‘I thought life was a special case in a lifeless physical world. The more I learn, I believe that biology is more general, and physics is a special case.

‘Most people will say that there’s a law to predict every quark and gluon, which lets you predict molecules, so cells, so human bodies, so all of society, economy, history, art, culture. This idea that everything can be reduced to physics is now bizarre to me. Physics did not emerge to explain what life is or does. Many biological things can only be explained at the biology level, not a simpler level. Physics tools are being imported into biology, which I think is the wrong idea. Physics is a hammer, and we’re looking for nails. We need to see life directly and develop new theory. The wrong tools give you the wrong questions. “What is life?” assumes that life is a thing. In biology we’re now swimming in an ocean of endless data, but so few principles. I think a much better question is, “why is life?”

‘Physics has causal chains. In biology the fundamental elements are causal cycles, self-referential loops that have caused paradoxes in math. Darwin lamented that he didn’t know any math to describe his theory, but I think that was good. If you try to quantify what is really qualitative, you lose it.'

Evolutionary biologist Pedro Marquez-Zacarias argues that biology cannot be reduced to physics, and has to be explained using new theory inspired directly by life. But how can biology have its own separate laws when it emerges from physics? And what kinds of new under-explored theories of cycles and relations promise to lead there? We discuss the cultural and authoritative tension with physics that arises from these new autonomous theories. Does evolution invert the causal chain to create order out of disorder? And does our scientific reasoning of causal chains vs loops map onto our religious cosmologies of a linear (e.g. Christian) vs cyclical (e.g. Hindu) universe? I share my first LSD vision of the causality of the world: a sea of snakes eating each other’s tails, and Pedro explains why he’s skeptical of current approaches to looking for extraterrestrial life.