Story Notes

Poet Machines and the mistake of life

There’s this fantastically interesting theory of evolution that I read about in a book called "The River that Flows Uphill" (kind of a long rambling discussion between physiologists as they travel down the grand canyon) which goes something like this: the traits that we kind of take for granted as being the primary byproduct of evolution, things like flight in birds, intelligence in us, etc. are actually, more often than not, the product of a giant happy mistake that comes along with another evolutionary step (like big heads perhaps) which is taken to fulfill quite a different survival need altogether. That these survival choices bring with them, bootstrapped along, this sometimes even more amazing mutational possibility as kind of a bonus prize.

Flight in birds is an example of this. The theory is this … it’s getting colder. Animals that retain their heat more efficiently survive longer. Scales (most of these creatures are still what we’d call reptiles at this point) are an ok insulator, but not quite good enough. Lots of individuals are dying due to the cold. Some animal is born with a mutant scale with a strange new fractal make up that is radically more efficient in holding on to heat. A feather. This animal survives, and passes on its genetic material. It’s successful. Its progeny survive due to this new insulator and live for thousands of years (maybe even millions) before this non-engineered marvel shows it’s true power and beauty, flight! The idea is this: Flight is an indirect result of the direct need to survive the freezing cold. Flight, which becomes such a successful survival mechanism later on that a whole new family splits of from the evolutionary trunk, is just a happy accident. That, without the feather, which really has nothing to do with flying (and at the same time, everything to do with it) in any evolutionary sense, we’d still be stuck on the ground.

But there’s even something more radical to this than simply flight arising by accident.

What if life itself … what if, what we perceive of as life itself, were just another of these happy evolutionary accidents? That life needn’t have come about at all, except as a crazy byproduct of the need for these stupid little pieces of self replicating patterns of information to find some way to duplicate themselves more efficiently. That without RNA and DNA’s evolutionary survival need, as information, to go on (kind of a precursor to the whole idea of the meme … (self replicating patterns of thought for those of you who are interested)) and on and on in that mindless energizer bunny kinda way, that we would never have had the blueprints necessary to build the proteins, that became the systems, that made up the structure of living beings, at all. That life itself is a happy evolutionary mistake because of a mutational solution that little chunks of chemicals came up with in order to be able to be more successful in replicating themselves.

Weird huh?

Everything from an amoebae to a blade of grass to a blue whale … just some happy, crazy, unrelated accident that’s bootstrapped into existence in some randomly beautiful non-necessary way. Cause, you know, DNA, RNA, they can make copies of themselves to their heart’s content, and go on making strange new patterns till the cows come home, even without the cows. They don’t really need us, well, or they didn’t. It’s like some crazy x-files episode, this alien symbiotic intelligence gives us the blueprints on how to build ourselves, while they go about their own agenda which really has nothing to do with us at all, nothing to do with these biological blankets they now wear.

Look at the human genome. There are over 3 million base pairs of information in there, and yet less than one percent of that information is used as the blueprint for how to build us. Isn’t there something so incredibly self important and delusional about calling it the HUMAN genome? I mean, how do we get off just assuming that we are its byproduct? Isn’t it equally likely that we are an accidental mistake, a non-intended byproduct of evolutionary process, and that the rest of the genome goes on with some greater, and to us, completely incomprehensible task? Maybe it’s something as simple as creating the perfect 3 million character poem? Or making pretty pictures, or music, or something beyond the capability of my accidental intelligence to figure out at all.

Wouldn’t that be funny? All of us, everything about us, all life existing because someone accidentally put a few sheet of music in front of a contractor, who mistook them for blueprints, and then built a building based on those plans? Then more building are built, and more, more and complex until some of that musical notation stops being music, and starts being something so accidentally, so beautiful different, it stops being music, and starts actually being blueprints after all. Meanwhile the rest of it churns on. Meanwhile millions of chunks of information cycle on towards some unknowable end. Towards the perfect limerick perhaps, and we, in our self important blindness, we tear apart this 3 million chunk code only listening for the less than one percent which pertains to us, which is relevant to us, and we file the rest of it away in that old circular file. File it away as "not important".

And life and sex and religion and art and the senses and breath and thought and emotions and heartbeats and instinct and digestion and growth and photosynthesis and … all these things are merely the accidental byproducts of a happy mistake. The weird displacement of one instruction set used in a radically and accidentally different interpretive context. That we, in some purely fundamental way, are the ultimate accidental babies. That life itself is the ultimate unwanted child, and, even stranger than that, our parents may not even have the capacity to know that we exist.

And what’s more beautiful than that?

What’s more overwhelmingly beautiful than the byproduct of an unnecessary mistake?

I once read a definition of art, which really rang true to me. It said that art is anything that is done that is not directly related to survival or sex. Basically that art is anything that is unnecessary.

Isn’t that life? Isn’t that everything about us if we make that crazy assumptional leap that life is merely a bootstrapped evolutionary mistake? Isn’t life the unnecessary by product, not related to survival or sex, of these C’s and A’s and T’s and G’s?

Maybe that’s why it’s always been so incredibly beautiful to me. All the trees, and jellyfish, and fish, cats, birds, dogs, people, insects, slime molds, diatoms, extrememophiles, all of it … all of life, the art, the sculptural byproduct, the unnecessary beauty of the unknowable, ununderstandable actions of random poet machinery?

© Jason Nunes 2001