Here is book review by Mike Behe of Paul Davies' "The Fifth Miracle"
in the latest First Things at:
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9906/behe.html
My favourite paragraph is Behe's last:
"The bottom line is that life's origin and meaning remain as elusive as ever,
at least within the (semi -) naturalistic framework of Paul Davies. Yet his
struggle to write a book that sticks to a general-law framework, even
while marveling at life's extravagant information content, makes The Fifth
Miracle a valuable and cautionary example of blinkered thought in action."
Steve
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Books In Review The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and
Meaning of Life
Copyright (c) 1999 First Things 94 (June/July 1999): 42-45.
God...Sort Of
The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of
Life. By Paul Davies. Simon & Schuster. 400 pp. $25.
Reviewed by Michael J. Behe
Paul Davies should need little introduction to readers of First Things. A
theoretical physicist and prolific author, he won the 1995 Templeton Prize
for Progress in Religion. As the title of the address he gave in receiving the
award indicates - "Physics and the Mind of God" (FT, August/September
1995) - he does not hesitate to think about the Deeper Meaning of his
science. The deeper meaning, however, turns out to be a pretty simple
proposition: our universe exhibits the remarkably narrow range of physical
conditions required for life, which makes one suspect that it was
intentionally set up that way. Although straightforward, this reasoning sets
off alarms in many scientists' minds. To his credit Davies ignores this peer
pressure. In his Templeton Prize address he wrote:
To me, the contrived nature of physical existence is just too fantastic for
me to take on board as simply a "given." It points forcefully to a deeper
underlying meaning to existence. Some call it purpose, some design. These
loaded words, which derive from human categories, capture only
imperfectly what it is that the universe is about. But that it is about
something, I have absolutely no doubt.
So far, so good. If a scientist thinks the physical evidence points to a
"contrived" universe, then he should follow the data. The hitch is that
Davies has definite ideas about how this design should be implemented: it
ought to be restricted to the general laws of nature. "I would rather that
nature take care of itself....To me, the true miracle of nature is to be found
in the ingenious and unswerving lawfulness of the cosmos."
Well, we all have our preferences about the way things should be. A
professional scientist, however, is supposed to put aside personal biases as
much as possible and let the facts speak for themselves. Admittedly, Davies
comes by his preference for a self-sufficient universe honestly: as a
theoretical physicist, general laws are what he studies. But in The Fifth
Miracle Davies leaves behind the tidy, simple realm of physics for messy,
complex biology, and grapples with the riddle of the origin of life.
Unfortunately, he attempts to fit square pegs of data into the round holes
of his theory, and they don't quite fit.
A primary topic of the book is the recent discovery of "superbugs," hardy
bacteria that live miles beneath the earth's surface in temperatures over
100oC. They apparently require no sunlight because they metabolize
minerals for food and energy. These exotic creatures have provoked
speculation that life may exist in niches in the solar system once thought to
be hopelessly sterile, such as the interior of Europa, a moon of Jupiter.
Some superbugs are so tough that they might survive a trip through outer
space (say from Earth to Mars) when blasted off a planet by an asteroid
collision. Davies thinks that life might even have spread around the
universe by hitchhiking on meteors. Kicked up by an impact, rocks carrying
frozen superbugs in suspended animation might travel for billions of years
until falling onto some hospitable planet, light years from home. (Davies
rather naively assumes that once microbial life reached another planet,
Darwinian evolution would take over and produce more interesting life
forms.)
This scenario can be granted for purposes of argument. The problem is
that, as Davies realizes, it doesn't explain the origin of life - where the very
first cell came from - so it has "zero philosophical significance." At best it
might say something about the early natural history of life.
What Davies thinks would have deep significance is the discovery of life
that had arisen independently, as evidenced by alien biochemistry. His
reasoning goes something like this: one accidental origin of life would be
really tough, so two independent origins would be essentially impossible,
and would show that life was intended in a "biofriendly universe." Davies is
clearly excited at the prospect of truly alien life, but I doubt its discovery
would change many minds. The fact is, from all we know of physics and
chemistry, one undirected origin of life already looks impossible. Those
folks who aren't impressed with one origin are unlikely to be impressed by
two.
The problems facing an undirected and purely chemical origin of life have,
of course, been reviewed before, and Davies, outside his area of expertise,
brings nothing fundamentally new to the discussion. He remarks that
"When I set out to write this book, I was convinced that science was close
to wrapping up the mystery of life's origin." But if he had read The
Mystery of Life's Origin by Charles Thaxton, or Origins by Robert
Shapiro, or even pertinent Scientific American articles, he might have
started with a clearer picture of the relentless difficulties. Some of the
unresolved questions that Davies rediscovers include the following: Amino
acids can be made under prebiotic conditions, but a whole lot of interfering
chemicals get made too, so how does one separate the wheat from the
chaff? RNA would be a possible candidate to begin life, but since RNA is a
whole lot harder to make than proteins, where would it have come from?
The genetic code mediates between the two languages of life - proteins and
nucleic acids - but how do mindless processes set up "codes" and
"languages"?
Like everyone else, Davies has no answers to these problems, so he passes
on to the reader whatever speculation has been floated. He recounts the
suggestion by Carl Woese that the code assignments and the translation
mechanism evolved together: "Initially there was only a rough - and - ready
code, and the translation process was very sloppy." More likely that the
thinking is very sloppy. Evolving code assignments together with the
translation apparatus is like pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps, instead
of all at once, a little bit on the right side then a little on the left. Davies
also cites a recent paper that compares the genetic code to energy levels of
atomic nuclei, but only to concede that the "correspondences may be
purely coincidental." He even trots out Sidney Fox's proteinoids and Cairns
- Smith's clay crystal life - ideas that are fifteen to twenty - five years old
and have led nowhere.
But Davies doesn't really believe any of these conjectures himself. Early in
the book he says he has now concluded that life's origin is indeed
mysterious: "This gulf in understanding is not merely ignorance about
certain technical details, it is a major lacuna....My personal belief, for what
it is worth, is that a fully satisfactory theory of the origin of life demands
some radically new ideas."
Using language reminiscent of William A. Dembski (see "Science and
Design," FT, October 1998) he writes that "Living organisms are
mysterious not for their complexity per se, but for their tightly specified
complexity....In short, how did meaningful information emerge
spontaneously from incoherent junk?"
As a matter of principle Davies balks at the obvious hypothesis of specific
design. "Science takes as its starting point the assumption that life wasn't
made by a god or supernatural being: it happened unaided and
spontaneously, as a natural process." The notion of God pushing molecules
around strikes him as distasteful. But it would pass muster with science, he
thinks, for God (or whoever it is - Davies doesn't like the word "God") to
make "biofriendly laws" at the beginning and then butt out, allowing life to
develop on its own. So from his perspective the key is to find a natural law
or laws that would produce life.
This limitation leads Davies into contradictions. He explicitly says that laws
cannot contain the recipe for life because laws are "information - poor"
while life is "information - rich."
Can [specified complexity] be the guaranteed product of a deterministic,
mechanical, law - like process, like a primordial soup left to the mercy of
familiar laws of physics and chemistry? No, it couldn't. No known law of
nature could achieve this.
Nonetheless, boxed in by his presuppositions, he proposes that there may
be a new type of "law," an information - generating law for which we have
no evidence. He thinks the law might be something along the lines of Stuart
Kauffman's complexity theory, where systems can self - organize. Davies
acknowledges that Kauffman's ideas have met with considerable skepticism
and have little evidence to support them. He also insightfully points out
that with Kauffman's ideas there is "a deeper problem of a conceptual
nature." "Life is actually not an example of self - organization. Life is in
fact specified i.e., genetically directed - organization." Still, and without
countering his own objections, in the end he declares that complexity
theory a la Kauffman might be the way to go. One gets the feeling that he
simply needed a stopping point.
The bottom line is that life's origin and meaning remain as elusive as ever,
at least within the (semi -) naturalistic framework of Paul Davies. Yet his
struggle to write a book that sticks to a general-law framework, even
while marveling at life's extravagant information content, makes The Fifth
Miracle a valuable and cautionary example of blinkered thought in action.
Michael J. Behe is Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University.
[...]
Updated: 13 July 1999
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"Our hypothetical nucleic acid synthesis system is therefore analogous to
the scaffolding used in the construction of a building. After the building has
been erected the scaffolding is removed, leaving no physical evidence that
it was ever there. *Most of the statements in this section must therefore be
taken as educated guesses.* Without having witnessed the event, it seems
unlikely that we shall ever be certain of how life arose" (Voet D. & Voet
J.G., "Biochemistry", John Wiley and Sons: New York NY, 1995, p23, in
Ashton J.F., ed., "In Six Days: Why 50 Scientists Choose to Believe in
Creation", New Holland: Sydney NSW, Australia, 1999, p165. (emphasis
in original).
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