Why Can't Nature Create
Life?
THE BELIEF that life spontaneously generated from nonlife has dominated the history of man's quest for an answer to his origin.1 And yet as popular as this belief has been through the centuries, it came under growing attack soon after the Renaissance in the 1500s. Up to this time, philosophy had guided the tenor of human thought. But, with the advent of science, a small group of thinkers began to systematically investigate the reproduction and life cycle of living things. These were men whose beliefs were based not on philosophy, but rather on the results of actual experiments they performed.2
Prior to the Renaissance, human thought regarding origins was focused either upon God or an intuitive, mechanistic mysticism that supposed that the motion of physical matter had in some way created the life existing on earth. But the advent of science brought a third focus whose basis for belief was neither Holy Writ nor biased thought, but rather the logical conclusions of empirical fact. When scientists working in the field of biology pursued their investigations into life's origin, they continued to draw the same conclusion after numerous and repeated observations. As they studied many different kinds of life forms, the repeating conclusion came to be known and accepted as the "law of biology," namely, that "life comes from other life."3
This law asserted that there is something special and distinctive about life; it has a peculiar quality, a unique attribute. This special trait was identified only with living things. If you wanted life, you needed other life to get it. Life could only come from other life. This was believed for a simple reason: It's what everyone observed. It was an experimental truth, and yet, despite the scientific warrant for such a law, it clearly stood in sharp contrast to the philosophical impetus that had driven large numbers to believe that life could be spontaneously generated.
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If one wants life, he or she can only get it from other life. This is true in a park, on a farm, or in a laboratory. What's startling is how many people are unaware that it's still true. Despite all that one hears and reads, no one has ever produced life from nonlife. You and I may have come across a story on radio or TV, or an article in a magazine or journal that communicates the distinct impression that at one time scientists produced life of some kind in a test tube, i.e., from chemicals, but such impressions — though even "intuitive" for some — are simply untrue. No one anywhere has ever created life from chemicals. And although you may have heard that it was done somewhere, or may be thinking of something you've read that you feel proves the opposite, it simply isn't so. Neither can it ever be so.
The Importance of "Information"
All experiments that have ever been done to create life fall into two categories: those that start with life and those that don't. If you start with life and get life, it doesn't count because everyone knows that life makes life. But when it's tried without life, we don't succeed, because we can't succeed.
Accidental miracles and inevitable assembly are romantic ideas, but neither is true. Modern scientific insights into the nature and origin of biological assemblies effectively outlaw self-organization of the kind needed to create life.4 There are times when nature can and does form structures, just like winter can make snowflakes. But nature can't create life any more than a snowflake can survive the heat of summer. The reason is that Mother Nature is impotent, i.e., she loses more than she wins. What does nature lose? Scientists call it "information," and it resides, among other things, in an observer's overall description of a biological structure.5
The greater the complexity of the living object, the greater is the information necessary to describe it — and we bring our own complexity to the process of observation. Recent scientific work has shown that this fact is quite important, because an observer and the object he describes are separate components of a common system (our world).6 New scientific laws teach that the information present in an observers description within the universe (for example, a living or fossil object) has meaning for the entire system. The new laws indicate that the information within an observer's overall description of a living object is as much a characteristic of the object as it is of the system in which the object resides.7
The scientific concept of information is a difficult one to discuss, yet it is vital if we are to understand life's origin. The concept is also fundamental to a true understanding of the physical laws governing the universe. The reason is that each one of these laws is nothing more than our description of how the universe and everything in it behave for us. Our perception of physical reality is what is real, and the only things we can logically show to be physically real are the things we are able to observe (directly or indirectly measure).
In the last analysis, natural law is our description of what we observe
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the behavior of things in the universe to be. Information is thus common to our description and to natural law. It is the umbilical cord that ties us, the observer, to the placenta of physical reality. Information is something that intelligence produces, nature loses, and life uses to assemble its parts in the process of reproduction. Moreover, vast quantities of information were utilized by the source of life at the time the first living object was created. Scientific evidence now indicates that this "source" was not nature.8
In terms of a simple yet descriptive picture, the calculations show that nature's seeds fall through the holes in her evolutionary purse faster than she's able to gather them up. That is, on average, physical systems lose information with the passage of time. If only natural processes are at play, then on average the complexity of physical structures should decrease and not increase with the passing of time. Yet when we examine the fossil record we do not see complexity decreasing; we instead see it increasing.
The New Generalized Second Law of Thermodynamics indicates that the production of information evidenced by the progression of increased fossil complexity did not arise from natural processes. These processes can, of course, degrade previously living forms into fossils, but they cannot be the womb from which these life forms originate. Were we to suppose that the properties of physical matter produced and sustained the systematic growth in biological complexity that we see in the fossil record, then we will have prioritized intuition over insight. The biological structures that nature destroys cannot originate from her processes because on average these processes destroy information. The limitations of natural processes are further discussed in Appendix 4. Were we to accept the claim that natural laws explain life on earth, then faith must supercede fact.
Can Life Be Made in a Test Tube?
Biochemists who do avant-garde work in laboratories routinely make bits and pieces of special chemicals that are found in living cells.9 But they don't make life. Even so, it's easy to get excited when one looks through a microscope at these tiny chemical wonders. At first glance, the bits and pieces of some of the chemicals appear to multiply in ways that give the appearance of life.10 Thus, these chemicals are reported by some to resemble fragments of a tiny part of a living cell. Another reason for excitement is that some have thought that a portion of the chemicals may actually be a piece of life's protein.11
The questions we need to ask are: Do the fragments actually qualify as life? And, are the look-alike chemicals really protein? The truthful answer to both questions is no. When we hear about test-tube babies, the experiments involve fertilizing an egg with a sperm.12 But the egg and sperm come from other life. Therefore, it's a situation where life makes life. Or else we may read and hear about how RNA — the "template" on which life's protein is assembled — has been made to multiply in a test tube. Some claim this is
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how life may have started. But the chemistry used in these RNA experiments is of two kinds: one that starts with life, and another that doesn't. The first kind doesn't count, and the second one produces chemical structures that contain essentially no information.
When enzymes (life) are used (in the first kind of RNA experiment), they contain information that can control which chemical goes where. Thus, it's possible for a string of chemicals to strategically grow in length, much like linking together words by selecting different letters of the alphabet. But if the enzymes are absent, what are produced are a number of look-alike fakes similar to random splotches that resemble letters, but which really are not. When examined, their length is pitifully short, they are structurally impoverished, and they are biologically sterile. Why? Because they contain virtually no information.
Did Life Self-Organize?
Prigogine won the 1977 Nobel Prize for mathematically showing that under certain conditions physical matter can undergo a change from a disorganized state to one of greater organization.13 He later inferred (without proof) that life could have come into being this way; and he also failed to identify any source for the information that it required.14 Furthermore, in discussions regarding the question of life, his equations do not account for the vast magnitude of information existing within biological structures, which enables them to coherently function as efficient oxygen-burning organic machines.
Natural combinations are totally inadequate to organize chemical parts to live, and when physical matter alters its distribution in the way described by Prigogine's equations, the overall information contained in the system decreases. This means that whereas local pockets of organization (increased information) are possible in principle they can only occur at the expense of disorganization (information loss) elsewhere in the system. Although scientific data indicates that the universe is about 13 billion years old and 30 billion light-years wide, it nonetheless is too young and too small ever to have produced the information needed to create biological structures.15 Even the simplest of structures contains information whose magnitude far exceeds that of the entire natural universe.16 Thus, rather than explaining life, Prigogine's analysis deepens the mystery.
What about experiments that involve the discharge of electricity through special gases? Has anyone ever tried to make life's protein this way? Did they succeed? Yes, they tried; and no, they failed.17 Lightning can't create life any more than duststorms can make airplanes. For many years people experimented with different kinds of exotic chemicals, and much of this work continues to be in progress even today. The special chemicals chosen for
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the electrical discharge are fragments of material that we find in living cells. In this sense they are biological chemicals.
The things these biochemists produce, however, are no more biotic than the granite used for tombstones. Both are expensive, and yet deader than a doornail. Virtually everything imaginable has been done to the chemicals in an attempt to create a biomolecule. This includes massaging them with energy, mixing them with gases, and exposing them to electricity under a variety of special arrangements. But functional biomolecules are chemicals organized to live. They contain information that comes from intelligence, not electricity. The first makes the second, not vice versa.
The Ink of Life
Suppose we find a lengthy story in a newspaper informing us that a hurricane is on its way. The story describes the hurricane's size, when it will arrive, the speed of the wind, and where it will strike. In other words, the page of newspaper contains information. That's because the ink is shaped into letters that in turn are arranged into words. The words are organized into sentences, and these in turn are grouped into paragraphs.
But if the ink were a big blob, there would be no information. It's the way that the ink is organized that creates the story about the hurricane. Likewise with life. It's the way in which the chemicals are organized that creates the material called protein. If the chemicals are uncoded then there is no life. Why? Because life does not consist of the chemicals in a molecule. It consists of the coherent and harmonious interplay among millions of microscopic parts that have been mysteriously organized to live.
To illustrate the point, imagine a tiny elf the size of a flea. Furthermore, imagine that he hops onto a sheet of newspaper and peels off, one by one, every letter on the page. We continue to watch as he throws each of the letters into a barrel. When he's finished, we see that all the letters are in the barrel, so that we're left with a big, white, blank sheet of paper.
Next, the elf proceeds to mix up the letters by repeatedly turning the barrel. Then, he removes the letters from the barrel and — one by one at random — pastes them back onto the otherwise blank sheet of paper. When he's through, the barrel is again empty, and every letter is back on the newspaper page. But this time the letters are helter-skelter, randomly located all over the page. We have a hodge-podge of ink in the form of letters. We have letters, but we don't have any words or sentences, i.e., all the information is gone.
At a distance of twelve feet away, our printed page looks like an ordinary sheet of newspaper. But when we get close, we realize that something is wrong because we can't understand anything. It's all jibberish! Nothing makes sense because there are no words. The story of the newspaper is the story of life. Man-made chemicals no more resemble protein than do confused blobs of ink resemble our hurricane story. The reason is that the story isn't
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the ink, but how the ink is organized. Likewise, life isn't the chemicals but how they are organized.
Making protein-like blobs by passing electricity through gases is akin to pasting random letters on a page. Neither the page nor the blob has information. In the laboratory, materials called amino acids are used as the chemical ink. Experiments are then designed in the hope that these chemicals will coalesce into life's protein. It would be like putting ink bottles on a white bed sheet during a thunderstorm in the hope that lightning may splatter the ink into Einstein's theory of relativity. But Mother Nature won't cooperate. The ink must always splatter into lifeless blobs because the needed information exceeds what nature can obtain from the inorganic universe.15
Were we to pass over the bedsheet in a low-flying airplane, the blobs of disorganized ink would be unreadable. Almost any story could be told in the plane as to what they really mean — just like viewing the disorganized newspaper sheet at twelve feet. But upon landing and examining the bedsheet close up, we would see that the ink was totally disorganized. Living structures contain chemicals organized to live. But the chemicals in the blobs generated by the electrical-discharge experiments are in disarray. What is important is not the chemicals, but rather how the chemicals are organized. Many people wrongly believe that scientists have created life's protein in the laboratory by passing electricity through mixtures of gases. But to identify lifeless chemical blobs with life's protein in this way is the same as calling ink flung by blindfolded monkeys a newspaper.
In many ways, nature is like the little elf who pastes random letters on the page. They both destroy information. Imagine a handwritten, personal letter that has fallen under a dripping faucet. The ink has smeared and only bits and pieces of the letter are legible, for the dripping water has slowly washed away much of the ink. Most all of the information is gone.
This illustrates in a simple yet clear way how all natural processes work. Natural processes destroy the way things are organized. And in doing so, they annihilate information. This means that if life evolved on earth at the mercy of natural processes, then the fossil record would show a decrease, not an increase, in the complexity of biological structures. This does not mean that life could not have evolved, but it does mean that if life did evolve, then it did so by a process that included all of the needed information from the very beginning. In other words, if each of the species originated as the issue of the one preceding, then the thermodynamic constraints imposed by the sheer magnitude of the information contained in just one human cell (see Appendix 6) disengage nature as the energizing agent. The reason is that otherwise, thermodynamically speaking, nature becomes the equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.
Chapter Twelve || Table of Contents
1. Hartman H. et.al. eds. Search for the Universal Ancestors (1985) NASA, Washington, DC; Scott. J. The Sciences (1983) 23(6):38 Nov/Dec; Oparin A. The Origin and Initial Development of Life (1968) NASA, Washington, DC May; Bernal J. "Biochemical Evolution":11 in: Kasha M & Pullman B. eds. Horizons in Biochemistry (1962) Academic Press; Schmitt F. Rev. Mod. Phys. (1959) 31(1):5 Jan.
2. Gillispie C. The Edge of Objectivity (1960) Princeton U. Press; Taton R. Reason and Chance in Scientific Discovery (1957) Philosophical Library, NY; Baitsell G. ed. Science in Progress (1947) Sillman Lectures V.6; Mees C. The Path of Science (1946) Wiley, London.
3. Gros F. "Cell Machinery, Transfer of Genetic Information":34 (Part 3) in: Pullman B. & Weissbluth M. eds. Molecular Biophysics (1965) Academic Press, NY.
4. Yockey H. Jour. Theor. Biol. (1981) 91:13.
5. Rich A. The Sciences (1980) 20(8):10 Oct; Elias P. Rev. Mod. Phys. (1959) 31(1):221; Yockey H. ed. Symposium On Information Theory In Biology (1958) Pergamon Press at: Gatlinburg, TN Oct 29-31 (1956). Quastler H. ed. Essays on the Use of Information Theory in Biology (1953) Illinois Univ. Press, Urbana.
6. Wigner E. "Remarks On The Mind-Body Question" I(12):168 in: Wheeler J. & Zurek W. eds. Quantum Theory and Measurement (1983) Princeton Univ. Press.
7. Jaynes E. "Where Do We Stand On Maximum Entropy":96 in: Levine R. & Tribus M. eds. The Maximum Entropy Formalism (1981) MIT Press, Cambridge, MA MIT Conference May 2-4 (1978).
8. Yockey H. Jour. Theor. Biol. (1977) 67:377. Thaxton C. et.al. The Mystery of Life's Origin: Reassessing Current Theories (1984) Philosophical Library, NY.
9. Jurnak F. & McPherson A. Biological Macromolecules and Assemblies (1985) Wiley Interscience, NY.
10. Eigen M. et.al. Sci Am. (1981) :88 Apr.
11. Scott J. New Scientist (1981) :153 Jan 15.
12. Gold M. Science 85 (1985) 6(3):26 April.
13. Prigogine I. et.al. Physics Today (1972) 25:23.
14. Prigogine I. From Being to Becoming (1980) Freeman, NY.
15. Discussed in Chapter 13 and Appendix 6
16. Golay M. Proc. IRE (1961) :1378 Sep.
17. Shapiro R. Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth (1985) Macmillan.
