“Easy Life” Fantasy Reaches Its Zenith of Silliness

Every realistic and candid consideration of the requirements for life should lead you to be impressed by the stratospheric difficulty of even the simplest living thing arising accidentally. The fundamental units of all living things are cells, and even the simplest cell consists of more than 180 types of proteins. Most of those proteins consists of hundreds of amino acids arranged in just the right way to achieve a particular function. A scientific paper tells us, “The median length of the proteins annotated among Eukaryotes (361 amino acids) is much higher than in Bacteria (267 amino acids) and this in turn is higher than in Archaea (247 amino acids).” An article in Nature is entitled “Smallest genome clocks in at 182 genes.” This smallest genome has 159,662 “letters” or base pairs that have to be just right. This is about the information complexity of a 400-page book or a 400-page carefully-coded computer program, and each of those 182 genes are about as unlikely to appear by chance as two well-written pages in an instruction textbook or two pages of well-functioning computer source code.

But there has been for a long time a group of people totally oblivious to such biological realities, a group that we may call the “easy life” thinkers. Contrary to everything we know about the complexity of life, these “easy life” thinkers have maintained that it is real easy for life to accidentally appear, so easy that it will happen whenever there is an opportunity. Such thinkers have long been guilty of all kinds of silliness and sophistry. One of their tricks is to cite (as evidence that life can easily arrive from chemicals) experiments that have never produced a living thing from chemicals, and have never even produced a protein from chemicals. A close examination of such experiments (such as here and here) will show that they failed miserably to realistically simulate conditions on the early Earth.

The world of the “easy life” theorist is a world of fantasy, not realism. Recently such silliness seemed to have reached a zenith. A scientific paper tried to persuade us that life might have arisen inside the interiors of stars. It would be hard to think of a sillier idea. The paper had the title, “Can Self-Replicating Species Flourish in the Interior of a Star?”

Life is a state involving enormously organized complexity. The temperature at the surface of a star like the sun is about 6000 degrees F (about 3700 degrees C). Anyone familiar with the kinetic theory of matter (one of the best established facts of science) knows that heat is actually just the degree of motion of particles. The hotter that something is, the faster its particles are moving about. At a temperature such as 6000 F, particles move about so fast that they cannot exist in any solid or organized form, but can only exist as a hot gas in which particles are moving about at a furious pace. Life could not possibly exist as such a hot gas. There could be none of the chemical bonds upon which life depends. Nor could there exist any of the liquid water on which life depends, 6000 F being a temperature very many times greater than the boiling point of water.

The paper authors try to back up their fantasy by appealing to speculative physics entities for which there is no evidence, some of a thousand and one imaginary things dreamed up by theoretical physicists, who these days seem more imaginative than J. K. Rowling or Stephen King. The first such entity is something called cosmic strings. The second and third such entities are something called magnetic monopoles and semipoles. Like somebody imagining with speculative abandon a Bigfoot monster riding on a unicorn, the authors imagine such cosmic strings, magnetic monopoles and semipoles (all imaginary things) forming into some kind of necklace. But such a necklace wouldn't be something like DNA, which has the shape of a spiral staircase, not a necklace. There is no reason to think that some necklace-like structure could be a basis for life. The shortfall is shown in Figure 1 of the paper (reproduced below), in which we see a fantasy "semipole necklace" on the left, and a DNA molecule on the right.  There is no reason for thinking that these fantasy "semipole necklaces" would have a winding appearance as in the diagram below, and in another paper they are depicted as straight lines. 

In the paper I just mentioned, we see these imaginary "semipole necklaces" looking like a few strands of spaghetti scattered around inside various places of a 10-gallon pot of water, and the resulting visual looks nothing like the concentrated organization of matter found within living things, where DNA is just one component tightly packed alongside many other components,  with the same tight component packing one sees in the engine of a car. 

The fantasy nature of cosmic strings is suggested by the wikipedia.org article on the topic, where we learn that there are no observations supporting such an idea:

"Note that most of these proposals depend, however, on the appropriate cosmological fundamentals (strings, branes, etc.), and no convincing experimental verification of these has been confirmed to date. Cosmic strings nevertheless provide a window into string theory. If cosmic strings are observed which is a real possibility for a wide range of cosmological string models this would provide the first experimental evidence of a string theory model underlying the structure of spacetime."

The wikikpedia.org article on magnetic monopoles makes clear at its beginning that such a particle is merely a "hypothetical" particle. 

In a press release one of the paper authors is quoted as making this very incorrect statement: “Information stored in the RNA (or DNA) encodes the mechanism of self-replication.” This is not at all true. RNA and DNA specify merely low-level chemical information (for example, DNA specifies which amino acids make up particular proteins). Neither DNA nor RNA encode anything like a high-level mechanism of self-replication for human beings. We do not at all understand how a speck-sized human egg is able to progress to become a large organism such as a human baby.  Nowhere in such an egg (or in its DNA or RNA molecules) is there even a specification of any of the 200 types of cells used by a human, nor is there anything like a specification of the full human body plan or any of the organ systems used by a human.  Scientists don't even understand how a single cell is able to reproduce, and the answer to this question is not found in DNA or RNA. "DNA cannot be seen as the 'blueprint' for life," says Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland.  He says, "It is at best an overlapping and potentially scrambled list of ingredients that is used differently by different cells at different times."  Sergio Pistoi (a science writer with a PhD in molecular biology) tells us, "DNA is not a blueprint," and tells us, "We do not inherit specific instructions on how to build a cell or an organ."

We currently live in an age of Fantasy Biology, in which many an unproven and unbelievable assertion and many a dubious boast is put forth because they have an appeal to the ideological inclinations of certain members of an erring professorial belief community. A paper such as the “Can Self-Replicating Species Flourish in the Interior of a Star?” paper shows just how far this tendency towards Fantasy Biology has gone. To the people who keep spinning these fantasies (while ignoring the most pertinent facts of biology) we should speak two loud words of advice: get real.

Dissipation Drivel of the “Easy Life” Guys

The online science magazine Nautilus sometimes gives its readers impressions that are completely at odds with reality. Based on many articles Nautilus has had on the multiverse, you might think that this is a well-confirmed scientific concept. But to the contrary, there is not a speck of evidence for any multiverse or any universe beyond or own. There are also very good reasons for thinking that no such evidence could possibly appear, given that any observations that we could possibly make would always be observations of our own universe, not an observation of some other universe.

Another area in which Nautilus creates an impression completely at odds with reality is the origin of life. An article by astrobiologist Nathaniel Comfort in the current edition of Nautilus has a subtitle telling us that “Hydrothermal vent models transform the origins of life from unlikely to near-inevitable.” The text of the article goes even further, stating this:

Vent models posit that given the initial conditions, the emergence of life was not a near-miracle. It was inevitable.

This statement gives the reader a very wrong idea. Any realistic appraisal of the origin of life must regard it as the most improbable type of event, basically a miracle. To calculate the odds of such a thing, we must consider all of the insanely improbable things that seemed to be required for life to originate from non-life. It seems that to have even the most primitive life originate, you need to have an “information explosion.” Even the most primitive microorganism known to us seems to need a minimum of more than 200,000 base pairs in its DNA (as discussed here). Protein molecules have to be just-right to be functional. It has been calculated that something like 10⁷⁰ random trials would be needed for a functional protein molecule to appear, and many such protein molecules are needed for life to get started. And so much more is also needed: cells, self-replicating molecules, a genetic code that is an elaborate system of symbolic representations, and also some fantastically improbable luck in regard to homochirality.

Postulating hydrothermal vents as the spot where life originated does nothing to help with these problems. A hydrothermal vent could supply some heat. But a lack of heat was never the issue. The issue was the appearance of life requires a very high degree of organization and functional coherence that should have been fantastically improbable to have occurred by chance.

By claiming that life appeared at hydrothermal vents, it seems that you are sharply decreasing the odds of life appearing, not increasing them.  As the map below shows, hydrothermal vents are found on only a tiny fraction of the ocean's surface, at the bottom of the ocean.  A person assuming that life might have originated anywhere in the ocean would be assuming perhaps 100,000 times more volume of space for chemical reactions to occur. 

Credit: NOAA

To support his “easy life” insinuations, Comfort cites a scientific paper using the word “dissipation” or “dissipative” 18 times. Comfort also gives us a little thermodynamic mumbo-jumbo centered around the idea of dissipation. He states the following:

What most goes against our intuition is that complex structures can be better dissipaters of energy than simpler ones. Catalysts help you up an energy hill so that you can drop even further down on the other side. Casting our gaze across the entirety of biological evolution, each organism is such an energy hill. It forms only if it is thermodynamically favored—if by pumping energy uphill to create it, even more energy is released. ...A world that also includes warm-blooded cows, munching grass and emitting heat, methane, and fertilizer, is an even better entropy engine; one with tigers is better still. It is the ecosystem that is energetically favored: A lush green Earth teeming with life pulls more heat out of the hot center of the planet and out of the sun, releasing it into cold, dark space, than does, say, Mars. Our biosphere is but a sophisticated icepack for the sun. A giant dissipation engine came on the scene with Homo sapiens. The history of technology is ultimately one of developing ever more powerful methods of extracting energy from the earth and sun: fire, cooking, agriculture, mining, smelting, logging, steam engines. Like a trickle of water flowing downhill, the exact path of neither evolution nor culture is predetermined—only the overall trend. Thus, neither art, nor war, nor NASCAR, nor smart phones were inevitable, but all can be seen as work done by the human entropy engine. In this light, our dissipative tendencies are not an aberration, but thermodynamically required.

As some type of attempt to explain the origin of life and increasingly complex biology, this thermodynamic twaddle is a complete bust, and we can laugh at the loopy statement, “Our biosphere is but a sophisticated icepack for the sun.” The term dissipation is defined as “squandering of money, energy, and resources.” Such a concept does nothing to explain biological organization. If some chemicals become organized into a life form, that is the opposite of dissipation. Far from helping us out in regard to the origin of life, the second law of thermodynamics just gives a reason for thinking that such a thing is all the more unlikely. The second law of thermodynamics says entropy or disorder always increases as times goes on. If we have life appearing and becoming ever more organized, that is a trend that is disfavored (but not prohibited) by the second law of thermodynamics, rather than something favored by it. Far from being thermodynamically favored, each increase in biological order is thermodynamically disfavored.  Similarly, each step you take up a stairs is disfavored (but not prohibited) by the law of gravity.

You can summarize the second law of thermodynamics like this: it likes anything that involves a dissipation or dispersion of heat, but doesn't like anything that involves a concentration of heat.  Because life forms are a concentration of heat, they are thermodynamically disfavored.  Things that are thermodynamically favored are things like a fire burning out, a hot object cooling down, and the sun eventually burning out. 

The idea that hydrothermal vents would have made the origin of life likely is busted in this statement by origin-of-life scientist Nick Lane:

Deep ocean hydrothermal vents are the systems most likely to have given rise to life. These far from equilibrium systems do at least favour the production of organic molecules, the biomass that makes up cells, but the level of self-organisation and dynamism required to get from cell matter to living cells is so great that we're in no position to specify the probability of life arising even in the most favourable environment.

Comfort seems to favor the “easy life” hypothesis, which claims that the origin of life was for some reason inevitable or all-but-inevitable. There are many reasons for thinking that such an idea is not correct. The main reasons are all of the difficulties in explaining the giant leap in complexity, information and organization involved in moving from non-life to even the simplest living thing.

Another reason for rejecting the “easy life” hypothesis is that despite more than 65 years of laboratory research, no one has been able to artificially create life in a laboratory. If it were true that the origin of life was thermodynamically favored, then it wouldn't be too hard to create an origin-of-life experiment which produced life from non-life.

Still another reason for rejecting the “easy life” hypothesis is the failure of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Life). If the origin of life was somehow thermodynamically favored or all-but-inevitable, then the whole galaxy would be teeming with life, and odds might have favored searching for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. But after decades of effort checking many thousands of sun-like stars, no such signals have been found.

Still another reason for rejecting the “easy life” hypothesis is that such an idea implies that life would have originated on Earth many times. If it was “all but inevitable” that life would originate, there should have been many separate origins of life. But the total number of times in which life has naturally originated on our planet seems to be no greater than 1. All earthly life uses the same genetic code. We see no organisms using a different genetic code. But imagine if life had independently originated multiple times on Earth. Then we would see various types of life that each used a different genetic code.

People sometimes argue that if there had been a second origin-of-life on Earth, then life based on that second origin would have been gobbled up by whichever life appeared first. But that's not a good argument. Imagine if these two things happened:

3,700,000,000 years ago: life originates using one genetic code, resulting in Biosphere 1

3,600,000,000 years ago: life has a separate origin using a different genetic code, resulting in Biosphere 2

In this case would the organisms of Biosphere 1 just destroy the organisms of Biosphere 2 through predation? No, since they both would use a separate genetic code, they would be incompatible.  The organisms of Biosphere 1 would not be able to consume the organisms of Biosphere 2 – or, if an organism of Biosphere 1 ate an organism of Biosphere 2, it would not find it nutritious, because it would be using an alternate chemistry. So rather than Biosphere 2 disappearing because Biosphere 1 had a head start, the two biospheres would both exist. 

There is no evidence of a second biosphere, and life seems to have not naturally originated on our planet more than once. Such a thing argues strongly against the "easy life" claim that the origin of life was inevitable or almost inevitable. 

Postscript: It is inaccurate for Comfort to be claiming that certain models posit that the origin of life was inevitable. While some of the authors of the papers that he references may have made optimistic statements about the origin of life, neither a mathematical model nor any set of equations could ever show the origin of life was likely.  There is no way to put "life" or "a living cell" on the right side of an equation. You could in theory have an experiment or a computer simulation that might show a likely origin of life, but none of the papers that he references involves such a thing. 

If a person tries to appeal to human beings or some other life form as a superior agent of heat dissipation, and then tries to suggest that such things are likely on the grounds of the second law of thermodynamics, such a person is committing a kind of fallacy like the fallacy in the reasoning below:

"The law of the wind is a kind of law of dispersion.  Wind likes to scatter things far apart. So the wind would bring various things together to make bombs. Because those bombs would be really good at dispersion, at scattering things far apart."

This reasoning is fallacious. The "law of dispersion" followed by the wind is not precognitive or intelligent. Such a law is too dumb and short-sighted to first bring things together because this will later eventually serve some goal of causing a high degree of blowing things apart.  Similarly, the second law of thermodynamics will act in a way that is completely short-sighted and lacking in any foresight, intelligence or precognition. It makes no sense to postulate that such a law will create things of concentrated heat and low entropy (living things) because such things might eventually engage in dissipation effects that result in heat dissipation and higher entropy.  Life forms are a concentration of heat, and there is no concentration of heat that is favored by the second law of thermodynamics.  

"Easy life" theorists sometimes cite the work of Jeremy England, an MIT Professor. A Harvard professor says, "Jeremy’s work represents potentially interesting exercises in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics of simple abstract systems," but says that any claims it is has to do with biology or the origin of life is "pure and shameless speculation." 

After quite a few absurdly immodest articles have appeared about his work, England seems to have got more modest. "I would not say I have done anything to investigate the 'origin of life' per se," he now says. He says, "If, when you say 'life,' you mean stuff that is as stunningly impressive as a bacterium or anything else with polymerases and DNA, my work doesn't yet tell us anything about how easy or difficult it is to make something that complex, so I shouldn't speculate about what we'd be likely to find elsewhere than Earth." 

Do the “Easy Life” Guys Want 8 Billion Bucks for Metaphysical Reassurance?

On the Ars Technica website, there is a very detailed and lucid explanation of NASA plans to search for life on Europa, a moon of the planet Jupiter. The mission described is fascinating, but it may be a case of people who want to spend 8 billion dollars to reassure themselves that their dubious philosophical assumptions are correct. The mission seems to be all about proving an “easy life” hypothesis, one which seems to be very unlikely to be true from a purely scientific standpoint.

Europa is believed to be covered with a thick layer of ice, but it is believed that deep below that ice is a watery ocean. The plan is to land a robot probe on the icy surface of Europa. The probe will then drill down into the ice, looking for signs of life. Advanced plans for searching for life on Europa have always looked like the plan shown in the NASA visual below. Under such plans a probe would release something that drills down through the ice, and makes contact with the ocean below.

The best way to search for life on Europa (credit: NASA)

When I read the Ars Technica article, I was expecting to hear about a mission such as this, one that would somehow make contact with Europa's ocean underneath its ice. But the article did not describe such a mission. It merely described a mission that would drill down a little into the ice, and look for signs of life inside the ice.

There are two reasons why such a mission seems like a gigantic boondoggle that will almost certainly fail. The first and lesser reason is that even if life had evolved in an ocean underneath Europa's thick icy layer, it is unlikely that signs of such life would pass up all the way through such a layer of ice. That ice is believed to be between 15 and 25 kilometers thick (10 to 15 miles thick). It seems unlikely that any type of organism could survive a journey through such a thick layer of ice.

The second and better reason why such a mission seems very unlikely to succeed is that the chance of life appearing in an ocean of Europa seems extremely low. To calculate this chance, we must consider all of the insanely improbable things that seemed to be required for life to originate from non-life. It seems that to have even the most primitive life originate, you need to have an “information explosion.” Even the most primitive microorganism known to us seems to need a minimum of more than 200,000 base pairs in its DNA (as discussed here).

Scientists have been knocking their heads on the origin-of-life problem for decades, and have made little progress. The origin of even the simplest life seems to require fantastically improbable events. Protein molecules have to be just-right to be functional. It has been calculated that something like 10⁷⁰ random trials would be needed for a functional protein molecule to appear, and many such protein molecules are needed for life to get started. And so much more is also needed: cells, self-replicating molecules, a genetic code that is an elaborate system of symbolic representations, and also some fantastically improbable luck in regard to homochirality.

Facts such as these are troubling to those who believe in a random, purposeless universe. To such people, it would be embarrassing to have to concede that our planet seems to have been blessed by an astonishingly improbable set of lucky events that got life started. So such people often advance a kind of counter-thesis: what we may call the idea of “easy life.” The “easy life” hypothesis maintains that we didn't get lucky, because given the right ingredients and chemicals, life will inevitably appear. Such thinking is perhaps rather like the daughter's thinking in this conversation:

Mother: Why are you leaving us and heading 2000 miles to Hollywood? The chance of you becoming a star is one in a million.

Daughter: No, it is inevitable that I will become the world's greatest starlet.

When you are faced with a mathematical reality that something that you want to happen is very unlikely to happen, it is very effective psychologically to “cross out” this troubling improbability by maintaining that the thing is not unlikely at all, but instead has a probability of 100%.

In the case of the proposed Europa mission, we have a mission that we might describe as “Desperately Seeking Easy Life.” Some people pitching such a mission want very much for their “easy life” hypothesis to be proven, and they are asking for 8 billion dollars of taxpayer funds so that they can achieve this metaphysical reassurance, and say to themselves, “I'm so relieved – Earth wasn't so lucky!” It's basically the kind of “give me lots of money so I can be reassured about my assumptions” thing that would go on if a fundamentalist group were to ask for millions of taxpayer dollars to fund projects digging underground looking for Noah's ark.

Looking at the probability of life arising by pure chance in Europa's ocean, a purely chemical and biological assessment must rate the probability as being extremely low. Now it is true that there may have been some additional factor involved in the origin of life on Earth. Perhaps life got started here through the action of some divine being or the action of extraterrestrial visitors. But while such a higher power may have acted to spur the start of life on many planets in our galaxy, the chance of such a higher power working to create life in some buried ocean underneath 20 kilometers of ice seems much smaller. So even if we throw in the possibility of some additional power helping life appear in our galaxy, it still seems unlikely that life would exist in Europa's ice-buried ocean, given all of the fantastically improbable things that have to happen for life to appear from non-life.

The proposed Europa mission seems like a fantastically expensive “shot in the dark” that is very unlikely to succeed. Even if some hint of life were to appear, it might well be some ambiguous signal like the one produced by the 1976 Viking mission to Mars. A mission putting cameras down into Europa's ocean might conceivably yield fascinating footage of swimming creatures. But a mission drilling only a little into the ice (like the currently proposed mission) would merely yield some numerical data that might be of interest only to scientists. Such data probably would still be subject to debate, and would be unlikely to give a final decisive answer as to whether life exists on Europa.

We don't need the Europa mission because there are other ongoing scientific research programs that can be used to test the “easy life” hypothesis. One such program is the search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, with a price tag a tiny fraction of the proposed Europa mission. If the “easy life” hypothesis is true, we would expect such searches to be successful before long. (Their failure so far despite thousands of hours of searching time may be a strong indication that the “easy life” hypothesis is not correct.)

Another such program is the search for atmospheric signs of life from planets revolving around distant stars. If the origin of life is easy, and life is all over the galaxy, we can expect that soon our space instruments will start showing up by-products of life (such as abundant oxygen) in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets.

So an advocate of the “easy life” hypothesis cannot claim that the Europa mission is essential to test such a hypothesis, as the hypothesis will be tested by other programs searching outside of our solar system. 

Postscript:  The selling point constantly made for SETI outside of our solar system is: there are so many planets where life might have appeared, so eventually we'll find something. But that argument cannot be used whenever you are talking about searching for life on one particular moon or planet. Think of it this way. Investing in some telescopic search of many stars (or a radio search of many stars) is like buying two big stacks of lottery tickets. But sending a robot mission to look for life on one moon or planet is like buying a single lottery ticket, and just as unlikely to pay off.  8 billion dollars is way too high to pay for a lottery ticket.