YOU’VE EVOLVED SO MUCH. COME SO FAR. WHERE’S THE KEYS?

FIND THOSE DAMN KEYS?

I was rebuked by ChatGPT recently.

While writing about homo sapiens, our allegedly superior brains, and our noble devotion to reason, CHAT shot back with something less like an answer and more like a slap from a very well-informed nun:

“Not even close to the truth. Humans are emotional beings. They prefer feel-good solutions and self-serving truths to rationality. Yes, they are occasionally rational, but usually only when it favors their tribe, politics, or self-image.”

You may have known this already. For me, it was a novel and mildly deflating thought.

I had gone to artificial intelligence looking for a compliment to the species and instead received a character reference from the prosecution.

But then another thought occurred to me. If CHAT could toss off that sort of gloomy wisdom in two seconds, why not ask it something larger? Something more worthy of a machine that has swallowed the Library of Congress and apparently digested most of it.

So I turned to biology.

“Please tell me the circumstances that led to life on this planet. Skip the divine, skip the aliens, skip the meteor delivery service. Give me the most likely explanation.”

After another two-second pause — roughly the time it takes me to find my reading glasses when they are already on my head — CHAT replied.

Life, it said, probably did not arrive with thunderclaps, trumpets, and a ribbon-cutting ceremony. It came gradually, more like a billion-year dawn.

At first, no one would have noticed anything. Of course, this was partly because there was no one there to notice anything, which is one of the many inconveniences of early Earth.

Still, imagine darkness softening at the edges. A few minutes later, some sober-minded observer might say, “Is it me, or is it getting lighter?” Ten minutes after that, the whole committee would agree that dawn was underway, pending further study and funding.

Life may have begun the same way: not as a sudden miracle, but as an endless chemical audition. False starts. Failed experiments. Promising blobs. Disappointing puddles. Molecules bumping into one another like guests at a cocktail party where nobody knows the host.

The favored guess is that some of this happened around underwater volcanic vents, where heat, minerals, and chemistry mingled in ways that eventually became suspiciously lifelike.

CHAT suggested that the earliest life had to pull off at least three tricks:

First, it had to consume and use energy — in other words, eat.

Second, it had to store and reproduce its own structure — in other words, make copies of itself without first attending business school.

Third, it needed some sort of home, like a primitive cell, where its chemical processes could be contained, protected, and metabolized.

Sitting here today, four billion years later, one can easily imagine one or two of those conditions occurring.

But all three?

At the same time?

In the same place?

Without a manual?

Without supervision?

Without even a junior assistant professor standing nearby saying, “Actually, we prefer the term proto-metabolism”?

Mother Nature had to arrange energy use, reproduction, and containment in one fragile little chemical system before anyone knew what life was, what it was for, or whether it would ever amount to anything more than ambitious slime.

And remember, there were no biologists.

There were no laboratories.

There were no grant proposals.

There were no TED Talks titled “What Early Molecules Can Teach Us About Leadership.”

There were only chemicals, heat, water, and time — an absurd amount of time — with everything bumping, breaking, bonding, and beginning again.

If life started that way, it was a biological miracle before biology existed. A miracle before there were witnesses. A miracle before anyone had invented the word miracle, or the committees that later argue about whether miracles are allowed.

Which brings me back to CHAT.

Perhaps I have been wasting its talents. Instead of asking small-potatoes questions like “How did life begin?” perhaps we should move on to something more suitable for artificial intelligence.

For example:

Where did the Big Bang come from?

What happened before time?

Who ordered gravity?

And most mysteriously of all: why, after four billion years of evolution, can a species smart enough to ask those questions still not reliably remember where it put the car keys?