Harvard Misrepresents Information-Empty Bubbles As Being Relevant to Life's Origin

 For 70 years the mainstream science literature has presented enormously misleading coverage about origin-of-life research.  There has been a huge amount of bunk and baloney in the press coverage of origin-of-life research, and the statements made on this topic by scientists themselves have often been inaccurate. Many examples of such misstatements can be found here and here and here and here and here and here and here. 

The latest example of baloney about the origin of life is a recent article in the Harvard Gazette trying to persuade us that some research of no real biological relevance is some great advance in understanding the origin of life.  We have a headline "A Step Towards Solving Central Mystery of Life on Earth." We have a subtitle of "Experiment with synthetic self-assembling materials suggests how it all might have begun."

BS. Baloney. Hogwash. The experiments are of no biological relevance because they involve mere bubbles containing no information at all. That means they are of no relevance to understanding the origin of life, because even the simplest living thing is a huge repository of functional information. 

How much functional information is in the simplest living cell? The paper "Fundamental behaviors emerge from simulations of a living minimal cell"  describes "a genetically minimal bacterial cell, consisting of only ... 493 genes on a single 543-kbp circular chromosome with 452 genes coding for proteins (Breuer et al., 2019 ), some of which are subunits of multi-domain complexes." Each of those genes is a complex invention with hundreds of fine-tuned parts that almost all have to be just right. The total number of amino acids that have to be arranged just right in the proteins partially specified by these genes is roughly 150,000. Far from supporting any "life is simple, we can make it from scratch" narrative, such a paper supports the idea that even the simplest self-reproducing cell has a degree of organization and functional complexity greater than the organization and functional complexity of an 80-page technical manual. And even all that information does not give you a self-reproducing cell; it's only a prerequisite for such a cell. 

This is an extremely important fundamental fact about life: that even the simplest self-reproducing cell is a huge repository of functional information.  Each of the genes in such a cell gives the assembly instructions needed to arrange some amino acids in the right way to assemble a particular type of protein.  Just as there are 26 characters in the English alphabet, there are 20 possible amino acids that can be represented in some portion of a gene. A gene typically has to specify a special sequence of hundreds of specially arranged amino acids in order for the gene to specify a functional protein. The amount of functional information in a gene is therefore roughly similar to the amount of functional information in a paragraph of a technical manual. Because a self-reproducing cell requires hundreds of different types of genes, the amount of functional information in even the simplest self-reproducing cell is roughly the same as the amount of functional information in a 100-page technical manual consisting of hundreds of paragraphs. 

How often would we expect chance combinations of matter to produce all the information needed for a self-reproducing cell? We would never expect such a thing to occur in the history of the universe. It would be an event so improbable it would be as unlikely as ink splashes producing a 100-page useful technical manual. Life can only be common in the universe if there is some causal agency counteracting these prohibitive odds against the accidental origin of life. 

Does the Harvard article discuss any research that produced any such information through natural processes? No, it does not.  What we have is a discussion of research involving  information-empty bubbles.  The trick of trying to pass off bubble behavior as being relevant to the origin of life is a long-running ruse in origin of life research.  A researcher may create some warm fluid filled with fatty acids.  He may see some bubbles in such a fluid. Speaking very misleadingly, the researcher may describe such bubbles as "protocells."  If he observes some big bubble splitting into two smaller bubbles, he may describe this as "reproduction," and may claim that it has some relevance to the the reproduction that it occurs in living things.  

The main reason such research on bubbles has no relevance to the origin-of-life is that the bubbles have no information at all in them. Even the simplest cell is a huge repository of functional information. But there is no information at all in bubbles produced in these type of misleading experiments.  Such bubbles have no genes at all. 

The Harvard article gives us this quote:

" 'This is the first time, as far as I know, that anybody has done anything like this — generate a structure that has the properties of life from something, which is completely homogeneous at the chemical level and devoid of any similarity to natural life,' said Juan Pérez-Mercader, a senior research fellow in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the Origins of Life Initiative, the senior author of the study. 'I am super, super excited about this.' ”

Beware of super-excited scientists, because many super-excited scientists deceive us about things. Pérez-Mercader's statement is untrue. His crummy little bubbles do not have "the properties of life" because they do not have any information. They do not have any protein molecules and do not have any genes. And instead of it being true that no one "has done anything like this," the type of work Pérez-Mercader has done has been going on for decades.  Many a researcher has fruitlessly tried this silly path of fooling around with information-empty bubbles, and trying to pretend that the results have relevance to the origin of life. 

The Harvard Gazette article has a link to a paper by Pérez-Mercader, one with a title misleadingly referring to cells (the "cells" referred to are not actually cells). The paper describes nothing of any  relevance to explaining the origin of life. The supplementary information of the paper gives us the visual below for the contraption Pérez-Mercader used, one consisting of a beaker of ethanol glycol and more exotic chemicals surrounded by 32 light-emitting diodes.  No conditions anything like such a device would have existed in the early Earth. 

We read of some ridiculously artificial concoction placed in the beaker shown above. The supplementary information tells us this:

"9.8 mg of polyethyleneglycol-4-cyano-4- [(dodecylsulfanylthiocarbonyl)sulfanyl] pentanoic acid (photo-iniferter, Mn = 1400) was mixed with 147 µL 2-hydroxypropyl methacrylate (monomer, Mn = 144.17) in 1.5 mL of water in a 1-dram vial. The vial is vortexed for 5 min and closed with a rubber stopper. Using two syringe needles (for inlet and outlet of gas) through the rubber stopper, the mixture in the vial was bubbled with N2 gas for 10 min to minimize dissolved oxygen."

Then some weird chemical was added to help grow bigger bubbles : "To accelerate the growth in vesicle size during polymerization, we added to the initial blend Zinc tetraphenylporphyrin (ZnTPP) as a photocatalyst that has previously been reported to work in PISA photopolymerization reactions."  This is a ridiculously artificial procedure bearing no resemblance to an experiment attempting to simulate early Earth conditions. 

The paper's sole use of the word "information" is this: "The simple (conformational) information that gets transferred by these spores is in the structure and length of their partially (and internally modified) reacted amphiphiles whose properties depend on the history of the mother." -- "Conformational" refers to shape. The shape of a bubble is no real functional information. In biology when someone talks about functional information, they mean some use of a symbolic system of representation (for example, the genetic code) by which useful instructions are stored.  A bubble's shape is not functional information. 

In the paper Pérez-Mercader repeatedly refers to "vesicles," and each time he uses that term he is merely referring to some bubble. Pérez-Mercader's beloved bubbles are information-empty things of no relevance to the problem of the origin of life, which is a largely a problem of explaining how there could have originated a gigantic  repository of functional information. Some simple searches of his paper show its irrelevance to explaining the origin of life:

Mentions of DNA: 0

Mentions of proteins: 0

Mentions of genes: 0

Mentions of RNA: 0

Mentions of amino acids: 0

Mentions of the genetic code: 0

Mentions of nucleobases: 0

All of the references to "reproduction" and "self-organization" in the paper are about as relevant to the origin of life as someone tracking the behavior of water drops on the hood of his car during rainy weather, while claiming that three small drops forming into a larger drop was an example of "self-organization" and claiming that one big drop splitting into two smaller drops was an example of "reproduction." 

Appendix: The definition of "information" I use above is the second definition of "information" I get when doing a Google search for "definition of information." That definition is: "what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things." Using that definition of information, there really is very much information in even the simplest one-celled life, because such life has many genes that do indeed represent something by a particular arrangement or sequence of things. Particular trios of the nucleotide base pairs in genes do actually represent particular amino acids, according to the scheme of representation called the genetic code,  illustrated in the table below. Under this system, particular triple combinations of nucleotide base pairs represent particular amino acids. Bubbles and vesicles and water drops and pebbles and rocks have neither representation nor information. 

The genetic code, a scheme of representation used by all earthly life

Postscript: In a recent Big Think article, cosmologist Ethan Siegel gives us what sounds like a very lazy effort. The article is entitled "Five Big Unanswered Questions About the Origin of Life." But three of his questions are not actually questions about the origin of life. Siegel keeps suggesting that life could have arose from "ingredients," failing to grasp the essential point that life can only arise from very organized components such as hundreds of different types of protein molecules, each a complex invention requiring a different special arrangement of hundreds of amino acids. When scientists talk about life arising from "ingredients," they plant in our minds the false idea that a living thing could arise from simple unorganized matter.  

An article in Universe Today discusses a new scientific paper "The unreasonable likelihood of being":

"The study focuses on the difficulty of assembling structured biological information under what could be reasonably expected prebiotic conditions, showing just how hard it would be for the first living cell to form naturally on early Earth. Think of it like trying to write an article about the origins of life for a well renowned space based website by randomly throwing letters at a page. The chances of success become astronomically small as the required complexity increases."

The paper estimates that a protocell would require a billion bits of information. A page of text uses about 200,000 bits. A billion bits of information is about the same information as in a book of 2000 pages. The estimate is consistent with a statement I have made several times on this blog, that the amount of functional information required for the origin of life is comparable to the amount of information in a long technical manual of very many pages.