The Star Larvae Hypothesis

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

The 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.

Think you're Bright? Rise and Shine at http://starlarvae.blogspot.com/

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

Stellar nebulae manufacture bacteria and viruses in their interiors as they cool to form solar systems.
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 religious motifs that includes ascendance, transcendence and illumination expresses humankind’s stellar calling. The star is the human imago.
Nature's universal metabolism encompasses the organic and the inorganic in a continuum of matter and energy exchanges.

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 a new model of biology's origins, development, and cosmic calling.

"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

Prolog: The Nature of Meaning and the Meaning of Nature

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: The new science of complexity, or complex systems theory, revives the doctrine of vitalism. It assigns to nature the capacity to self organize—to construct complex structures and processes spontaneously.
Entropy: The old science of thermodynamics assigns to nature the capacity to self disorganize—to deconstruct complex structures and processes spontaneously.
Metabolism: Complexity and entropy—anabolism and catabolism—feed each other in circuits collectively called metabolism. Nature's universal metabolism encompasses the organic and the inorganic in a continuum of matter and energy exchanges.
Organism and Environment: Some cross sections of nature’s metabolism act like discrete unities. These organisms elude easy delineation, however, because their metabolisms diffuse into their environments.
Symbiosis: Defining an organism becomes more complicated when the organism extends its metabolism through, and becomes dependent on, other organisms.
Technology: Defining an organism becomes even more complicated when the organism extends its metabolism through, and becomes dependent on, its 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: Science and religion are at odds over whether nature and history participate in a program—whether they serve a purpose.
Ontogeny: Science rejects programming in nature, with one exception.
Phylogeny: Science rejects programming in nature, especially in evolution.
Anthropic Coincidence: The physical constants of nature appear to be tuned to ensure that biological organisms (star larvae) arise and proliferate. The values of the constants suggest that biology is a product of a universal plan.
Cosmological Natural Selection: The physical constants of nature appear to be tuned to ensure that black holes (the universe's reproductive organs) arise and proliferate. The values of the constants suggest that a planless Darwinian process operates across an ensemble of universes.
The Stellar Organism: The birth, catalytic metabolism, periodic physiological cycles, and death of a star finger the luminary as an organism.
Astrotheology and Astral Religion: The universality and persistence of astral themes in religious art and lore testify to humankind’s stellar longing and ultimate identity.
Silicon and Biogenesis: Atoms are star spores. Biological life is cosmic, not terrestrial, in origin and scope.
Panspermia: Biological life impregnates planets, where it gestates, until it returns to space symbiotic with its technologies.
The Proton Crisis: Biological life extends the life of the universe by recycling black holes into new protons (through a technology sufficiently advanced so as to be indistinguishable from magic).
Quantum Gravity and the Ontology of Consciousness: Science continues to map correlations between neurochemical and mental events. But subjectivity per se seems to reside at another interface—between quantum and gravitational events.

PART 3: Space Brains

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

Space Migration: 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 an underlying trend in human evolution.
Sleep: Juvenilized brains exuberate and snooze. But snoozing threatens the enrichments that exuberance produces.
Lucid Dreams: Dreams remedy the otherwise impoverishing effects of sleep. Dreaming with intent extends conscious will into the unconscious.
The Synergy of the Network: Virtual reality releases solitary dreamers into the collective dream.
The "Observer Effect" and Quantum Theology: Resolving the proton crisis through oneiric intent—the universe heals itself through its will to live.

PART 4: Addendum: Cyberfetus Rising

Technology decommissions the specialized adaptations of the adult body, retarding human ontogenetic development. The resulting neoteny demonstrates gene-culture coevolution. In space this process—techneoteny—will deliver a posthuman form anticipated by the religious figure of the cherubic angel, 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

PART 5: Addendum: Exo-Psychology Revisited

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 the most naturalistic explanation of human social organization, but it remains a 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 the source. 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 relgated 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