In
my earlier post They
Keep Feeding Us “Explanation Is Near” Baloney,
I discussed how science writers have the extremely bad habit of
writing stories that suggest that scientists are on the brink of
understanding some long-standing riddle, even when the evidence
suggests they are light-years away from understanding such a problem.
We had an example of such a piece of science writing in a recent
Quanta article entitled “In
Warm, Greasy Puddles, the Spark of Life?”
The article discusses the work of a biochemist named David Deamer.
The article states, “Over the
past few years, Deamer has expanded his membrane-first approach into
a comprehensive vision for how life emerged.”
But
that is baloney. The word “comprehensive” means “complete.”
So if we had a complete vision for how life originated, we would
understand how a self-replicating molecule was able to originate
against all odds. We would understand how the complicated genetic
code originated. We would understand how the first cells originated.
But none of our scientists understand such things. All of our
scientists are light-years away from having any such thing as a
“comprehensive vision for how life emerged.”
QUANTA MAGAZINE: What have been the biggest accomplishments of researchers seeking to understand life’s origins? What questions remain to be solved?
DAVID DEAMER: We have really made progress since the 1950s. We have figured out that the first life originated at least 3.5 billion years ago, and my guess is that primitive life probably emerged as early as 4 billion years ago. We also know that certain meteorites contain the basic components of life. But we still don’t know how the first polymers were put together.
Asked
to list “the biggest
accomplishments of researchers seeking to understand life’s
origins,” Deamer fails to list anything very substantive. He talks
about some finding about when
life first emerged. The important question is not when
it emerged, but how
it emerged. As for the claim that meteorites contain “the basic
components of life,” that isn't correct if we use the term “basic
components of life” in the most common way. What we generally
think of as “the basic components of life” are self-reproducing
molecules and cells, and meteorites have no such thing. Of course,
you can shrink your scale further and talk about something much
simpler, some little chemical fragment, and call that a “basic
component of life,” but that's no more meaningful than claiming
that the basic components of glass windows (silicon atoms) are found
in sand on the seashore, which doesn't explain how the windows came
into existence.
By
admitting that “we still don’t know how the first polymers were
put together,” Deamer shows that he does not have any such thing
as a “comprehensive vision for how life emerged.”
The
traditional concept of life's earthly origin is that of a primordial
soup, a warm concentration of ingredients in which life might have
originated. This idea has always been extremely inadequate, because
it doesn't explain how those chemicals combined into a
self-reproducing molecule. What does Deamer add to this? Based
on the diagram he supplies, his main addition seems to be a kind of
sandwich underneath the soup, a sandwich made up of greasy
semi-permeable layers. Below is a diagram similar to the one in the
Quanta article, but a little easier to understand.
Does
adding this little “sandwich” underneath the “primordial soup”
help things out a great deal? Not really. The problem of the origin
of life is a problem of explaining what we can call a functionality
explosion. According to the common thinking, suddenly a disorganized
sea of chemicals transformed into the machinery of a self-reproducing
molecule, which was followed by the machinery of a cell, which
somehow used the highly organized system of symbolic representations
known as the genetic code. How do you explain that? Adding a
sandwich underneath the soup doesn't get you to that explanation.
That's because it is not merely a problem of concentration (which
this “sandwich under the soup” might help you to explain) but a
problem of organization, a vastly improbable coordination in which
complicated machinery somehow arises. It's a rather like a chemist
mixing some chemicals in a beaker and somehow ending up with some
cool self-reproducing nanobots at the bottom of his beaker.
Deamer's
approach to trying to illuminate the origin of life question is an
example of a particular approach that we may call the “special
environment” approach. If you try this approach, you concentrate
on trying to describe some unusual local environment that might explain the
origin of life. Scientists have been taking this approach for 50
years, and it seems to be a futile exercise, a case of knocking their
heads against the wall. Given the enormous difficulties of
explaining the origin of life, there is no reason to suspect that
they can be overcome by any approach centered on just imagining some
favorable environment. If I'm trying to explain an event that is
like typing monkeys producing a Shakespeare sonnet, there's no way to
do that by imagining some special monkey room in which such a thing
might have been likely.
Here
is a totally unorthodox approach that might have a better chance of
success. Imagine you are some ambitious young scientiest hell-bent on
explaining the origin of life sometime in your career. You might do
worse than to follow the approach described below.
First,
spend a few years researching anomalous effects involving water. Pay
no attention to the “don't look into that, because it's impossible”
skeptics. Thoroughly and impartially investigate any and all claims
involving inexplicable effects involving water.
Then
spend a few years researching anomalous effects involving atoms or
molecules. Pay no attention to the “don't look into that, because
it's impossible” skeptics. Thoroughly and impartially investigate
any and all claims involving inexplicable effects involving atoms or
molecules.
Then
spend a few years researching anomalous effects involving energy. Pay
no attention to the “don't look into that, because it's impossible”
skeptics. Thoroughly and impartially investigate any and all claims
involving inexplicable effects involving energy.
Then
spend a few years researching anomalous effects involving
communication, coordination, or coincidence. Pay no attention to the
“don't look into that, because it's impossible” skeptics.
Thoroughly and impartially investigate any and all claims involving
inexplicable examples of communication, coordination, or coincidence.
Then
finally, come back to consider the question of the origin of life.
See whether some of the things that you have learned from these
investigations may help to shed light upon the origin of life. It
could be that these “mini-miracles” you have investigated may
help to explain the “major miracle” of the origin of life.
Because
of the enormous difficulties of explaining the origin of life, such
an approach probably would not work. But I suspect that it would have
a greater chance of success than the futile “special environment”
approach our scientists have been pursuing for decades with very little
success.
No comments:
Post a Comment