When it all amounts to nothing in the end (?)

My final year of college I took a class in political science, my major, entitled Plato-Aquinas. In this class I never did the readings, or take the exams, but by reenacting the class several months later I managed to pull through will a B+. I won't disclose where I took this class (and no, I did not graduate from USC like it says in the other blog posts). This class began with Pericles' Funeral Oration, then proceeded with Plato's Timaeus and Republic, followed by Aristotle's Politics, Cicero's On The Commonwealth, St. Augustine's City of God and Confessions, and some segments from St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica. I learned many, many things in this class that will continue to influence me for the rest of my life. For one thing, I finally worked out the meaning of "teleological," a word that I had previously been expected to learn about six times. It was also in this class that I first felt ready to identify my friends and foes among these philosophers, in addition to other thinkers from various points in history. Aristotle I was never especially fond of, but previously I didn't make any strong judgments about him; after taking this class, I decided once and for all I shouldn't hang out with him. I also became curious about who influenced whom, and how these influences manifested themselves among the names I'd encountered in college and afterwards (albeit only those whom I can claim to have any understanding of). And lastly, there were all kinds of thoughts that had been swirling through my head for most of my life before taking this class. It was only with this class that I felt ready to organize them and devise conclusions.

What's the meaning of life? I guess the answer should be purely subjective, since we all have different life experiences. However, I can think of one reason why there might be an objective answer to this question. Once our tube is cut and tied together, and our most essential parts are up and running, there is one and only one experience that everyone shares. This question is teleological, i.e. it is concerned with the "telos" or purpose of something. Let's take some less lofty examples. Why do we have eyes? There are various ways of answering this question, but the teleological answer would be "so we can see." When I buy a polo set from the Walmart, why does the cashier give me a receipt? A facile might be "to prove that we didn't steal it." However, this is not the only reason: I'm also given the receipt to prove that the item was purchased at a Walmart, and that the day I purchased it is within the bound of the return policy; I'm also receiving it in case Bank of America did not process the transaction correctly, and the reader might think of more reasons. So the teleological answer to this question becomes more complicated, maybe something like "to provide about the purchase that might be needed for purposes of documentation." Let's take some more examples. Why did HIV develop and spread rapidly across the globe, infecting 34 million people? Well that's just too easy: it's to punish sinners, i.e. homosexuals, drug users, unscrupulous women and their children, women who were paired with the wrong man in an arranged marriage, recipients of contaminated blood donations before Reagan got serious, girls who were infected during female genital mutilation because their culture assumes INCORRECTLY that Christianity or Islam justifies this practice ... the list goes on. And Aristotle has his own example: why do some people become slaves? Well,

a possession is spoken of as a part is spoken of; for the part is not only a part of something else, but wholly belongs to it; and this is also true of a possession. The master is only the master of the slave; he does not belong to him, whereas the slave is not only the slave of his master, but wholly belongs to him. Hence we see what is the nature and office of a slave; he who is by nature not his own but another's man, is by nature a slave; and he may be said to be another's man who, being a human being, is also a possession. And a possession may be defined as an instrument of action, separable from the possessor. But is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right, or rather is not all slavery a violation of nature? There is no difficulty in answering this question, on grounds both of reason and of fact. For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule. (Politics, Book I Part IV-V)

 Why did I become a grad student? I was a liberal arts major; grad school was the only alternative to homelessness. Now we'll turn to the bigger picture. In this blog post we'll take a tour of world history to see if it's leading us anywhere. Why is it that our life expectancy is 78, whereas in Victorian Europe it was about 40? Why is it that IQ's across the globe have increased very persistently over the past century? Why is it that  such a brainy species, capable of traveling to the moon and discovering the Higgs Boson, came into being? Is it likely that this will all be canceled out by a nuclear war or by natural disasters and other profound problems resulting from global warming? Does this all matter to someone who dies from malaria at age three? I'll do what I can to take all these matters into consideration. Approximately 13.7 billion years ago the universe reached adulthood, if you will, when suddenly it was banged, and as far as we know it was the first time. After that point things happened rather quickly, and within a few minutes we would see helium nuclei, which would coalesced into elements over the next few million years, and within a billion years we started seeing galaxies, including ours. Approximately eight billion years later the sun has more or less finished spinning together the earth into the imperfect sphere that it is now. Then God said "let there be a uniformly molten object with no atmosphere," and therefore plenty of sunlight. Shortly thereafter, radioactive materials within the earth increased the earth's temperature further, thereby melting it further and allowing for easier movements of particles within the earth. Denser elements, namely iron and nickel sank to the center, whereas the various lighter elements moved towards the periphery. Among the newly formed layers of the earth, the "inner core" became the hottest, yet the gravitational pull on it was so strong as to prevent it from melting. By contrast, the "outer core" was given the chance to melt, which allowed energy to run through it, creating convection. With the help of earth's rotation, this excess energy manifests itself in an electromagnetic current that travels easily through the earth, being composed primarily of iron. The earth's magnetic field is a rare gift among planets, and by warding off rays from the sun of certain wavelengths, it has allowed the earth to accumulate certain gases, creating the atmosphere.

I would guess the reader is familiar with the Miller-Urey Experiment. Scientists at the University of Chicago in 1952 combined water, ammonia, methane, and hydrogen in a sort of circuit of flasks and glass tubes. It is well-agreed that these four substances would have existed on the earth, in significant quantities, when the first life-forms emerged. The water was heated past its boiling point, simulating the effect of geothermal heat, and sparks were administered to one of the flasks, continually for an indefinite period of time, to simulate lightning. Two weeks later, the hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen from these four substances had re-assembled to form 23 existing amino acids (of which five were observed at the time). I guess God can do things more dramatically. And amino acids can exist outside of earth, as the article reminds us, citing as evidence a meteorite that landed in Australia in 1969 and was found to be rich with amino acids. So what, if anything, sets us ahead of the place this meteorite came from?

As we learned in high school, a life form is defined as having eight properties, defined by the mnemonic: "good children r dying all over earth rapidly." In other words, organisms grow and develop, they're contain carbon, they reproduce, they die, they adapt to their environment, they are organized into cells, they require energy, and they regulate their temperature. I am, of course, directly recalling what I learned when I was fourteen. There are viruses and other creatures that have some of these characteristics, but they don't make the cut. So, assuming that amino acids could have developed on earth with the help of volcanoes and lightning, what would they need to assemble into cells?

To be continued ...