Hope, Change and Evolution

Story: Learning to Eat

Did anyone eat breakfast this morning? 
How did you learn to do that? 

Have you ever seen a baby learning how to eat solid food?
Someone would offer maybe a finger or a spoon dipped in baby food, and you can see the look on the baby’s face- like WOW- WHAT IS THAT!
Then usually they spit it back out, until through a process of trial and error, they learn to swallow it.

It is a messy process. That is why babies wear bibs, because sometimes as much food ends up on the floor as gets into the baby’s mouth.

They learn how to get the applesauce off that rubber baby spoon, and eventually to hold the spoon or crust of bread in their own hand, and eventually by watching other people, with practice
and the helpful advice of parents and caregivers
they get to the point where they can eat their own breakfast and most of it gets into their mouths instead of their hair and table and clothing. It takes a long time.

Now, here’s a hard one- how did you learn how to turn breakfast into tissue- like eyes and skin and heart?
Everyone knows it, right? You don’t have to study that in school. You just… know

Not all living things eat what we eat for breakfast, but every living thing eats.

For billions of years animals and plants and bacteria have been eating,
that is to say, turning the proteins of their food into the proteins they need in their own bodies

When the first cells learned to do this, they couldn’t write it down, they didn’t have religious education classes to teach it to the young folks  

instead the special new thing one bacteria can do, is passed on to its children and to its children’s children through its DNA,
(that’s the code written in the cells of our bodies that makes us- us)

We are used to thinking of ancestors as our grandparents and our great great grandparents. We don’t often think about single celled organisms billions of years ago as our ancestors.

And these ancestors, they left us a gift, us and all their children. They left us the pattern for how to turn breakfast into, well… us.

They left it to us in our DNA, along with all the other patterns we need
to make lungs and to breathe into them,
to make blood and circulate it through our bodies,
to make brains that think and learn.

Our DNA is like the most amazing encyclopedia ever.
Everyone here in this room knows how to eat breakfast because
not only did our parents spend all those meals showing us
not only did we try and try again with applesauce on our face and spaghetti on the floor
But over millions of generations Life itself learns.

Reflection: Hope, Change and Evolution

Why do we celebrate Evolution Weekend? It’s partly because our UU sources encourage us to “heed the guidance of reason and the results of science,” and indeed our faith grew up alongside science when it was a brand new way of looking at the world. Darwin himself was raised by a Unitarian mother and went with her to her Unitarian chapel. Says the National Center of Science Education “One goal of [evolution weekend] is to … demonstrate that religious people from many different denominations and faith traditions understand that evolution is sound science, and that, properly understood as science, it poses no problem for their faith.”[i] I would go one step further and say that when we take a long loving look at the world around us, it can be a source of our faith. The body of the earth, and our bodies, and the history we all share can be a kind of scripture, to which we turn when we are troubled and need wisdom and hope.

We take part in Evolution weekend to practice that long loving look at the real, with science as our magnifying glass. We tell the story of the history of how our universe, how our ecosystems evolved through millennia because the story gives us hope, which is something we all need very much. When we look at the many real troubles of our world and feel powerless, as individual humans, and even as a people together - I know there are times when I wonder “are we up to this challenge?” In such moments we need a source of hope that is larger than our human selves. Because we are theologically diverse here, we are atheists, theists and agnostics, when we need a source of hope outside ourselves, when we feel like even all of humanity together is not enough, I am reassured to remember that life itself has been solving overwhelming problems since long before there were humans.

Because most of us are not scientists, and sometimes our eyes glaze over when we hear the word “Cytochrome-c” storytellers are trying to turn the raw facts of peer reviewed science into stories ordinary people can understand and remember and turn to for hope.

Our Universe story is full of moments when life solved overwhelming problems through the process of evolution; just one example of this is the problem of what we are going to eat. Those first living cells feasted on the chemical nutrients which were abundant until they ate them all up. This crisis was met with the stunning evolution of an ancestor who evolved to photosynthesize 3.9 million years ago, to capture photons and turn them into energy. When this new process of using the suns rays for energy, eating the light for food, produced a deadly gas --overpowering clouds of oxygen which was toxic to all life forms then on our earth. the first single celled organisms to use oxygen for fuel spontaneously adapted in response to this huge crisis.

In our story this morning, we talked about how we inherited the capacity to disassemble grains and transform them into the building blocks of our own lives. One of the tools we inherited that allows us to do this is Cytochrome-c-- an enzyme[ii] in our cells that is important in the breakdown of food molecules. It is found in large, complicated organisms like trees, alligators, and us, and also found in little one celled bacteria. It has existed for a very long time, but not always. The primal single-cell organisms first put together this very useful enzyme billions of years ago. And it was so useful that it has been handed down ever since.

But life can’t hand down a molecule the way my grandmother handed down a recipes; molecules don’t last forever. Instead the same pattern of nucleotides used by the first organisms to make Cytochrome-c was passed on to us and our bodies use that pattern today to make brand new Cytochrome-c proteins which help turn grains and bread into flesh and blood. For as long as there have been cells, even those very first primal Prokaryote cells, they have had this capacity to reproduce patterns. These patterns are tucked into our DNA[iii], and the very first pattern they had to learn was how to re-create life. Without those patterns life on earth would have been a momentary blip.

But how did our ancestors back over 2 billion years ago “learn” to turn food into useful stuff? The way scientists believe this works is that as DNA is passed on mother to child, sometimes by chance little changes happen (and what we are learning now is that not all of those changes happen by chance- some changes are sort of lying dormant in the DNA and are triggered by the environment). These slight differences in the patterns of the nucleotides lead to differences in the proteins within the cell. Huge numbers, possibly millions of such “slightly different” proteins are made this way before one of these slightly-changed patterns holds within it a unique gift that helps that cell to survive, and this genetic pattern for –say - cytochrome c, is passed on to its children and following generations until, if it is a very useful gene, it is spread throughout the population.

Much as one baby learns to eat food through trial and error, thousands of generations of living beings “learn” through living out different patterns, some successful, some unsuccessful, which patterns allow life to flourish and thrive. But unlike the baby learning to eat solid food, it is not any one individual who learns, instead it is life’s long process of adapting through trial and error, and then remembering through these patterns and so passing on what is learned to future generations.

Brian Swimme is a professor and writer that has spent his career trying to take all that complex science information about our past and turn it into a story those of us who haven’t had a science class since high school can remember. As Swimme and Tucker say in their book The Journey of the Universe “It is life as a whole that learned to digest its various foods.” In this way, Swimme and Tucker write:

“Though life’s creativity is a groping and sometimes chaotic process it is also a learning process. The connotation in modern English of the verb “to learn” is that of an individual acquiring a new skill, but with the discovery of biological evolution, we have a new insight into the way the ancient process of evolution can be understood as a higher-level form of “learning” we can begin with a simple question “Who has learned to transform food into flesh?” We humans certainly had nothing to do with the construction of the physiological processes involved. Nor can we think of the early bacteria that first generated the cytochrome c protein as having any idea of what their invention might one day be used for. No, it was not any individual who learned this. It was rather life’s whole process of adaption and memory that was responsible for this new ability. It is life as a whole that learned to digest its various foods.  [Journey of the Universe p. 60-61]

It’s really quite amazing – the stunning intelligence of the forms life takes, from the nuclei of a single cell, to the amazing complexity of a leopard or a human body. For a long time creationists took the point of view that this beauty and complexity proved a divine entity was at work. Science took the mechanistic view that life was more like a machine, randomly creating mutations until we hit the lottery and through endless combination came up with something amazing, like photosynthesis. Today some scientists are starting to wonder- is it possible that life’s yearning, life’s striving, life’s urgent need could in some way guide our evolution? In the same way that I know I am existentially different from a toaster, could life itself have in its growing and learning and evolving something beyond the nihilism of meaningless chance?

But I digress. For things like breaking down grains into the more useful proteins that are the building blocks of our bodies, we rely on a legacy going back billions of years in our DNA. This happens entirely outside our consciousness. Not only does this story give me evidence for the hope that life can overcome great obstacles, but also that within each one of us, within our very cells is a great library of information from our ancestors. Now not every being gets a copy of every pattern. Flying, for example, is a piece of the pattern you and I did not get. Breathing air and photosynthesizing are both amazing skills critical to our balanced biosphere, but we got one and plants got the other. No one set of DNA has the learning of all our ancestors, so in a way life’s learning is a community activity. We need all this great diversity of genetic patterns present in all the living things to preserve the tremendous knowledge needed to sustain life on earth.

Humanity, life on earth, we in this congregation face challenges we’ve never faced before. So what do we do? In her book Earth Path Starhawk finds hope in how our non-human ancestors have faced the great challenges. “Those simple, one-celled beings were already experimenting with different forms. Some were long and skinny and wriggled and swam. Some were round and fat. Some adapted to hot and some to cold. And always they were trading genes, shifting forms, changing and transforming.” Like our earliest ancestors we experiment, we try stuff. All the great advances in life came from trying all kinds of things, being creative, experimenting.

Then, we learn from our experiments- we notice what worked, what didn’t work. Fortunately it’s not just our brains that do the learning, it’s our bodies too, it’s the bodies of every living thing on the planet trying to solve the problem of how life can thrive. And just as our families pass on to us the knowledge of how to bake bread, our genes pass on to our descendants how to digest it.

As much as I long to know the answers to life’s pressing problems, sometimes our job is just to experiment and try stuff, in community with all the incredibly diverse forms of life on our biosphere.

This story fills me up with gratitude and wonder for the legacy we carry in our very cells filled with the wisdom of 4 billion years of life on this earth. Our human lives are only a small chapter in this epic adventure, but life is evolving through us, and new chapters are still being written.

As people who honor the evolution of life on this planet, we know that massive change is possible, and that life strives, clings, fights for life. Joanna Macy, Buddhist teacher and activist once, remarked “Evolutionary pressures want us to survive.” Evolution is the transformation of species and eco-system to increase the odds that life in all its abundance and variety will survive. Sometimes this comes through radical change, change as radical as the first plants who photosynthesized light into food, as radical as learning to breathe air, as radical as holding the first tool. The survival of life counts on our capacity to change, to evolve as the world itself changes and evolves.Swimme and Tucker write:

 “When we today remember that the energy of our lives comes from the original flaring forth of the universe, and that the atoms of our bodies come from the explosion of ancient stars, and that the patterns of our lives come from many ancestors over billions of years, we begin to appreciate the intricate manner in which life remembers the past and brings it into fresh form today. Life adapts. Life remembers. Life Learns.” (p. 61)

We have not reached the end of our evolution as a biosphere, nor have we reached the end of our evolution as a species. I offer this as a very nerdy and concrete source of hope -- when hope is hard to find, remember that life itself wants us to succeed, to survive, to creatively overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges as we have since the dawn of life.