Life From Lightning

It's easy, in any age, to think that we've got it all figured out; that, regardless of how much remains to be discovered, what is known rests on a fairly firm foundation. At the risk of singling out the present as somehow unique, however, these days it seems that mankind is particularly prone to this illusion. Our scientific knowledge is so vast that to imagine that any one part of the edifice rests on the infirmity of illusion is, for many, unthinkable.

Take DNA: the hereditary molecule, repository of a species' history, determinant of an organism's attributes, blueprint by which the cell and ultimately the body is constructed. Deterministic, Darwinian theory relegates DNA to the status of historical record and blueprint ... whilst demoting living beings to no more than the machines constructed by it. The process of evolution is thought to be nothing more than the happenstance 'improvement' (if such a word can be said to apply, which committed Darwinists insist it doesn't) of the organisms built by DNA: random changes in the genetic code, tested against a randomly shifting fitness landscape over geologic spaces of time, stretching from the now back to a chemical mud puddle somewhere on the Earth's surface 3.8 billion years ago, when a set of molecules just happened to accidentally fall into a self-replicating configuration.

Well, that's the story according to mainstream biology, and so the one the man on the street knows, more or less vaguely, as the truth. Within the confines of official culture Creationism is peddled too, as a sort of jester at the feet of dignified science, its bald-faced denial of reality and wide-eyed innocent credulousness in the face of the most ridiculous of Biblical stories held up now and again for public ridicule. There are those who believe the Creationist line, but in truth, its cultural function is primarily to prop up Darwinian biology by providing a false - and by necessity absurd - alternative, one that cannot possibly survive inside the halls of academia. It's the hoary old dynamic of cultural polarization all over again, analogous in both form and function to the left-right political function: by gesticulating at caricatures of the opposition, either side is able to keep its followers from straying too far from the official line.

Then there's Intelligent Design. Darwinian apologists often try to connect ID to Biblical creationism, but it's been a tough charge to make stick because ID isn't a coherent theory so much as a stance: a growing community of scholars who, having looked at the fantastic intricacy and sophistication of molecular biology, and having been told it all arose according to chance fed through a recursive algorithm, shake their heads and shout, laughing and incredulous, "No fucking way, man!"

You won't find many books by ID proponents that lay out how, precisely, life was created; rather, most of the literature consists of a catalogue of inconsistencies, improbabilities, and anomalies that, taken together, produce quite a bit of negative evidence against standard evolutionary theory, but very little positive evidence for any alternative (a charge Darwinists make frequently, often stating sarcastically that the implication is that God fits into the blank spots.) So, into this theoretical vacuum I'll throw out my own speculations.

It starts with an interesting experiment conducted in 2003 by Romanian biophysicist Mircea Sanduloviciu at Cuza University, in which an electrical discharge inside an argon plasma caused cells to form, dubbed 'plasma blobs'. The plasma blobs contained no complex structure - at least, none has yet been observed - but they did possess properties of growth (by absorbing gases), replication (by dividing in two), and communication (by emitting electromagnetic waves, causing the atoms in other plasma blobs to vibrate.) So right here we have a possible origin for cellular life, taking place not in a puddle of slime but in a plasma. The early atmosphere of the Earth was a highly charged environment, in which plasmas were very much dominant, so if such structures could form there - and form naturally - this would be a worthy line of inquiry.

Now, let's jump ahead and look for a moment at some of DNA's largely unsung properties. Everyone knows about DNA's hereditary attributes, but few outside of the New Age community have heard about DNA's amazingly sophisticated function as a transceiver for biophotons. Outside of a few scientists - who over the decades since their discovery in 1923, and largely under the public radar, have advanced the understanding of the phenomenon - mainstream science has largely ignored biophotons, leading them to dismiss the parts of the molecule that function as a transceiver as 'junk DNA'. What is known is this: DNA molecules continually emit and receive photons of coherent light in a highly sophisticated fashion that indicates the photons may well serve as a communications medium, linking perhaps not just the cells within an organism but potentially organisms throughout the biosphere. Many researchers speculate as to an identity between biophotons and ki energy, suggesting that techniques such as acupuncture work by manipulating this photonic communications web. At any rate, we see that DNA and the cellular plasma blobs communicate in much the same fashion: with light.

Finally, I'll draw your attention to an interesting morphological correspondence. Look at these two images:


The first you no doubt recognize: the familiar double helix of DNA. The second is a Birkeland current, that is, an electrical current that naturally arises inside charged plasmas under the influence of magnetic fields. Birkeland currents are interesting beasts: they scale through at least 14 orders of magnitude, ranging from the planetary to the intergalactic, representing one of the only phenomena in the universe exhibiting an essentially fractal dynamic over such a broad scope. So far as I know, at present it's unknown whether or not Birkeland currents can form at molecular scales, though I myself would not be at all surprised to find that they do.

In that case, we'd have a situation whereby not only cellular analogues arise in high energy plasmas, but DNA analogues as well.

So, here's my theory: that's exactly what happened, and it happens everywhere throughout the universe, more or less continuously and entirely naturally, though absent certain very specific conditions the structures remain more or less ephemeral. However, the early earth, with its preponderance of solid and liquid state matter in close contact with high-energy plasma, provided exactly those conditions. By a mechanism as yet unknown, the plasma blobs cooled and precipitated as cellular membranes; whilst the Birkeland currents wound amino acids into ropes of DNA, drawing them into place through electromagnetic influence, then leaving the structures frozen in place as energy levels decreased and the currents ceased.

From this point, the initial 'programming' could well have been random; evolution might have picked up from there, and moved things along in an entirely conventional Darwinian way. However, there's reason to suspect that this, too, is not the whole story, for DNA's primary function appears to be as a transceiver rather than a simple historical record. Evidence suggests that 98% of the structure - the so-called 'junk' DNA - fulfills just this function. I'm getting quite a bit more speculative here, but as I noted in Electric Astrology an energy conduit can also transmit information, meaning that early earthly life may well have received programming instructions from cosmic sources. If this is the case, the first cells might have been created as nothing more than simple cellular membranes together with molecular antennae. A cosmic intelligence, reaching down to the earth's surface with fingers of lightning, would be able to program these early cells with the data necessary to make use of the self-organizing properties of the ambient building blocks - ranging from simple molecules such as methane and ammonia up to the more complex but still abundant amino acids - in order to bootstrap the construction of appropriate proteins.

Is this what happened? Hey, I don't know. As always with anything you read on the internet, caveat emptor. This much I do know: if God exists, and permeates the universe, then there must have been some physical mechanism by which She created life. The above, at the moment, is my best guess at what that mechanism is.