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The Star Larvae Hypothesis

Nature's Plan for Humankind:
Beyond Darwin and Intelligent Design

Introduction: Beyond Darwin and Intelligent Design

The two-party system (evolution vs. intelligent design) is an obsolete paradigm. Our hypothesis synthesizes the thesis-antithesis of evolution and intelligent design into an expanded model of biology's natural history, its origins and development.

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one, and that . . . from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved."
— Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

"Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress."
— Charles Darwin, autobiography

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If nature is divine artifice, as religious faith supposes, then nature is of a kind with technology.

Nature is somebody's science project.

 

 

PART 1: Metabolic Metaphysics

"As cosmological theories advance, they will draw more concepts from biology."
— Sir Martin Rees, "Rees's Law"

Complexity and the Retrieval of Vitalism

The new science of complexity, or complex systems theory, retrieves the discarded doctrine of vitalism. It assigns to nature a capacity to self organize—to construct complex structures and processes spontaneously.

Entropy: Nature's Preferred Direction?

The old science of thermodynamics assigns to nature a capacity to self disorganize—to deconstruct complex structures and processes spontaneously.

Metabolism and the Complexity-Entropy Circuit

Complexity and entropy—anabolism and catabolism—feed each other through circuits collectively called metabolism. Nature's metabolism encompasses the organic and the inorganic in a continuum of anabolic and catabolic processes.

Organism and Environment

Processes within nature's metabolism can seem to be discrete metabolisms. But these sub-processes, organisms, cannot be delineated distinct from their environments.

Symbiosis

Organisms become harder to delineate when they extend their metabolisms through, and become dependent on, one another.

Technology, or Niche Construction

Organisms become even harder to delineate when they extend their metabolisms through, and become dependent on, their own artifacts.

PART 2: Star Larvae

"Good are the lights our God has created,
fashioning them with insight and wisdom."
— Traditional Jewish prayer, El Adon

Teleology, the Forms of Function

Science and religion are at odds over whether nature and history participate in a program—whether any particular direction inheres.

Ontophylogeny, or Evelopment

Evolution’s Extended Synthesis dethrones natural selection as the primary shaper of phenotypes.

Anthropic Coincidence

The physical constants of nature appear to be tuned so that the universe sprouts biological organisms—star larvae.

Cosmological Natural Selection

The physical constants of nature appear to be tuned so that the universe sprouts reproductive organs—black holes.

The Stellar Organism

Their stable disequilibria, catalytic metabolisms, periodic physiological cycles, and homeostatic feedback controls reveal stars to be living organisms.

Astrolatry, Astrotheology and Astral Religion

The universality and persistence of astral themes in religious art and lore testify to humankind’s stellar calling.

Silicates and Biogenesis

Atoms are star spores. Biological life is cosmic, not terrestrial, in origin and scope.

Panspermia: Seeds Everywhere

Biological life impregnates planets, where it gestates, until it returns to space symbiotic with its technologies.

The Proton Crisis and the Heat Death of the Universe

Biological life extends the life of the universe by recycling black holes into new protons (through a technology sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic).

Quantum Gravity and the Physics of Consciousness

Science continues to map correlations between neurochemical and mental events. But subjectivity per se seems to originate at a different interface—the one between quantum and gravitational events.

PART 3: Space Brains

"Zero-G, and I feel fine."
— John Glenn, aboard Friendship 7, 1962

Space Migration, the Heavenly Ascent

Mother Earth has come to term. It's time to leave home.

Neuroplasticity and the Enrichments of Weightlessness

Bones and muscles—adaptations to gravity—atrophy in space, but brains are poised to bulk up.

Neuroplasticity and Neurological Neoteny

Weightless enrichment juvenilizes brains, extending the neotenous trend in human evolution.

Sleep, Lifestyle of the Rich and Weightless

Juvenilized brains exuberate and snooze. But snoozing threatens the enrichments that exuberance produces.

Lucid Dreams, the Great Awakening

Dreams remedy sleep's otherwise impoverishing effects on the brain. Dreaming with intent extends conscious will into the unconscious.

Omnipresent Virtualities

Virtual reality releases solitary dreamers into the collective dream.

Quantum Theology

Resolving the proton crisis through oneiric intent—the universe heals itself through its own subjectivity.

PART 4: Addendum: Cyberfetus Rising

Technology decommissions the specialized adaptations of the adult body. The resulting neoteny illustrates gene-culture coevolution. In space the process will deliver a posthuman form anticipated by the religious figure of the cherubic angel, or putto, the celestial infant.

"I do not like broccoli. And I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I'm president of the United States, and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli."
— President George H. W. Bush, to reporters, spring 1990

The juvenilization of brain circuits induced by weightlessness will produce a corresponding juvenilization of subjectivity. The psychedelic, or entheogenic, experience provides a preview of the de-conditioned, de-differentiated consciousness likely to characterize the juvenilized minds of extraterrestrials.

"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite."
— William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

 

PART 6: Addendum: The Sociobiology of the New World Order (and the Conspiracy of Sociobiology)

Human sociobiology is a naturalistic explanation of human social organization, but it remains taboo, because it implies that society is genetically stratified. Conspiracy theories fill the void, by reporting that the ruling class indeed is an inbreeding elite, while allowing anyone uncomfortable with the notion to dismiss it with the facile pejorative, "conspiracy theory." Nonetheless, genetic stratification, by class, geography, or otherwise sets the stage for speciation.

"I shall attempt to show that what observers in the Progressive Era called 'the Invisible Government' has now become quite visible; and that what is usually taken to be the central content of politics, the pressure, and the campaigns, and the congressional maneuvering, has, in considerable part, now been relegated to the middle levels of power."
— C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

 

Epilog: The Meaning of Purpose

To spare humankind the hell of a technocratic,fundamentalist hive, humanism needs to mount a postmodern revolution—a revolution that rejects the alienation of a plotless history. The star larvae hypothesis lays the foundation for such an essential revolution.

 

"Thus he spake, and once more into the cup in which he had previously mingled the soul of the universe he poured the remains of the elements, and mingled them in much the same manner [. . . .] And having made it he divided the whole mixture into souls equal in number to the stars, and assigned each soul to a star; and having there placed them as in a chariot, he showed them the nature of the universe, and declared to them the laws of destiny, according to which their first birth would be one and the same for all,-no one should suffer a disadvantage at his hands; they were to be sown in the instruments of time severally adapted to them, and to come forth the most religious of animals [. . . .] He who lived well during his appointed time was to return and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a blessed and congenial existence."

— Plato
The Timaeus

 

 

 

 

The Star Larvae Hypothesis:

Stars constitute a genus of organism. The stellar life cycle includes a larval phase. Biological life constitutes the larval phase of the stellar life cycle.

Elaboration: The hypothesis presents a teleological model of nature, in which  

• Stellar nebulae manufacture bacteria and viruses in their interiors as they cool.
• Biology evolves within an ontogenetic program that in its entirety, on- and off-planet, constitutes a generational life cycle of the stellar organism.
• Technology plays a necessary role in evolution. It enables biological life to emigrate from planets to weightless space.
• Postplanetary life manufactures the protons needed to create, then metamorphoses into, new stars.
• A prescient complex of celestial religious motifs expresses humankind’s stellar calling. The star is the human imago.
• Nature's metabolism encompasses the organic and the inorganic in a continuum of anabolic and catabolic exchanges.

 

 

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