It’s Not That Simple - 2

Question: What is LIFE?

Ah… such a simple question. And a simple answer, too: “Life is ______.” Wait… okay, so how do you define life? Hmm… Maybe it isn’t so simple. I have a sneaking suspicions that the answer for most people is “life is what I think (or believe) life is.” Yup, a rather circular, incestuous reasoning.

“Wait a minute,” you protest, “I know what life is because ______ describes what it is.” That blank could be filled in with any number of options: a branch of science, a religious text, a school of philosophy, among others. But ultimately is comes down to, “I know what life is because of what I have chosen to accept/believe as an authoritative source.” Guess what? Your authoritative source isn’t necessarily accepted by every single human being.

Even in the case of science there is no unequivocal definition of what life is. Do chemical processes define life? Or maybe it’s biological? Or is it a combination, i.e., biochemistry? Does the branch of physics have anything to contribute? Science has come up with a consensus description of what what something called life generally shares, but that is far from a indisputable definition. It seems that even in science, it comes down to “I know life when I see it.”

If something as objective as science cannot form a precise definition of life, should we expect reliance on other sources to be any more precise and accurate? Perhaps not. Interpretations of religious and philosophical sources are far more subjective than interpretation of scientific data.

What precipitated this thought was the topic of “pro-life.” Now, if taken literally, pro-life simply means “for or promoting life.” I’d wager, except for a few sociopaths, no one is anti-life and all would agree they are pro-life. Is that how pro-life is used? We all pretty much know that pro-life is an euphemism for anti-abortion.

If the description of life was simply limited to the biological – e.g., a single cell containing growth and reproduction capabilities, ability to taken in food, ability to respond to external stimuli – a zygote would indeed be life, as well as a single cell amoeba, bacteria, spiders, ants, mosquitoes – and someone who professes to be pro-life would be bound to protect all of the above.

If the description of life was, instead, provided through ontology – e.g., the ability to think, feel, love – then only certain higher-order creatures would fit that description. Amoeba, bacteria, spiders, and ants certainly would be excluded. Cats, dogs and birds might be in an intermediate state. A human zygote… strictly would not be life, though it would have the potential for life if allowed to successfully grow and mature beyond some certain point. Ah, but what is that point?

The reality is that all of us combine the scientific and onotological descriptions of life. No two of us combine them in exactly the same manner. The result is that the description of what life is will vary between every person.

Therein lies the complexity of the pro-life/anti-abortion issue. Every person stands on a different foundation: some just slightly different, others vastly so. Even those who share sources of authority can disagree widely because of different methods of interpreting those sources and thus come to polar opposite conclusions. As I described in an earlier post, each person believes they are right and believe they are doing the right thing, but they may be in fact be wrong, and in complex cases no one can know for certain if they are right or wrong.

LIFE. It’s not that simple.

Leaping to conclusions?

I came across a news item on MSNBC.com, Genetic mutation makes those brown eyes blue. It is basically how researchers have figured that all blue eyes originate from a single ancestor. This was due to a genetic mutation that occurred some 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.

The final two paragraphs in the MSNBC.com article read as follows:

That genetic switch somehow spread throughout Europe and now other parts of the world.

"The question really is, 'Why did we go from having nobody on Earth with blue eyes 10,000 years ago to having 20 or 40 percent of Europeans having blue eyes now?" Hawks said. "This gene does something good for people. It makes them have more kids." [Emphasis mine.]

If a person begins with the assumption that humans have been around for much longer than 10,000 years populating all parts of the earth in great numbers, and a priori rule out a Great Flood that could have constricted the gene pool and reduced the population down to a very small number, then how else can one explain how this single mutation in a single individual spread so quickly and so widely?

Now, since I am only basing my observations on what I read in the news item, I may have missed the fact that validates the theory, "It makes them have more kids." I suspect though, inferring from the way the statement is worded, that this was a off-the-cuff leap to a conclusion, putting forth a theory to fit both the assumed and the observed facts. Has there been any scientific study that tests the theory that blue-eyed individuals have more kids? If so, I'd have expected the news item to at least mention it.

Maybe the statement was made tongue-in-cheek, a joke. But the way it's reported, it's hard to tell. In any case, to my ears it is just a bizarre statement, and I had to share and comment on it.