The Flaws in Gould's “New Understanding” of Life

The book “Universe in Creation” by Roy R. Gould has the pretentious subtitle “A New Understanding of the Big Bang and the Emergence of Life.” Given the incredibly mysterious nature of both of these things, it would seem that no one has any business claiming to have an understanding of them, and a more modest subtitle might have been “A New Outlook on the Big Bang and the Emergence of Life.”

Gould states on page 70, “The Big Bang is not a theory or a hypothesis or guess” on the grounds that it “is a conclusion supported by many lines of evidence.” This is not correct; the Big Bang theory is indeed a theory. According to the Big Bang theory itself, it will forever be impossible for us to observe the first 300,000 years of the universe's history, because matter and energy were concentrated so densely during those years that all light from the first 300,000 years must have been hopelessly scattered. Not only is the Big Bang a theory, but according to the theory itself the theory will forever be unverifiable, because we cannot observe anything in the first 300,000 years of the universe's history. Instead of “many lines of evidence” supporting the Big Bang theory, there are basically only two: the existence of the cosmic background radiation, and the red-shift of galaxies, indicating the universe is expanding.

It is conceivable but unlikely that we might one day find alternate explanations of these two things, and if that were to happen, there would no longer be any reason for believing in the Big Bang. A major current problem with the Big Bang theory is that it does not correctly predict the current distribution of matter and antimatter. The Big Bang theory predicts that the universe should have equal amounts of matter and antimatter (or nothing but pure energy), and this is not at all the case. You can do a Google search for "baryon asymmetry" to read more on this topic. Another major problem with the Big Bang theory is that it does not correctly predict the amount of lithium in our universe. An article yesterday at phys.org says, “The standard models of the Big Bang predict an abundance of Li7, the main lithium isotope, three or four times more than that actually observed.”

There doesn't seem to be anything particularly new in Gould's “new understanding” of the Big Bang. The dust jacket of the book says that the book will expound the idea that “the cosmos expands inward, not outward,” but such an idea is barely mentioned in the text. It seems to have something to do with the idea that the universe is not expanding into empty space, but such a point has already been made many times, so it's hardly new.

As for the emergence of life, Gould advances the idea that life was kind of foreordained by the universe's laws. There is nothing new about this claim, it being a piece of wishful thinking that has been long pushed by those trying to make it look like the origin of life was a not-too-impressive event or a sure thing. Speaking of his 245-page book, he says on page 144, “The remainder of this book presents the chief lines of evidence that life really is written into the universe's building plan.” Based on chapter 15 of the book (discussed below), I conclude that when Gould speaks of the universe's “design” or the “universe's building plan,” he seems to be speaking merely of the universe's physics and physical characteristics. The idea that life was foreordained by the universe's laws and physics is not a correct one, based on the universe's laws as we currently understand them. To clarify the matter, we must distinguish between necessary conditions and sufficient conditions.

A necessary condition is something that must occur first for something else to occur. A sufficient condition is something that will guarantee that something will occur. For example, water and light are necessary conditions for plant growth, but not a sufficient condition. If we launch into space a sterile globe of water, that globe will have two necessary conditions for plant growth (water and light), but no plant growth will occur.

In regard to the appearance of life, the universe's physics and physical characteristics include many necessary conditions for the appearance of life. There are, for example, quite a few conditions that have to be just right for stable atoms to exist, for planets to exist, and for lots of carbon and oxygen and water to exist. But none of these things are anything like sufficient conditions for life to appear. We know of nothing in the universe's physics or laws that is a sufficient condition for life to appear. Given a planet with suitable temperatures in which there is a mixture of both land and water, we know of no reason at all why there should ever occur the “organization explosion” required for life to form. The origin of life seems to require a fantastically improbable arrangement of matter. Based on what we currently know, such an arrangement should be fantastically improbable, even given billions of years and billions of planets for random combinations of matter to occur.

Based on what we now know about the universe's physics, it seems false to make statements implying that life was foreordained by the universe's physics. It could conceivably be that there are dramatic undiscovered laws of nature that make the appearance of life probable, but we have not discovered any such laws yet. On page 150 Gould states, “The extreme stability of life's infrastructure suggests that, far from being an 'accident,' life is a necessary part of the universe.” This statement makes no more sense than claiming that the extreme stability of your house in the woods suggests that the house was a necessary part of the woods.

On page 179 to page 180 Gould tells us about an experiment done by Jack Szostak at Harvard. Gould claims that Szostak “generated one trillion different protein molecules,” and found a handful of them were capable of binding to the molecule ATP, a molecule that provides energy in the body. Gould says, “These experiments provide further evidence that life can arise naturally from the universe's initial conditions.” There are two errors here. The first is that the “universe's initial conditions” were the incredible density and heat of the Big Bang, which were, of course, totally inhospitable to life. Even if we amend Gould's statement to be simply “these experiments provide further evidence that life can arise naturally,” it is not a correct statement.

The Szostak experiment Gould describes actually states that it started out with a random generated library of 4 X 10¹⁴ sequences, which is 400 trillion. This library was then whittled this down to a library of 6 trillion. The “ATP binding” functionality in question (found in four of the random molecules) was not something terribly complicated. According to the Szostak paper, it involved merely “a core domain of 45 amino acids sufficient for ATP binding.” By comparison, the median number of amino acids in a human protein is about 400, and the median number of amino acids in a yeast protein is about 400. Getting by chance a functional arrangement of 400 amino acids is very many times more difficult than merely getting an ATP binding functionality. The functionality described in the Szostak paper was found in only about 1 in a hundred trillion random molecules, about 1 in 10¹⁴.

Why is such an experiment not at all “evidence that life can arise naturally” as Gould claims? In order for a living thing to arise from chemicals, you would need (among other things) many functional proteins, more than 100 of them. You would need these to appear more-or-less simultaneously, to produce a cell capable of self-reproduction. It would not at all be a case that if you got only one of these incredibly unlikely “long shots” producing a protein, that such a protein would stay around until you got the next one many years later. Instead, you would have to get about 100 of these incredibly unlikely long shots occurring at about the same time in the same little space, so that a single cell had everything needed for self-reproduction. We can roughly calculate the odds of that, using a figure suggested by the Szostak paper of a 1 in 10¹⁴ figure for the chance of one of the proteins being functional (although the chance of each functional protein appearing by chance would almost certainly be some vastly smaller probability such as 1 in 10²⁵ or 1 in 10⁵⁰). It's something like 1 in 10¹⁴ to the hundredth power, which has a probability of something like 1 in 10¹⁴⁰⁰. We wouldn't expect something that improbable to happen by chance even once in the history of the universe.

Gould states this on page 183:

Nature says, Give me a trillion bacteria, and I'll guarantee that one of them has resistance to your antibiotic. Give me a trillion antibodies, and I'll guarantee that one of them fights the invader. Give me a trillion protein molecules, and you can count on finding the function you are looking for.

But it is extremely misleading to insinuate that given a trillion random protein molecules you'll get any function you're looking for. The functionality of the more complex protein molecules is unlikely to be found even once in a billion trillion random protein molecules. The type of functionality discussed in the Szostak paper is some of the simplest functionality that you could experiment with. Since “ATP binding” is merely connecting to another molecule, you can compare it to the simplicity of an electrical socket. There are countless proteins that have functionality vastly more complex. Protein expert Douglas Axe has estimated that the chance of getting a functional protein from the set of all random proteins is 1 in 10⁷⁴. This a probability more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times smaller than the “1 in a trillion” probability that Gould is suggesting to his readers. 

One of the extremely complex protein molecules used by living things is the hemoglobin molecule. It consists of two “alpha chains” of 141 amino acid residues each and two “beta chains” of 146 amino acid residues each. Getting functionality that complex to appear by chance would require some set of random protein molecules enormously larger than the 400 trillion random proteins in the Szostak experiment – probably 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or more random protein molecules, more than the number of random protein molecules that would be produced in the history of our planet.

On page 156 Gould says something about the origin of hemoglobin – something goofy indeed. He states this:

But in practice, nature selects for proteins that automatically fold into a single shape, step by step, as they are manufactured by the cell. An example is hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in the bloodstream.

This type of speech is extremely erroneous. Natural selection simply means differential reproduction, the superior reproduction that can result once an organism gets some biological innovation. A trait or characteristic can only be “selected for” through something like natural selection if the trait or characteristic already exists in one or more organisms of a population. We cannot explain the origin of any complex biological innovation by saying that “nature selected it” or “nature selected for it,” for there can be no natural selection going on in regard to that biological innovation until after it appeared. The sequence of events is:

1. First a biological innovation appears.
2. Then (if other conditions are right) that innovation may cause some organism to have a better survival rate or reproduction rate (natural selection).

Anyone who inverts this sequence and suggests that “nature selected” some complex biological innovation or that nature “selected for” that complex biological innovation is making the elementary error of speaking as if something was caused by a consequence of that thing. It's the same same type of error a person commits when he says that the dark thundercloud was caused by the summer downpour that appeared after the dark thundercloud.  

A hemoglobin molecule

The idea of "nature selecting for" hemoglobin molecules becomes all the more absurd when we consider that such molecules are only beneficial if there exists a very complex circulatory system that would have no reason to exist until there were already molecules such as hemoglobin molecules, the interdependence of the two being a kind of "which came first, the chicken or the egg" problem defying our attempts at explanation.  

In Chapter 15 (entitled “Design Without a Designer?”) Gould asks, “Can simple rules – for example, the rules with which the universe was born – create something as complex as a human being?” Gould then discusses at length something that he thinks “bears on the question”: the Mandelbrot pattern. Mandelbrot patterns are beautiful patterns that can be produced by simple mathematical rules. But there are two reasons it is laughable to be citing Mandelbrot patterns to shore up the idea that “simple rules” can create something as complex as a human. The first reason is that Mandelbrot patterns are totally non-functional, and are created purely for beauty reasons. The second is that Mandelbrot patterns do not naturally exist in nature, but are produced only by graphical computer programs designed by humans.

On page 238 Gould tells us “there is every reason to believe that within our lifetimes, we'll hear the historic announcement of the first evidence for life on another world.” This is not at all correct, because of the math I previously discussed. If the most primitive living thing requires 100 proteins, and each has a likelihood of no better than 1 in a hundred trillion of appearing, the chance likelihood of life appearing in some particular spot is less than 1 in 10¹⁴⁰⁰. Given such odds, and the failure of all SETI radio searches so far, it is quite absurd for Gould to be saying “there is every reason to believe that within our lifetimes, we'll hear the historic announcement of the first evidence for life on another world.” Certainly Gould has not cited any facts or made any arguments justifying such optimism. Life might well exist all over our galaxy and all over the universe, but only if there is some dramatic teleological causal factor at play different from any Gould has discussed.