This
week I saw an outrageous example of puffery in a press release
announcing a scientific study. The press release was put out by the
Georgia Institute of Technology, and was picked up word-for-word by
the popular Science Daily site and other sites. The press
release was entitled “Finding the Origins of Life in a Drying
Puddle.”
Despite
the dramatic title suggesting a solution to the age-old problem of
the origin of life, when we read the details of the study we find
some utterly boring results that aren't even a major step towards
such a goal. Some scientists used a procedure involving wetting and
drying cycles, and succeeded in combining amino acids into
polypeptides that consisted of as many as 14 units.
To
illustrate how minor this result is, I need merely show a diagram of
a polypeptide. A polypeptide is like a necklace, and amino acids are
like beads on the necklace.
This
result (similar to previous results) is about as exciting as
stringing 14 necklace beads onto the string of a necklace, or
combining 13 individual playing cards into a bridge hand of 13
playing cards. The study does essentially nothing to answer the main
problems in the origin of life, which include the staggering problems
of the origin of self-replicating molecules, the origin of the
genetic code, and the origin of proteins consisting of thousands of
amino acids, not just 14.
So
what we have here is quite a case of exaggeration by biologists. A
press release that should have been humbly titled “Looking for the
Origins of Life in a Drying Puddle” has instead been titled
“Finding the Origins of Life in a Drying Puddle,” as if
scientists have already solved a problem that could easily take them
another thousand years to solve.
All
in all, this press release tends to raise again the question of
whether many of our scientists (who often speak as if they were lords
of knowledge) may be closer to being “lords of exaggeration.” The
truth is that scientists have made relatively little progress in the
past 70 years searching for clues to the origin of earthly life.
The task of explaining the origin of life using existing paradigms
seems all-but-insurmountable. The concepts of natural selection and
evolution really offer no help, because neither evolution nor natural
selection can get started until life itself begins.
As
I was typing this post, I was coincidentally watching a TV program in
which some astronomers talked about the likelihood of life on other
planets. One spoke as if the origin of life was as simple as having
the right ingredients. Using similar reasoning, we might vacuously
argue that we can explain the origin of a computer program by just
mentioning that the electrons that make up that program (when it is
stored in a computer) were lying around ready to be used.
The
problem of the origin of life is a problem of accounting for an
“information explosion” that seems inexplicable as a chance
event. To get insight on such a thing, we may need a new paradigm
that assumes that the information needed for the origin of life was
already lurking within the universe, in some mysterious information
infrastructure beyond our ken, some cosmic framework involving not
just laws of nature but programming. You can't dismiss such a
possibility by saying, “That's not allowed, because it sounds like
some gift of a deity interested in our existence.” Exactly the
same criticism could be made of the theory of gravitation or the
theory of electromagnetism, which are equally necessary for our
existence.
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