Genesis of Eden

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BIOCOSMOLOGY

Chris King
Department of Mathematics
University of Auckland, New Zealand
The latest version of this paper is in PDF form linked below
  1. Prebiotic Epoch: Cosmic Symmetry-breaking and Molecular Evolution (pdf)
  2. Evolutionary Epoch: Complexity, Chaos and Complementarity (pdf)
  3. Consummating Cosmology: Quantum Cosmology and the Hard Problem of the Conscious Brain (pdf)

CONTENTS

  1. Paradise on the Cosmic Equator
  2. Generating a Complex Twisted Universe
  3. The Abudantly Fecund Universe
  4. Quantum Chemistry as Non-Linear Complexity
  5. The Non-recurrent Table and the Elementary Bifurcation Tree
  6. Structural Dynamics of Core Polymerization Pathways
  7. RNA and Cosmology
  8. Diverse Horizons of the RNA Epoch
  9. Universal Stability Structures in Molecular Biology
  10. The Precocious Origins of Life on Earth
  11. Quantum Evolution at the Edge of Chaos
  12. The Five Kingdoms as Ecosystemic Bifurcations
  13. Stochastic Accident versus the Relentless Limits of Selection
  14. Homeotic Universality
  15. Virus-Cell Complementarity
  16. Sexuality as Complementarity-based Symmetry-breaking
  17. The Mammalian Brain as a Universal Algorithm
  18. Consummating Cosmology: The Emergance of Sentient Consciousness
  19. The Cosamology of Life's Diversity
  20. References

THE COSMOLOGY OF LIFE'S DIVERSITY

This places upon us an awesome responsibility to care for the living Earth in space-time so that its future can flower regardless of the heat death or cosmic crunch which will await us far further down the track. It is urgent to consider the mass extinction of life this failure of understanding is leading us to in the acute and devastating holocaust of Earth's genetic and biological diversity. Survival of any species depends on endurance over evolutionary and thus cosmic time scales. All the indications are at present that humanity remains unaware of its increasingly perilous disruption of all natural long-term processes of conservation on the planet in the naive belief in a technological quick fix after the damage has become inescapable.

This deranged social phenomenon appears to source from a break in the human evolutionary stream which led us from a hundred thousand year epoch of sustainability as gatherer-hunters into a transient period of gender, natural and social disruption by war, genocide, famine and nascent overpopulation. If we are going to survive, we need urgently to rediscover and reinvest in our coherent relationship with the cosmos and with the diversity of nature.


Fig 35: Comparison of the evolution of the universe from the big bang and the evolution of life on Earth shows that life has existed for a full third of the universes lifetime and can thus be considered a long-term stable feature of cosmic evolution. Astronomical events including impacts and possibly also nearby supernovae have always played a major role in causing mass extinctions accompanied by volcanism possibly as a secondary consequence of the impacts themselves. However the advent of so-called human civilization is threatening in the next century to cause a mass extinction more serious than the cretaceous-tertiary event that wiped out the dinosaurs. The process is caused both by direct impacts such as deforestation and habitat destruction and by genetically modifying the very species upon which we depend without conserving their naturally viable forms, so that our future becomes brittle and fragile, dependent on maintaining artificial growing environments and high-tech food distribution processes which would be disabled globally by the slightest of astronomical disturbances, leading directly towards human extinction. For a single species to cause a mass extinction of life's diversity, possibly lasting 10 million years in one century is thus terminal folly. It is compounded by the ever increasing value biological resources have in the genetic epoch. There is thus a paramount need for us to rediscover our relationship with the cosmos and to take the responsibility to regenerate genetic and biological diversity to sustain our own future generations.

Life has existed on Earth for a full third of the universe's own lifetime. It is the most eloquent and complete expression known of the universes cosmological capacity for complexity. The quantum universe is not the Newtonian machine we once envisaged and neither is it a substrate for human and religious dominion over woman and nature alike. Discovering that consciousness and free-will does have an impact on the evolving history of the universe may be a first step to regaining our survival prospects in the universe over cosmic time and thus regaining our natural and possibly pivotal place in the cosmic process which we lost in Jericho ten thousand years ago when men assumed reproductive imperative over women and the right to dominion over all the natural processes on the planet, overthrowing the evolutionary sexual paradox between the genders which saw Homo sapiens sapiens emerge sustainably in evolutionary time as gatherer-hunters over the last 100,000 years (King 1999). Human civilization, and with it the biosphere, is becoming increasingly brittle and fragile to the mildest of astronomical disruptions, which could take out our food distribution systems, seve our communications and render much of the arable area of the planet unproductive. It is essentital for the evolutionary robustness of our future survival to preserve the full diversity of life, particularly the species upon which we depend in their natural viable state in well-conserved habitats, yet we are systematically on a global basis undermining the very source of our own genetic future. Not only is there wholesale destruction of speices and genetic diversity by habitat destruction but we are failing to adequately maintain the natural habitats and diversity of even those food, medicinal and commercial species upon which our livelihood depends.

The advent of unbridled genetic modification is likely to exacerbate this problem further through the loss of the viable natural varieties through the devotion of the vast proportion of the arable areas of the plaent to non-viable engineered varieties, the loss of control of natural varieties through aggressive marketing of patented varieties and the horizontal transfer of engineered traits into natural ecosystems through cross-pollination.

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