I do not pretend to know precisely what it is that’s going on around here, but I find it peculiar and disturbing that vast populations of otherwise relatively intelligent people appear to think that life on Earth is just a happy accident in a meaningless void. That all the forms of life we see are accidents of chemistry, proximity, and circumstance, and that all of their evolutionary ‘adaptations’ are the relatively mechanical results of circumstance, competition and cooperation.

I can’t understand the argument. The staggering diversity of life on Earth and it’s inexplicable profundity, beauty, and … intelligence… simply do not look, act or feel like an accident. Neither do you. In fact, the argument presumes the universe just accidentally assembled every great and beautiful thing, being or event without the slightest possibility of purpose or longing. It seems absurd. I mean, oops, a giraffe? Whoops, the species hymenoptera? So, the cetaceans, those were just a lucky dice roll? The primates? The hominids?

As I said at the outset, I have no real idea what is going on here. But I will offer this wild speculation. For billions of years some kind of organism traveled through space on or within a small stone. Somehow, it got to the pre-biological Earth, and survived atmospheric entry from space. This … life form… does this… all the time. It crosses the gulf between stars in a kind of seed. Within the seed, it can only evolve relationally, as there is no space or energy for physical diversification.

When, after long ‘meditation’ the seed finds a fertile world… it explodes into impossibly diverse branches of expression appropriate to the local context and resources. Eventually, the seed produces representational cognitives like you and I. But that is not by any means the end of the metamorphosal sequelae. Not by a long shot.