Eons ago, perhaps in a volcanic vent in the deep sea, under crushing pressure, in total darkness, chemicals came together in a process that made copies of itself. We’re not exactly sure how this happened – perhaps a simple tangle of molecules grabbed other nearby molecules, and formed them into identical tangles.
You know the story – some of those chemical processes made mistakes along the way. A few of those copies were better at copying themselves, so there were more of them. But some of their copies were subtly different too. And so it goes. This seems straightforward, but this alone is the mechanic of evolution, the root of the tree of life. Everything else follows.
So these tangles of protein or DNA or whatever-it-was in the deep sea, it keeps going. This chemical process grows a cell wall, DNA, a metabolism, starts banding together and eating sunlight.
By this point, the deep-sea vent itself had long since been swallowed up by tectonic plates, the rock recycled into magma beneath the ocean floor. But the process carried on.
Biologists even understand that if you let this process run for long enough, it starts going to war, and paying taxes, and curing diseases, and driving old beat-up cars, and lying awake at night wondering what it means to exist at all.
All of that? Evolution didn’t tell us to do that. Evolution is what gave you a fist-sized ball of neurons, and gave you the tools to reshape those neurons based on what you learned. And you did the rest.
Sure, evolution gave you some other things – hands for grabbing, a voice for communicating, a vague predilection for fat and sugar and other entities who are similar to you. But all of this is the output of a particular process – a long and unlikely chemical process for which you, the building blocks of your brain, your hands, your tastes, are a few of the results. None of this happened on purpose. In the eyes of the evolutionary tree of life, you can’t think about existing ‘for a greater reason’ beyond the result of this process. What would that mean? Does fusion ‘happen on purpose’? Does gravity work ‘for a greater reason’?
This might sound nihilistic. I think this has two lessons for us. First of all, when you and your friends are sitting in a diner eating milkshakes and french fries at 2 AM, as far as evolution gets any say in your life, you’re doing just fine.
But here’s the other thing – we’re a biological process. Apparently, we’re just what happens when you mix rocks and water together and then wait 3.5 billion years. Everything around us today, our lives, our struggles, nobody prepared us for this. It makes sense that there will be times when nothing makes sense. When your body or your brain don’t seem to be enough, well, we weren’t made for anything.
Nobody exists on purpose. There’s no promise that we’ll get to keep existing. There’s no assurance that we, as a species, will be able to solve our problems. Maybe one day we’ll run into something that’s just too big, and the tools evolution gave us won’t enough. It hasn’t happened yet, but what do we know? As far as we’re aware, we’re the only processes in the whole wide night sky that have ever come this far at all. We don’t have the luxury of examples or mentors to look to.
All we have are these tools, this earth, this process, these hands, these minds, each other. Nothing less and nothing more.
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