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W.R. STOEGER S.J.
71
1 (2008) 64-77
new properties and potentialities – just as at a basic chemical level salt is formed from
sodium and chlorine, and at a much more advanced level groups of single cells begin to
collaborate and eventually diversify their respective functions to provide the first primitive
multi-cellular organisms. These relationships among entities and organisms help
constitute some of the individual characteristics which each of them possesses and provide
the environmental network in which they and their descendants develop, maintain
themselves and evolve. Thus, profound and pervasive interrelationships and hierarchical
organization on all levels is a second important feature which the sciences have revealed
about the reality of which we are part.
A corollary of this is that individual entities and organisms are transient and limited.
There are no ‘eternal’ or unchangeable objects or material beings. All eventually die,
disappear, become extinct. Many, many species – 99.9 % of them – have gone the way of
the dinosaurs. All will eventually follow that path. Our own species will change and
eventually die out. Our Sun will die in another few billion years. And eventually our
galaxy, the Milky Way, will dissipate. The universe itself may very well succumb to “heat
death” in the very distant future. In their passing away organisms and objects of whatever
sort sow the seeds of new possibilities and new life, Just as billions of stars, through
supernova explosions, have in their disappearance seeded their localities with heavier
elements thus making new, more complex the exciting things possible, so have innumerable
past generations of more primitive organisms established the environments for
more advanced descendants – the oxygen atmosphere of the Earth, for instance – and
then suffered extinction, leaving niches open for new species.
Another more profound way of considering this complex interrelatedness and fertile
transience is in terms of the unity of nature as manifested in its forces and laws, and in
the hierarchies of components which make it up. We have already discussed this. But is
important to emphasize that manifest unity. Nothing falls outside it.
Everything we clearly recognize as living (whether viruses are a form of life is controversial
– specialists still have not found definition of life upon which all agree) is composed
of cells. Though these cells can be very different in their functions and in the proteins
they produce, they all share fundamental characteristics and underlying basic structures.
The genetic material of every cell, which controls the production of all structural
and functional proteins, consists of the same double-stranded DNA, composed of a
sugar-phosphate backbone along which are arrayed combinations of the same four nucleic-acid
bases. These combinations of nucleic-acid bases which code for a given protein
and thus for a given function constitute what we call genes. And the proteins themselves
– in all their amazing variety and specificity – are formed of the same 20 amino
acids and are related to the information carrying nucleic-acid bases by the same genetic
code for all biological organisms – from the most primitive to the most advanced. Furthermore,
our human genome is the result of the gradual accumulation of intricately
interrelated information over the entire history of life on Earth. Thus, all living things
are united in common chemical and biological structures and processes and in a common
underlying code. We are in deep solidarity with all living things on this earth! And,
as we have already seen, at a much more basic chemical level, the same 92 natural chemical
elements provide the basis for all material reality.