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When did "life" start on Urantia?
Many readers will be aware of claims that life has been on Urantia for close to 4 billion years but that The Urantia Book states the original life patterns were planted here 550,000,000 years ago by the Life Carriers. This discrepancy may be due to differences in the definition of what constitutes "life" and has been discussed in "The Science Content of The Urantia Book" (Bain, Glasziou, Neibaur, Wright) which is available for free from the Brotherhood of Man Library. The Urantia Book is not necessarily entirely consistent in the way it uses the term "life." A point that was overlooked in the above paper is this sentence: "The material self, the ego-entity of human identity, is dependent during the physical life on the continuing function of the material life vehicle, on the continued existence of the unbalanced equilibrium of energies and intellect which, on Urantia, has been given the name, life." (1229)
The word to notice is "intellect." One of the requirements to include "original life plasm" on your family tree is the potential to display "intellect" So maybe there has been a lot of organic systems on Urantia, loosely classified as living, but lacking "intellect" for which the "original life plasm" concocted by the Life Carriers is not ancestral. Some of these systems may have been present 3-4 billion years ago, but do not qualify as "life" as the term is used in the book.
The book says, "The original life plasm of the evolutionary world must contain the full potential for all future developmental variations and for all subsequent evolutionary changes and modifications." (398) The Bain et al. paper briefly discusses work on "homeotic" genes suggesting that combinations of genes (homeoboxes) controlling development of functional organs in insects and mammals (a limb, for example) were already present in ancestral form in lowly organisms such as the roundworm (see also McGinnis et al., Sc. Amer. Feb. 1994). This accords with the Urantia Book statement that the full genetic potential to give rise to us was present in the original life plasm. Darwin and his followers would not have conceded that possibility.
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