Author’s Note:  Required reading for this course can be found here.

Alrighty then!  I have yet a new theory.  Another pivotal Rock & Roll moment in the Evolutionary history of our fawning, sycophantic, followed-quickly-by-blushing Planet.  Lend an ear, oh faithful one, as I proudly announce my long-researched corollary to Charles Darwin’s seminal little ditty The Origin of Species:

People, life itself evolved through long exposure to Rock & Roll music!  Gazillions of hours of it, non-stop, directly into our primordial ears.  Quite literally stone ground into our skinny, soggy chromosomes.  There.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Willie “Darwin couldn’t do DAT!” Dembski.

As background for our discussion, here is a passage from a recent Forbes article on "Regenesis" discussing how life may have begun on Earth:

“In 1953, chemist Stanley Miller showed that just running electricity through a soup of basic chemicals created the kinds of complex proteins needed for life. But assembling these proteins into an actual living thing is apparently no easy task. Certainly, no one has done it in the lab.

But there is a theory on how it could have happened. To get things started, a single molecule just has to start copying itself. Slowly, it will crowd out molecules that are just being created randomly. Any slight change that makes the self-copier better at replicating itself will have a similar effect. Fairly soon, geologically speaking, this original molecule would have turned itself into something that's really good at copying itself--a bubble of self-replicating biological material, otherwise known as a cell. At that point, evolution had begun.”

According to this informed article, the chain of life spanning from inert chemicals in a watery soup to a single-celled biological paradise is nearly complete.  The only glaring gap appears to be the actual “construction” if you will, of spiral-shaped molecules like RNA that can copy themselves.  Nature has no apparent problem with spawning life’s soupy building blocks – amino acids -- via lightning strikes on tidepools, and the Hollywood stage appears to be all set for cellular division way down the Evolutionary road, but at this point, the greatest story ever told simply falls flat.  How DID the wavy gravy of primordial “Gunge,” if you will, lurking for eons in a mostly dazed and confused state under low-lying rocks sheltering tidepools constantly bombarded by lightning-strikes, finally get rolling?  Could it be that humble-yet-talented collections of “gunge-rockers” achieved the pivotal stage of evolution by huddling in dark places near the ocean?

Sounds a lot like Nirvana or Pearl Jam to me… or Microsoft, take your pick.

But what I’m really trying to grind into this Evolutionary argument is as simple as Play-Dough.  Have you ever taken playdough or even bread-dough and rolled it under your palms into a cigar-shape on a flat surface?  If you were to start out with dough that had different layers of color or strata, and then rolled it up, you would find that the grain structure could be described as “spiral-like.”  Small pieces of dough are shed from the main wad under the rolling action of your hands, and these satellite pieces get rolled up incidentally also and form miniature “cigars” in their own right.  If the consistency of the dough is just right, it is possible to shed hundreds of these small “spiral cigars” during the rolling process, and each of the “offsprung” cigars will spawn even smaller duplicates still. 

You see where I’m going with this, don’t you:  It’s completely possible that humble, murky, amino-acid-laced gunge, trapped beneath the constant shifting and sliding of tidal pool rocks, was literally VIBRATED into RNA-like precursor molecules by billions of years of the crashing yet rhythmic rock & roll action produced by the stirring music of relentless ocean waves.  The first organic molecules capable of effective self-replication and genetic encryption – the keys to biological life -- were formed in the waterlogged mosh-pits of Earth’s greatest and longest running Rock and Roll show:  tidal pool concert halls.  You thought I meant The Rolling Stones, but they came a little later.

Yea, life itself literally crawled out from under a rock.

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Nearly every person I know loves the sound of the sea.  People who dwell inland often purchase seashells during coastal excursions and place them to their ears, happy just to own a substitute for the singular sound of the mighty ocean, and the peaceful retreat and recoil of its crashing, rhythmic waves.  The Rock & Roll Theory of Evolution explains this little quirk of human nature perfectly, for how can we resist the native music of our ancestral home, our Evolutionary birthplace?  The ocean is our cradle, and the sound of its waves:  Mother Gaia's eternal, rocking lullaby.

Even more convincingly for the physics buffs, the sounds produced by seashore wave action contain a significant component of what is called “white noise.”  White noise is a term used to describe an audio signal comprised of mostly random components over a broad range of frequencies.  The concept of white noise is routinely employed in sound generators which assist people in sleeping or concentrating.  Some mathematicians believe white noise, chaos theory, and stochastic processes are fundamental to the way the Universe works.

So let’s see… in summary, once again we have inert stuff, random stuff, lightning, wave action, and… VOILA!  Life itself.