by J.E. Kennedy

ABSTRACT.  According to the prevailing view in biology, the driving force for biological evolution is self-serving enhancement of reproductive and associated material success through competition and struggle for existence.  However, the evolution of consciousness in humans has resulted in symbolic thought and culture that can disengage from the instinctive self-interests underlying evolution.  This evolution of consciousness includes the emergence of spirituality, and motivations for transcendence and ethics beyond self-interest.  Experimental parapsychology has assumed that psi is directed by needs and motivations based on self-interest.  However, both experimental and spontaneous case findings suggest that psi is generally not guided by conventional motivations and needs.  The parapsychological assumptions have not produced significant scientific progress and the experimental results appear capricious and actively evasive.  On the other hand, paranormal phenomena tend to inspire an enhanced sense of connectedness, meaning in life, and spirituality, and have had a major role in most spiritual traditions.  Psi appears to have the function of drawing attention to spiritual matters.  The instances of striking psi draw attention away from the material world, and the capricious, actively evasive characteristics of psi thwart efforts to use psi for material self-interests.  Enhanced consciousness can be viewed as the self-evident result of biological evolution, the ultimate goal of spirituality, and the primary effect of paranormal experiences.  Interest in spirituality and related paranormal phenomena appears to be associated with personality traits that have significant genetic components.
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The lack of progress in psychical research may be due in large part to the inability to identify the role of psi in life.  Instances of seemingly purposeful psi inspire the belief that psi may have a prominent, readily identified place in nature.  On the other hand, the replication problems, the lack of practical application, and the seemingly capricious, actively evasive, trickster nature of psi (Beloff, 1994; Hansen, 2001; Kennedy, 2003a) leave an incomprehensibly inconsistent and more skeptical view.

The most thought provoking book I have read in decades is The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms, and the Order of Life by Franklin M. Harold (2001), Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.  The purpose of this book was "to asses how far we have come toward a scientific understanding of the phenomenon of life" (p. i).  Harold has a thorough knowledge of the most fundamental details of life as found in biochemistry and microbiology.  At the same time, he grasps big picture concepts and sees the relations, limitations, and discrepancies among the details, the broad concepts, and the implicit assumptions of science.  His writing displays remarkable objectivity, insight, and thoroughness that inspire a sense of how science at its best should be done.
Harold argues that reductionistic approaches to biology have not and cannot provide fundamental understanding of the nature of life.  He believes that entirely new realms of scientific understanding remain to be discovered that will greatly enhance the understanding of life.  He says that as a scientist, he believes the new levels of understanding will be physical rather than supernatural, and suggests that a good place to start looking is in the emergent, self-organizing properties of complex systems.  However, he leaves open the possibility that answers will be found in realms that are very different from what he imagines now.  A few of the points he makes are summarized below.

Harold notes that definitions of life seem to depend on the scientific subspecializations of writers and are controversial.  However, he offers several general characteristics of life that can readily be agreed upon.  
Living organisms have a surface or membrane that separates them from their environment and have mechanisms that exchange nutrients and energy with their environment.  "Like a flame or eddy, an organism is not an object so much as a process, sustained by the continuous passage through it of both matter and energy." (Harold, 2001, p. 10).  
Living things self replicate with extreme accuracy.  The replication process is based on transmitting instructions for the next generation.  All known life on earth replicates by means of DNA sequences that are decoded and converted to proteins that provide structure for living systems and serve as catalysts for reactions and processes.  Cell reproduction requires a myriad of biochemical processes in exquisite order with complex regulatory mechanisms.
Living things have organization.  "Even the simplest unicellular creatures display levels of regularity and complexity that exceed by orders of magnitude anything found in the mineral realm. ...There is nothing random about the assemblage, which reproduces with constant composition and form. ... As with any hierarchical system, each constituent is at once an entity in itself and part of the larger design" (pp. 10-11).  For example, the genome for the bacteria E. coli encodes about 4,000 proteins that are used for specific purposes by this relatively simple single cell.
Living organisms have the ability to adapt to their environment and evolve across generations.  Adaptation results from reproduction with variation combined with natural selection from the environment.
In summary, Harold views life as "the property of [self-replicating] systems capable of evolving by variation and natural selection" (p. 232).  He considers the living cell to be the minimal unit of life.

The available evidence strongly suggests that life originated on earth at one time and all forms of life evolved from this one ancestor.  The fundamental mechanisms for certain cellular processes are the same throughout known life on earth.  Most notably, the genetic code, the code mapping DNA sequences to amino acids for proteins, is the same for all known life.  This code appears to be arbitrary in the same way that mapping letters to numbers for storage and processing on computers is arbitrary.  Similarly, basic molecular mechanisms of energy storage and transfer and certain other fundamental cellular mechanisms are the same throughout life, although alternative mechanisms appear to be equally viable.  If life spontaneously developed at different points, these arbitrary mechanisms would be expected to vary.
Other factors suggest that the origin of life is a very rare event that is not close to being explained by established principles of chemistry and molecular biology.
Cell components as we know them are so thoroughly integrated that one can scarcely imagine how any one function could have arisen in the absence of the others.  Genetic information can only be replicated and read out with the aid of enzyme proteins, which are themselves specified by those same genes.  Energy is harnessed by means of enzymes whose production requires energy input.  Darwinian evolution is at bottom the struggle among individuals defined by cell membranes, yet how could membranes and transport catalysts arise without genes, proteins, and energy?  Here are profound mysteries, for unless one is willing to entertain miraculous genesis, that universal ancestor of all cells must itself have been the product of protracted and stepwise evolution, guided by variation and natural selection. ...
For most biologists, the hallmark of life is Darwinian evolution, and the most fundamental relationship is that which links nucleic acids, the carriers of information, to proteins that perform functions and generate the phenotype. (p. 245)
[E]volution is hamstrung until the emerging "functions" within the developing system have been codified in a "text" of some kind that can be transmitted, executed, altered, and put to the test of utility again and again. ... No satisfying scheme of this kind [for the origin of life] is presently on the books, and I have none to offer.  I have only the strong hunch that there is much more to this mystery than is dreamt of in molecular biology.  (p. 251).

If the origin of the first living cell is the greatest mystery in biology, the next greatest mystery is the development of eukaryotic cells.  These are cells with DNA contained in a nucleus and with other internal structures.  Eukaryotic cells are the foundation for the evolution of the higher plants and animals.  In comparison, (non-eukaryotic) bacteria have shown little evolutionary development over billions of years.
Available evidence indicates that the first eukaryotic cell developed from the symbiotic combination of bacterial cells.  It is relatively easy to imagine that such cells could somehow combine in ways that are mutually beneficial, but much more difficult to imagine how their DNA and reproductive mechanisms became entwined in a way that resulted in successful reproduction of a relationship.
The symbiotic combination of bacteria into eukaryotic cells was followed by the evolution of multicelled organisms.  Here also, cells developed specialized complimentary functions and became part of a larger order.  The human body with specialized cells and organs for respiration, digestion, the heart, liver, blood, brain, etc. is a result of the evolution of multicellular organisms.
Cells, organs, and the organism form an interdependent hierarchical organization that is exquisitely coordinated.  Each cell contains the full genome, but utilizes only a small part of the genetic information for its specialized function as part of an organ and organism.
Harold suggests that the mysteries of biology indicate that fundamental principles of science remain to be discovered.  He is skeptical of the reductionistic belief that physics will explain chemistry, which will explain biology, which will explain psychology.  He believes that there are properties of a living system than cannot be predicted or understood from the physical properties of the individual components of the system, including the sequence of proteins encoded by DNA.  
Until that impasse is overcome, we cannot refute philosophers, skeptics, religious believers, and mystics who suspect that science is sweeping out of sight the very mystery that it purports to elucidate. (Harold, 2001, p. 218)
He suggests that looking in the realm of properties of complex systems may be fruitful.  These systems
include the emergence in the system as a whole of properties that cannot be assigned to any one of its components, invariance of the whole even though its components fluctuate, and a complementary interplay between local causes and global ones, such that each level constrains the other. (p. 222)
In looking for explanations, he notes "we [scientists] are compelled by our calling to insist at all times on strictly naturalistic explanations"  (p. 250), and later says:
I know of no evidence for the existence of vital forces unique to living organisms, and their erratic history gives one no reason to believe that life's journey is directed toward a final destination in pursuit of a plan or purpose.  If life is the creation of some cosmic mind or will, it has taken care to hide all material traces of its intervention.  Now one can argue that so long as we confine our inquiries to the material side of life, material answers are all we can expect; they do not warrant the assumption that there are no other questions to be asked, with altogether different answers.  Science alone may not be sufficient to make sense of all the world, but I insist that science is privileged; for of all the ways of questioning nature, science alone holds the promise of objective knowledge. (p.254).