On the Likely Origin of Species

On the Likely Origin of

Species

Xavier L. Suarez

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© 2013 by Xavier L. Suarez. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 01/07/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4772-7847-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-7848-2 (e)

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Contents

FOREWORD

CHAPTER I THE DAY WITHOUT YESTERDAY

CHAPTER II THE MAGIC FURNACE

CHAPTER III THE PRIVILEGED PLANET

CHAPTER IV WHAT IS LIFE?

CHAPTER V GENOME

CHAPTER VI THE EVOLUTION OF LIVING ORGANISMS

CHAPTER VII SEX AND EVOLUTION

CHAPTER VIII APES TO MEN

CHAPTER IX CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED

CHAPTER X NO TWO ALIKE

CHAPTER XI MAN IN FULL

EPILOGUE

FOREWORD

This foreword is about a person, as much as it is about a book.

The person is my godfather, a most interesting man named Ignacio Warner. In the old days, the Readers Digest magazine would come out every month with a section that described a most unforgettable character. Ignacio Warner was worthy of one of those stories.

As kids, we called him Tio Warner (uncle Warner) or just Warner. He was perhaps the most knowledgeable person I ever met. He was conversant with all basic disciplines, from engineering to philosophy, from history to economics, from art to the natural sciences to psychology and theology and demography. He was the only person I ever met who could be arguably called a polymath mind – sort of a modern day Benjamin Franklin or Leonardo Da Vinci.

I was lucky that he was my intellectual mentor, and that he got me every kind of book to read.

Warner died just a few weeks before I finished writing the first draft of my little story of man’s evolution from nothingness. Right before he died he bought me a book. It was probably the hundredth book he got me to read. And, in this case, as in many others, he ended up paying for it.

His eyesight had deteriorated to the point that he could no longer read. But he wanted me to read whatever was relevant to the enigma of where we came from.

It’s a good thing he bought this one last book, or I might never have realized that there is a chronological coincidence linking the discovery of what is called Dark Energy with the first stirrings of life on this universe.

But now I am getting way ahead of my own story, which begins at the so-called Big Bang. Organic life, you see, does not appear in the universe until ten billion years after the Big Bang.

So let’s roll back the film and start at the beginning.

They call it the Big Bang.

Warner had a part to play in my understanding of the Big Bang. He introduced me to Stephen Hawking and his marvelous bestseller, A Brief History of Time. He also suggested that I attend a book-signing by a fellow named Paul Steinhardt, who just happened to be appearing, in person, at the same bookshop where I had introduced my first book a couple of years before.

Now this Steinhardt guy had some solid credentials as a scientist: He held the Albert Einstein chair in physics at Princeton. And Warner was convinced that Steinhardt, who grew up in Miami, was related to the prominent Cuban family that had built the first railroads in my native country.

But the Miami-Cuban connection was not enough to convince me to go to the book reading. I had perused the subject matter of Steinhardt’s thesis, and it struck me that his thesis is untenable. I realized that Steinhardt is another of these parallel-universe fanatics, trying to fit fancy equations into the simple, historical facts of nature’s beginnings.

Parallel-universe adherents would like to convince us that the Big Bang was not the beginning of the universe, but merely the beginning of the current universe. They reckon that an infinite number of other universes have existed and might someday come back, in a cycle that never began and never ends.

It sounds to me like looney-tunes.

So when the godfather encouraged me to attend Steinhardt’s book signing, I resisted the idea. I had already done my best to debunk the notion of infinite, parallel universes in my first book. There was no way I was going to waste a glorious Sunday night going to this particular book signing.

But Warner knew better: He ordered the book and displayed it prominently in his bedroom the next Thursday I visited in what I had termed my TOE (theory of everything) nights.

So I borrowed it from him.

In the meantime, my Cuban-born relatives and friends (as well as I) were busy trying to figure out who Paul Steinhardt was. Or rather, we were trying to figure out if the whiz at Princeton was related to the Cuban family with a similar name.

He was not. There was a missing d in the name. The Cuban Steinharts, who started our railroads, were not related to the Princeton Steinhardt.

But the damage was done. Warner had bought the book; and it was his last one ever, before he went to meet the Big Banger.

Since the godfather had bought it, and thinking I ought to read what the opposition is saying, I laid my hands on the magnum opus by the Princeton professor.

And I had an epiphany.

Reading Steinhardt’s book, I realized that there are no less than two discontinuities in the scientific explanation of the universe, as it evolved all the way from the Big Bang to our species.

The first discontinuity has been pretty much resolved in the last two decades. It has to do with the fact that the universe as we know it apparently underwent a sudden, unexplainable expansion at the beginning of time. That expansion is discussed, and (hopefully) explained to the satisfaction of the reader, in the first chapter of this book.

My explanation of the first void or discontinuity in the life of the universe borrows heavily from the theory advanced by two brilliant scientists: MIT’s Alan Guth and Stanford’s Andrei Linde. It also borrows from the writings of eminent, theoretical physicist, Brian Greene.

Another discontinuity that has stumped modern science (and that has no current explanation) deals with the discovery that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. That phenomenon is called Dark Energy. It is a much smaller void than the inflationary period – quantitatively speaking. Even so, it is a very disconcerting mystery to science, since it suggests that we are unable to account for about 70% of all the energy and matter in the known universe.

I will leave the whole question of Dark Energy for later on in my little book, which begins at the beginning of time.

Now that was a moment of true darkness. That was before the Big Bang – before a single point of light could be seen, anywhere in the universe.

It is a point in time that begins the tale of how we humans came to be.

Our species, it now appears, evolved from very fine dust.

Chapter I

THE DAY WITHOUT YESTERDAY

[A] surprise from the Deep Field is that the universe’s lights, contrary to astronomers’ hunch, turned out in one great burst. It was as if every chandelier in a mansion were flickered on simultaneously on a moonless night. Sharon Begley, Newsweek, November 3, 1997.

An Unexpected Discovery in the Heavens

It was the beginning of a new millennium; the world had just survived what had been called the Y2K moment. No catastrophes had befallen mankind on what was a numerically interesting new year’s eve – the two-thousandth anniversary of the modern era. As it happened, the last day of the year 2000 was significant only because it completed yet another cycle in the earth’s orbit around the sun.

In a little corner of the earth, that anniversary was significant for a totally different reason. The end of the millennium coincided with a very important discovery by a Yale astronomer, who was beginning to make her mark as the foremost discoverer of black holes.

I should explain that black holes are super-dense concentrations of matter. Recent discoveries about black holes have solved a lot of riddles in science; but for now, all we need to know is that they are the only explanation we have for a peculiar phenomenon that has been recently detected, by which clusters of stars in the middle of certain galaxies have been seen spinning towards the center, as if they were water droplets revolving around a drain that sucks them in with inexorable force.

The astronomer from Yale was named Meg Urry; and on this particular day, in the beginning of the twenty-first century, she was interested in finding out what was that drain-like object sucking in stars, smack in the middle of the Andromeda galaxy.

The Andromeda is our closest neighbor. Perhaps I should say the closest neighborhood to ours, since each galaxy is filled with billions of stars. Planet earth is located in a suburb of the Milky Way metropolis. Next to us, perhaps a little closer to the galactic downtown, is the Andromeda.

Professor Urry was trying to confirm the best guess of the astronomy establishment, which said that Andromeda had an enormous black hole in its center. The good professor was getting her instruments ready by calibrating them – something you do by measuring well-known quantities. She pointed her telescope at our own galactic center, much closer and brighter than our neighbor galaxy and thus much easier to measure.

It was then that she made a remarkable discovery, which shook up astronomers everywhere: She found that our own galaxy also had a large, dark object in its midsection, and that it was eating up the nearest stars. This was evident from the now familiar drain effect, in the form of stars spinning madly into the galactic center. She wrote other astronomers and suggested that our galaxy, like Andromeda, had a super-heavy black hole in the middle.

Soon astronomers were checking the other galaxies; it turned out that most other galaxies also seemed to be organized around a super-heavy object in their center, as determined by the gravitational pull on the nearest stars. The scientific community was rocked to its foundations. And soon things got even more interesting… .

The Second Big Discovery of the New Millennium

More surprises were in store. A theory had been put forth, ten years before, under which the super-heavy black holes found in the middle of galaxies were thought to be related in size to the speed at which the stars on the perimeter were spinning. The bigger the black holes, the faster the stars at the edge of the galaxy spun around the center.

Such a correlation would make sense if the stars on the periphery were being propelled on their journey by the black hole; the gravitational pull of the huge lump of matter in the middle would force the outer stars to spin faster, in the same way a ball tied to a string spins faster when pulled by an adult than the same ball and string when pulled by a child.

But the thing was that the stars at the edge of the galaxies are no longer being pulled by the black hole: They are too far away to be affected by the black hole’s gravitational force. And yet the correlation was perfect: big black hole equals fast-moving stars at the edge of the galaxy.

The only possible explanation was that the black hole was already there from the birth of the galaxy, and exerted its powerful force on the stars way back at the beginning of time. In other words, the galaxies were born with a big lump of matter in their center. That big lump of matter was a key shaping force in what came later, as the galaxy took form. Galaxies could be thought of as enormous clocks, with a huge spring in the middle that powered them.

The Third Major Discovery: Order at the Beginning of Time

By this time, the Hubble telescope was picking up light that came from very close to the beginning of time. And the surprise was the rather neat organization that was found so close to the beginning, which came to be called the Big Bang. It had taken the better part of a century to discover that the universe began with a huge explosion, with enough power to propel and light up trillions of stars and planets. Now we were asked to believe that almost immediately after that explosion, order reigned in the kingdom of the heavens.

How could that be? Are scientists seriously expecting us to believe that one moment there was a huge explosion and soon after that there were nice stars and galaxies, organized around enormous lumps of matter, some of which give off energy in the form of heat and light?

Yes, that is what they expect us to believe.

The latest scientific discoveries reveal that the universe is dancing to the beat of a powerful drummer, whose first act was to smash the drum with enough force that we still feel its vibration, 13.7 billion years later. And, it seems, certain vibrations of that drum caused an array of huge lumps of matter to act as drill sergeants for a host of stars, who would soon be marching in circular patterns to the beat of their own galactic drummer.

This central galactic drummer, this black hole in the middle of most galaxies, will probably end up eating the stars that dance to its beat. But that won’t happen for billions of years. And we are interested in understanding what is happening now. And that brings us back to the Big Bang.

The Importance of Being the Big Bang

It is a safe bet that at some point in every one of my reader’s lives, someone mentioned the Big Bang and added, by way of explanation, that the world began with a big explosion.

If you are like most people I know, you probably reasoned: If the big-time scientists are sure that the universe began with one huge burst of energy, which scattered planets and stars into every corner of the heavens, then so be it. What, in heaven’s name, does that have to do with me?

Well, on second thought, it has a lot to do with all of us humans. Depending on how the world was made, and by whom, it will affect where it is heading. And that, in turn, affects decisions that we make in our lives and lessons we pass on to our children about their life decisions. For example, the possibility that the world will end in my lifetime or in my children’s lifetime, or even my grandchildren’s, is of obvious concern. So is the possibility that the world might not end, but the quality of life in the world might end.

The preoccupation with the quality of life is so great in developed countries like the United States that when Americans are asked what issue they consider important for politicians to address, the environment invariably ends up as number one.

And that is to be expected.

We are right to be concerned about how we all got here, where we are going, and what should be our role in making sure that we preserve the good things in life and reduce or eliminate the bad things. Pollution is bad, because people die when they can’t breathe the air or eat the food. Parents burying their children or dying before they get to see their children grow into adulthood is bad. People shooting one another in gang fights or domestic quarrels, or wars involving entire continents, are bad. Prejudice and hatred of those who don’t look and sound like us is bad. Poverty is bad.

I personally consider it a bad thing that there exists any needy or unhappy human being. Perhaps it’s a purely subjective feeling that I happen to have. But I don’t think so. I think – in fact, I am pretty sure – that it is a generalized, objective sensation shared by the overwhelming majority of the members of my species. We humans like one another enough to wish that we were all happy. It is our condition, as much as the rather pressing instinct each of us has to survive.

We struggle for our individual welfare; but we also feel better if everyone around us has a fair share of the good things.

And so, the question beckons us: Is our world designed to guarantee our own welfare, as well as that of other members of our species? Or, to the contrary, are we doomed to fight each other to the death, as some other species seem to do as a matter of routine? Was the reality of a struggle for survival an intended feature of our existence or, to the contrary, did some kind being or positive, hidden force put us on this planet, with the intention that we would happily coexist with one another?

And how did our species appear on the earth? Was it all part of an intricate plan, where nature took its time preparing for our arrival? Or did we just pop into existence, as a complex arrangement of molecules that is peculiar only in the sense that we are the only species that seems capable of pondering these things?

Bertrand Russell, with his gift for eloquence in posing difficult philosophical problems, put it thus:

Has the universe any unity or purpose? Is it evolving towards some goal? Is man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water impotently crawling on a small and unimportant planet? Is there a way of living that is noble and another that is base, or are all ways of living merely futile?

What about the fact that most of us worry constantly about getting old and dying? Is it normal for a species to ponder about its demise – to dwell on what will happen when its natural life cycle ends, as nature seems to have determined and as happens with boring regularity to all animal species? Or did our species evolve into having a special corner on the market for wanting to live forever?

Perhaps the answer to those questions lies in the first moments of our world’s existence. It certainly makes sense to look there, in the hope that some answers will be forthcoming. Science works that way: If you want to understand something, you look for its cause, its source, its beginning.

It would be nice, for example, to be able to determine from the scientific evidence if the beginning was really a beginning, in the sense that nothing existed before. That one moment, it was totally quiet, dark and empty out there and all of a sudden, there was a marching band, involving lively lumps of matter, including negatively and positively charged ones that were attracted to one another.

My readers should know that there is an alternative theory for the creation of the universe: It is based on the notion that there was no beginning and that our universe is merely one among many that are probably out there. The theory is called the parallel universe theory. It is quite speculative. It cannot be confirmed from the evidence.

The bulk of the evidence we have so far indicates that the physical universe we see around us began at one point in place and time. A single, tiny, little, itsy-bitsy, one-dimensional point. Scientists call it a singularity.

One moment the universe was quiet and dark and very, very cold; the next, it was the scene of major fireworks – as if someone had dropped into a ghost town a complete Fourth of July celebration, with every kind of performer making noise and intermingling with a huge crowd of characters, all marching to the beat of the same invisible drum.

Well, the drum part is a bit of a simplification. In the beginning, there apparently was a different drummer from the one now guiding the galactic march of stars. How can that be? asks my scientifically minded reader. How can there be a different drumbeat at the beginning of time from the drumbeat we experience now? Aren’t the laws of physics standard and unchangeable throughout history? Can the galactic parade have changed drummers somewhere along the line?

Yes, science answers, there was a huge change in the way the parade marched; before the first reviewing stand, it seems the parade was going very quickly and without any kind of pattern; then in one fell swoop, all the marchers fell into line and all the drummers started in unison. It was as if a symphonic orchestra had been warming up, with musicians in total disharmony, and then, the maestro gave the signal; they breathed in and started playing loudly and in perfect harmony.

But wait, my scientific reader protests, are you saying the Big Bang was actually two bangs – a two-step process of the universe organizing itself? Why, yes, science answers, I must advise you to think of it as two events, closely connected in time, but entirely different in effect. If I had to give you an analogy, it was as if a clock was quickly assembled and then, moments later, wound up by a huge hand that set it going for all eternity. Correct that, for at least the next 13.7 billion years…

How the Big Bang Was Discovered

The history of man’s search to understand how the universe began is a marvelous tale of jealousy and intrigue, not to mention excommunication and religious turmoil. And the story is told by Simon Singh in his marvelous new offering, which goes by the economical title of: Big Bang

Another fascinating, though more sober, account is the one provided by Columbia physicist Brian Greene, who has dazzled us with not one, but two books on the general topic of how the universe works and how it began. The more recent book, The Fabric of the Cosmos, follows the tradition established by Stephen Hawking, under which the most advanced concepts in theoretical physics are made intelligible to the layman.

I personally have to admit that if it had not been for Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which was the coming-out party for popular modern physics, I would not even be dreaming of writing about the Big Bang. For me, as for most other amateur physicists, the working day would end with Grisham or Clancy, followed by a warm bed. But we did have Stephen Hawking to get us interested; and now we have Greene and Singh.

Brian Greene and Simon Singh have given us, with exquisite timing and in perfect unison, a harmonious, literary duet: The former is scientific prose at its best, the latter pure poetry. Where Greene goes deep into complicated notions, Singh gives us a day in the life of each important scientist who contributed to the ultimate theory of the Big Bang.

Singh’s offering is truly an odyssey that transports us back to the early moments of astronomy, when all-knowing Greeks with strange names like Eratosthenes were somehow able to measure the earth’s circumference. The narrative proceeds to the mesmerizing battle between the steady-state advocates (led by the Patrician, Fred Hoyle) and the Big Bang proponents (led by the Belgian priest, Georges Lemaitre). The former argued that the universe was constantly expanding and contracting; the latter were convinced that the universe was always expanding. In the end, Lemaitre and the Big Bang proponents won the day, and a favorable verdict was handed down by Albert Einstein himself.

No one is too sure how the good priest confronted Einstein, but a most captivating scenario was described by John Farrell in his recent work (The Day Without Yesterday), which gave me the title for this chapter. Farrell’s narrative goes as follows:

No one knows for certain the exact day of that week in October 1927 when Albert Einstein ran into the round-faced Catholic priest . . . It was in Brussels, then . . . in the alleys of the Leopold Park that George Lemaitre found him. Einstein had heard of Lemaitre, of course. Accounts of the first meeting between the physicist and the Abbé George Lemaitre vary. But common to all of them is the older man’s brusque dismissal of Lemaitre’s idea. Your calculations are correct, Lemaitre years later recalled him saying, but your physics is abominable.

As it happened, Lemaitre was proven right in both his math and his physics. And his discoveries did not end with the notion of a Big Bang or Genesis moment.

Lemaitre was fifty years ahead of his time in suggesting that the rate of expansion of the universe may not have been uniform since the beginning. Alan Guth, whom we will later mention in connection with the inflationary theory (a/k/a the Second Big Bang), had this to say as to Lemaitre’s much earlier contribution to the theory:

Although I didn’t know it at the time, the exponentially expanding space that I discovered was hardly new – it was in fact one of the earliest known solutions to the equations of relativity. I had rediscovered the equations of de Sitter cosmology of 1917, written in a form that was introduced by Georges Lemaitre in 1925 as part of his Ph.D. thesis at MIT.

So we can rightfully credit Lemaitre with both the Big Bang and the Second Big Bang. The rest of the narrative of mankind’s discovery of our origins can be found in Simon Singh’s account, with all its personal vignettes. We can thus proceed, with a note of gratitude to Mr. Singh, not only for his exhaustive scholarship, but also for his penchant for making the story fun to read and almost as much fun to try to understand.

What Simon Says About the Big Bang

Simon Singh’s vivid narrative leaves us with a high degree of scientific confidence about how things got started. It seems just about as certain as these things can be that the universe began about fourteen billion years ago, and that it began at a single point in space and time – referred to as a singularity.

What it means is that Michelangelo was essentially right when he depicted the moment of creation as one rather well garbed and long-haired fellow pointing his index finger into thin air, as if selecting a particular spot where all of creation had to begin its evolutionary journey.

This matter of a singularity bears careful consideration. If one were the Big Banger, and had to make a decision as to how to start building a universe, choosing a single point in space might not seem the most reasonable way to begin. For one thing, starting with one tiny little bit of space and time restricts what can be later inspected by the inevitable – and inevitably curious – human types that would be sure to follow at the end of the evolutionary chain.

Or does it?

At first blush, the idea of a singularity seems like a way to hide the moment of creation. Packing major amounts of matter and energy into a single point means enormous density; strike that, infinite density. It means temperatures in the range of billions and