How Sacred Now,
Dead Brown Cow?
By Sam Aurelius Milam III
Here's
an excerpt from an essay (Ravin'
Evermore) that I completed on August 12, 1991.
For
years the religious nuts and the scientific nuts have been arguing creation
versus evolution.13
The scientific nuts won't admit that God might have created the world with
the fossils in place, as a test of faith, and the religious nuts won't
concede that God might have used evolution as a handy tool, just because
He damned well felt like it. The religious nuts must love their evangelism
a lot more than their religion, and the scientific nuts must love their
dogma more than their science. Otherwise, they'd each leave the other
alone, and simply live their lives.
Maybe
God is Limited by Noblesse Oblige, or maybe not, but I expect that
He can still make a few Choices in how He runs His universe. If He
wants us to evolve, then we'll damned well change from something into something
else, and if he wants to create a planet with fossils, what's to stop him?
(Here's
a conundrum for you. Is God limited? If not, then He can encompass
all possible universes. That means He can't possibly create a universe
so large that He can't encompass it. But if He can't create a universe
that large, then that's a limit on what He can create, so He's limited.
Religious nuts, go figure!)14
Amidst
the brouhaha, some ideas have been overlooked. At least, I've never
seen them in the literature. Presuming that life arose spontaneously,
then it must be possible for life to arise spontaneously. Well, who
can argue with that? And, if it's possible once, it's possible more
than once. What? UnGodly thought! More than one sacred
spontaneous generation of life? Not on your Holy Bunsen burner!
Now I'll have both the religious nuts and the scientific nuts after me.
Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan can both turn over in their
graves.
Well,
sorry guys, but there's no reason why I have to be related to spiders.
Maybe their ancestors and mine came from completely different spontaneous
origins, and their adenine and cytosine just happens to look like mine.
That stuff's just a theory anyway. I also question the charts which
arrange the animal kingdom in the form of an evolutionary tree, starting
with the amoeba, and ending with us. How could we possibly evolve
from amoebas? They're contemporary occupants of the planet.
Not only that, they've been through countlessly more generations of evolution
than we have. Well anyway, it seems that they have, since they have
a higher generation rate than we do. So, if there's anything to the
evolution theory, then amoebas are a more likely end product than we are.
And unlike us, they're not fouling their own nest, so maybe they're more
intelligent. Or maybe intelligence is a deficiency they've outgrown.
Maybe that's why they've headed south. Maybe they're just trying
to put as much evolutionary distance as possible between us and them, to
get themselves as far from our environmental niche as possible, before
we destroy it. And before we discount them because of their small
size, recall that our reproduction depends upon little critters of comparably
small size, while the amoebas don't need giants to make more amoebas.
I'm reminded of the theory that a human being is nothing more than a gamete's
method of producing more gametes. If so, amoebas are more efficient.
There's
no reason whatsoever to assume that all life on Earth arose from a common
ancestor, or that all life originated at the same time. There need
not have been a single magic instant and location which was uniquely suited
to the spontaneous generation of life. For ages, and at countless
locations, conducive conditions probably existed, if they ever did.15
Here's
another interesting idea. Why does life have to spontaneously arise
in the ocean? Why couldn't it happen in the blood stream of an already
existing critter? Some animals live a long time. Maybe even
a hundred years. That's a long time in the evolutionary history of a microbe
fresh off the theological drawing board. Just think! Within
your own body, at this very instant, the AIDS virus could be spontaneously
generating!
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Check
the famous "Monkey Trial" (1925), in Dayton, Tennessee. |
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Thank
you, Jonathan, for the conundrum. |
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Perhaps
they still do. Would we recognize new, spontaneous life if it arose
today? Most likely, we'd exterminate it.
"Ooow Harold! What
a horrible bug! Where's the Raid?" |
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So,
what about the origins of life? I never did develop a good definition
of the difference between the living and the non-living. No matter
what characteristics I used to define the difference, I could always think
of some annoying exception. In that vein, consider BSE — the so-called
Mad Cow Disease that has recently created such a stir. BSE makes
the difference between the living and the non-living impossible to define.
BSE is caused by a non-living "agent", a protein that not only causes the
infection of one animal from another, but even reproduces. OK, it
doesn't have babies like us or divide like an amoeba, but the result is
the same. It makes more like itself and gives them the ability to
do the same. It reproduces, yet it isn't a living thing. It
has no organic structure or function. It's just a protein, yet it
multiplies and has effects typical of living infectious organisms.
I think it's an example of the transition between the non-living and the
living. I believe we've seen a miracle, the spontaneous origin of
new life — in a cow.![10x5 Page Background GIF Image](../../Images/10x5_Page_Background.gif)
![Frontiersman, 435 South White Road](../../Images/Frontiersman_435_S_W_R-2.gif) |
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