In reading, discussing with friends, and writing views on the stuff of life, I had to begin with the origin of things, What happened in the first place? Egg-heads have thought about this problem, and I must quote a poem, that of Omar Khayyam, the Persian poet, who wrote the following beautiful verses in his Rubaiyat:
"Into this Universe and why, not knowing,
Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing.
And out of it, as Wind along the waste.
I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about; but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went".
and as for myself, I am still going in and coming out through the same revolving door, trying to seek, vainly, an intellectually satisfying key to everything.
It is quite pardonable for humans, given their limited thinking and creative capability to think of the ‘beginner’ of the beginning, as some superior being, but as a devout student of science, it suddenly occurred to me that, on the other hand, the beginning of things was in Chemistry, the stuff that tutories dole out to failed A-level candidates.
Look at it this way. I was compelled to accept Hoyle’s Big-Bang as the initial event, and then got bogged-down, as happened to Omar Khayyam, in the insoluble problem of Life that followed the Bang. Cogitating on what possibly happened before Life, I feared that it will only get me tied up in tautological knots which are however those that theists, preachers and believers tie themselves up with, but I think I have found the ultimate key to the padlock that has shut us up in ignorance.
It seems that after the Big Bang, atoms and molecules were hanging around in outer space and oxygen atoms mingled with hydrogen atoms to make water, the basis of organic life. Stanley Miller, Oparin, and then Cyril Ponnamperuma latched on, to tell us that we had ‘lightning’, that chemist-egg heads call a ‘catalyst’, (a thing that accelerates processes, like a bribe to get a job done in a government office), to get other atoms, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen to get-together to form more complex molecules to produce the building blocks of organic life, the nucleic acids.
These lifeless, amoral, un-thinking atoms and molecules had no ulterior motive when they happened to mingle; it was their internal structures that had the propensity to react with each other; so a carbon atom C stretched out a hand to hydrogen atom H a scene which chemists represent as C – H where – is the hand or string. These are imaginary hands, strings, or bonds as chemists call them. Carbon atoms can put out one (Single), two (Double, i.e. C = H) or even three (Triple) hands out. No celestial agency is involved; no purpose is designed in atoms and molecules holding hands, however zealously and naively the Jesuit Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin argued that there is a divine holding-hands game, with an ultimate Noosphere in his mind. (That Chardin-idea, incidentally, suffered a Big Bang at the hands of Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Medawar).
And ever since the innocent oxygen and hydrogen and other atoms that were hanging around, mingled and held hands, things have gotten more complex for all of us. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and other atoms just reacted with each other and we then had the absolutely fascinating molecule Dexoyribonucleic acid, popularly called DNA. Other atoms and molecules mingled to make other guardian molecules the nucleases, that regulate how the DNA functions, and the DNA first formed a long chain and that for some curious reason got hold of another chain of DNA to make what James D Watson and Francis Crick who won the Nobel Prize for their work, called the Double Helix. Now this curious double helix unwinds itself and by some mysterious process aided by other chemicals, lengthens the chains and sets the Ball of Life rolling. There was an intriguing cartoon of the DNA molecule unwinding the Double Helix before it propagates just like a couple would unwind in bed to propagate their kind, except that the cartoon had a fig leaf where the DNA chains were separating (the sort that Adam wore when Eve was around, except in bed) to remind us that how that happened, is Nature’s great private secret.
This was all chemistry but there was no celestial Chemist fiddling with these molecules. Just as much as a stone falls to the ground if thrown up, and if you spit looking up you will get back spit on your face; these cute carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and other atoms just interacted. Gravity, that thing that dropped an apple on Isaac Newton’s head, is amoral, inexorable, inevitable, non-discriminating, and has no Creator but just exists because objects have the intrinsic nature to attract each other like the Earth does to a thrown-up stone. Nobody knows why inanimate bodies attract each other. No Intelligent Design or Designer was involved, just as much as there was no Intelligent Designer who brought back the stone that was thrown up or get molecules to fiddle with each other.
Chemistry gets more complex. Those mischievous carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen atoms, recruited new ones like sulphur and phosphorus and made awfully complex molecules that plague the lives out of second-year medical students who have to learn about hormones, such as the male hormones that give moustaches and little willies to their owners and female hormones that make the female so beautiful that she made Adam eat the apple. And then other hormones and chemicals in our brains, ever since then, make men fall for women (as I wrote in the piece called Chemicals in my Brain, in this journal) who then repeat the original sin that drove Man out of Eden and into a woman’s arms.
So as some wise nut said, all we have to explain the enormous irreconcilable differences that exist between Man and Woman, are just carbon atoms and a few single and double chemical bonds; (matrimonial bonds come later in this game).
The physical, emotional, psychological, financial, organizational, sartorial, argumentational, cogitational, rational, irrational, temperamental, and managerial differences between Man and Woman that get poets raving, philosophers getting entangled in their thoughts, artists daubing themselves with paint, and divorce lawyers at each other’s throats in Court, all ensue, believe it, just from carbon chemistry. But I have yet to read of divorce lawyers arguing in court that the rift between their warring clients was solely due to these few carbon atoms and chemical bonds. But more proximally, I can paraphrase Richard Dawkins (in his book The Selfish Gene) who realized that Men and Women are men and women, not for sublime philosophical reasons that poets swoon over, but simply as pretexts for the crafty, selfish genes to get their innocent men and women-carriers to mate, breed and so perpetuate the genes.
So we must now retreat a step and understand that Men and Women are just tools that the aforesaid atoms and a few chemical bonds devised, to work out the mayhem of life. In plain words, we are a matter of just Chemistry, nothing more, nothing less and don’t you believe those simple-minded poets and philosophers who go over their top into the clouds with meaningless explanations. So the bottom line, literally, of all this is that the basic difference between a Man and a Woman is not in his cute little Willie but in the Chemistry of two carbon atoms and a chemical bond C - C.
