Our destructive nature is not written into the original code
We need to figure out the real reason behind the messed-up side of human nature—because it's not the fault of the first living cell!
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Mark Golding
6/11/20266 min read
Understanding Our Origins
It’s fascinating to consider how far we’ve come from the very first living cells. Those microscopic marvels were all about survival, equipped with genetic coding that allowed them to tackle problems and communicate effectively with other cells. With billions of years of evolution leading us to where we are today, one could ponder why we, as the newest species on the block, are capable of producing such destructive inventions. This stark contrast begs the question: what went wrong?
Survival of the Fittest… or Just the Fittest Weapons?
At the heart of evolution lies the principle of survival of the fittest. Early multi-cellular organisms developed through a series of intelligent adaptations, each one saying, "I will do what I must to survive." But as humanity evolved, our collective intelligence bore not just creativity and problem-solving skills but also the absurdity of mass destruction. From nuclear weapons to chemical warfare, we’ve taken the tools of survival and crafted them into instruments of obliteration. So, how did this flip occur?
The Duality of Human Nature
Humans are uniquely equipped with the ability to create, innovate, and nurture. Yet, embedded within our DNA is the potential for chaos that no other species has matched. It’s easy to say that the first living cell set us on a path of pure survival, but when we examine our behavioral patterns, we see a duality: a dark side that revels in destruction, opposing our natural tendencies toward community and coexistence.
We must remember that this propensity for destruction is a recent development, a byproduct of advanced civilization rather than a fundamental trait inherited from our earliest ancestors. As the "new kids on the block," our ability to create weapons has outpaced our emotional maturity. While nature equipped us to solve problems, it also set the stage for our more sinister inclinations.
As we look at the history of humanity, it’s clear that our technologies and inventions, meant to ease life, have often been twisted into tools of war. This shift raises the question: are we governed more by our primal instincts or by our evolved nature? The truth may never be fully understood, but what we need to recognize is that our brilliance is accompanied by the danger of self-destruction.
In conclusion, as descendants of those initial living cells, our history is a testament to the complexities of evolution. While we are adept at communication and problem-solving, let’s ensure that the legacy we leave behind is one of understanding and empathy rather than devastation. After all, it’s not just survival that defines us; it’s about the choices we make with our uniquely human capacities.
The Core Dilemma
Here is the core dilemma, the profound paradox that haunts the conscience of the cosmic observer: For an incomprehensible span of time—billions of years—the engine of evolution, a collective, emergent intelligence inherent in life itself, painstakingly incubated and refined ever-more complex biological structures. This grand, agonizingly slow process culminated, eventually, in the emergence of multicellular organisms, then complex nervous systems, and finally, humanity. We are, by astronomical standards, the newest arrivals on the planetary stage, the temporary pinnacle of this staggering biological achievement.
Given this epic backstory—a heritage of intricate collaboration, survival ingenuity, and the seemingly inexorable drive toward greater complexity and awareness—why is our current, defining trajectory characterized by a persistent, almost compulsive drive to create increasingly sophisticated and destructive weapons?
It is a question that cuts to the heart of our self-understanding. How can the species that can decipher the very code of life and glimpse the edge of the universe also possess the singular capacity to engineer its own instantaneous annihilation? The logic of life, as demonstrated over eons, favors cooperation and replication; yet, the logic of modern human politics and industry often seems to favor self-destruction, stockpiling arsenals capable of extinguishing the very intelligence that brought them into being. This fundamental, terrifying contradiction remains the most urgent philosophical and existential puzzle of our time.
It's a total contradiction, right? We came from a life form designed to develop life, but we act in a way that reverses the process and achieves the exact opposite. What gives?
Over the course of recorded history, humans have killed roughly five hundred and eighty-seven million of each other. These lives were lost in an endless cycle of wars as people fought over territory, resources, and power, much like today. We can trace the psychological root of this violence back to the birth of language and symbolic thought. As soon as early humans could communicate complex ideas, they adopted a terrifying baseline assumption that physical death permanently terminates our experience.
Today, modern science reinforces this assumption through the theory of abiogenesis. This is the idea that life emerged spontaneously, an unguided chemical accident brewing in a primordial soup billions of years ago. Under this framework, abiogenesis acts as a finite operating system for the human mind. It tells us that we are temporary, random blips of matter, and in a strictly finite universe, survival is a harsh zero-sum game where one person's gain requires another's loss. Facing an absolute deadline, we panic. To secure our brief determined futures, we actively eliminate rivals and crush anyone who stands in the way of our dreams. But the entire moral logic of the system collapses if the science of unguided chemical evolution is shown to be demonstrably false.
The cosmological theory we choose to believe about our origins isn't merely an academic debate. It serves as our primary moral framework, directly dictating whether we feel licensed to commit mass murder for a temporary advantage. To test this finite framework, we need to look closely at the laboratory science of chemical evolution, which attempts to replicate how life formed from non-living matter.
The modern belief in a chemical origin of life largely stems from the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment. By passing electrical sparks through a mixture of gases thought to mimic early Earth, scientists claimed they could spontaneously generate the amino acid building blocks of life. However, this process requires heavy investigator interference. In a real primordial setting, those newly formed chemicals would instantly cross-react and turn into a dead toxic sludge. To make the experiment work, have to actively intervene, isolating and purifying the chemicals at every step. Even with intervention, researchers hit a massive roadblock with water. To build a complex protein, individual amino acids must link together in a process that strictly requires removing water molecules from the equation. In this animated logic model, we can see why a primordial ocean is actually a hostile environment. In liquid, water induces a destructive process called hydrolysis. The surrounding liquid element literally forces itself between the molecular building blocks, repelling them apart before they can bond. Then there is the ultimate barrier, the chirality problem. Molecules possess a physical handedness, either left or right.
Unguided nature always produces a fifty/fifty randomized mixture of both. But biology demands homochiral or single-handed molecules to function. If even a fraction of a percent of an opposite-handed molecule enters the sequence, the assembly dies. The wrong shape physically caps the end of the line, acting as a permanent chain terminator that causes the entire structural sequence to freeze and fail. Random unguided chemistry is inherently hostile to the structures required for life.
The physical laws of the universe do not support a spontaneous chemical accident, which suggests the finite operating system is built on a scientific impossibility. The failure of unguided chemistry suggests that we must examine life through the lens of information theory rather than physical matter. DNA functions as a dense structured storage system possessing a level of engineering that defies unguided formation. To illustrate, information theory shows us that the physical properties of ink cannot autonomously write a book. Similarly, the chemical properties of molecules cannot write the complex operating instructions required to run a living cell. DNA is so fragile that it suffers millions of errors every day. To survive its first generation, it relies on an array of advanced repair machines, which are themselves built using the exact instructions stored inside the DNA they fix. This circular dependency points towards cellular intelligence.
The first cell required an embedded problem-solving source code, a dynamic memory capable of overseeing its own developmental trajectory and repairing itself. Recent biological research into biofields suggests that cellular intelligence is in constant connection with a non-local informational system.
In an eternal cosmos where life is a ubiquitous property, this points to an intelligent coder whose divine memory permeates all living matter. The evidence shifts us toward an infinite operating system, a reality where life is an intentional eternal function of the cosmos rather than a localized accident on a single planet. When we scale this realization up from the microscopic cell to human society, the implications rewrite our entire moral framework.
Consider the historical teachings of figures like Jesus of Nazareth. Statements like "God is within" and the promise of eternal life are recontextualized here as potentially literal biological truths. If an intelligent coder resides as an operative memory within every living cell, the zero-sum panic of a finite ticking clock completely evaporates. We are forced to see every human being as an eternal intelligent fragment of a shared cosmic consciousness. When you recognize that the person across from you shares that endless continuity, eliminating them to secure a temporary earthly advantage becomes utterly illogical.
Imagine a society that actually aligns its behavior with the true science of its origins. By recognizing our shared infinite nature, humanity naturally outgrows the artificial need for bloodshed and territorial conquest. A framework based on an accidental universe has nearly destroyed us. Embracing an eternal intelligently designed life in the cosmos is the only scientifically valid path left to save humanity from itself.
