A Philosophy that Accounts for DNA? It Changes Everything.

A reliable philosophy should point the way when we need guidance. It should be our framework that helps us make decisions, like the kind as heavy as how we should treat each other, especially when we have chosen the burden of governing ourselves. But maybe more importantly, it should comfort us when we feel lost, when hope has faded, when we can’t help but wonder why we’re here in the first place. A reliable philosophy should help us understand who we are and why, so that everything we choose to do makes sense.

The untenable discord in our world today suggests that we’re still looking for it.

Here are lyrics from the song “Message in A Bottle” by the Police, circa 1979, but feeling timelessly human:

Just a castaway, an island lost at sea, oh

Another lonely day, with no one here but me, oh

More loneliness than any man could bear

Rescue me before I fall into despair, oh

After sending an “S.O.S. to the world,” a message in a bottle thrown into the vast open sea and entrusted only to chance, there is this realization:

Walked out this morning, I don’t believe what I saw

Hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore

Seems I’m not alone at being alone

Hundred billion castaways, looking for a home

We’ve had millennia of philosophers producing some of the most brilliant work in human history, but we have yet to find the anchor point for all those castaways.

I believe that is because the key to it all has only recently been made available to us.

The ancient Greek philosophers never had access to the results of the Human Genome Project, published in 2003; nor did most of their more contemporary counterparts. In fact, humanity has only had access to Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution for the last 150 years, and it was only about a hundred years ago that Darwinian evolution was seen to be compatible with Mendelian heredity.

Long story short, what has been missing is an understanding of how life really works, especially how it changes over time.

Around 2500 years ago, Heraclitus of Ephesus said that a man cannot step into the same river twice, meaning that the flowing water was, like all other things, constantly changing. He was really on to something. Here’s what that means, given what we now know:

Life changes over time. That is a defining principle. An individual organism changes as it grows older, and it will have acquired more information at the end of its life than when it began. Consider an acorn becoming a tree, a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, a primate learning to use a stone to crack nuts. The wonders of an individual lifetime.

More importantly, science has shown us that life evolves over generations. Every living thing on Earth today traces its genetic origins back to the original organisms at the dawn of life on this planet. No longer do we need to rely on mere speculation, or even our best interpretations of the fossil record; our understanding of DNA proves this. And the fact that there are countless varieties of complex life now when only simple life once existed proves that life becomes more complex over time.

Science has come to define DNA as a carrier of information, as information itself. DNA is the information that is used in the construction and operation of individuals, and then that information is passed on to the next generation. Instead of a “message in a bottle” cast into the unknown, it is a message packaged up and passed along with intent, where it can be guarded and nurtured as if it were the greatest treasure that could be possessed, as if it holds all the genetic information given to us from all previous generations, because it does.

When connected to the next level of this process, the pattern becomes much more apparent, more resilient, and even more beautiful. This next level is embodied by the accumulation of knowledge that made our understanding of DNA possible.

Over time, humans have invented and refined the means to pass along information not just through genetics, but by language. We have created the means to encode and store information in a way that transcends the ordinary lifespan, and allows it to be transmittable across both space and time, virtually without limit. Information is no longer relegated to a gift of one generation to the next; beneficial information acquired today can be spread across the entire planet and used by the entire species within seconds. If DNA has been the carrier of information that allowed life to evolve, language and encoding of meaning represent the evolution of information, which has allowed us to become even more successful in the world around us. The act of evolving has itself evolved, becoming more complex over time.

What this all means is simple, but profound and irrefutable: the value of each individual organism alive today, whether plant, animal or other, is that each carries with it all the genetic information passed on to it from previous generations, an unbroken chain back to the very beginning of life on this planet. For a human being, prone to feeling lost and isolated, this is the immovable anchor point to hold on to.

From this anchor point, the direction forward is determined by simply acknowledging the pattern of the past. If those who came before us, regardless of form, lived and experienced, and their experiences were passed down to us in ways that benefitted those generations that followed, then our purpose is the same: to evolve individually over time, and then to pass along what we have acquired to generations that follow. To learn, and experience, and then to teach. That is the essence of a meaningful life.

When hope has started to fade, when belief in our common humanity has started to faulter, when our mythologies give us reason to build more walls than bridges, science finally offers us an understanding of ourselves that can unite us in meaning and purpose: we exist to better understand the world, so that we can offer up that understanding to generations that follow, so that they can be one increment more successful than we were.

With our awareness of nature’s pattern for life, how can we not follow it with more intention? With this meaning and purpose now being obvious, how can we not reestablish our governing and cultural priorities to embrace this path that we are already on, and focus our efforts to maximize our evolution?

If we did, if humanity, as a community, as a species, pursued a common and continuous path of learning and teaching, with passion and intent, expressly to benefit those who come after us, we would no longer be blindly drifting along, nudged by nature’s current. We would be hoisting a sail, together, heading off in the direction we now know we’re predestined to take.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

REFERENCES:

Some references regarding the current state of research on DNA for any reader looking to follow the discussion down a more detailed, scientifically specific rabbit hole:

Here is a 2019 article by Raymond M. Keogh called DNA & The Identity Crisis | Issue 133 | Philosophy Now in which he uses the recent developments in genetics to better define the concept of “the individual”. This is a useful exercise, and it shows how we are starting to redefine terms using our newfound tools.

For an in-depth background on how DNA works as transferable information, an excellent (albeit very scientifically dense) roadmap of where the science currently lies can be found in this article by Peter R. Wills from 2016:

DNA as information | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences (royalsocietypublishing.org)

The tagged references in the Wills article mentioned above can take you down countless paths, each delving deeper into the latest findings and understanding of how DNA works, how life may have crossed the line from non-living to living, etc.

The piece was published by the Royal Society, a scientific association founded in 1660 to promote the findings of science as what was back then a new endeavor for humanity. Contributors to their journal have included Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, and relevant to this discussion, Charles Darwin.

Other references:

Environmental Epigenetics and a Unified Theory of the Molecular Aspects of Evolution: A Neo-Lamarckian Concept that Facilitates Neo-Darwinian Evolution by Michael K. Skinner · April 26, 2015:
https://academic.oup.com/gbe/article/7/5/1296/605886

Epigenetics and Evolution: Revising the Theory by Alex Osborne · July 31, 2016:https://the-gist.org/2016/07/epigenetics-and-evolution-revising-the-theory/

Epigenetic Inheritance and Its Role in Evolutionary Biology: Re-Evaluation and New Perspectives by Warren Burggren, Chris O’Callaghan, Academic Editor, Jukka Einne, Academic Editor, and John S. Torday, Academic Editor · May 25, 2016: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4929538/

Epigenomic Plasticity Within Populations: Its Evolutionary Significance and Potential by L J Johnson & P J Tricker · March 24, 2010:
https://www.nature.com/articles/hdy201025

The Dawn of Quantum Biology by Philip Ball · June 16, 2011:https://www.nature.com/news/2011/110615/pdf/474272a.pdf

I Believe in Something More Beautiful

I don’t believe in royalty. I don’t believe in royal bloodlines or birthrights. I don’t believe that a prince or a princess is, by title, somehow more charming or enchanting than any other human being. I don’t believe in a class system that relies on history to establish a person’s value today, or that those in the “higher” classes somehow deserve more or something different from those in the lower. And I don’t believe in the forced, artificial sense of honor and duty required to perpetuate a monarchy. I believe in something more beautiful.

I don’t believe in trusting our self-governance to business leaders who have found fortune using a short-sighted definition of success. I don’t believe in the trickle-down theory of economics, no matter how many times it’s pitched from above. I don’t believe power is righteousness, or that gaining power imbues someone with wisdom. Nor do I believe in the wisdom of an easily swayed crowd. I believe in something more beautiful.  

I don’t believe anyone who says they have all the answers. I don’t rely on the word of someone who has left no room for new information, or new opinions, or new findings. And I don’t believe anyone who has cherry-picked information in the service of a predetermined conclusion. I believe in something more beautiful.

I don’t believe that the world as we know it is an illusion. I don’t believe we somehow live within one of many possible parallel universes, or that we exist in an inescapable loop. I don’t believe that life is simply about enduring pain and suffering, nor do I believe life is about surviving in an absurd world. I believe in something more beautiful.

I don’t believe everything happens for a reason. I don’t believe in fate, or in fulfilling a destiny waiting for each of us to seek out. I don’t believe in looking back in revisionist history to rationalize why something happened to us. I believe in something much, much more beautiful.

I believe in the democratic power of the people. I believe in self-governance, of, by and for the people, as outlined in the Declaration of Independence of the United States. I believe in one person = one vote, and that each and every person deserves the equal voice in how to be governed that comes with the equal share of responsibility that comes with it, just as outlined in the Constitution as amended over time. I believe in American progress. I believe in the provisions for growth and improvement built into the American framework of governance, made possible by a process navigated by those that both serve and that are served, in our effort to collectively become a more perfect union. I see that as truly beautiful.

I believe in the self-motivation created by capitalism. But I also believe this motivation creates an inherent tendency to sacrifice the long term for the immediate gain, so I believe in a properly managed regulatory framework for commerce, overseen by that aforementioned government of, by and for the people, to balance the short-term motivations with the understanding of the long-term consequences, including the concept of sustainability in all aspects deemed important, especially that of the environment we all live in. I believe that this regulatory framework will always need to be properly empowered and properly funded to accomplish its mission, and it will need to be protected from those driven to undermine it with their short-sighted definition of success. I believe properly regulated capitalism has, and will, allow humanity to accomplish great things with the right self-guidance, for the benefit of all. And I see that as truly beautiful.

I believe in science. I believe in the essential human activity of questioning how the world around us works. And while there will always be some level of uncertainty, I believe we can rely on data, and trends in the data, to show us how to understand the things necessary to be successful in our endeavors. And I believe in experts, and expertise, and trusting those who have studied the question to provide the best available answer, especially given the associated level of uncertainty. I believe this process, this scientific method, has allowed us to take humans to the moon, and create GPS to map every corner of our planet, and create vaccines. I see that as truly beautiful.

I believe there is more to the world around us than what we can currently observe. But I believe in science, and I believe we will continue to find clues as to how the universe works, and I believe we will continue to expand our ability to observe the currently unobservable. I personally believe in a single direction of time that follows a cause-and-effect trajectory, of action-then-consequence, and that the accumulation of information (both genetic and learned) demonstrates this to be true, and I will continue to believe this until a different theory is presented that convinces otherwise. But in the meantime, I will hold onto my belief, one which explains a reality that is truly beautiful.

I believe everything that happens is an opportunity to learn and grow, and then to teach, following the arrow of time that allows us to understand our existence more completely as time passes, and allowing us to pass on to those that follow us all that we have gained. I believe in defining every hardship and every challenge, as well as every victory, as another opportunity to learn, which then becomes an opportunity to teach. I believe this creates a perpetually proactive view of our lives and our future, and the future of the generations that follow – an empowering one, like hoisting a sail and catching the wind that is already pushing us towards a more evolved existence, allowing us to gain speed towards a brighter future. In that, I see beauty beyond words.

A Rating System for Democracies Based on the Green Building Model

A new building can be rated by a third-party agency to certify that it has been designed and built to accomplish a set of sustainability goals. This points-based rating system, called LEED and developed by the U.S. Green Building Council, has made a truly remarkable impact on the built environment. What if democratic governments could be measured by a similar third-party rating agency, using goals established to measure the effectiveness of their representative process?

Imagine a rating system that could take stock of certain metrics to determine how closely that government was meeting the goal of one person = one vote. It would establish a set of best practices – universal voter registration, holidays for certain elections, clear limits on campaign contributions to curtail undue influence, absentee voting measures to ensure access to the process for all, etc. – and then it would award points for encoding into law each of those measures. A government reaching a certain threshold of points could achieve a “model democracy” rating, call it a “Shining City on A Hill” level of democratic participation. Another democracy could achieve a “developing democracy” rating, and it could seek to improve on its status, asking those model democracies to help in their ascendency.

Imagine that system being available to those who felt disenfranchised by their democracies, so that they could have a data-based metric to back up their complaints, and even justify their revolution if necessary. Imagine that system being used to track the slide of a democracy towards an “authoritarian state,” with points falling off in real time as individual measures become subverted, one at a time, under the guise of some populist defense.

Imagine how, in the year 2020, the United States of America would measure in that system for rating democracies. Imagine if it showed we were sliding towards an “authoritarian state.” Who would we reach out to for help?

What We Lost in the Fire: Keeping Track of Progress Lost in the Trump Presidency

The ancient Library of Alexandria is said to have been intentionally destroyed, set ablaze by those who felt the knowledge and wisdom held within were too much of a risk to their own interests to keep around. There is no way to know what we, our collective humanity, lost in that destruction. There is no way to know how advanced we would be today had we benefitted from that knowledge and wisdom, instead of having to relearn what was once already known. Even worse, there is no way to know how our development was stunted by the replacement of that knowledge and wisdom by dubious substitutes.

Two thousand years later, in the year 2017, there is a gut-level nervousness affecting the people of the United States that I believe comes from a fear of similar loss. A faction of people, driven by nothing but selfish motivation, a lack of faith in human achievement and the support of a disillusioned popular minority, now sit in the most powerful positions in human history. Their deeds and plans trend toward the destruction of an incredibly significant amount of American achievement, making that nervousness more than justifiable.

In the months and years to come, if these people have their way, entire government agencies will be gutted. Individuals and entities, the robber barons of the twenty-first century, will concentrate power, wealth and resources in places from which they will probably never be redistributed. The protections of the Supreme Court will likely be tilted away from politically unconnected human beings for generations. And most tragic of all, faith in the institutions that make up our government of, by and for the people will be reduced to near unrecoverable levels.

We will fight. We will resist. And there will be some things we can save. Other things we will have to just watch as they burn, feeling powerless, mourning progress lost. But while we watch, there is something we can do: plan our rebuild.

To do this, we need to keep an unburnable public record of those things – policies, legislation, budget priorities, global relationships, or even just the customs of civil discourse – that are being undone and taken from us. We need to establish a virtual archive of the things we stand for, from the full protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to the structure of Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, to the retention of career diplomatic staff in the State Department, to the assurances of the Affordable Care Act, and so on and so on.

As a start, we can use the power of social media to keep track of these ideas by name until the momentum of effort can result in a more shepherded approach. I offer up the following hashtags to get the conversation started:

#thingswelostinthetrumpfire

#Americanprogressundone

#Americanprogressatrisk

#resistancearchive

#wewillgetthisback

Now is our time to fight. There will be losses, and we have to accept them as part of the process. But when the tide has turned, we can’t just stand there and weep at everything we’ve lost. We have to remember what we’ve been fighting for, and start working to get it back.