Take a stone in one hand and a small animal, perhaps a mouse, in the other. Squeeze them gently with your fingers and close your eyes. The difference between inanimate and animate matter is obvious, no? And what if I told you that the distant ancestor of that mouse was a living… stone?
Earth, four billion years ago. At the bottom of a shallow pool, gas bubbles rise lazily out of the mud. We look closely at the surface of the mud, which seems to be slightly foamy and slightly fibrous. If we used a microscope, we would observe a tangled web of threads, platelets, pipes and little balls, alternately growing and shrinking, swelling and withering, splitting and joining up. This is the first organism on our planet. Living mud. Unbelievable? Not for two eccentric gentlemen from Scotland who, over the last few decades, have turned the fundamentals of biology upside down.
He breathed into his nostrils
This is an idea as old as the world itself: matter in and of itself is dead, stupid, passive, and without free will. In order for it to be active, to have a will, a goal and a spark in the eye, the element of Spirit is required; the Word whispered into the ear of matter. For as many cultures as there have ever been, there are ways of expressing this primal intuitional concept. The ancient Greeks flirted with the idea of a Great Artist, who cast form into the world, like a craftsman transforming a shapeless lump of clay into a pitcher. The ancient inhabitants of the Indus Valley believed that, just as man is equipped with the carnal ‘I’ and the vital ‘I’, the Cosmos also has a physical body (Virat) and the ‘Soul of the World’ (