Origins and Universal Questions
Scholars and Children Ask the Same Fundamental Questions
Fundamental scientific questions are often the same basic questions children ask, but at a deeper level.
Children
Where did I come from? This universal question forms in early childhood and continues throughout our lives. When young children ask it, their parents brace themselves for a lesson on the birds and bees. At the earliest stages, "from mommy's belly" will suffice. As we mature, we seek more sophisticated answers and more details. We also stop believing in storks, cabbage patches, and so on. This basic question however runs much deeper than biological details of reproduction.
Genealogists
Adults often study their family tree for as many generations back as they can trace it. Genealogists can devote vast amounts of time, effort, and money seeking their roots. Adoptees, similarly, often wonder about their birth parents and may search for years to find them. All these people searching for their roots are asking the same basic question but on a deeper level than the young child. Our roots have to do with where we came from.
Historians, Archeologists, and Paleontologists
Historians carry this question to a deeper level. By studying human history and uncovering the origins of our civilization and culture, they are trying to understand where we came from in a collective sense. Pushing this idea another step, anthropologists and archeologists sift through ancient pot shards and bone fragments in search of a crucial clue to help us understand our earliest ancestors prior to recorded history. Paleontologists push still farther. They search for ancient fossils providing clues to the very first hominids in order to understand the origin of our species. Even more ancient fossils help them unravel our species' family tree. They are applying the question, "Where did I come from?" to our species. Their ultimate goal is to trace back from the origin of our species to the origin of life on Earth.
Astronomers
Just as this question runs deeper than reproductive biology, it also runs deeper than evolutionary biology. Even if we were to completely understand the origin of life on Earth, we could still ask where did Earth and the rest of the solar system come from. Basically solar systems form from large interstellar clouds of gas and dust. Most of the material collapses into the central star (or sun). The leftover material coalesces into planets. Astronomers who study the origin of stars and of the solar system are pushing a deceptively simple childhood question to an extreme limit.
One might be tempted to think that we've reached the limit, when we ask how the solar system got here. We haven't. Our studies of stellar evolution and supernovae tell us the origin of the atoms that make up our bodies and the world (and universe) around us. Stars are the cosmic cauldrons that cooked the carbon and other atoms in our bodies. With the exception of hydrogen, all the atoms in our bodies were manufactured by stars and recycled into the interstellar medium by supernova explosions. Pushing even farther, cosmology is a branch of astronomy that asks: What is the origin and history of the entire universe? Our current best answer is some version of the big bang theory. Cosmologists and other astronomers trying to work out the details of the big bang are still basically asking the same question as the young child who wonders where he or she came from. Our desire for these answers is so strong that one of NASA's major initiatives is the search for origins.
Theologians
At the deepest level, theologians from most major religions ponder the question of a deity who set the whole process in motion and the purpose that this deity has for us. There often seems to be a conflict between science and religion, but both are concerned with different aspects of the same question. Science concentrates on mechanical details such as the details of cosmic and biological evolution. Religion is properly less concerned with these mechanical details in order to deal with the deeper questions of purpose and of a deity.
Most of the work that scientists and other scholars do is simply asking the same questions that a small child will ask and then searching for increasingly deeper answers.
