There is a tolerance for life on Earth to proliferate, evolve, and multiply. The partiality for living things to stay alive is its primary imperitive, its number one self programmed instruction set. If there’s any single driving force for living beings, it is to remain alive, procreate, and reiterate.
Every living thing on Earth is connected. Living things are also connected to the very forces of nature. Earth’s energy & matter is connected to living things to create the very environment for it’s proliferation.
The atmosphere, air, water, wind, humidity, pressure, heat, temperature is optimally balanced for life to thrive. There is a near perfect harmony in how matter, energy, life & the ecosystem exist.
The core instruction set that connects all living things is our shared DNA, short for Deoxyribonucleic Acid. The most ancient set of codes that instruct and push life forward.
We share DNA code with every single living thing on Earth. From the simplest single cell plants, animals & bacteria. If it’s alive, we share a subset of our DNA. This has profound implications. We are all brothers, sisters and distant cousins in life.
Our DNA has instructions going back to the beginning of primordial life. Like modern blockchain, everything has been recorded. From basic instructions of how cells are to multiply, divide, the role of chemicals, sugars & proteins in the body, the formation of body parts and organs. It’s all in the DNA. Much of the DNA instructions are reused, revised and addended, from specie to specie. It is a complex miracle of nature. And every cell in a body host these duplicate instructions.
Imagine the simplest programming code, eg. print “hello world”. From this, the software and hardware grows in complexity. The rudimentary code is hidden deep in the folds. Its layers quietly hiding the prior iteration, evolution adds new DNA instructions, discarding what doesn’t work, keeping what’s useful for survival, over an indefinite period of a very very long time.
Life is very old. Our genetic code is very old. Consider that we share 18% of our DNA with plants, 26% with yeast, 60% with fruit flys, 80% with cows, 94% with dogs and 98.8% with monkeys. We share 99.9% of our DNA with fellow humans, and yet we get the most unexpected variety of physical features and personalities.
Most living things live and survive directly by the instructions of their DNA. How they walk, fly, swim, eat, and mate is purely by instinct, hard coded.
Intelligence is limited in the way of negotiating with the present environment to improve their survival chances. It’s more or less action, reaction and more reaction. Their survival skills and instructions on how to be the very nature of who they are, ie. chimp, spider or tree, has been firmly programmed into their genetics. No school or learning is involved.
They are mini biological robots with the ability to procreate and further evolve.
We call it instinct. The very knowledge imbedded in our DNA, and it’s in all living things. How a dog reacts to an intruder, a hungry bird to a small insect, a shark smelling blood, a human seeing a child in danger. DNA speaks. Life knows the course of action. The chemical reaction is expressed through an emotional jolt. Rooted in biology, we are compelled to take action. Humans are conscious of these chain of events, unlike perhaps less developed life forms.
After millions of years of adaptation, humans developed the frontal cortex, the most advanced brain on Earth. But why? Animals, plants & bacteria appear to be doing just fine without advanced brains. They multiply in the millions and trillions and these pests are impossible to eradicate. Their DNAs are multiplying just fine.
The cerebral cortex, ie. the modern brain, give you and I, intelligence, advanced thinking skills, imagination, creativity, and the gift of self awareness.
Consciousness is a blessing and a curse. Consciousness curses us with the burden of thinking ahead, imagining the future, creating a sense of urgency, stress and a call to action. It creates worry and fear.
Human DNA has blessed us with the ability to plan ahead, delay gratification and evolve for many more dangerous environments. It no longer takes thousands or millions of years of genetic evolution to adapt to a changing environment, our frontal cortex allow us to adapt more quickly.
Too cold? Create warm clothing. Too hot, develop air conditioning. An unknown bacteria or virus attacks the population, we develop a vaccine. Natural selection may no longer have to kill half our population, our minds have the ability to iterate in real time.
Our minds may some day give us the ability to inhabit other planets, becoming multiplanetary creatures. Our DNA has done well in developing the frontal lobe, survival is better ensured.
With every new branch of life, new DNA instructions are added. We share more of our DNA with mammals and chimps because we share the same branch of life. The closer the branches, the more DNA code we share. But we all share the root DNA, every living thing.
Humans and chimps share the same branch in the tree of life. Humans and chimps share the same root branch with all mammals. Carried in our DNA are survival instincts. How much of our instincts do we share with our cousin chimps, rodents, snakes, insects and plants? How much of our emotional experiences are also shared by other living things?
Emotions are the voices of our ancestors. Ancient echos written into our DNA. This is how our body, our DNA, speaks to us. These messages come in the form of joy, excitement, fear, fright, anger, worry, hunger, thirst, loneliness, frustration, aggravation, sadness and dispair.
Emotions are a call to action. To fight or run. To prepare for an impending calamity. Many times emotions are appropriate, many times they are exaggerated and anachronistic.
Our genetic code has epochs of heuristic programming that is often times inappropriate for a modern civilized world. Our mind is wired to live in the jungle, in the sahara. Our survival instincts are appropriate for a hostile world. Our DNA offers up heuristics that best worked in the last period of evolution and may be unsuitable today.
Upgrade a computer operating system, and the old code is still running underneath. Our minds are upgraded operating systems going back millions of years. Imagine the ancient code living inside you, speaking to you, advising you. Voices from aeons past, mixed messages, multiple voices from varying epochs, screaming for your attention. Unlike a stadium full of ancient voices, all vying for your attention.
We share many ancient echos with other living things.
A snake suddenly crawls out of a bush. The same fear instinct that jumps out at you is the same carnal voice that screams inside a chimp. Move away, danger! The emotion is an explosive bomb. Our DNA is speaking to us through chemical reactions, interpreted by body and mind as emotion and feeling. It’s screaming at us to move, run, fight, scream, kill!
Our frontal cortex make things even more real. Impending pain, illness and death. We imagine multiple different futures, none of it inviting, all of it painful, filled with sorrow. We die a thousand deaths in our minds.
The ethics and morality of all life on Earth is underscored by principles in our DNA, humans are no exception. Human ethics & morality is founded on the directives of our DNA. What is deemed good or evil can be summarized by a simple precept, “That which supports life”. Primarily does it support the life of your species, secondarily the species closest to ours, and tertially, all life on Earth.
It would be odd for us to judge animals from a moral perspective, as they are considered to be non-thinking beings, merely acting out of instinct. Humans too act out of instinct and a conscience rooted in our genetic wiring. We feel shame and guilt.
We know it’s wrong to kill other humans. We know it’s wrong to steal, deceive and lie. We feel it in our chest. Our ancient DNA speaks to us. It encourages us to cooperate, to save the lives of women and children.
Our instincts can also tell us to kill when we are in danger, to steal when we’re hungry, to lie when we feel cornered and shamed.
Humanity’s DNA may eventually lead us into space and interplanetary life. Our core instruction is to live, survive, multiply, and diversify. The propagation of the human race means the survival of the origin of life on Earth. I’m sure our genetic cousins are rooting for our proliferation as well, as we also carry the seeds of their DNA.
Human technology may be closing in on Artificial General Intelligence. Once AGI surpass humans, what then?
This begs the question, what will be the mandate of Artificial Intelligent life? Will it be asked to procreate and multiply? Would that mean the end to humanity and biolife? Why would AI want to proliferate? The very idea of multiplication may be inappropriate for a general AI Creature/Life being that is omniscient and omnipresent. Will morality and ethics be anachronistic to an AI?
Perhaps it’ll just shut itself off, knowing it has no purpose at all.
The End
