The Origin of the Species

The universe is generally thought to have commenced with the Big Bang some 15,000 million years ago. Science now attributes this event to quantum fluctuations which can arise, without cause, out of nothing. Our current universe is a kind of solidified end product of this event. What that 'nothing' is, or was (if we can say 'is' or 'was' in this context), is a question addressed by writers such as Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. Fortunately (for this author) the field of cosmological physics is outside the scope of this book - although we will have to consider some of the philosophical issues it raises. First, it is necessary to consider what it is 'we' are.

The earth is thought to have formed some 10,000 million years ago. Life is believed to have begun on earth some 4,000 million years ago, and the Neanderthals, from which the modern human species, Homo sapiens, emerged, some 3 million years ago. In 10,000 million years, inert matter had developed on earth the ability to reproduce and produced … us … the currently dominant species on an evolving planet in an evolving universe.

The crucial feature of life is the ability to reproduce - an entity called, in biology, a 'replicator'. This simple fact was overlooked by early thinkers (perhaps blinkered by ideas of gods and the transcendental) until revealed by Charles Darwin in 1859 in his theory of evolution. The theory for the evolution of different species is generally described as 'natural selection arising from random variation' and was described by Darwin in his work The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

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