From: "Wahome, Kimamo" <WAHOMEK@uwec.edu> Date: Mon, 3 May 2010 14:51:00 -0500 Subject: "What, pray, is your Idea of life?" Message-ID: <E3F0E607B3CF71418CE725F002B5F6047D15D4EA05@CHERRYPEPSI.uwec.edu>
FYi-Philip Ochieng is an weekly columnist for the Sunday Nation, a Kenyan n
ewspaper.
Kenya: What, Pray, is Your Idea of Life?
Philip Ochieng
27 March 2010
________________________________
column
Nairobi - Communicative thinking -- which is unique to the human mind -- is
possible only through definitions. Human beings share their thoughts prima
rily by means of words carrying conventional meanings. This is also the way
science proceeds.
For science -- speculation into our social and natural universe -- is the c
ontent of all our thoughts. Everything else is detail.
That is why a concept must first be given a primary conventional definition
before we can argue about its other meanings -- especially if the word or
concept is as important as life.
I offer the scientific definition because I believe that knowledge is the d
estiny of mankind. But I also respect free thought.
Even if I occupied State House, I would not impose science on you. So, if y
ou have a definition of life different from science's, your very humanity o
bliges you to share it with me.
That is the only demand I make of my e-mail interlocutors and Anthony Nderi
tu of Wajir (Sunday Nation, March 21). Let me repeat a very reasonable requ
est: Please give me your definition of life before we can argue and possibl
y agree on when that phenomenon begins.
Yet the only answer I get is a repetition of an opinion proclaimed during t
he Stone Age - when mankind was still absolutely ignorant of biology - the
opinion that life begins only at conception. According to it, all the entit
ies that are active before a foetus is formed are dead things!
For "death" is our conventional antonym of "life". But, of course, until Mr
Nderitu's ilk have favoured us with their definition of life, we shall nev
er know how two "dead" things -- ovum and sperm -- can suddenly spring to l
ife merely by combining chemically.
If his ilk continue to skirt around what the latest science says about the
concept of life, then they are victims of Zen mysticism and instruments of
positive nescience.
They keep swallowing and regurgitating ideas formed at a time -- in the Pal
aeolithic Age -- when mankind lived in total ignorance of nature.
Those ideas pass as super-human qrite simply because, in their ignorance, o
ur ancestors endowed them with supernatural quality and, on reducing them t
o scripture, proclaimed them as sacrosanct and inviolable.
Throughout mankind's history, the sacerdotal class has had a keen self-inte
rest in primitive doctrines. It has always tried to drag mankind back to ho
rrendously atavistic mental conditions. In Moliere's charming tautology, op
ium has a dormitive virtue which sends all your inquisitive faculties aslee
p.
Myth - to paraphrase Santayana -- when one tribe has invented it, passes fo
r revelation, and when that tribe is Israel-Judah and has lived long ago, i
t passes for divine history. And it suits vested interests to a tee.
The status quo ante of thought promises golden nukes. Science promises only
loss of ill-gotten power and wealth. Yet, let us not gag any mouth. All I
want to know is exactly what LIFE quality a foetus has which a sperm does n
ot. I don't mean that science is omniscient.
The term "ontological gap" refers to areas -- like Heisenberg's quantum "un
certainty" - which science cannot yet explain. Such gaps are godsend to the
"pro-lifist". He rushes into them like a kifaru, shouting that he has foun
d the "proof" of the "miracle of life" and the falsity of science. He burie
s his head permanently in the sand of history.
Otherwise, he would know from NicCopernicus, Jacques de Molay and Giordano
Bruno that science will one day evict him from his "ontological" subterfuge
as embarrassingly as it did when Pope John Paul apologised to Galileo and
passed the Big Bang theory as "probable".
But I reiterate my question: What miracle of life does a human foetus perfo
rm which sperm and egg do not? In science, life is the ability by certain m
aterial forms to consume other material (as food) and use it to replicate i
tself and perpetuate its kind.
In summary, life is nutrition, irritability, contractibility, internal move
ment, excretion and metabolism (i.e., birth, growth, maturation, disintegra
tion and death), all revolving around food, i.e, absorption of energy from
the food and excretion of the unused matter.
That is what Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Stephen Jay Go
uld, J.B.S. Haldane, Carl Sagan and other scientists teach us about life: L
ife is but the chemism - the sum of phenomenal functions -- of what we used
to call albumen.
Long before they unite into a foetus, ovum and sperm perform all these func
tions, including self-reproduction (in their case, by the cellular division
that we call nuclear fission). Sperm, then, is as lively as a porpoise.
But I won't ram it down your throat. You are free to reject science - excep
t that, in that case, you owe us your definition of life.
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