"Take a great idea and twist it beyond recognition
Turn it inside out until its guts are its skin
Water-board its truth until it lies, just to stay alive
Drowning in desperate dystopian dogma
Survival its only purpose, Coercion its friend
Darwinian irony in the heart of academia
The price of truth is steeper than that
Life doesn't come easy and biogenesis is for fools
Rotting flesh will birth flies before dust becomes dreams
Waiting on time for something to happen
And yet we are here
Software coded in subatomic vibrations
A SETI jackpot searching quasars and quarks for clues
Designed to find intelligence among the stars
But not ours
When the universe exploded out of nothing
Into something
It wasn't looking for us
It came without codes, without language, without ideas
It came without a plan for mice or men
Or anything else that lives
Without biology, without ecology
Without psychology, without theology
A barren waste of rock and gas
The past the present, the present the past
Ruled by chemistry and laws of physics
Ripe for uninterrupted existence
Then Darwin looked out on all he surveyed
And made an educated guess
He studied and reasoned with care and intelligence
Making his case in the face of resistance
His new idea was a bridge to the future
He boldly proposed what none had considered
He assumed that life was, more or less
An accident trying hard to survive
He concluded that mistakes and multiplication
Would perpetuate not being eaten alive
He noticed that creatures adapted through time
That variation enabled survival
He noticed that changes occurred and were shared
Depending on where creatures lived, and their rivals
He noticed that fossils to prove his bold thesis
Were lacking as yet, but he hoped they would show
That natural selection, of random mutations
Had written his beautiful thesis is stone
He didn't know the language and codes
Needed to make even simple things live
He didn't know life was programmed to alter
And adapt to wherever it happened to live
He couldn't have known
That these changes were guided
By intricate language within every cell
He couldn't because no one else knew it
There was no one alive to tell him
He never imagined the sophistication
Required to build life's nano-machines
He lived before seeing computers designed
By brilliant minds
That could not compete
With the structures that simply appeared in the strata
The fossils he hoped that others would find
Like any good scientist, Darwin had doubt
And was willing to go where the evidence leads
He stated that his own theory would suffer
If fossils could not be found to agree
After all these years, his very worst fears
Have confirmed that science must now move on
It must face the fact that intelligence acts
In ways that nature can only rerun
When life exploded from nothing into something
The fossil record captured the news
In the blink of a nonexistent eye
In the snap of fingers not yet formed
In a geological speck of time
The language of life was born
The dust of the earth began making and molding
Brilliant complexity encoded for use
Not enough time and not enough chance
In this whole universe could ever produce
These body forms, structures, processes, pieces
The unthinking past giving way to the future
All the earth's creatures now trace their beginning
To the moment when software built its own computer"
Turn it inside out until its guts are its skin
Water-board its truth until it lies, just to stay alive
Drowning in desperate dystopian dogma
Survival its only purpose, Coercion its friend
Darwinian irony in the heart of academia
The price of truth is steeper than that
Life doesn't come easy and biogenesis is for fools
Rotting flesh will birth flies before dust becomes dreams
Waiting on time for something to happen
And yet we are here
Software coded in subatomic vibrations
A SETI jackpot searching quasars and quarks for clues
Designed to find intelligence among the stars
But not ours
When the universe exploded out of nothing
Into something
It wasn't looking for us
It came without codes, without language, without ideas
It came without a plan for mice or men
Or anything else that lives
Without biology, without ecology
Without psychology, without theology
A barren waste of rock and gas
The past the present, the present the past
Ruled by chemistry and laws of physics
Ripe for uninterrupted existence
Then Darwin looked out on all he surveyed
And made an educated guess
He studied and reasoned with care and intelligence
Making his case in the face of resistance
His new idea was a bridge to the future
He boldly proposed what none had considered
He assumed that life was, more or less
An accident trying hard to survive
He concluded that mistakes and multiplication
Would perpetuate not being eaten alive
He noticed that creatures adapted through time
That variation enabled survival
He noticed that changes occurred and were shared
Depending on where creatures lived, and their rivals
He noticed that fossils to prove his bold thesis
Were lacking as yet, but he hoped they would show
That natural selection, of random mutations
Had written his beautiful thesis is stone
He didn't know the language and codes
Needed to make even simple things live
He didn't know life was programmed to alter
And adapt to wherever it happened to live
He couldn't have known
That these changes were guided
By intricate language within every cell
He couldn't because no one else knew it
There was no one alive to tell him
He never imagined the sophistication
Required to build life's nano-machines
He lived before seeing computers designed
By brilliant minds
That could not compete
With the structures that simply appeared in the strata
The fossils he hoped that others would find
Like any good scientist, Darwin had doubt
And was willing to go where the evidence leads
He stated that his own theory would suffer
If fossils could not be found to agree
After all these years, his very worst fears
Have confirmed that science must now move on
It must face the fact that intelligence acts
In ways that nature can only rerun
When life exploded from nothing into something
The fossil record captured the news
In the blink of a nonexistent eye
In the snap of fingers not yet formed
In a geological speck of time
The language of life was born
The dust of the earth began making and molding
Brilliant complexity encoded for use
Not enough time and not enough chance
In this whole universe could ever produce
These body forms, structures, processes, pieces
The unthinking past giving way to the future
All the earth's creatures now trace their beginning
To the moment when software built its own computer"
( Phil Long )
www.ChordsAZ.com