Shortfalls of the Theory Called Cosmic Ancestry

Panspermia is an old theory of the origin of life. Panspermia is simply the theory that earthly life originated when life came from outer space. Early advocates of the theory suggested that life may have come to Earth when spores drifted through interstellar space. Later advocates of the theory would sometimes suggest that perhaps comets brought life to Earth. 

I can understand some mathematical reasons why someone might be a little attracted to a theory of panspermia. Let us imagine that the probability of life appearing from some accidental combination of chemicals is 1 in X per billion years per planet, where X is some number such as a trillion. If we imagine that life could have appeared on any of a 100 billion planets in our galaxy, and somehow found its way to Earth, then the improbability of life appearing on Earth might be greatly reduced. For example, if X is a trillion, and there are 100 billion planets in our galaxy where life might have arisen, then the chance of life eventually ending up on Earth (through some cosmic migration) might be much less than 1 in a trillion.

Unfortunately, a realistic estimate of the chance of life appearing from chemicals due to merely accidental processes will result in a probability estimate very, very many orders of magnitude smaller than 1 in a trillion. A more realistic estimate would be something on the order of 1 in 10¹⁰⁰⁰, where 10¹⁰⁰⁰ is 10 followed by about a thousand zeroes. With a probability that low, it doesn't help very much if you imagine that life might come from somewhere else in our galaxy. Such an idea might reduce the unlikelihood by 100 billion times, but when you have a likelihood such as 1 in 10¹⁰⁰⁰ that means very little. A probability of 1 in 10¹⁰⁰⁰ increased by 100 billion times is still a way-too-small number such as 1 in 10⁹⁹⁰.

A theory of panspermia has long been presented at the website www.panspermia.org. In this well-organized site with quite a few pages, we have a theory that is called Cosmic Ancestry. At the start of a page introducing the theory, we are told this:

“Cosmic Ancestry is a new theory pertaining to evolution and the origin of life on Earth. It holds that life on Earth was seeded from space, and that life's evolution to higher forms depends on genetic programs that come from space.”

Oops, we are getting a sign right at the beginning that Cosmic Ancestry is on the wrong track. The idea that the appearance of higher forms of life can be explained by “genetic programs” is wrong. DNA (consisting of genes) does not contain any program or algorithm for making an organism. DNA is not a blueprint or a recipe specifying the overall structure of an organism. DNA does not specify how to make any of the organs of an organism, and does not even specify how to make any of the cell types of an organism. DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information such as the polypeptide sequences (chains of amino acids) used by proteins. Massimo Pigliucci (mainstream author of numerous scientific papers on evolution) has stated  that "old-fashioned metaphors like genetic blueprint and genetic programme are not only woefully inadequate but positively misleading." Debunking the idea of DNA as a program consisting of algorithms, biologist Denis Noble states the following:

"No complete algorithms can be found in the DNA sequences. What we find is better characterised as a mixture of templates and switches. The ‘templates’ are the triplet sequences that specify the amino acid sequences or the RNA sequences."

The myth that DNA is some kind of blueprint or recipe for making organisms (or a program or set of programs for making organisms) is something I call the Great DNA Myth. This myth was spread by orthodox Darwinists soon after DNA was discovered, because such thinkers needed such an idea to bolster their boasts that an explanation for the origin of species had been discovered. On pages such as this one, the Cosmic Ancestry site expresses great skepticism about the main explanatory claims of Darwinism. But the source of the Cosmic Ancestry theory seems to have swallowed hook, line and sinker one of the biggest myths peddled by Darwinists, the myth that there are genetic programs that specify the structures of organisms. 

On the same introductory page, we have some information that is not fully accurate:

"Starting in the 1970s, British astronomers Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe rekindled interest in panspermia. By careful spectroscopic observation and analysis of light from distant stars they found new evidence, traces of life, in the intervening dust. They also proposed that comets, which are largely made of water-ice, carry bacterial life across galaxies and protect it from radiation damage along the way. One aspect of this research program, that interstellar dust and comets contain organic compounds, has been pursued by others as well. It is now widely accepted that space contains the 'ingredients' of life." 

It is not at all true that Hoyle and Wickramasinghe found "traces of life" in outer space. Although astronomers such as Carl Sagan kept telling us that "the stuff of life is everywhere," there was no sound basis for such claims. There are virtually no signs of building blocks of life in outer space. The building blocks of life are proteins, which have never been discovered in outer space. The building blocks of proteins (what can be called building blocks of the building blocks of life) are twenty types of amino acids used by living things. None of the twenty amino acids used by living things has been discovered in space, other than the simplest amino acid, glycine (which was not found in space while Sagan lived). None of the nucleosides or nucleotides that make up DNA or RNA has ever been found in space. 

If life came here from outer space, how did it get here? On the page "Comets: The Delivery System," the Cosmic Ancestry site offers an answer of comets.  This is not a terribly plausible theory, given that any life existing in a comet would be likely to be destroyed by the incredible violence of the comet striking the Earth, an event with almost as much kinetic energy as an asteroid collision. The site seems unwilling to endorse any theory of intelligent visitors from another planet deliberately setting up life or new species here on our planet.  Such a theory (called directed panspermia) would seem to be a more promising approach. But the Cosmic Ancestry site does not seem interested in such an idea. If genetic information had  come to our planet from comets, it is hard to think of any credible path by which such information could have ended up in the genomes of earthly organisms.  If an animal drinks a little water coming from comet, that wouldn't cause some gene from the comet to end up in the animal's DNA. 

On the question of how life first orginated, the Cosmic Ancestry offers the strange answer that life has always existed.  The site states the following:

"Cosmic Ancestry implies, we find, that life can only descend from ancestors at least as highly evolved as itself. And it means, we believe, that there can be no origin of life from nonbiological matter. Without supernatural intervention, therefore, we conclude that life must have always existed."

Such claims are very inconsistent with modern cosmology, which tells us that the universe has not always existed, and that the universe suddenly began about 13 billion years ago in a state of unimaginable heat and density which would have destroyed any life.  Even those cosmologists who believe (with no real justification) that the Big Bang was a Big Bounce (from a previous cycle of the universe) believe that the early universe must have been so fantastically dense and hot that no life could have persisted through the Big Bang. The claim that life has always existed is therefore a credibility issue for the theory of Cosmic Ancestry.

The theory of Cosmic Ancestry seems like one of the less persuasive versions of panspermia. A rather more viable  panspermia theory would be a theory that imagined the intervention of visiting intelligent extraterrestrials.  You can always explain more by imagining some kind of intelligent agency than by imagining blind natural processes.  But even that type of theory (what is called a directed panspermia theory) would have its shortfalls.  You can imagine a million and one visitations by ancient astronauts, but that doesn't explain how a newly fertilized egg is able to grow from a mere speck to become a full-sized human.  Since there are no genetic programs that explain such a thing, the fact of morphogenesis and embryogenesis is the most gigantic shortfall both for orthodox biology and the theory of Cosmic Ancestry. Then there is the reality that the main capabilities and phenomena of the human mind and human memory are not explained by anything in the human brain, contrary to the boasts of today's biologists.  You cannot get around such a shortfall by any theory of "stuff from space." When it comes to explaining consciousness, comprehension and enormously organized systems of coordinated complexity, comets don't cut it. 

Systems this complex are all over the place in biology

Was the Cambrian Explosion Caused by Extraterrestrials?

In his book Darwin's Doubt, Stephen C. Meyer calls our attention to an unexplained anomaly in paleontology. When we examine the fossil record, we don't see fossils appearing in larger and larger sizes, at an even rate of progression between 3 billion years ago and 100 million years ago. Instead, we see relatively little fossil evidence of life prior to the Cambrian era about 500 million years ago. But during the Cambrian era there is a sudden surge of fossils in the fossil record. This sudden blossoming of life during the Cambrian era is known as the Cambrian explosion. The Cambrian explosion is illustrated in the diagram below, from a paper suggesting a prosaic explanation for it. The "known fossil range" lines go back no further than the Cambrian era.

Meyer (who has a PhD from the University of Cambridge) argues that this Cambrian explosion is the result of intelligent design at work in the evolution of life. But there is an alternative to assuming a supernatural hand at work in such a thing. Maybe the Cambrian explosion was caused by extraterrestrials.

We can imagine a hypothetical conversation that could have occurred millions of years ago, aboard an alien spaceship that entered into orbit around our planet.

Xynus: So give me the facts. What is the status of life on this planet?

Zeesin: Our underwater robot probes have confirmed that this planet is an evolutionary dud. There's hardly anything here in the way of life. What a waste of time coming here to this crummy little rock! I told you we should have checked out Alpha Centauri instead.

Xynus: But maybe we can turn this “dud” into a success. What if we were to accelerate the evolution of life on this planet? Maybe we can turn a dull planet into something where intelligence might eventually evolve.

Zeesin: What do you have in mind? Finding some of those dismal organisms in this planet's oceans, and then gene-splicing them to soup up their evolution? That would be a pretty hard chore. You know I don't like to get my four feet wet.

Xynus: No, I have something very different in mind. We can create some species ourselves using our nanotechnology biology lab. We need merely specify some requirements, and the computer will take care of designing the appropriate DNA. We can print out the organisms cell layer by cell layer using our molecular materializer. Then we just dump the newly designed organisms into the oceans of this planet.

Zeesin: Okay, I guess there's nothing much else to do around here.

There are three ages in time when the idea of extraterrestrial intervention might be helpful. The first is the point when the most primitive life developed. Modern science has not yet explained a plausible scenario by which that occurred, partially because of the difficulty of explaining both the origin of a self-replicating molecule and the difficulty of explaining the origin of the genetic code. The second age in time is the Cambrian explosion mentioned here. The third age in time is the time when we saw the emergence of human intelligence. We might call this the “consciousness explosion,” when man seemed to gain in a relatively short span of time (geologically speaking) a variety of subtle mental characteristics such as aesthetic abilities, spirituality, math abilities, language abilities, musical abilities, introspection, and moral reasoning. Accounting for this consciousness explosion is perhaps more difficult than accounting for the Cambrian explosion, given that most of these things are not easy to explain through natural selection, as they are mostly not traits that increase an organism's likelihood of surviving until reproduction.

But there is a barrier to anyone suggesting that some design – either extraterrestrial or supernatural – may have played some role in the origin of life or earthly life or human life. Some scientists have declared that any mention of design in discussing such matters is “not part of science” or “unscientific.” This thought taboo is indefensible. A few examples show very clearly that there is no truth to the idea that “scientists don't consider the possibility of design” when trying to consider causes.

For example, imagine a strange radio signal is received from deep space. If the signal is sufficiently suspicious, a scientist will indeed consider the hypothesis that design was involved, and that the signal may be a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization. Or imagine that some suspicious looking structure (on an asteroid, moon, or planet) is photographed by a space probe. A scientist will indeed consider the hypothesis that design was involved, and that the structure may have been designed by some extraterrestrial expedition that arrived in our solar system. Or suppose a scientist finds some artificial-looking object buried in a geological bed. A scientist will indeed consider the hypothesis that design was involved, and that the structure may have been designed by some human or some extraterrestrial visitor. Any scientist could advance any of these ideas in a scientific paper without fear of being excluded because he had considered some possibility of design.

The notion, therefore, that considering (or arguing for) a possibility of design in discussing the origins of life on earth is unscientific (or not admissible in a science publication) makes no sense. Such claims need to be translated. When a scientist claims that a hypothesis is “not part of science,” what he typically means is that such a hypothesis “is forbidden or should be forbidden to scientists.” When he claims that a particular hypothesis is unscientific, what he typically means is that such a hypothesis is a taboo that violates the tribal norms of the scientific community. Such claims tell us about sociological and cultural restrictions and prohibitions within the scientific community, but usually don't give us any cogent principle as to how our thought should be limited.

New Findings a Boost for Panspermia Theory?

Panspermia is the theory that life on our planet arose from other planets. The most plausible variant of the theory is the hypothesis of directed panspermia, the idea that life was seeded on our planet eons ago by some extraterrestrial intelligence, which may or may not have been robotic. 

Panspermia seems to be a useful concept, because it may help explain something that is otherwise very hard to plausibly explain. The problem with the origin of life is that before you can have anything at all get started from an evolutionary standpoint, a very high level of sophistication has to be reached – in other words, a very high hurdle has to be jumped. This threshold is apparently the simultaneous appearance of a sophisticated genetic code and the existence of self-replicating molecules such as RNA or DNA. There is a severe, unsolved problem of explaining how that happened on the early Earth.

How can the panspermia concept help with that? I can help explain it with an analogy. Imagine you robbed $100,000 from a bank, and wanted to explain your new riches to your girlfriend without raising suspicion. If you told her that you just started playing the lottery yesterday, and won $100,000 on your first try, she would never believe you. But if you told her you had been playing the lottery every day for 10 years, and finally won $100,000, she would be much more likely to buy the story. The panspermia concept has pretty much the same effect. We can help “reduce the miracle” of life appearing (making it seem like not quite so much a miracle) if we imagine that there are billions of planets in our galaxy on which life had an opportunity to arise, and that on one of these life did arise, eventually evolving to some form that then spread the seeds of life throughout the galaxy. The more trials or chances there are for an improbable event to occur, the greater the chance of eventual success.

Let's look at various possible findings that may increase or decrease the plausibility of the panspermia idea.

Things That Might Make Panspermia Look More Likely

Below are some things that may add to the credibility of the panspermia theory.

The existence of abundant planets revolving around other stars. The more planets that exist in our galaxy, the more attractive the idea of panspermia is, because the more it accomplishes the effect of reducing an origin of life “miracle” by increasing the number of trials or chances.

The existence of planets much older than Earth. If there are planets in our galaxy billions of years older than Earth, than panspermia becomes a more attractive theory, because if allows us to say that even if life did not have enough time to naturally arise on Earth four billion years ago, it might have arisen on other planets during a much larger time window spanning billions of years, and then spread to our planet. Also, the earlier that life arose in our galaxy, the more likely that it may have spread to other solar systems.

Possible breakthroughs allowing interstellar travel. If interstellar travel is impossible, then panspermia is ruled out. But if there are breakthroughs that allow interstellar travel, then the idea of panspermia becomes more popular.

Evidence of artificiality in the genetic code. In this paper, some scientists have claimed to find evidence of artificial features in the genetic code. If such claims are ever confirmed, they would give weight to the hypothesis of panspermia (although others might argue that some divine hand was involved).

Things That Might Make Panspermia Look Less Likely

Below are some possible developments that might decrease the credibility of the panspermia theory, making it less likely to be true.

The artificial re-creation of self-replicating molecules in conditions simulating the early Earth. Imagine if scientists were ever to rig up some laboratory setup that mimicked the conditions of our planet four billion years ago. If the scientists were ever able to produce self-replicating molecules such as RNA in such a laboratory setting, that would help show that the origin of life wasn't such an improbable miracle. There would then be much less need for any theory of panspermia.

The artificial re-creation of the genetic code in conditions simulating the early Earth. Again, imagine if scientists were ever to rig up some laboratory setup that mimicked the conditions of our planet four billion years ago. If the scientists were ever able to produce something like the genetic code in such a laboratory setting, that would help show that the origin of life wasn't such an improbable miracle. There would then be much less need for any theory of panspermia.

Things That Would Not Make Panspermia Look More or Less Likely

Below are some possible developments that would not clearly either lend credibility to the panspermia theory, or make it seem less plausible.

The discovery of life on a planet revolving around another star. Imagine if scientists were to find the tell-tale chemical signature of life in some planet revolving around another star. No doubt some would claim that this was proof that life will naturally arise wherever it gets the chance, and that there is therefore no need for a theory of panspermia. But such logic would be incorrect. We would have no idea of whether that life discovered on that distant planet had naturally arisen on that planet, or had been seeded on that planet through the same process imagined by the panspermia theory.

The discovery of life elsewhere in our solar system. Imagine if scientists were to discover life on one of the moons of Jupiter, or in a comet in our solar system. No doubt some would claim that this was proof that life will naturally arise wherever it gets the chance, and that there is therefore no need for a theory of panspermia. But such logic would be incorrect. We have no idea how panspermia might have worked if it occurred billions of years ago. Rather than it involving only a placement of life on our planet, it might have involved a biological seeding of large parts of our solar system, including a large part of our planet's cometary system.

How is the Panspermia Theory Standing Up These Days?

So far, the panspermia theory seems to be holding up quite well. Little has come in recent decades from scientists' attempt to recreate the key components of life in a laboratory setting. When science writers write about such a thing, they usually discuss the Miller experiments, but those experiments occurred way back in the 1950's, and didn't take things very far, producing only some of the building blocks of proteins rather than self-replicating molecules. Attempts to get much farther haven't been very successful. The origin of the genetic code and the first self-replicating molecules is still a gigantic mystery, a mystery that panspermia theorists hope to lessen.

In the past ten years astronomers have discovered more than 1000 extrasolar planets, leading them to conclude there are many millions or billions of planets in our galaxy on which life can evolve. Last week astronomers announced the discovery of five earth-sized planets in a solar system (Kepler-444) that is 11.2 billion years old, almost 7 billion years older than our solar system. That's exactly the type of finding that lends weight to the idea of panspermia. If there were billions of planets for life to evolve five billion years before Earth even existed, that increases the chance that life may have been spreading throughout the galaxy while our solar system was forming; and in such a case some of that life may be the parent of all earthly life.

But it is an open question whether the theory of panspermia eliminates the miracle of the origin of life, or simply makes it seem somewhat less miraculous. There may be some possibilities that still deserve to be called miraculous even if you allow a billion trials and 10 billion years for their occurrence.

The Mathematical Basis for Suspecting Alien Intervention in Earthly Evolution

The History Channel has a regular television series called Ancient Aliens that is devoted to advancing the idea that extraterrestrials may have intervened in human history. This television show is often guilty of laughable leaps of logic. For example, it might show a strange face on an ancient statue, and then show a modern person saying that a face so strange-looking is probably a depiction of an alien. That may seem like good reasoning until you remember that humans have a little thing called imagination, which is a much simpler explanation for a strange-looking ancient statue.

But even though Ancient Aliens won't win any logic prizes, there is actually a strong theoretical basis for thinking that aliens may have intervened in earthly evolution. The rationale is not based on direct evidence of such an intervention. It is based instead on probability considerations we can make after analyzing a variety of scenarios relating to the likelihood of intelligent life evolving on a small planet in the habitable zone of a star.

Your basic alien panspermia event

Let's crunch some numbers to throw some light on the issue. Before doing that, I will declare a general intellectual principle worth following: what I may call the principle of improbability minimization. This is the principle that given two explanations, one of which requires us to believe in something with a particular likelihood, and the other requiring a belief in something much more improbable, we should generally prefer the explanation that requires us to believe in the less unlikely occurrence (the event that is not such a huge “long shot”). For example, given the choice between an explanation that requires us to believe in no long shot more unlikely than a 1 in 100 long shot and some other explanation that requires us to believe in a 1 in 1,000,000 long shot, we should minimize the improbability by preferring the explanation that only requires belief in a 1 in 100 long shot.

For example, you notice your lottery playing friend has some additional cash, and you can explain it either by assuming that he won the 3-digit “Daily Numbers” lottery that he regularly plays (with a chance of 1 in 999 of winning), or you can explain it by assuming that he won the Megabucks lottery he also often plays (with a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of winning). Following the principle of improbability minimization, you prefer the first of these two explanations.

Now let's look at different scenarios relating to the likelihood of intelligent life evolving on a small planet like ours, in the habitable zone of a star (the "Goldilocks zone" that is neither too hot nor too cold). The most optimistic possibility is what we can call the “sure thing” hypothesis, which is the assumption that intelligent life will almost always appear on any small planet in a star's habitable zone. If this assumption is correct, then we have absolutely no need to assume that extraterrestrials interfered with evolution on our planet, because such an intervention would have been unnecessary.

But we are far from understanding how the amazing DNA molecule and the language-like genetic code appeared billions of years ago. We also don't understand how natural selection could have produced all the higher human faculties such as inner lives and self-consciousness, as I discuss in this blog post. So it is entirely possible that the probability of intelligent life evolving on a small planet in a habitable zone of a star is very low – perhaps 1 in 1000 or 1 in 100,000 or perhaps as low as 1 in 1,000,000,000,000.

It is under cases like these that the hypothesis of extraterrestrial intervention in earthly evolution becomes very useful. It helps very much in the intellectually desirable goal of improbability minimization. Under some cases, rather than having to believe in a very unlikely event with a probability such as 1 in a 1,000,000, we can believe in a much more probable event with a likelihood such as 1 in 10,000.

Let me give a specific example of what I mean. Let us gloomily suppose that the probability of intelligent life independently evolving on a small planet in the habitable zone is 1 in 1,000,000,000. The number of small planets in the habitable zones of stars in our galaxy is perhaps 10,000,000,000. Under this scenario we would expect that intelligent life would independently evolve on 10 planets in the galaxy. If we don't believe that extraterrestrials interfered in earthly evolution, we have to believe (under this scenario) that our planet lucked out with an event that had a likelihood of only 1 in 1,000,000,000. But imagine we suppose that civilizations on these 10 planets with intelligent life were able to achieve interstellar travel, and that such civilizations (or other civilizations that they helped to make possible) were able to intervene in the evolution of an average of 100 planets, helping intelligent life to evolve on such planets. Then we have a much higher total of planets on which intelligent life appears. In that case the long odds become 100 times shorter. Instead of having to believe in an extremely unlikely 1 in 1,000,000,000 long shot that blessed our planet, we only have to believe in a much less unlikely 1 in 10,000,000 long shot. We have thereby achieved our goal of improbability minimization, and we have made our end assumption much more credible.

The table below shows a range of scenarios concerning the evolution of intelligent life in the galaxy, with each row making a different assumption about how likely it is for intelligent life to independently appear.

Click to Expand

 
Most rows make the assumption that if intelligent life appears on a planet, that life will travel to other planets and assist in the evolution of intelligent life on other planets (the assumption is that an average of 100 planets will be assisted in such a way). To see the effect of improbability minimization, we can compare columns D and E. In almost all cases the odds in column E are about 100 times greater than the odds in column D. I have adjusted the numbers in cells E10, E11, and E12 to avoid having a probability greater than 1.

This table illustrates the general idea that under many different assumptions about the likelihood of intelligent life evolving on small planets, by assuming the possibility of extraterrestrial intervention in our evolution, we can end up with a less farfetched scenario that requires less of a long shot for it to occur. So contrary to the first impression you may have from watching cheesy shows like Ancient Aliens, the idea of extraterrestrial intervention in earthly evolution would actually seem to be quite respectable from the standpoint of mathematical plausibility (which does not necessarily mean it is likely that such an intervention occurred).

It is interesting to compare the principle of improbability minimization I have evoked here with another worthy intellectual principle: the principle of Occam's Razor, the old and honored principle that “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity,” or that the simplest explanation is best. Both are good principles, and in many cases both principles lead us to the same conclusion. For example, if I see an ordinary light in the sky, then the principle of improbability minimization leads me to prefer an explanation that the light is an ordinary airplane rather than an alien spacecraft; and the principle of Occam's razor leads me to the same conclusion. But there are some cases in which the two principles may lead us to different conclusions. I may note the very interesting fact that the simplest explanation sometimes has a much lower probability than a more complicated explanation.

For example, suppose a young wife dies of an apparent heart attack in her backyard, apparently from an electrical shock. We can believe she died from a simple lightning bolt, or we can believe she died because of some complicated murder plot hatched by her husband (perhaps because of some fancy electrocuting gadget rigged up by the husband). In this case the principle of Occam's Razor leads us to favor the lightning bolt explanation – it is simpler and also natural. But the principle of improbability minimization leads us to a different answer. Following that principle, we prefer the murder plot explanation, because we wish to avoid believing in the extremely improbable occurrence of a lightning bolt killing the woman.

The question of alien intervention in earthly evolution is another case where the principle of Occam's Razor and the principle of improbability minimization lead us in different directions. The principle of Occam's Razor tends to lead us to shun the idea that any extraterrestrials intervened in earthly evolution, on the grounds that it involves introducing additional entities. But the principle of improbability minimization may lead us to think warmly of such a hypothesis, on the grounds that the overall chance of intelligent life evolving on Earth is much higher if we concede such an evolution may have received external assistance.