Recap

Cosmic Evolution

"Intelligence is the architect of the universe," said James Gardner (biocosm.org), a complexity theorist who appeared on Wednesday's program. The author of the newly published book Biocosm, Gardner asserted that an "intelligent universe can be its own mother," and that "the future can in effect create its own past."

We're part of a life cycle that began with a hyper intelligent entity which "evolved from creatures like us," he explained, likening his theory to Darwinism as applied to the Cosmos. Such an entity could be conceived of as "an incredibly condensed point of matter and energy," capable of triggering a big bang, he said.

Accordingly, humans are not the end product of evolution but part of a larger function, serving like the mitochondria in cells, he said. Gardner laid out the case for the "Creator" being intelligence itself, an element of nature, rather than the mystical force ascribed by western religions.

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Cosmic Concepts

Tonight's guest, James Gardner, breaks away from both mainstream scientific and religious thought, with his "biocosm" theory. "The immense saga of biological evolution on Earth is one tiny chapter in an ageless tale of the struggle of the creative force of life against…the brute intransigence of lifeless matter," he writes. This view turns the standard scientific precept that life developed randomly and is of no cosmic significance, on its head.

Gardner's hypothesis also parts from the Judeo-Christian notion of an unknowable supernatural Creator. He writes "the mind of God is the natural culmination of the evolution of the mind of humans and other intelligent creatures throughout the universe."

But what if "life" itself is merely a label of our own invention? "Try as we might to impose a definition of life on nature, there are bound to be instances where the distinction between living and non-living is blurred or indeterminate," David Darling expounds in his Extraterrestrial Encyclopedia.

--L.L.