“That's
what life needed to get started: energy.”
This
statement was made by a narrator on the show. Energy may be a
requirement for life to get started on a planet, but such an event
requires enormously more than just energy. So citing energy as “what
life needed to get started” is rather absurd, given so many other
steep requirements.
“We're
all made of the same dead dust that makes the planet -- it's just
mixed up differently.”
This
idea of life as a mere mixture was stated more than once in the show.
In another place a narrator stated that “it's hard to get the
ingredients right,” again implying the idea that life will appear
whenever some particular mixture of ingredients appears. But even the
simplest life is more than just an appropriate mixture – it's a
state of organization vastly greater than in any mere mixture.
Narrator
says she was excited by the “thought that energy can make lifeless
stuff come alive.”
One
of the show's narrators said this after mentioning origin of life
experiments of the 1950's. Again, the show suggested the completely
erroneous idea that mere energy can create life. The idea was further
enforced by a long sequence showing a lightning rod technician
climbing high up a skyscraper. Someone watching the show might have
said, “Wow, I didn't know that – maybe you'll get life after just
the right lightning flash.”
“If
you want to make stardust into life, there's a bit more to it than
just add water.”
This
statement implied that it is pretty easy to make life, just a “bit
more” than adding water to dust. This is rather absurd considering
the mountainous requirements for the origin of life, which I'll
mention near the end of this post.
The
origin of all of us was fired out of a hot chimney at the bottom of
an ocean.
This
statement was made by a narrator after discussing the theory that
life originated in hydrothermal vents. Since such a theory is purely
speculative, the idea should have not been described as fact.
A hydrothermal vent (credit: NASA)
The
claim the DNA has every detail of what makes you you.
The
idea that DNA has every detail of what makes you you is very much
erroneous. For one thing, you are largely a mental and intellectual
thing consisting of your attitudes, beliefs, principles, and
memories, and none of these are specified by DNA. It is also not even
true that DNA specifies your body plan. The idea of DNA as a
blueprint for constructing a human is unfounded, for the reasons I discuss at
length in this post. DNA is best described as an ingredient list. It
mainly specifies the amino acids to build particular proteins. We
do not understand how the linear sequences of amino acids specified
in DNA turn into the elaborate three-dimensional shapes of protein
molecules (which is the mystery of protein folding), and we also do
not understand how a speck-sized human egg is able to grow to became
a human baby (the mystery of morphogenesis).
The
claim that carbon can connect in almost infinite ways with other
elements to create all the molecules for a living cell.
Strictly
speaking, this statement was not inaccurate, but it was highly
misleading in the sense of implying that incredibly complicated
molecules such as protein molecules or DNA molecules are somehow
consequences of carbon or things that we might predict from what is
known about carbon. They are not any such things, but are instead
things that could possibly be created out of carbon and other elements
given incredibly improbable luck. Saying that carbon can connect
with other elements to make the molecules needed for life is rather
like saying that the scrabble squares in your Scrabble box can
connect together to form meaningful instructions. In both cases this
is something that will only happen given deliberate intention or incredibly unlikely luck.
A
person watching the National Geographic “Genesis” TV show might
have gone away with the idea the origin of life was pretty easy. That's
because the show totally failed to mention the main thing it should
have mentioned: that even the simplest life is a state of
organization vastly greatly than that of non-life.
A
team of 9 scientists wrote a scientific paper
entitled,
“Essential genes of a minimal bacterium.” It analyzed a type of
bacteria (Mycoplasma
genitalium) that
has “the smallest genome of any organism that can be grown in pure
culture.” According to wikipedia's article, this bacteria has 525
genes consisting of 580,070 base pairs. The paper concluded that 382
of this bacteria's protein-coding genes (72 percent) are essential.
So multiplying that 580,070 by 72 percent, we get a figure of about
418,000 base pairs in the genome that are essential functionality.
So even
the most primitive microorganism known to us seems to need a minimum
of more than 400,000 base pairs in its DNA. For such a state of
organization to have appeared from non-life would have required what we must call an organization
explosion or an information explosion -- as would the appearance of the genetic code.
We
could imagine various ways in which a TV show could have conveyed the
idea of an organization explosion as big as the one needed for life
to appear from non-life. For example, on a TV set we might have seen
the host with one of those transparent lottery ball spinners. Then
the show might have shown the host pouring into the lottery ball
spinner ten or twenty types of ingredients: metal nuts, screws,
nails, strips of wood, strips of wire, strips of steel, steel angle
brackets, and so forth. Then we could see the TV host spinning the
lottery ball spinner. We then could have been told that for life to
originate from non-life, it would be like this random chamber of
ingredients forming not merely into a machine, but a machine capable
of making copies of itself (with each of the copies also being
capable of making copies of themselves).
Then
the TV viewer would have got a proper idea of how miraculous would have been the luck
needed for such an origin of life from non-life – an idea
completely different from the “just add water and zap a good mixture of dust” drivel suggested by National Geographic's TV show.
Postscript: A comparable show was a NOVA Wonders episode on the search for extraterrestrial life. The transcript is here. There was a long narration that made no mention of the great complexity of even the simplest life. There was a scientist named Kevin Hand who stated this about Jupiter's moon Europa: "So, if we found amino acids in ice, that could be a pretty strong sign of life within that ocean." But it would be no such thing. Life requires not only DNA but many proteins, each of which is a very complex functional arrangement of many amino acids of different types. Finding some amino acids is no more a strong sign of life than finding some stones in the woods is a sign there's a stone house over the hill.
Postscript: A comparable show was a NOVA Wonders episode on the search for extraterrestrial life. The transcript is here. There was a long narration that made no mention of the great complexity of even the simplest life. There was a scientist named Kevin Hand who stated this about Jupiter's moon Europa: "So, if we found amino acids in ice, that could be a pretty strong sign of life within that ocean." But it would be no such thing. Life requires not only DNA but many proteins, each of which is a very complex functional arrangement of many amino acids of different types. Finding some amino acids is no more a strong sign of life than finding some stones in the woods is a sign there's a stone house over the hill.
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