The Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature's Plan for Humankind
Part 2. Star Larvae

Ontogeny

Science rejects programming in nature, with one exception.

When it comes to the life cycles of organisms, science carves out a conspicuous exception to its otherwise dogmatic insistence on the planlessness of natural processes.

The pre-programmed unfolding of the life cycle of an organism is an obvious, dramatic example of programming in nature—that is, of teleology. Biologists call the programmed unfolding of an individual organism's life cycle ontogeny. Ontogeny reveals nature's potential to act planfully, specifically in the potential of natural systems to develop with increasing complexity and move progressively away from equilibrium in accordance with a pre-programmed plan.

Each organism begins life as a single cell. Some stay that way. Others grow into multicellular complexity, progressively differentiating in form and function as they develop, each according to the instructions of its unique DNA coding. (Environmental factors exert an influence within the genetic parameters, but a limited one—for example, you cannot teach, reward, or with a special diet cajole a tadpole into maturing into a rhinoceros. But through diet and other chemical environmental factors, you can nudge it toward one extreme or another of its phenotypic potential. But the range is constrained by the genotype. Whether it exhibits a robust or an atrophied morphology, it remains a frog.)

An acorn develops according to its internal programming into an oak tree; it will not mature into an adult mushroom or squid. It will develop, given a hospitable environment, predictably into an oak tree. But science does not attribute the growing complexity of a maturing oak to a chance process that just happens to deviate from its simple beginnings because it has enough time to and because coincidences work in its favor, as in Gould's metaphor of the drunkard's walk. Even science attributes the progressive development of the oak, and of every other organism, to a directional program, specifically one that is pre-coded into particular arrangements of chromosomal DNA in an organism's cells.

The tadpole does not—cannot—mature into an adult walrus or the adult form of any other creature except that of a frog. The tulip bulb cannot sprout into a Norway pine. The caterpillar cannot metamorphose into a giraffe. Ontogeny is a progressive development operating in nature that is constrained to a predetermined plan.

Junk DNA Might Not Be Junk

And the juvenile form of the species might show little resemblance to the adult form, as in the case of the lowly caterpillar that nature transforms into a high-flying butterfly. The metamorphosing insects demonstrate the potential of an ontogenetic program to encompass highly diverse forms and functions and release them into an organism’s life cycle according to a precoded sequence of stages.

This aspect of development, which involves genes hitching a ride inside an organism until they are needed, might have implications for phylogeny, the evolutionary process. The received view of evolution theory has no place for "anticipatory" genes that function this way, lying in wait until they are needed. But the received view also is stumped by so-called junk DNA, sections of DNA preserved across generations but not expressed in the development of an organism. These unexpressed sections are also called "noncoding" DNA. Their origin and persistence remain a mystery. Why would evolution tolerate excess baggage?

But if we look at the life cycle of a complex organism, such as a human being, we find a kind of ontogenetic, or developmental, counterpart to junk DNA of the evolutionary biologists. And this genetic counterpart suggests a function for junk DNA. It might be junk only in its particular developmental context.

To understand the ontogenetic counterpart to evolutionary junk DNA, consider the cells of a particular tissue type in a human body, such as muscle cells. Each muscle cell in a person contains the person’s entire genome, which each cell inherits from the zygote (fertilized egg cell) from which it is descended. During the course of development the zygote divides over and over again into the many cell types that make up an adult human being. Each cell expresses only part of its genome; unexpressed DNA rides along as "junk." (A complete genome being present in each of those cells is what makes cloning possible.) So, in the case of a muscle cell, DNA for all the other cell types is present. It’s just not expressed.

As an extreme case, consider the phenotype of the zygote itself, which contains unexpressed DNA for all cell types that make up an adult body, though only a tiny portion of that genetic potential is expressed in the functioning of the zygote’s unicellular physiology. All the rest of the zygote’s DNA is "junk", until ontogenetically useful sections get expressed during development. The DNA for wings is "junk" in a caterpillar, but sheds that status when used to build a butterfly.

The star larvae hypothesis proposes that biological evolution on Earth and Earthlike planets is only a particular phase in a complex lifecycle: It is the larval phase of the stellar life cycle. In the context of the hypothesis, in which phylogeny is a subroutine within an overarching ontogeny—the mystery of junk DNA looks less mysterious. Junk DNA might have a function in the future—as does wing DNA that lies dormant in a caterpillar. Because anticipatory DNA is to be expected in the context of ontogeny, it poses no problem for evolution, if phylogeny is repositioned as a subroutine within the ontogenetic life cycle of an organism.

But no matter how baroque a species' genetic plan, science situates that plan and the species in a larger context of planlessness. This planless context is the overarching biological process of evolution, or the descent of species, a counterpart to ontogeny that explains the particulars of individual species in terms of their evolutionary descent from ancestral species.

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