Dear Josephus,

I am so glad you’re asking questions. The elements were not created by natural selection. Natural selection is a force that drives evolution. The elements in the periodic table were created in the stars which are nuclear furnaces. We get heat from our sun because it is a nuclear reactor. Gravity pulls it together and the immense forces cause nuclear reactions which result in new elements and heat.

Origin of the Elements (lbl.gov) on the net tells how the sun and other stars create new elements.

Forces such as lightning acting on this matter create the amino acids which are the building blocks of life. In 1953 Stanley Miller tried to duplicate the conditions of early earth and was able to generate amino acids which are some of the building blocks of life.

Exploring Space . Meteorites and Life . Murchison Meteorite: Stanley Miller's Experiment | PBS

I am overjoyed that my grandson is now going to university with the goal of becoming a theoretical physicist and finding out more.

It is a very exciting time.

Josephus: "David, please explain by natural selection how the initial chemistry of the universe was formed that can identify the periodic table?"

Ok, so this has nothing to do with the topic of this thread, but why would he have to use natural selection to explain the period table?

Physicists do have a proposed account how the elements formed (and are still being formed) and they don't invoke natural selection. Natural selection is a relevant to biology not the physics of nucleosynthesis.

The basic idea, if I remember correctly, is that the big bang followed very quickly by the initial stage of the universe gave as protons, neutrons and other particles. Some of the protons and most of neutrons fuse into heavier nuclei- mainly deuterium and helium-4. Then due to expansion the universe cools and after a while its cool enough for the nuclei to bind with electrons to form Hydrogen and Helium atoms as well as H2 molecules (I think the H2 is actually via a chemical process- not sure what though, look it up if interested). Now more time passes and these atoms/molecules comes together in "clouds" of matter due to gravity and then the clump and compress to form the initial stars which via fusion gave us some of the heavier nuclei. Then some of these stars exploded in supernova which formed varieties of other nuclei. The debris of these supernovas may sometimes clump again under gravity to form other generations of stars and these stars sometimes have protoplanetary discs from which planets arise by clumping under gravity. And that's primarily how solid matter arises with many different elements.

Physicists determined these processes occur within stars because they can directly detect the reactants and products of them by their distinctive light signatures found in the light of stars (especially our own sun). We have also directly observed supernova/remnant debris and protoplanetary discs.

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Other types of elements can be also created by the natural terrestial nuclear reactions of radioactive decay or nuclear reactions initiated via comic rays (eg. here on Earth comic rays cause nitrogen-14 to beta decay to carbon-14).

So physicists' "stories" accounting for the formation of the elements are not some mystical wild crazy ideas, but something that you backup with real observations. ie: it's real science not mythology.

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PS: I see davidf has also posted something similar to this. He posted while I was still writing this.

All of this predisposes an energy source that gave character to the elements. What has that energy source got to do with the link with our very being?

I see purpose and design in the Universe, though I am not the chemicals of my body, I am the spirit and character that my body allows me to project in HIs Story. My chemistry has been borrowed from the earth and other life and will become other lives that I have discarded as once my body

Dear Josephus,

You are on the brink of the world of knowledge. To enter you have to examine many preconceptions you have and reject them.

I wish you well. Have courage.

Ok Josephus, so you've mentioned "energy" and this immediately raises red warning flags for me. This is because "energy" in a scientific statement to a physicist has a very different meaning to what people commonly think it would mean. Indeed there are many such words that raise flags.

Here are some: energy, vibration, quantum, vacuum, force, field, zero point.

If you see a scientific sounding sentence containing any of these words then unless it is from a professional scientist/engineer/mathematician or a advanced and well studied lay-person, it is quite likely complete BS.
eg: "We can harness the power of the vibrational vacuum energy of the quantum zero point force field to solve the world's energy problems", now I just made this sentence up, sounds super cool, really technical and scientific but in reality it is gobbledegook.
And even when a phrase with such words is uttered by a physicist, for many such phrases, unless you have studied university level math and physics for a few years then you won't understand what it actually means and what its implications are.

Josephus: So what do you mean by "energy" / "energy source" in your post?

Just so you know, I'll tell you what I mean by "energy" in physics: While I'm not a physicist, I have studied a lot of it. For me, in most everyday physical Newtonian settings, I use the term "energy" as that stuff which can do work* (gibbs free energy) or heat something. It can be transferred from thing to thing and has different forms. And in a Newtonian setting cannot be created or destroyed.
A more technical definition and at a deeper philosophical level I would say that, in a Newtonian setting, it is the conserved property that corresponds to the universe's time symmetry. (ie: that thing that is conserved when the Lagrangian in Noether's theorem is independent of time)

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