Mysterious Ways

I wake up every morning to the soothing sounds of NPR. They always segue into the classical music with Block and Byrd doing their little science talk thing. Today they talked about the emergence of life and how that could have possibly happened. Doesn't it make you feel good to know that people are still working on the big questions? I mean the whole God-Is-Mysterious line of thinking is nice, but it is a dead end. If everyone thought like that we would never know the difference between the stars and your neighbor's Christmas lights.

But you want amazing - how about Emergent Complexity?

We observe, over and over in nature, when lots of objects, lots of particles, like sand grains or stars or molecules, or cells, when they interact, they tend to yield structures that are far more complex, that have behaviors that are far beyond anything that the individual sand grain, or star, or cell, could do itself. - Robert Hazen

Basically, the total is greater than the sum of its parts. This is so simple but it blows me away. It is amazing how a long string of emerging complexity could lead to something like myself. Or you! Or blogging! Most especially think about some sand getting together and yadda, yadda, yadda, we got Elgar's Enigma Variations, we got Egon Schiele's drawings, we got the freaking Grand Canyon. Imagine if one particle of sand had not been there. You might have been a duck instead. Or a duct! Or duct tape! Or a tape worm! Or a worm hole! eww . . .

P.S. Another thing that blows me away - the beautiful reference to Peter Seller's Being There on Arrested Development last night.