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THE
INTELLIGENT
UNIVERSE
The restless species • The intervention
of intelligence • A window of opportunity • Forwards andbackwards in time • Mankind reaches
its final challenge
Humans are restless probing creatures, difficult to satisfy.
Give us our heart's desire and it will hardly be five minutes
before we are thinking of something else we would like tohave. Age matters little, it is the same for a child as for an
adult. The situation is not much different in science either, at
any rate so far as my own experience goes. Once I understand
the solution to one problem, I soon find myself looking
around for another to puzzle about.
Enthusiasts for the Darwinian evolutionary theory would
no doubt claim that our restlessness aids survival, because it
could be reckoned an advantage to search for your next meal
before you really need it. But there are plenty of exceptions to
this argument. The businessman with a large fortune, for
example, although he does not need to search for his next
meal, or his next thousand meals, will spend a great deal of
effort in trying to increase his wealth, despite the fact that he
may lose all that he has in the process.
But the strange aspect of this restlessness is that it centresaround those mental characteristics which, as we saw in the
last chapter, did not arise from evolution. Our restlessness, in
short, appears to be pre-programmed, like the human ability
to do complex forms of mathematics. It is a quality apparently
without immediate advantage. Indeed, it seems to me that
people of unusually placid temperament who, having
stumbled by chance or otherwise on some successful enter-
prise, are then able to content themselves with it, tend to fare
best in their personal lives. A scientist who manages in the
third and fourth decades of his life to make one or two
significant discoveries, and who then "shuts up shop", often
does better than a colleague who risks failure by trying tomake further discoveries. By sticking undeviatingly to the
evolutionary theory of 1859, Charles Darwin did better,
historically speaking, than Alfred Russel Wallace who kepton throughout his life trying to find solutions to still harder
problems.
With this in mind, it is perhaps not wise to press the
arguments of this book any more closely than we have done
already. We have seen that life could not have originated here
on the Earth. Nor does it look as though biological evolution
can be explained from within an Earthbound theory of life.
Genes from outside the Earth are needed to drive the
evolutionary process.
This much can be consolidated by strictly scientific means,by experiment, observation and calculation. It is a conclusion
that is quite revolutionary enough. Nevertheless, in spite of
my awareness that curiosity killed the cat, I have allowed it to
carry me a whole lot further. There is an important reason for
doing so. Even after widening the stage for the origin of life
from our tiny Earth to the Universe at large, we must still
return to the same problem that opened this book—the vast
unlikelihood that life, even on a cosmic scale, arose from non-
living matter.
Order
from chaos
There is no shortage of scientists who will shout this problem
down, but in my opinion their protestations are more dog-
matic than scientific. By dogmatic I mean that they are arguing
from ideas that are pre-set to begin with, instead of allowing
their thinking to develop and even to change drastically as
new facts become available. The pre-set state of mind—in this
case that life arose from non-living inorganic matter—leads
to all manner of excuses and deceptions when life's com-
plexity comes up for explanation.
When this problem is considered in detail—in the way we
have done in this book—it is apparent that the origin of life is
overwhelmingly a matter of arrangement, of ordering quite
common atoms into very special structures and sequences.
Whereas we learn in physics that non-living processes tend to
destroy order, intelligent control is particularly effective at
producing order out of chaos. You might even say that
intelligence shows itself most effectively in arranging things,
exactly what the origin of life requires. This point is so
important that it is worth pausing to consider the very great
difference that intelligence can make, not by thunder and
lightning methods like Thor with his hammer, but by the
subtlest of touches.Let us return to the example of the Rubik cube. Suppose an
observer, who understands the cube thoroughly, stands
behind a blindfolded person attempting to solve it. At each
move of the cube the observer says "no" if the move does not
advance the cube towards its solution, in which case the
blindfolded person reverses the move just made and tries
another. If on the other hand a move advances the cube
towards its solution the observer says nothing, and the blind-
folded person makes a further move. Reckoning 1 minute for
each successful move and, say, 120 moves to reach the
solution, two hours will be needed to solve the cube. And if
the observer cries "Stop!" when the solution is reached, the
thing will be done. Just the one short word "no" from the
observer makes the difference between a solution that takes
two hours and a random one that takes three hundred times
the age of the Earth.
I can almost hear the convinced Darwinian crying out: "But
what you have just described for the Rubik cube is exactly like
the origin of species by natural selection, with mutations
taking the place of the moves made by the blindfolded personand with selection by the environment taking the place of the
observer". The cases are not at all the same, however. The
essential point of the Rubik cube analogy is that its quick
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