The Miracle of

YOU!

From “The Zohar”

In the beginning

there was only brightness,

a flood of light so radiant

as to blind the eye,

or enable it to see

from one end of the universe

to the other.

Then the will of the Creatorbegan to take effect,and a dark flame issued forthfrom deep inside the mystery of the EYN

SOF –a flame that was more like a fog,for it was neither black nor white,nor red nor green, nor any color whatsoever.

And from the innermost center of the flame,

there sprang forth radiant colors

which showered everything beneath.

Still, nothing could be recognized at all,

until, under the impact of the movement,

a hidden, supernal point shone through.

This point is called reshit – the beginning.

Beyond this point,

Nothing can be known.

EYN SOF

• That which is without end, that which was before the beginning, before there was even space or time; above and beyond all human knowledge, having neither shape nor form, the absolute no-thing, the perfect unity, The Mysterious One, incomparable, unknown and unknowable.

RESHIT

• The divine spark which contains within itself the potentiality of all creation; the wisdom of God which is about to unfold.

Here you are!

And they’re off!• A man launches

three hundred million sperm per ejaculation! A single ejaculation could populate the entire Earth!

Wow -- Your parents met!

• What are the odds that your two parents would ever meet? That they would make a baby? That the baby would be YOU?

And THEIR parents met! And so on … and so on…and so on…

• Your number of ancestors doubles with every generation … Only 40 generations back, your total number of ancestors exceeds the total population of the Earth!

The ‘Butterfly Effect’

• Complex systems are extremely sensitive to initial conditions. The history of the world is one such complex system … if someone had so much as sneezed in an alternate direction 2,000 years ago, you most certainly would not be here today.

• The basic prerequisite for your existence: everything in the history of the world, of the universeuniverse must have happened PRECISELY as it did!

Development of societies

• Anatomically modern man first arose 200,000 years ago• “Speaking man” probably arose about 40,000 years ago • But not until 11,000 years ago did we move past hunter-

gatherer status and start building stable communities, with cities, religion, the arts, writing … civilization.

• That’s 30,000 years that modern humans, just like us, were living much like animals, struggling from day to day just to find enough to eat, stay out of the elements, and survive! Hobbes: Their lives were “nasty, brutish, & short.”

Guns, Germs, and Steel• Jared Diamond … Civilization

requires a steady accumulation of knowledge over time, which requires a stable, sedentary lifestyle.

• First prerequisite: domesticable wild animals (several)

• Second prerequisite: domesticable wild crops (many)

• A large east-west axis on which to spread.

Roads not taken

• Mitochondrial Eve -- 200,000 years ago• Very small groups, in the thousands. Could easily

have been wiped out. Most “human-like” species, such as Homo Erectus, Australopithecus, Bosei, and numerous others, have gone extinct. 99 percent of the species that have ever existed have gone extinct!

• Intelligent life on earth took 4 billion years to develop … that’s about one-quarter of the age of the universe!

• Homo has only been a separate species from the chimpanzees for roughly five million years.

Bite vs. Brain

A change in a single muscle protein may have been a key step in the evolution of modern humans, according to a new theory. A mutation in a myosin gene (MYH16) 2.4 million years ago made the protein less effective. Because of this change, primates' massive jaw muscles shrank, proposes Hansell Stedman at the University of Pennsylvania, making possible a threefold expansion of the brain. "The big surprise is that this deletion was common in all the human DNA that we tested," says Stedman. In contrast, the researchers found that in macaques, chimpanzees, gorillas, and five other nonhuman primates, the gene reliably runs its course to make the complete protein. By using genetic comparisons among species, the team calculated that the mutation appeared about 2.4 million years ago, just before human evolution took off. The protein proved to be a key component only in some jaw muscles. And in humans, it builds just a "sliver" of a jaw muscle compared to the same muscle in nonhuman primates, says Stedman. "We're not suggesting that this mutation alone [buys] you Homo sapiens," he says, "but it could make possible brain growth."

Extinction events!

Life at all• Biologists believe

that the spontaneous evolution of life requires the presence of carbon, with all the bonding properties that make it the basis of DNA and RNA, the helical molecules of life.

• The presence of carbon in the universe depends not merely upon the age and size of the universe (we’ll discuss this later) but also upon two amazing apparent “coincidences” between those constants of nature that determine the energy levels of nuclei.

• When nuclear reactions in stars combine two helium nuclei to produce beryllium, we are just one step away from making carbon (by the addition of another helium nucleus). But … this reaction appears to be too slow to make carbon of any consequential amount in the universe.

• Prodded by the fact that we do indeed exist, Fred Hoyle made a startling prediction back in 1952: The carbon nucleus could reside in an energy level just greater than the sum of the energies of the helium and beryllium nuclei…

Ta-daaa!

• This situation produces an especially fast helium-beryllium reaction, because the combination of the two nuclei occupies what is called a “resonant” state … one that has a natural level of energy waiting for it … Hoyle was right!

A “put up job”• “If you wanted to produce carbon

and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you would have to fix, and your fixing would have to be just about where these levels actually are found to be … A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.” –Fred Hoyle

• The picture that has emerged from modern physics and astronomy suggests that the formation of the chemical elements for life, and planetary systems capable of sustaining life and evolution over millions of years, are really only possible if the overall structure of the universe and all the laws of nature are almost precisely as they are!

Planet capable of life?

Must be orbiting just the right kind of star at just the right age, at the appropriate distance.

Must have just the right amount of water.

Water• If the properties of water

were not almost precisely what they are, carbon-based life would in all probability be impossible. If the thermal properties of water were even slightly different, the maintenance of stable body temperatures in warm-blooded organisms would be problematical. No other fluid comes close to water as the ideal medium for carbon-based life.

The ‘Bubbles of Life’Jack Szostak and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School are seeking to understand the origin of life through a series of audacious experiments intended to build a basic living cell from scratch (see “What Came Before DNA?” Discover, June 2004). Using a simple experiment, they now demonstrate that one of the key steps—creating a simple growing cell by tucking self-reproducing molecules into a membrane—may be startlingly simple.

 • The new research rebuts the widespread belief that cells have to evolve

elaborate molecular machinery to enable them to grow, one of the basic characteristics of living things. Szostak and his colleagues started with chemicals thought to have been common on early Earth: nucleic acids (the building blocks of DNA) and fatty acids. One interesting property of fatty acids is that they spontaneously form bubbles, or vesicles, that allow water molecules to pass back and forth but trap larger molecules. In the Harvard experiment, vesicles that contained relatively high concentrations of nucleic acids expanded like balloons, while nucleic acid-poor vesicles shrank. The growing vesicles cannibalized fatty acids from the shrinking ones, so they were able to keep growing without popping.

• Previously, researchers have shown that some simple RNAs, the smallest about twice as long as those of the Szostak group’s simple cells, can replicate without help from other molecules. The group’s new observation is that packing a membrane with more nucleic acids makes it expand; this mechanism could provide the cells with a simple method for evolutionary competition. If some of these model cells contained nucleic acids that could replicate themselves, even inefficiently, they would have grown at the expense of competitor cells. The more effectively the nucleic-acid molecules can replicate, the more rapidly their surrounding membranes will grow. “What we showed was that you can get a Darwinian competition to emerge just from the basic physical properties of the system,” says Irene Chen, a graduate student in Szostak’s lab. “It doesn’t require biological machinery.” 

The solar system emerges• All the elements

necessary for life – carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and iron, etc. – are manufactured in the nuclear furnaces in the interiors of stars. If these elements are to accumulate in rocky planets such as earth, they must be released from the stellar interiors in supernovas and dispersed widely throughout the cosmos. It is in the dying of stars that life has its birth.

• Representatives of every class of atoms in the periodic table are necessary for life. Even uranium is essential for life, providing the heat and energy required for tectonic activity and the turnover of the earth’s crustal rocks, which in conjunction with the water cycle ensures the chemical constancy of the earth’s superficial layers.

• Supernovae generate shock waves which are important in initiating the condensation of interstellar gas and dust into planetary systems such as our own solar system.

• The electromagnetic radiation reaching the surface of the earth is uniquely fit for carbon-based life. The sun’s radiation is mainly in the visual range – from the near ultraviolet to the near infrared. Not only is most of the electromagnetic radiation outside of this tiny range harmful to life, but the energy levels within the visual spectrum are precisely fit for photochemistry.

Another lucky break!• Remarkably, the

atmospheric gases, including water vapor and liquid water, absorb virtually all the harmful radiation outside the visual range and transmit only this tiny band of biologically useful radiation.

The Galaxy

• The distance between stars in our galaxy is about 30 million miles. If this distance were much less, planetary orbits would be destabilized. If it was much more, then the debris thrown out by a supernova would be so diffusely distributed that planetary systems like our own would in all probability never form!

• If the cosmos is to be a home for life, then the flickering of the supernovae must occur at a very precise rate and the average distance between them, and between all stars, must be very close to the observed figure.

The consensus?

• The universe seems too good to be true.

• If the expansion rate were a little slower, the universe would have collapsed in on itself.

• If the expansion rate were just a little faster, there wouldn’t have been the leisure for structures like galaxies to form.

• An “old universe” is necessary to produce stars, which generate the nuclear elements heavier than helium required for the subsequent evolution of complexity.

• The growth of the universe – so close to the border of collapse and external expansion that man has not been able to measure it – has been at just the proper rate to allow galaxies and stars to form.

• If something called the “fine structure constant” (the square of the charge of the electron divided by the speed of light multiplied by Planck’s Constant) were about one percent different from what it is, then the universe would be unrecognizable, perhaps uninhabitable by anything remotely like us.

• Remember, if the constants of nature were even slightly different, then the resonance of helium, beryllium and carbon would not exist – and neither would we, because there would be hardly any carbon in the universe.

• (Once the carbon is made, it could all be turned into oxygen by the nuclear reactions between carbon and further helium nuclei, but this reaction falls just short of being resonant, by an extremely fine

margin, and therefore the carbon survives!)

Four fundamental forces in the universe:

• Gravitational force

• Nuclear / Strong force

• Electromagnetic force

• Weak force

• Were the strength of gravity a little different, or the strength of the electromagnetic force slightly perturbed, then stable stars could not exist and the finely balanced life-enabling properties of nuclei, atoms, and molecules would be destroyed.

• The strength of the four forces varies ENORMOUSLY. The fact that the gravitational force is fantastically weaker than the strong nuclear force – by an unimaginable 38 orders of magnitude – is criticalcritical to the whole cosmic scheme, and particularly to the existence of stable stars and planetary systems.

• If the gravitational force were a trillion times stronger, then the universe would be far smaller and its life history far shorter. An average star would have a mass a trillion times less than the sun and a life span of about a year – far too short a time for complex life to develop and fluorish. (Any weaker, and stars and galaxies would not have formed at all!)

• If the Strong Force were slightly weaker, the only element that would be stable would be hydrogen. No other atoms would exist!

• If the Strong Force had been slightly stronger in relation to electromagnetism, then an atomic nucleus consisting of only two protons would be a stable feature of the universe – which would mean there would be no hydrogen, which means NO STARS, NO GALAXIES!

• If the four fundamental forces of nature had been even SLIGHTLY different than what they are, there would be NO stars, NO supernovae, NO planets, NO atoms, NO LIFE!

• The initial conditions had to be a certain way or we wouldn’t be here to wonder about it! (The Anthropic Principle)

“This now tells us how precise the Creator’s aim must have been, namely to an accuracy of one part in 10 to the 10 to the 123. This is an extraordinary figure. One could not possibly even write the number down in full in the ordinary denary notation: it would be a 1 followed by 10 to the 123 successive 0’s. Even if we were to write a 0 on each separate proton and on each separate neutron in the entire universe – and we could throw in all the other particles for good measure – we should fall far short of writing down the figure needed.” –Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind, 1989

• “If the universe is simply an accident, the odds against it containing any appreciable order are ludicrously small. If the Big Bang were just a random event, then the probability seems overwhelming (a colossal understatement) that the emerging cosmic material would be in thermodynamic equilibrium at maximum entropy with zero order.” Paul Davies, God and the New Physics

• “Nature has been kinder to us than we had any right to expect. As we look out into the universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together for our benefit, it almost seems as if the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.” –Freeman Dyson, “Scientific American” magazine, 1971.

Ludwig Wittgenstein:

• “We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course then there are no questions left, and this itself is the answer.”

Wittgenstein again:

• “Doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.”

And again:

• “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”

Wittgenstein:

• “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.”

Finally:

• “What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence.”

The Big Question:

• Why not just nothing?

Just how big is the universe?

• Take a gander!

• “God of all power, Ruler of the Universe, you are worthy of glory and praise.”

• “At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, the suns, planets in their courses, and this fragile Earth, our island home.”