The implications to Natural Philosophy of extraterrestrial life and its relationship to life on Earth.

Life on Earth has evolved from the simple to the complex. I will assume the reader is familiar with at least the basic concepts of Darwin’s theory and of evolution and biology in general. Darwin’s theory of natural selection accounts for the survival of successful life forms and for the increase in complexity resulting from such selective pressures as he describes. Such selective pressures allow for more and more complex organisms and symbiotic relationships that may or may not eventually evolve to be a single organism. For example, mitochondria are assumed to have been “eaten” whole by certain free cells and instead of being digested, the mitochondria survived in the host cell, obtaining nutrients from the cell while giving energy to the cell in return. This would be an example of how two different organisms combined to become one. Was this relationship a symbiotic one at first before the ultimate union? We don’t know but it could have been. Another example of a symbiotic relationship is that of certain algae and coral. One provides food for the other and the other provides shelter. These may not be the ultimate reasons for the symbiosis, there may be others, but it serves to illustrate that life may evolve through non hostile means. What I mean by hostile is when a cheetah evolves to run faster to catch more prey and the prey that survives is the one who can run faster. In the case of the corals and algae, it is not hostile but mutually beneficial. Now, I cannot say that one day long ago a hostile algae invaded the tissues of a coral with the express intent of eating it, thereby preying on the coral and destroying it. Perhaps that was the case. A case of an unwelcome guest. Many such invasions must have occurred and failed. The coral could have destroyed the algae with antibodies and the only algae to survive would have been ones which mutated to avoid being an irritant to the coral. One could speculate for a long time. The point is that life started with simple molecules and became more complex, firstly combining with other molecules to become a more complex chemical, but later independent bodies of chemicals in protective membranes learned to combine with other bodies not chemically but in order to improve the chances of survival via a mutually beneficial arrangement, or at least a non destructive to each other arrangement.

Let’s talk about a more complex life form. We know that certain ants farm aphids. The ants have learned that aphids produce a sweet food that the ants can use. Somehow, the ants have learned to protect the aphids from other predators. The somehow is easy enough to imagine. Those ants who “discovered” and began eating the sweet sugar from the aphids were able to survive. Ants who ate the aphids lost this resource and were out competed by other ants who protected the aphids. A simple case of selective pressure that seems somehow intelligent but it is not intelligent (by that I mean it was not a planned strategy by any one particular ant). It’s just that you had a whole bunch of ants over millions of years with a lot of variable genetically programmed behaviors, and only the ones with the behavior of protecting the aphids survived.

I am going to be talking about how mankind has purposefully planned and selectively bred animals for his own benefit, but first let’s talk some more about these ants. Have the ants done this? Can we view the ants to be like us as farmers who keep and protect cattle and other animals so that they are now so evolved as to be helpless – that left alone they would be butchered and extinct in no time, like sheep? Of course not. Ants have not selected the aphids who have produced the most sugar. They have not selectively picked out certain aphids for breeding and they do not kill those who have less desirable traits. It is a static system which will remain static, ants and aphids evolving slowly if at all with little reason to change. If the ants had intelligence they would have the ability to select the best aphid traits and thus improve their resource base even though the ants have no tools or fingers or whatever. All they would have to do is isolate, kill, or protect selectively. But they do not.

Mankind however has intelligence and is able to cause other species to evolve, some of whom have evolved so much that they are indeed a new species and some which would certainly go extinct if they were neglected by us. To me this is a more intense form of Darwinian natural selection. Instead of being selected by survival pressures, they are selected by other traits desired by other species. This is still in my view, natural selection.

I make no distinction between natural and artificial selection in that although artificial selection is somehow viewed as unnatural, it is, in fact, natural. So called artificial selection is however, a fundamentally more complex extrapolation of natural selection. Now here is where we begin to move this discussion from normal everyday earthly concepts to an expanded concept of a universal natural philosophy. You might even say it gets crazy.

In this sense if I were to discover that we have become sentient and intelligent beings because some other beings have selected us and even genetically manipulated us, I would not be offended in the least. I would not be angry to discover that we were meddled with. I would merely view this as part of our evolution in as natural a sense as ever. If life affects life and causes it to be changed and to evolve into something different it is still evolution and natural selection.

There are those who believe that extraterrestrial beings have “uplifted” us from our simian ancestors. As far back as the Pliocene or even the Miocene, a civilization from another planet has genetically and continually manipulated our ancestors so that eventually modern humans emerged and they are still manipulating us genetically. I don’t know if this is true, and frankly I would not care if it was or not. My ego would not be offended to learn that we are not the first intelligence beings or that we did not do it all ourselves. The reason why I would not be offended is because if this intervention was true, it would be to me natural selection anyway. Life begets life. Life changes and alters other life.

It seems to me that the discovery that we are not alone and in fact that life abounds in the universe will come very soon and is almost a certain fact already. And this leads me to imagine life beginning on isolated planets in a lot of places, evolving in each one via Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and eventually leaving their planets of origin to continue the evolution of life, only this time in the Universe as a whole. A grand escalation leading to something as large as the universe itself and what could it be? Could it be that the universe itself is somehow evolving to become self aware?

While we are at it why not pretend also that we survive death, that our bodies are merely a way for our “souls” to experience the material world? If this is so, are the souls of the extraterrestrials also the same as ours? Or are there different “species” of souls with different capabilities in the realm of the “souls”. Ya, I know, some pretty heady stuff there. You can take this a lot further but it gets really messy and in the end it’s all speculation.

But I guess the point is that I believe that life will continue to evolve, however it will happen that evolution will become bigger than just on mere isolated planets as various space faring civilizations get out and about. We need to begin to become unified in this world and join the other worlds out there in that great quest for the self awareness of the Universe, whatever that means.