears implications here as well, in this case, as explained by Christians, with singularity prevented through either reincarnation or eternal salvation, both of which offer a human equivalent of the cyclical universe (their own version of the big crunch renewed as a big bang). However, chances seem excellent that the principle of immortality is limited to DNA replication in the children we bear. We do not survive our lives: it is our children who do. When death occurs there is nothing to suggest that our consciousness in any guise or distillation levitates toward a superior realm identified as heaven or toward a new body we might be able to inhabit. Any psychologist or brain physiologist who conducts research to suggest such a possibility--for example by investigating psychic emanations from the skulls of dying patients--would be a laughing stock of the profession. For why should the human being possess a soul or spirit that survives death any more effectively than the conscious experience of a beetle, housefly, or dead squirrel at the side of the road? We possess basically the same brain functions with basically the same neural circuitry. Our primary advantage consists of the amount of circuitry we possess, and the qualitative superiority of our minds entirely derives from this quantitative superiority. In effect, our brains are the same but vastly bigger. Why, therefore, is the bonus of heavenly bliss restricted to the human species? Why no heaven for worms, spiders, and garden snakes?

True, human intelligence might seem to deserve eternal life, but it terminates as soon as its interstitial electric circuitry comes to an end, just as the filament of an electric light bulb goes dark when one turns off its switch. The biological transition that takes place at the time of death begins with the cessation of the blood supply followed by oxygen loss that produces mitochrondrial collapse in nerve cells, then a breakdown of the Krebs cycle, and finally the stoppage of the electron transport chain that transmits nerve impulses from one nerve cell to the next. This terminal process is swift, and its overall cause and outcome remain simple enough, for, like every other cell in the body, each neuron feeds on a steady supply of oxygen from the lungs to metabolize a slightly more variable supply of glycogen from the stomach. When the heart stops pumping blood, all of the brain's hundred billion neurons unavoidably suffocate within a minute or two from oxygen deprivation. As my clever three-year old granddaughter Liza explained, "the cow just takes one more moo, and that's it," after which, as Hamlet promised, the rest is silence. Once the loss of oxygen has simultaneously closed down all brain cells, their circuitry ceases and consciousness as a kind of mental illumination simply ends. More appropriate than the lightbulb analogy would be a television screen when it is turned off, a moment's afterglow quickly swallowed up in darkness.

To conclude that the soul, a residue of neural impulses more pure and eternal than the stuff of ordinary thought, thereupon disembarks from the dead brain toward a transcendent realm that guarantees eternal joy is comforting but unlikely. Instead, one's mind ceases to exist, and what follows this singularity may be considered little different from a delectable afternoon's nap undisturbed by telephone calls. As Pliny once explained, all of humanity endured an eternity of total death right up to the moment our lives began, and upon dying we merely return to it. Death is supposed to be a mystery, but each of us is expert in the experience of oblivion, having already been exposed to it for countless aeons preceding our birth. And what we remember--exactly nothing--is what can be expected once we die. It is the act of dying that should worry us, not death itself once this final rite of passage is over and done with.

4. Anthropomorphic God

Christian dogma emphasizes the role of a personal God who performed his initial "singularity" with a big bang that launched light, the firmament, paradise and the world that followed. However, none of this was the product of instantaneous creation as well as can be determined by current scientific research. Most cosmologists today agree that something besides God preceded the big bang, whether it began as a vacuum fluctuation, as a swift transition from a big crunch, or as an instantaneous worm-hole transmission of energy from an earlier universe. They also understand the history of our particular universe both before and after the advent of life to have been evolutionary rather than fixed. And many of them suspect the whole process will repeat itself when our universe comes to an end, guaranteeing eternity rather than a span of limited duration end-stopped by two singularities (obviously the Biblical events of creation and judgment day). Moreover, it seems the same lack of singularity may apply to the origin of life. For when does life begin--when carbon molecules attach themselves to iron-sulfide surfaces, when they acquire cell envelopes, when TNA begins, when RNA begins, when DNA begins, or when the eukaryotic cell begins? And when does the human soul first manifest itself, with Homo habilis, with Homo erectus, or with Homo sapiens? And, vice versa, when we die, why should our brain-functions identified as soul resist singularity by surviving the rest of our bodies? Why should overarching continuity occur in this one particular instance, such that a special zone of the universe identified as heaven has been reserved for the eternal perpetuation of this puny and otherwise unproductive mental function? Why, all in all, is the Bible consistently wrong both when it insists upon singularity (e.g., regarding creation, the origin of life, and the human soul) and when it denies singularity (e.g., regarding the immortality of the soul). None of these issues even begins to be explained either by Christ, Paul, or the first three chapters of Genesis that provide the keystone to Christian eschatology. All in all, Biblical wisdom offers an abundance of answers but none of the appropriate questions, so we should not be surprised that its answers betray abysmal ignorance--the same ignorance that brought ridicule upon Paul when he tried to preach his message before a crowd of unfriendly philosophers in Athens (Acts, 17.18-33). Appropriately, Paul fled Athens for Corinth, where there were no philosophers to challenge his misinformation.

edward.jayne@wmich.edu

Footnotes

i. See B. G. Schmidt, "A New Definition of Singular Points in General Relativity," in General Relativity and Gravitation, I (1971), pp. 269-80.

ii. See William Craig and Quentin Smith's Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford, 1993), pp. 114-25, 167-78, 171-78, 234-36, 251, and 272-73, for a summary of the controversy. My reference both to Hawking's 1976 definition and Schmidt's 1971 definition is suggested by Quentin Smith, pp. 120 and 235.

iii. Heinz Pagels, Perfect Symmetry: The Search for the Beginning of Time (Simon and Schuster, 1985), pp. 243-44, 336-37.

iv. Alan Guth, The Inflationary Universe: The Quests for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins (Addison Wesley, 1997), pp. 86, 341.

v. Stephen Hawking, "Breakdown of Predictability in Gravitational Collapse," Physical Review, D14 (1976), p. 2460, and A Brief History of Time from the Big Bang to Black Holes (Bantam, 1988), pp. 88, 115, 122, 173, and 186.

vi. Paul Davies, The Edge of Infinity (Simon and Schuster, 1981), p. 161.

vii. For an extended list of additional singularities in physics see Craig and Smith, pp. 172-73.

viii. Obviously I am summarizing the so-called E version of creation recounted in Genesis, chaps. 1 to 2.4. The J version, chaps. 2.4 to 3.24, obviously complicates this sequence by having God create Adam before the animals and much of nature, and finally Eve, who introduces the issues of sin and salvation.

ix. My primary sources for the information that follows include The New York Times science articles, especially in the Tuesday science supplements, as well as The Columbia Encyclopedia, Oxford's Concise Science Dictionary, The New York Times, Isaac Asimov's outdated but useful New Guide to Science (Basic Books, 1984), John Maddox's What Remains to be Discovered (Free Press, 1998), and Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee's Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe (Springer-Verlag, 2000).

x. See John Noble Wilford, "Deep Space Fireworks as 2 Galaxies Collide," The New York Times (Oct. 27, 1997), p. A17.

xi. Fred Hoyle, "The Universe: Past and Present Reflections," Engineering & Science, Nov., 1981, p. 12--cited by Peter Rinaldo, Atheists, Agnostics and Deists in America: A Brief History (DorPete Press, 2000), p. 2. A.G.E. Lemaitre first proposed the Big Bang theory in 1927, and George Gamow revived it in 1946.

xii. Isaac Asimov, The Collapsing Universe: The Story of Black Holes (Walker, 1977), p. 148.

xiii. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time from the Big Bang to Black Holes (Bantam, 1988), p. 108.

xiv. The 67 billion year estimate for future life of the universe (40 billion years after it completes its expansion) I obtain from Lloyd Motz, The Universe: Its Beginning and End (Scribners, 1975), p. 308.

xv. Quoted by David Strauss in The Old Faith and the New (Prometheus, 1997), vol. 1, pp. 174-75.

xvi. Pagels, p. 69. Hawking proposes essentially the same outcome in his paradigm of the big bang becoming a big crunch, pp. 107, 115, 138, and 173. See also Asimov, p. 162; and Motz, pp. 310-11.

xvii. My brief history of the concept of black holes is based on Hawking, pp. 81-86.

xviii. Hawking, pp. 91-2, 102, 104-5, 108, and 110.

xix. See Dennis Overbye's "From Light to Darkness: Astronomy's New Universe," in The New York Times (April 10, 2001), "Science Times" section, p. 1, for a summary of a recent Baltimore conference of the Space Telescope Science Institute in which current speculation pertaining to the expansionist impact of dark energy was debated.

xx. Motz emphasizes this possibility on p. 80. Steven Weinberg's single reference, "perhaps black holes," in his classic text, The First Three Minutes (Basic Books, 1977), p. 150, as well as his three brief references in Dreams of a Final Theory (Pantheon, 1992), pp. 40, 62, and 280, would suggest that he hedges his bet on black holes by mentioning them without granting them a central role in astrophysics. Hawking's concession is to be found on p. 94, where he literally talks of hedging his bet by having gambled against their existence with his friend Kip Thorne, and without either of them having yet been able to collect because of insufficient evidence.

xxi. Motz, p. 312.

xxii. Hawking, p[. 156-57. See also p. 173.

xxiii. Another analogy that suggests itself is of a shower of sparks from a bonfire. Just as any particular universe slows down after having been launched into existence, a single tiny ember slowly dies once thrust from a fire. One might suggest that the universe we know lurched into existence like a bubble, and is now playing itself out like a dying ember.

xxiv. Edward P. Tryon, "Is the Universe a Vacuum Fluctuation?" Nature, (1973), vol. 246, pp. 396-7.

xxv. Alan H. Guth, The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins (Addison Wesley, 1997), pp. 12-15, 245-49, and 271-3. I obtain from p. 272 my reference in the previous paragraph to the false vacuum that surrounds the universe as a "perpetual tempest." Hawking emphasizes the importance of a phase transition in A Brief History of Time, p. 127.

xxvi. Guth, p. 271. Guth himself does not make any reference to Aristotle.

xxvii. Guth, p. 258.

xxviii. Hawking, p. 116.

xxix. Aristotle's rejection of creationism may be found in his treatise, "On the Heavens," in The Basic Works of Aristotle (Random House, 1941), pp. 421 and 444--respectively in sections 280a 24-25 and 301b 5-302a 3.

xxx. See Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe (Springer-Verlag, 2000), pp. xiii-xxviii.

xxxi. Maddox, p. 160.

xxxii. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, Appendix "Theory of the Method of Applying the Teleological Judgment," sect. 80, p. 579, in the Great Books edition of Kant (Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1952)--quoted by Gunter Wächtershäuser in "The Origin of Life and its Methodological Challenge," Journal of Theoretical Biology, 187 (1997), pp. 485-85.

xxxiii. Here I summarize the brief history of the theory of spontaneous generation by Wächtershäuser in "The Origin of Life," op. cit., pp. 487-88, and by André Brack in The Molecular Origins of Life: Assembling Pieces of the Puzzle (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 1-2. As a compilation of eighteen essays by scientists, Brack's book is often impenetrable for the non-specialist. However, its cumulative assessment of current research upon the origins of life is impressive.

xxxiv. The Origin of Life, first published as a booklet in 1923; trans. by Sergius Morgulis (MacMillan, 1938). My explanation of Oparin's contribution and its later extension by Stanley Miller paraphrases Miller's explanation in his essay, "The endogenous synthesis of organic compounds," in Brack, p. 59.

xxxv. S.L. Miller, "A production of amino acids under possible primitive Earth conditions," Science 117:528-29. Also, see Brack, p. 4, and Miller, p. 60, in Brack's The Molecular Origins of Life.

xxxvi. Miller's "Endogenous synthesis," p. 66. On pp. 75-76, Miller includes arginine, lysine, histidine, porphyrins, pyridoxal, thiamine, riboflavin, folic acid, lipoic acid, biotin, and straight-chain fatty acids among the biological compounds that have not yet been prebiotically synthesized under latoratory conditions

xxxvii. See Malcolm W. Browne, "Chemist Adds Missing Pieces to Theory on Life's Origins," The New York Times Science section (July 4, 1995), p. 1.

xxxviii. This limitation of theories emphasizing spontaneous generation in a primordial broth was effectively articulated by Robert Shapiro in his book, Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth (Summit, 1986), chap. 12, pp. 281-98.

xxxix. Walter Gilbert, "The RNA world," Nature, vol. 319 (20 Feb. 1986), p. 618.

xl. Stephen Sowerby, et al., "Differential adsorption of nucleic acid bases: Relevance to the origin of life," Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, vol. 98, issue 3 (Jan. 30, 2001), p. 820. Christian de Duve, "Clues from present-day biology: the thioester world, in Brack's Molecular Origins of Life, p. 228. Kenneth James and Andrew Ellington propose in "Catalysis in the RNA world," Brack, p. 271, that current ribozymes exist in lengths between twenty and over three hundred nucleotides, so even shorter functional RNA lengths might have been possible in the earliest stages of RNA development.

xli. Günter Wächtershäuser, "Groundworks for an Evolutionary Biochemistry: the Iron-Sulphur World," Prog. Biophys. molec. Bio., vol. 58 (1992), pp. 181, 185-86. In its entirety the article, pp. 85-201, provides a full description of Wächtershäuser's iron-sulphur world theory.

xlii. Wächtershäuser, "The Origin of Life," in Brack, pp. 492-93--also pp. 483-84 and 486.

xliii. Wäachtershäuser, "Origin of life in an iron sulfer world," in Brack, pp. 206-8; the quotation is from p. 208, in which Wächtershäuser summarizes his earlier article, "Before enzymes and templates: theory of surface metabolism," Microbiological Review (1988), 52:452-84.

xliv. See George D. Cody, et al., "Primordial Carbonylated Iron-Sulfur Compounds and the Synthesis of Pyruvate," Science, vol. 289 (August, 2000), pp. 1337-40, as well as Wächtershäuser's response in the same issue, "Life as We Don't know It," pp. 1307-8; also see Nicholas Wade's news account of the breakthrough in The New York Times on August 25, 2000, p. A17.

xlv. Cody et al., p. 1339.

xlvi. "Life as We Don't Know It," p. 1308.

xlvii. Corliss, et al. first proposed the importance of deep-sea hydrothermal vents in the earliest stages of evolution in their paper, "An hypothesis concerning the relationship between submarine hot springs and the origin of life on Earth," Oceanologica Acta 4 Suppl. (1981), pp. 59-69. An earlier paper by Corliss et al. announced the first discovery of hydrothermal vents, "Submarine thermal springs on the Galapagos Rift," Science (1979), 203:1073-83.

xlviii. The concept of a subterranean life later identified as archaeons was first entertained during the 1920s. It was found a distinct possibility starting in the 1970s and finally confirmed in 1987 by the U.S. Department of Energy. See Rare Earth, pp. 7-8.

xlix. Ward and Brownlee, chap. 1, esp. pp. 2-11 for the discussion of archaeons, and p. 72 for the estimate regarding the number of meteorites from Mars. Also see Maddox, op. cit., chap. 4, pp. 125-62, for further background.

l. Ward and Brownlee, p. 85.

li. Recent authors who reject Darwinism in favor of the theory of intelligent design include Phil Johnson, Michael Behe, and William Debenski. Johnson's book, Darwin on Trial (1991) has been the "bible" of the movement, and its most recent contribution is Jonathan Wells' book Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? In a recent lecture that I attended, Wells limited his critique of theories pertaining to the origin of life by arguing that Miller's 1953 experiment had been fraudulent, since his atmosphere to recreate a primordial broth bore an excessively reducing effect. However, Wells totally neglected to mention Miller's later tests using lower levels, as well as Wächtershäuser's iron-sulphur theory that effectively preempts the argument that Darwinists are unable "to offer detailed step-by-step sequences of events" toward the clarification of irreducible complexities. Wells also glossed over as much as possible the obvious interaction between genetics and evolution that has been generally accepted since Watson and Crick's explanation of DNA in 1953. As a result, his lecture seemed more vulnerable to charges of dishonesty than any of the Darwinian excesses he decried. See James Glanz's "Biologists Face a New Theory of Life's Origin," in The New York Times, April 8, 2001, for a current assessment of intelligent design theory as religion's most recent effort to refute Darwinism.

lii. See Stephen Jay Gould, "Humbled by the Genome's Mysteries," The New York Times (February 19, 2001), p. A21.

liii. All this data is based on the recently completed mapping of the human genome by two separate groups, Celera Genomics and the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium. See Nicholas Wade, "Reports on Human Genome Challenge Long-Held Beliefs," The New York Times (Feb. 12, 2001), p. 1; also the full coverage of the accomplishment in the next day's issue (Feb. 13), including three articles by Nicholas Wade and one by Natalie Angier. It should be mentioned that at least one respected geneticist, Dr. William Haseltine, continues to believe the total number of human genes is between 100 and 120 thousand.

liv. See Natalie Angier, "Genome Shows Evolution Has an Eye for Hyperbole," The New York Times ((Feb. 13, 2001), p. D5.

lv. A recent article in The New York Times, "Researchers Find Grave Defect Risk in Cloning Animals," (March 25, 2001), p. 1, quotes experts in the field who predict that cloning human beings is possible in the near future, but that it could bear dangerous consequences. Because the reprogramming of eggs and sperm cells speeds up their time of maturation from years to minutes or hours preceding fertilization, random errors have been found to increase in the genome of cloned animals, often producing developmental delays as well as heart, lung, and immune system defects. As a result fewer than three percent of cloning efforts succeed with animals at this time. One can expect, however, that problems of this sort will be eliminated or brought under control within another couple decades.

lvi. For the purposes of comparison with the universe as a whole, the earth's population of six billion people provides something on the order of three hundred million cubic feet of brain tissue, a very small fraction of a cubic mile. Such a grand soggy mound of human folly would fill a large warehouse a thousand feet square and thirty stories high, roughly the size of the Egyptian pyramid of Cheops, 756 feet square by 482 feet high.

lvii. Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (MacMillan, 1967), pp. 330-33.

lviii. John Kinney and Hugh Tucker, Energy Metabolism: Tissue Determinants and Cellular Corollaries (Raven Press, 1992), pp. 62-64. It may be conceded here that the brain's ten-to-one excess in metabolism as compared to the body as a whole is less than the hearts ratio of 19.15 and the kidneys' ratio of 18.18, as indicated on p. 63. Interestingly, the metabolism of the infant's brain is almost half its total body metabolism, more than double its level in adults.

lix. See Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (Norton, 1986), pp. 188-90; Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing (Holt, 1982), pp. 48-50; and J. Philippe Rushton and C. Davison Ankney, "Brain size and cognitive ability: Correlations with age, sex, social class, and race," Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1996, 3 (1), pp. 21-24. The extensive bibliography on pp. 31-34 is also useful to those who might want to pursue the issue further.

lx. See H.J. Jerison, "Issues in brain evolution," in Oxford Surveys in Evolutionary Biology, ed. by R. Dawkins and M. Ridley, pp. 102-34--cited by Dawkins p. 189. Jerison proposes the adoption of an "encephalization quotient," (EQ), as a measure of intelligence that integrates logarithms of brain and body weight standardized against the species as a whole.

lxi. See Nicholas Wade, "Human Or Chimp? 50 Genes are the Key," The New York Times, Oct. 20, 1998, p. D1.

lxii. Koestler, p. 272.

lxiii. Pliny, Natural History, bk. 7, sect. 55, vol. 2 in the Loeb Classics, (Harvard, 1942), pp. 633-35. Pliny may be selectively quoted as follows: All men are in the same state from their last day onward as they were before their first day, and neither body nor mind possesses any sensation after death, any more than it did before birth. . . . These are the fictions of childish absurdity, and belong to a mortality greedy for life unceasing. . . . Assuredly this sweet but credulous fancy ruins nature's chief blessing, death, and doubles the sorrow of one about to die by the thought of sorrow to come hereafter also. . . But how much easier and safer for each to . . . derive our idea of future tranquillity from our experience of it before birth.