Imagine you live in a world containing two distinct types of things. Actually children have a good intuitive grasp of this: there are things that are alive and things that are not alive. It is obvious to a child what a living thing is. My seven year old niece Alisha, has a solid grasp of the idea that a carrot or a rabbit or a snail or a tree is a fundamentally different thing from a rock, a cloud, a mountain or the moon. It's not something she was taught at school. Nor was it something she learnt at home. She just knows. It's instinctive. Like the way she is picking up language.
But why am I talking about my niece? What has she got to do with artificial life, gods and youtube?
Patience my friends, we'll get there! - but I need to build you up, slowly. I must nudge you up the ramp - gradually, gently. Not push you to the top in a single bound so you'll collapse in a heap! Once we reach the top you'll see the vast view. You'll see everything in one sweeping arching all encompassing gaze.
Back to my niece. So there she is. This seven year old bundle of girlhood. A sweet little thing to. Totally mad, naturally! - but sweet nonetheless. The reason we love children so much (by 'we' I am assuming that you too fall within this category) is because they present to us the naked truth of what we are. There is no pretence or pretending in children. They are like a mirror through which we see our true selves - if only we'd care to look. The same applies to pets I suppose. A dog is a dog and always a dog. Pets and children do and say what they want and feel. We grown-ups hide our true colours under layers of geological stratas and sophistry. An example of this is the different way we react when we see a disabled person. We adults will avert our gaze. We won't look too long. Staring is forbidden; even though secretly, we may wish to look for a little longer. We want to see how the disabled person copes with getting through the train ticket barrier, or getting on the bus or whatever. A child will just look. It will stare at the disabled man despite our entreaties. It does what it feels. It does what it is - and that's why we love children so much! I suppose, also, the fact that we too, without exception, were once children must play a significant part - a sort of vicarious reliving of our carefree childhood through children's play is part of the joy of being in the presence of children.
But I seem to have gone down a narrow alley I wasn't supposed to! Let's head back onto the main street and continue our discussion!
So, as I was saying. Children have an intuitive grasp of living and non-living things. And it would have been the same for Stone-Age man of the Palaeolithic era from 50,000 - 2,000 BC. For ancient Stone Age man life was throbbing with a vital force. If I had been born then; as a stone age man, I too would look around me and it would be 'obvious' that a body is merely a shell. A vehicle you might say. And while the person or organism is alive it has something in it that makes it alive. But when that person dies that something that gave it life disappears. A dead person is nothing but an empty shell. You prod it, you nudge it, you stab it, it moves no longer. It's no longer the living talking smiling lover it once was. But it's still there in front of you! What has changed? Why is it no longer living? To stone age man, and even to myself, if I had been born then, it would have seemed obvious, that when something is alive it has something in it, a something that seeps or escapes outside when it dies. A vital force. A spirit. A soul! It's common sense. It's obvious. It makes total sense!
One of the things I've learnt is that what makes a body alive is not a single thing or a spirit or some sort of life-force. A body is alive due to the industry of many different processes going on inside it at the same time. And it is these processes, in all their bewildering variety, that imbue inanimate matter with the spark of life. Let's take a simple bacterial cell as a quick example. We know it's alive because it grows. It needs food. It reproduces. We feel the effects of this reproduction first hand when we get ill because an infection will get worse before getting better.
Let's think about some of these processes:
It grows: what does that mean? It means it absorbs material from the outside world, it breaks this material down into smaller parts, and then uses the building blocks to fashion its body parts, to add more to the parts it already has and make them bigger, or to change their shape.
It reproduces: It makes an exact replica of its own DNA (if it's not sexually reproducing) and shunts it into another nucleus and cell, with an outer membrane and voila! You have two bacteria now! A mother and her baby.
It eats and generates energy: It has these large protein pumps in its membrane that pump specific food molecules from outside to inside the cell. These food molecules are broken down to give energy. The energy is used to power life processes.
Now, all these processes we have just talked about are indicative of life. Who or what controls them? How do they get started? Answer: DNA.
DNA is basically a recipe for making a living organism. All the instructions on what to do and when to do it are embedded in the triplet genetic code of DNA. Don't worry I'm not going to throw a biochemistry textbook at you! So, if you want to create artificial life in the laboratory, the question you need to ask yourself is: What is the bare minimum of DNA that I need, in order to make a living bacterial cell that can grow and eat and reproduce into baby bacterial cells?
That is what Craig Venter and his team worked out! That is the genius of their achievement. How did they do this? Well firstly, they created computer models into which they threw in the genes they thought they would need. Since the bacterial genome has been completely mapped by the World Genome Project all they had to do was look up the database of all bacterial genes and start whittling them down to the bare minimum required for a bacterial cell to still do the things that we would describe as living (i.e. reproducing, growing, eating etc). For example the computer model told them that they would need a gene for making an enzyme that makes a protein that makes a transporter molecule. This transporter molecules attaches itself to the cell membrane and 'eats' molecules from outside bringing them into the cell. The models told them they would need another gene to tell this gene when to switch on and when to switch off at the right time - otherwise what's to stop the cell from making endless transporter molecules? A cell has a limited number of resources and it must make 'cost benefit' decisions. Remember these 'cost benefit' decisions are unconscious.
In nature cells and organisms that make wrong cost-benefit decisions die. Those that make good cost-benefit decisions survive and they are the one's that pass on their genes for...? For making good cost-benefit decisions!!
So you can see that the world becomes populated with organisms that are good at surviving. It's a sieving process. Over time living things become better and better and come up with more elaborate contrivances, to survive. Your heart has been beating non-stop from the moment you were a foetus to the moment you will die. That's a lot of beats! And not once (except when you first lay your eyes upon the love of your life) will it skip a beat! It will beat day and night. It will beat on the train. It will beat when you're on holiday. It will beat in the rain or in the sunshine. It will beat and beat and beat. That's quite an amazing feat if you give it a moments thought. How is it that the heart is so good at what it does? It's almost perfect! It is. And the reason it is so good at what it does is because your heart, and my heart, and the hearts of every heart-beating organism on this planet; all these hearts I've just described, have been 'perfected' over time. They've improved over the aeons. If your heart is not so good it will die. Hearts that were not so good in the past killed the bodies that possessed them before those bodies could make babies. The genes for making these under-performing bad hearts were never passed on to children. They were lost. But the better performing hearts did better in the struggle. The bodies that possessed them were able to live at least long enough to the age of reproduction - thus passing on those same genes for making good hearts to the next generation. You can now see what I meant by sieving process.
And thus you have the grand mystery explained. Of why we are so good at what we do!
OK, now let's head back onto the road. The truth then is, that if you know which are the bare minimum genes required for something to be living - you can then go ahead and make yourself...something living! A brand new living organism! Just identify the genes you need, look them up in the world gene catalogue, place an order, pay, DHL man (or woman) arrives, unpack the box, join the genes (DNA strips) up, add in-between bits of DNA code to let the bits know when to switch the genes on and when to switch the genes off, put the whole lot into an empty shell of a cell...and then watch and see what happens. And what happens? Well in the case of Venters' team the cell started dividing. It started growing. It started eating like any normal living cell. It was alive! The only difference being that these genes and this cell was designed on a computer by the hand of man - not the hand of God.
It seems to me that God is becoming more and more redundant as the zeitgeist creeps along. What more is left for Him (or Her, or It) to do? Today's God is a watered down individual. He no longer makes the rain fall. He no longer makes the mountains climb. He no longer makes the stars shine. Or the rivers flow. And now he no longer is needed to create life. He adds nothing to our understanding of the world we find ourselves in. We've learnt so much without Him. So what is He now for? People still hang onto him don't they? There must be a reason for his popularity? I see plenty of young teenage Muslim youths turning to god for the answers that society can't and hasn't delivered. And it is true. Modern Western society has created a world in which the god of 'consumption' rules head over shoulders above the rest. 'There must be more to life?' is a question these youths ask themselves.
The truth is that science will provide the best answers of how we got here. 'What is the nature of the processes that got us here?' - that's the sort of question science excels at. And we need to know how we got here before we can even begin answering in a meaningful way the question: 'Now that we are here; where do we go now?'
How to love?
How to live?
What is a good life?
What is a life worth living?
For answers to these questions we must turn to secular philosophy.
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