If life pervades the universe this throws a different perspective on many issues

It was particularly interesting to read that Peter Godfrey-Smith wrote in his 2017 book Other Minds that the octopus ‘is probably the closest we’ll ever get to an alien intelligence’.

The way that Tricia quoted this immediately made me think in terms of ET, or little green men (or women) in flying saucers.

Turns out that what Godfrey-Smith meant was that the cephalopods (octopus, squid, cuttlefish, nautilus) came up a somewhat different evolutionary route to the other group of animals that ended up with what we can call brains (and of which we humans are the top of the tree – so far anyway).

In the other branch the octopus seems to have the most brain power, though as Tricia points out it has a more distributed nervous system than we do, with only a small proportion in a central nerve complex, and eight other centres in association with the eight arms. Still it has about 500 million neurons, compared to say a brown rat with 200 million, or a cat with about 760 million.

So mentally it must also be at the top of its tree, though this looks rather like an evolutionary dead end, because it’s difficult to see how a water dweller can go any much further, or how such a squidgy animal could evolve onto dry land without some very significant changes.

But what is interesting is that a camera-like eye should have evolved twice (once in each branch). It’s always been rather difficult to imagine how the necessarily long chain of small intermediate variances produced by random genetic mutations could have all been sufficiently favourable to drive natural selection towards an eye at all, let alone twice. But maybe it had nothing to do with random genetic mutations.

In the sixties and seventies Professor Sir Fred Hoyle and his then assistant Chandra Wickramasinghe were working on the chemical composition of interstellar clouds, by analysing the wavelengths at which the dust absorbed the light from distant stars, and arrived at the conclusion that the best model to explain the observed absorption patterns was that the dust consisted of desiccated bacterial spores.

Thus seems to have begun a resurgence of interest in a theory of panspermia, which postulates that life arrives on Earth from space in the form of genetic and other organic materials, viruses, bacterial spores, and maybe other cell structures.

Inevitably this was controversial and slow to gain traction, but in 2018 a paper was published in the peer reviewed journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology under the title Cause of Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic?

This reviewed the evidence which had accumulated in recent years for the theory of panspermia, which was impressive and persuasive. It dealt with the Cambrian Explosion of about 530 million years ago, when there was a sudden (in cosmic terms) burst of mass extinctions and new species development. Too much new genetic data must have been involved too quickly for it to have come from random genetic mutations.

And it also mentions the large decentralised and sophisticated nervous system of the octopus, its ability to rapidly change colour, its camera-like eyes and intelligence, which also seem to have arrived on the scene rather quickly.

Since then it seems that additional discoveries still continue to be made which support panspermia.

If life pervades the universe this throws a different perspective on many issues concerning life and our lives, perhaps including consciousness and our place in the world.

A phenomenon of consciousness as a production of terrestrial biology is one thing. Consciousness pervading the entire universe seems quite another.

And for those who wish to believe in a creator spirit, then if this pervades the entire universe this is something else as well. Indeed it could be that we will not understand consciousness unless we can admit a paradigm shift towards something like this.

One can be reminded of the ancient Hindu idea of Brahman (the universal spirit) and Atman (the individual spirit), a metaphor for which can be Brahman as the ocean and Atman as a single drop of water.

BOB PERKINS

Les Corneilles

Rue de la Ronde Cheminee

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