by Robert Lanza
this. But biocentrism supplies answers, as we shall see.
There’s more. Brilliant equations that accurately explain the
vagaries of motion contradict observations about how things behave
on the small scale. (Or, to affix the correct labels on it, Einstein’s
relativity is incompatible with quantum mechanics.) Theories of the
origins of the cosmos screech to a halt when they reach the very
event of interest, the Big Bang. Attempts to combine all forces in
order to produce an underlying oneness—currently in vogue is
string theory—require invoking at least eight extra dimensions,
none of which have the slightest basis in human experience, nor can
be experimentally verified in any way.
When it comes right down to it, today’s science is amazingly
good at figuring out how the parts work. The clock has been taken
apart, and we can accurately count the number of teeth in each
wheel and gear, and ascertain the rate at which the flywheel spins.
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b i o C e N T r i s m
We know that Mars rotates in 24 hours, 37 minutes, and 23 seconds,
and this information is as solid as it comes. What eludes us is the big
picture. We provide interim answers, we create exquisite new tech-
nologies from our ever-expanding knowledge of physical processes,
we dazzle ourselves with our applications of our newfound discover-
ies. We do badly in just one area, which unfortunately encompasses
all the bottom-line issues: what is the nature of this thing we call
reality, the universe as a whole?
Any honest metaphorical summary of the current state of
explaining the cosmos as a whole is . . . a swamp. And this particu-
lar Everglade is one where the alligators of common sense must be
evaded at every turn.
The avoidance or postponement of answering such deep and
basic questions was traditionally the province of religion, which
excelled at it. Every thinking person always knew that an insuper-
able mystery lay at the final square of the game board, and that there
was no possible way of avoiding it. So, when we ran out of explana-
tions and processes and causes that preceded the previous cause, we
said, “God did it.” Now, this book is not going to discuss spiritual
beliefs nor take sides on whether this line of thinking is wrong or
right. It will only observe that invoking a deity provided something
that was crucially required: it permitted the inquiry to reach some
sort of agreed-upon endpoint. As recently as a century ago, science
texts routinely cited God and “God’s glory” whenever they reached
the truly deep and unanswerable portions of the issue at hand.
Today, such humility is in short supply. God of course has been
discarded, which is appropriate in a strictly scientific process, but no
other entity or device has arisen to stand in for the ultimate “I don’t
have a clue.” To the contrary, some scientists (Stephen Hawking and
the late Carl Sagan come to mind) insist that a “theory of every-
thing” is just around the corner, and then we’ll essentially know it
all—any day now.
It hasn’t happened, and it won’t happen. The reason is not for
any lack of effort or intelligence. It’s that the very underlying world-
view is flawed. So now, superimposed on the previous theoretical
m U d d y U N i v e r s e
9
contradictions, stands a new layer of unknowns that pop into our
awareness with frustrating regularity.
But a solution lies within our grasp, a solution hinted at by
the frequency with which, as the old model breaks down, we see
an answer peeking out from under a corner. This is the underly-
ing problem: we have ignored a critical component of the cosmos,
shunted it out of the way because we didn’t know what to do with it.
This component is consciousness.
In the BegInnIng
2
there wAs . . . whAt?
All things are one.
—Heraclitus, On the Universe (540–480 bc)
How can a man whose career revolves around stretching the sci-
entific method to its outer bounds—stem cell research, animal
cloning, reversing the aging process at the cellular level—bear
witness to the limits of his profession?
But there is more to life than can be explained by our science. I
readily recall how everyday life makes this obvious.
Just a short time ago, I crossed the causeway of the small island
I call home. The pond was dark and still. I stopped and turned off
my flashlight. Several strange glowing objects caught my attention
on the side of the road. I thought they were some of those jack-o’-
lantern mushrooms, Clitocybe illudens, whose luminescent caps had
just started to push up through the decaying leaves. I squatted down
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b i o C e N T r i s m
to observe one of them with my flashlight. It turned out to be a
glowworm, the luminous larvae of the European beetle Lampyris
noctiluca. There was a primitiveness in its little segmented oval body, like some trilobite that had just crawled out of the Cambrian sea
500 million years ago. There we were, the beetle and I, two living
objects that had entered into each other’s worlds, and yet were fun-
damentally linked together all along. It ceased emitting its greenish
light and I, for my part, turned off my flashlight.
I wondered if our little interaction was any different from that of
any other two objects in the universe. Was this primitive little grub
just another collection of atoms—proteins and molecules spinning
like planets around the sun? Could it be grasped by a mechanist’s
logic?
It is true that the laws of physics and chemistry can tackle the
rudimentary biology of living systems, and as a medical doctor I can
recite in detail the chemical foundations and cellular organization of
animal cells: oxidation, biophysical metabolism, all the carbohydrates,
lipids, and amino acid patterns. But there was more to this luminous
little bug than the sum of its biochemical functions. A full understand-
ing of life cannot be found only by looking at cells and molecules.
Conversely, physical existence cannot be divorced from the animal
life and structures that coordinate sense perception and experience.
It seems likely that this creature was the center of its own sphere
of physical reality just as I was the center of mine. We were con-
nected not only by intertwined consciousness, nor simply by being
alive at the same moment in Earth’s 3.9-billion-year biological his-
tory but by something both mysterious and suggestive—a pattern
that is a template for the cosmos itself.
Just as the mere existence of a postage stamp of Elvis would
reveal to an alien visitor much more than a frozen snapshot of pop
music history, the slug had a tale to tell that could illuminate even
the depths of a wormhole—if we only had the right mindset to
understand it.
Although the beetle stayed quiescent there in the darkness, it
had little walking legs, neatly l
ined up under its segmented body,
i N T H e b e g i N N i N g T H e r e w a s . . . w H a T ?
1 3
and possessed sensory cells that transmitted messages to the cells in
its brain. Perhaps the creature was too primitive to collect data and
pinpoint my location in space. Maybe my existence in its universe
was limited to some huge and hairy shadow stabilizing a flashlight
in the air. I do not know. But as I stood up and left, I no doubt
dispersed into the haze of probability surrounding the glowworm’s
little world.
Our science to date has failed to recognize those special proper-
ties of life that make it fundamental to material reality. This view
of the world in which life and consciousness are the bottom line in
understanding the larger universe—biocentrism—revolves around
the way a subjective experience, which we call consciousness, relates
to a physical process.
It is a vast mystery that I have pursued my entire life with a lot of
help along the way, standing on the shoulders of some of the greatest
and most lauded minds of the modern age. I have also come to con-
clusions that would shock the conventions of my predecessors, plac-
ing biology above the other sciences in an attempt to find the theory
of everything (or TOE) that has evaded other disciplines.
Some of the thrill that came with the announcement that the
human genome had been mapped or the idea that we are close to
understanding the first second of time after the Big Bang rests in our
innate human desire for completeness and totality.
But most of these comprehensive theories fail to take into account
one crucial factor: we are creating them. It is the biological creature
that fashions the stories, that makes the observations, and that gives
names to things. And therein lies the great expanse of our oversight,
that science has not confronted the one thing that is at once most
familiar and most mysterious—conscious awareness. As Emerson
wrote in “Experience,” an essay that confronted the facile positivism
of his age: “We have learned that we do not see directly, but medi-
ately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and
distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their
errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps
there are no objects.”
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George Berkeley, for whom the campus and town were named,
came to a similar conclusion: “The only things we perceive,” he
would say, “are our perceptions.”
A biologist is at first glance perhaps an unlikely source for a new
theory of the universe. But at a time when biologists believe they have
discovered the “universal cell” in the form of embryonic stem cells,
and some cosmologists predict that a unifying theory of the universe
may be discovered in the next two decades, it is perhaps inevitable
that a biologist finally seeks to unify existing theories of the “physi-
cal world” with those of the “living world.” What other discipline
can approach it? In that regard, biology should really be the first and
last study of science. It is our own nature that is unlocked by the
humanly created natural sciences used to understand the universe.
A deep problem lurks, too: we have failed to protect science
against speculative theories that have so entered mainstream think-
ing that they now masquerade as fact. The “ether” of the nineteenth
century; the “space–time” of Einstein; the “string theory” of the new
millennium with new dimensions blowing up in different realms,
and not only strings but “bubbles” shimmering down the byways
of the universe are examples of this speculation. Indeed, unseen
dimensions (up to one hundred in some theories) are now envi-
sioned everywhere, some curled up like soda-straws at every point
in space.
Today’s preoccupation with unprovable physical “theories of
everything” is a sacrilege to science itself, a strange detour from the
purpose of the scientific method, whose bible has always decreed
that we must question everything relentlessly and not worship what
Bacon called “The Idols of the Mind.” Modern physics has become
like Swift’s Kingdom of Laputa, flying precariously on an island
above the Earth and indifferent to the world beneath. When science
tries to resolve a theory’s conflicts by adding and subtracting dimen-
sions to the universe like houses on a Monopoly board, dimensions
unknown to our senses and for which not a shred of observational
or experimental evidence exists, we need to take a time-out and
examine our dogmas. And when ideas are thrown around with no
i N T H e b e g i N N i N g T H e r e w a s . . . w H a T ?
1 5
physical backing and no hope of experimental confirmation, one
may wonder whether this can still be called science at all. “If you’re
not observing,” says a relativity expert, Professor Tarun Biswas of
the State University of New York, “There’s no point in coming up
with theories.”
But perhaps the cracks in the system are just the points that let
the light shine more directly on the mystery of life.
The root of this present waywardness is always the same—the
attempt of physicists to overstep the legitimate boundaries of sci-
ence. The questions they most lust to solve are actually bound up
with the issues of life and consciousness. But it’s a Sisyphusian task:
physics can furnish no true answers for them.
If the most primary questions of the universe have traditionally
been tackled by physicists attempting to create grand unified theo-
ries—exciting and glamorous as they are—such theories remain an
evasion, if not a reversal of the central mystery of knowledge: that
the laws of the world somehow produced the observer in the first
place! And this is one of the central themes of biocentrism and this
book: that the animal observer creates reality and not the other way
around.
This is not some minor tweak in worldview. Our entire education
system in all disciplines, the construction of our language, and our
socially accepted “givens”—those starting points in conversations—
revolve around a bottom-line mindset that assumes a separate uni-
verse “out there” into which we have each individually arrived on a
very temporary basis. It is further assumed that we accurately per-
ceive this external pre-existing reality and play little or no role in its
appearance.
So the first step in constructing a credible alternative is to ques-
tion the standard view that the universe would exist even if it were
empty of life, and absent any consciousness or perception of it.
Although overturning the widespread current mindset, ingrained as
deeply as it has been, may require the remainder of this book and
perusal of strong, current evidence from disparate sources, we can
certainly begin with simple logic. Certainly, great earlier thinkers
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have insisted that logic alone is all that’s needed to see the universe
in a fresh light, not complex equations or experimental data using
$50 billion particle colliders. Indeed, a bit of thought will make it
obvious that without perception, there can be no reality.
Absent the act of seeing, thinking, hearing—in short, awareness
in its myriad aspects—what have we got? We can believe and aver
that there’s a universe out there even if all living creatures were non-
existent, but this idea is merely a thought and a thought requires a
thinking organism. Without any organism, what if anything is really
there? We’ll delve into this in much greater detail in the next chap-
ter; for now, we can probably agree that such lines of inquiry start to
smack of philosophy, and it is far better to avoid that murky swamp
and answer this by science alone.
For the moment, therefore, we’ll accept on a provisional level
that what we’d clearly and unambiguously recognize as existence
must begin with life and perception. Indeed, what could existence
mean, absent consciousness of any kind?
Take the seemingly undeniable logic that your kitchen is always
there, its contents assuming all their familiar forms, shapes, and col-
ors, whether or not you are in it. At night, you click off the light,
walk through the door, and leave for the bedroom. Of course it’s
there, unseen, all through the night. Right?
But consider: the refrigerator, stove, and everything else are com-
posed of a shimmering swarm of matter/energy. Quantum theory, to
which we will devote two full chapters, tells us that not a single one
of those subatomic particles actually exists in a definite place. Rather,
they merely exist as a range of probabilities that are unmanifest. In
the presence of an observer—that is, when you go back in to get a
drink of water—each one’s wave function collapses and it assumes
an actual position, a physical reality. Until then, it’s merely a swarm
of possibilities. And wait, if that seems too far out, then forget quan-
tum madness and stay with everyday science, which comes to a sim-
ilar conclusion because the shapes, colors, and forms known as your
kitchen are seen as they are solely because photons of light from the
overhead bulb bounce off the various objects and then interact with