About genes, science, the Universe, evolution, God and all that stuff

We've all heard about our genes. Genetics is the science of genes, their structure, function and the not quite perfect way they transmit copies of themselves - without which there would be no variety and people would not show it in profusion among us, as they do.

As if that weren’t enough, environments also change, and the life varieties that survive over time are those naturally adapted to sustain their existence - their 'life' - in changed conditions. Charles Darwin, who of course introduced this mechanism to us all, called it ‘natural selection’ to distinguish it from the artificial selection that people had already been doing for ages. From tigers, pussy cats.

There is no known or apparent reason why the process of natural selection is not at work in the Universe itself, or across the Multiverse if that’s what the situation is. 

Our Universe has certainly evolved or we wouldn’t be here. And we’ve all heard as well of a primordial ‘soup’ that was around very early on. If our Universe, in all its stunning complexity - galaxies, stars, planets, tigers, cats and us - did not emerge out of that soup, we must explain what it did emerge from, and how.

On that, more recent scientific theorising (itself constantly ‘evolving’) considers that the Universe is not necessarily running down like some gigantic machine, as is generally supposed to be the case. That scenario, faintly depressing however far off, is the result of entropy,* which means everything runs from order to disorder and finally arrives at a featureless state of equilibrium. Like the coffee in our picture, or the hot water left to become tepid then cold in your bath.

The alternative proposal is that, provided a system is not ‘closed’ - that is, it continues to receive inputs of energy - the increase in disorder spontaneously gives rise to new forms. And those that succeed are the most stable, the forms naturally adapted to the environment. 

Now the Universe that began with the Big Bang clearly did not start out like it is today. In which case, entropy may not be death but re-birth, midwife not undertaker, and this may be the way things are eternally.

That’s where, if S/He ever left, God comes back in.

 

*Entropy is promulgated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Could it have been repealed?