If Microbes begat Mind
from origins of life to emergence of intelligence

If Microbes begat Mind presents a hypothesis: traits ascribed to mind may have counterparts in early life. The origin and synthesis of life are windows on the controversy over evolution and intelligence. Rather than argue for “one right answer” to the question of how life originated, I show how design principles apply, not only to the origin of life and to the design of hypotheses about it, but also to the debates and question it inspires:

How do the origin and synthesis of life reveal principles of “mind”?I draw a parallel between the origin of life and the emergence of intelligence. No one would explain scientific progress as randomly generated hypotheses from which the community selects the fittest to survive.

No one questions that when humans discover or invent, someone must recognize possibility. Although Columbus didn’t recognize that he’d discovered America, others did. The debates about whether replication or enclosure or metabolism came first in the origin of life overlook a logical fallacy. First life might have accidentally replicated (although life couldn’t logically “replicate” until there was life to replicate) or accidentally recruited “the right stuff” into its enclosure (although keeping that right stuff may also have entailed recognition of what to retain and what to filter out). But in order for life to metabolize, life had to recognize what to metabolize. A capacity we associate with consciousness — mind — seems in rudimentary form to have been present at the dawn of life and to have been a defining prerequisite for life to live and evolve.

If random variation and environmental selection alone were insufficient to originate and evolve complex life on Earth, we need a complementary mechanism that embraces, but goes beyond the traditional interpretation of evolution — life designing its “self” through synergetic evolution as its components “collaborate” to achieve wholes greater than the sum of their parts. Intelligent Design missed the point in placing the locus of intelligence outside life (in an Intelligent Designer). Darwinists also told only half the story in placing evolution’s creativity outside life in environmental selection. If Microbes begat Mind reveals why the current paradigm of reductionist science focused on half the story, random mutation and environmental selection, overlooking the full story — life’s role in designing itself.