Searching for the Laws of Life
In the book of Genesis, God’s fifth act of creation was to create life on earth. Of course, modern science has a different myth.
In the beginning, there was a simple soup of inorganic chemicals: water, ammonia and methane. And into this soup came a bolt of lightning that brought into being the amino acids that gradually assembled themselves into peptides and proteins and the nucleotides from which came RNA and DNA. And the DNA learned the art of becoming self-replicating and so began the ascent of life.
I recently reviewed a fine book – The Fifth Miracle, by Paul Davies – on the Amazon website. Paul points out that believing the scientific myth demands an act of faith and credulity as great as believing in the literal truth of the Biblical story. He is one of many scientists who have calculated the seemingly impossible odds of all this happening by chance. This is not some back door into intelligent design, but instead an exploration of some profoundly important ideas in biology that make us realize that there are some gaping holes in our current models.
We know that inorganic processes tend to run down and become disorganized over time: they show entropy. By contrast living processes become progressively more organized, a process that requires massive amounts of information. It is not difficult to calculate that the amount of information required for even the simplest organism far out strips the biochemical processes of an organism. Thus the implication that life requires a new fundamental law of nature that is yet to be discovered.
If this is true, and the mathematics indicate that it is, it would imply that life should exist everywhere, and wherever it is found it would march toward progressive greater and greater complexity, that would eventually lead to sentience.
The most likely candidate for this natural law is information. The book and CD series, Healing, Meaning and Purpose is dedicated to this notion that a fundamental property of the Universe is conscious awareness and that the first content of awareness is information, in its technical sense. And it is this information together with energy that generates the subtle systems that animate biochemical processes.
Long after I wrote that, I came across an important paper by someone whose work I like very much: William Tiller. In the paper he examines homeopathy as a form of “information medicine,” and comes up with some interesting mathematical modeling to support his conjecture, which I feel sure is correct.
There is also some older data that supports this idea of information. A study from Brazil examined highly diluted thyroid gland extract on the rate at which tadpoles developed into frogs. The extract increased the speed of metamorphosis of the tadpoles, despite the fact that the solutions were so dilute that there could not have been any molecules present. This work was in fact a replication of work done in 1995 in Graz, Austria.
There is a much larger literature than most people realize on this idea of information in biological systems, though most has been presented at meetings or written about in textbooks.
But I’d like to leave you with an interesting paper that is easily accessible. It has the title “Paranormal phenomena in the medical literature sufficient smoke to warrant a search for fire.” The author has done us a great service by collecting a large number of cases of phenomena – collected by physicians and other educated people – that cannot be explained within the current biomedical paradigm. He includes some splendid examples, including the well-documented cases of people being able to speak foreign languages of which they have no conscious knowledge. The most parsimonious explanation for the observations? Information transfer between individuals, even if sometimes separated by many miles.
“Disease of the body as we know it, is a result, an end product, a final stage of something much deeper. Disease originates above the physical plane, nearer to the mental. It is entirely the result of a conflict between our spiritual and mortal selves. So long as these two are in harmony, we are in perfect health: but when there is discord there follows what we know as disease.”
–Edward Bach (English Physician and Creator of the Bach Flower Essences, 1886-1936)
Dr. Richard G. Petty, MD is a world-renowned authority on the brain, and his revolutionary work on human energy systems has been acclaimed around the globe.
He is also an accredited specialist in internal and metabolic medicine, endocrinology, psychiatry, acupuncture and homeopathy. He has been an innovator and leader of the human potential movement for over thirty years and is also an active researcher, teacher, writer, professional speaker and broadcaster. He is the author of five books, including the groundbreaking and best selling CD series Healing, Meaning and Purpose. He has taught in over 45 countries and 48 states in the last ten years, but spends as much time as possible on his horse farm in Georgia.
