> Here's how I see it. At some point, life emerges. Yet life is
information
> and where did this information come from? The information-generating
> examples I have seen invoke genetic variation coupled to selection
> (back to Darwin). But all of this presupposes life which itself
> presupposes information. Paul Davies nicely outlines this problem
> and finds that, as a physicist, when he enters the world of molecular
> biology, he finds himself in unfamiliar territory. How did a dumb
> planet make a cell? Planets make mountains, clouds, oceans,
> atmospheres, but a cell?
Paul Davies had the answer, but he dismissed it rather cavalierly in my
opinion, even though by the end of his book he clearly was torn between it
and invoking some form of intelligent intervention. In fact, I found his
book emminently dissatisfying since, after having trashed all the the good
scientific ideas, he had forced himself into a position he clearly did not
want to espouse, and so ended it with no resolution, not even a speculative
one.
In any event, the answer is self-organization: molecular structures, using
the physiochemical laws, are able to form larger, more complex, even
organized structures on their own. For example, heating amino acids in the
absence of water creates polypeptiditic macromolecules with non-random
sequences that are catalytically active; these are called thermal proteins
(many people still use the old term proteinoid). These thermal proteins are
then able to form cellular structures upon rehydration that can convert
sunlight into ATP, create polynucleotides using thermal proteins as
templates, and create polypeptides from polynucleotides. They can also
perform other metabolic reactions, they can grow and they can reproduce.
The information for doing all this comes from the amino acids and the
resulting thermal proteins themselves, from their physiochemical structure
and function. Davies couldn't bring himself to accept that the answer could
be so simple, yet in science often the most profound mysteries turn out to
have very simple answers. The secret is that the complexity and organization
of the universe is built up, layer by layer, from simple beginnings that have
the ability to arrange and rearrange themselves in tremendously varied
combinations. In other words, the information for life is already built into
the universe when it first appears.
Kevin L. O'Brien