Thus Spoke Zarathustra

No, it's not the time yet. God is not dead yet, and supermen have not yet ruled the earth. But this is an overdue post that came up right after our group meeting on Pre-Biotic Chemistry II. For the unenlightened, scientists- in this context, chemists- have always been interested in figuring out the origins of life, the possibility of design, why the world is made this way and not that way and so on. The findings reported so far have hinted on the possibility of self-replicating and self-amplifying world, ie. peptides replicating themselves through a 'template' or achiral materials getting enantioenriched over time (Curiously, a large portion of the people involved in this area of chemistry work in the vicinity of San Diego, such as Joyce, Ghadiri or Eschenmoser). One could imagine that if such processes would go on for a very long period of time, a world such as what we have is not entirely impossible- the accuracy of the time frame might be debatable, but that's another story-, all it needs is just the 'templates' to be there. This could easily be a springboard for a plethora of other questions: Does the choice of the base pairings found in our DNA: adenine, guanine, thymine, cytosine arise arbitrarily or by necessity? Is everything that we have on the molecular level right now: our DNA, RNA, amino acids (Why those 20?) the so-called thermodynamic minimum so that life couldn't have existed otherwise? Ultimately, we are led to the design vs evolution argument; do we actually need to invoke the involvement of a pair of 'invisible hands' or do all these things happen through evolution, through survival of the fittest? That nature picks what we have in the world right now through some kind of sublation?
Sartre once said, "Men are condemned to be free." One day, perhaps, we will be able to confidently say, "Nature is condemned to be free."