A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Graham Cairns-Smith (b. 1931) Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Chemistry Department at the University of Glasgow Web Amazon GBS
Biology has become, quite simply, the study of the causes and effects of evolution, and the question of the origin of life is, first, the question of the origin of evolution. Seven Clues to the Origin of Life (1985) p.1
The optimism persists in many elementary textbooks. There is even, sometimes, a certain boredom with the question; as if it was now merely difficult because of an obscurity of view, a difficulty of knowing now the details of distant historical events.
What a pity if the problem had really become like that! Fortunately it hasn't. It remains a singular case (Sherlock Holmes' favourite kind): far from there being a million ways in detail in which evolution could have got under way, there seems now to have been no obvious way at all. The singular feature is in the gap between the simplest conceivable version of organisms as we know them, and components that the Earth might reasonably have been able to generate. This gap can be seen more clearly now. It is enormous. Seven Clues to the Origin of Life (1985) p.4
Now I cannot deny all these possibilities: life on the Earth may be a miracle, or a freak, or an alien infection. And I agree that the confidence was misplaced that supposed in the fifties that the answer to the origin of life would appear in some footnote to the answer to the question of how organisms work. Something much more will be needed. Something odd. Seven Clues to the Origin of Life (1985) p.8
It may seem hardly surprising that no one has ever actually made a self-reproducing machine, even though Von Neumann laid down the design principles more than 40 years ago. You can imagine a clanking robot moving around a stock-room of raw components (wire, metal plates, blank tapes and so on) choosing the pieces to make another robot like itself. You can show that there is nothing logically impossible about such an idea: that tomorrow morning there could be two clanking robots in the stock-room...(I leave it as a reader' home project to make the detailed engineering drawings.)
There is nothing clanking about E. coli; yet it is such a robot, and it can operate in a stock-room that is furnished with only the simples raw components. Is it any wonder that E. coli's message tape is long? (If you remember the paper equivalent would be about 10 kilometres long.)
Is it any wonder that no free-living organisms have been discovered with message tapes below '2 kilometres'? Is it any wonder that Von Neumann himself, and many others, have found the origin of life to be utterly perplexing?' Seven Clues to the Origin of Life (1985) p.14-5
Finally, and again casting back to chapter 2, it is not just the sheer size of even the smallest Libraries; it is not just that nucleotide units are rather complex in themselves, and rather difficult to join together (because Nature is on the side of keeping them apart); it is not just the need for enzymes, here, there and everywhere; it is not just that enzymes are of little use unless they have been made properly; it is not just that ribosomes are so very sophisticated -- and look as though they would have to be to do their job; it is not just such questions relating to the particular kind of life that we are familiar with. There seems also to be a more fundamental difficulty. Any conceivable kind of organism would have to contain messages of some sort and equipment for reading and reprinting the messages: any conceivable organism would thus seem to have to be packed with machinery and as such need a miracle (or something) for the first of its kind to have appeared. Seven Clues to the Origin of Life (1985) p.30
There are many thoughtful and knowledgeable people, nowadays, who don't understand the origin of life. This is in spite of a 'big picture' provided by a theory known as 'chemical evolution'. Like the phlogiston theory, 'chemical evolution' looks good from a distance, and there is a common-sense about it. But, to my mind, like the phlogiston theory, it fails to carry through an initial promise: it fails at the more detailed explanations. Seven Clues to the Origin of Life (1985) p.34
I will grant that the path of chemical evolution seems sensible and in the right direction. There are a few obvious puddles to be avoided and some of the flagstones are a bit uneven, perhaps. but there is the promise of an easy walk up to the foothills of the mountain that we can see straight ahead of us. It is a promise that is unfulfilled. The trouble with this path is that it leads us toward, but it does not lead us to expect, a sudden near-vertical cliff-face. Suddenly in our thinking we are faced with the seemingly unequivocal need for a fully working machine of incredible complexity: a machine that has to be complex, it seems, not just to work well but to work at all. Seven Clues to the Origin of Life (1985) p.37
But if we take this as the kind of chance that we are talking about, then we can say that the odds against a successful unguided synthesis of a batch of primed nucleotide on the primitive Earth are similar to the odds against a six coming up every time with 140 throws of a dice. Is that sort of thing too much of a coincidence or not?
There are 6 possible outcomes from throwing a dice once; 6 x 6 from a double throw; 6 x 6 x 6 from a triple throw; and 6 multiplied by itself 140 times from 140 throws. This is a huge number, represented approximately by a 1 followed by 109 zeros (i.e. ~ 10109). This is the sort of number of trials that you would have to make to have a reasonable chance of hitting on the one outcome that represents success. Throwing one dice once a second for the period of the Earth's history would only let you get through about 1015 trials: so you would need about 1094 dice. That is far more than the number of electrons in the observed Universe (estimated at around 1080).
Of course you might argue that in practice a synthesis might be carried through in different ways, and that is true, but remember what generous allowances we made in cutting down the actual amount of sheer skill that organic synthesis requires. And remember too that a manufacturing procedure is not usually very forgiving about arbitrary modifications: it all too easily goes off the rails never to recover. This is especially true of chemical processes, where it is usually not good enough to add the acid at the wrong time or throw away the wrong solution, or even use an ultraviolet lamp of the wrong sort. Seven Clues to the Origin of Life (1985) p.47-8
The bit that is not so clear about the eye -and a favourite challenge to Darwin - is how its components evolved when the whole machine will only work when all the components are there in place and working.
Not that this problem is peculiar to the eye. Organisms are full of such machinery, and it is a widely held view that this appearance of having been designed is the key feature of living things. Seven Clues to the Origin of Life (1985) p.58
see also: Stephen Jones
Paul Campos
Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Web
Materialism
is the view that at bottom reality consists of nothing but particles in fields
of force, and that all events are caused solely by the operation of mindless
physical laws. Several things should be noted about this belief. First,
believing in materialism is an act of faith like any other. The ultimate nature
of reality isn't a scientific question, and anyone who expects science to
provide answers regarding such matters doesn't understand either science or
religion. Second, the
debate about whether the world is ultimately a meaningless flux or something
more has been going on for thousands of years. The belief that materialism is a
product of post-Enlightenment thought in general and modern science in
particular is itself a product of historical ignorance.
Materialism's Leap of Faith Rocky Mountain News November 29, 2005 Jun-Yuan Chen
Research Professor Nanjing Institute of
Geology and Palaeontology In China we can criticize
Darwin but not the government. In America you can criticize the government, but
not Darwin. The Wall Street
Journal August 16, 1999 Francis Collins
(b. 1950) Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute Web
Amazon
GBS There were long stretches of DNA in
between genes that didn't seem to be doing very much; some even referred to
these as "junk DNA," though a certain amount of hubris was required
for anyone to call any part of the genome "junk," given our level of
ignorance. The Language of
God (2006) p.111 Nicolaus Copernicus
(1473–1543) Web
GBS My goal is to find the truth in God's majestic creation. Jerry Coyne Professor
of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago Web
Amazon
GBS
AV In science's pecking order,
evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology
than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with
history's inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a
Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike
"harder" scientists, we usually cannot resolve issues with a simple
experiment, such as adding tube A to tube B and noting the color of the mixture.
Of Vice and Men The New Republic April 3 2000 p.27 Truth
be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes,
bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but
beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new
vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn’t
evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most
improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything
about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of
‘like begets like’. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of
quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties.
Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based
on evolution at all. Nature
August 31 2006 p.984 Francis Crick
(1916–2004) Co-discoverer of the structure of DNA,
Nobel laureate 1962, Professor at the Salk Institute Web
Amazon
GBS
AV To produce this miracle of molecular construction all the cell need do is to string together
the amino acids (which make up the polypeptide chain) in the correct order. This is a
complicated biochemical process, a molecular assembly line, using instructions in the form of
a nucleic acid tape (the so-called messenger RNA) which will be described in
outline in Chapter 5. Here we need only ask, how many possible proteins are there? If a particular amino acid sequence was selected by chance, how rare of
an event would that be? This is an easy exercise in combinatorials. Suppose the chain is about two hundred amino
acids long; this is, if anything, rather less than the average length of proteins of all
types. Since we have just twenty possibilities at each place, the number of possibilities is
twenty multiplied by itself some two hundred times. This is conveniently written
20200 and is approximately equal
to 10260, that is a one followed by 260 zeros! This number is quite beyond our everyday comprehension. For comparison, consider the number
of fundamental particles (atoms, speaking loosely) in the entire visible universe, not just
in our own galaxy with its 1011 stars, but in all the billions of galaxies, out to the limits
of observable space. This number, which is estimated to be 1080, is quite paltry by
comparison to 10260. Moreover, we have only considered a polypeptide chain of a rather modest
length. Had we considered longer ones as well, the figure would have been even more
immense. Life
Itself (1981) p. 51-52. An honest man, armed with all the
knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin
of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions
which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. Life
Itself (1981) p.88 Every time I write a paper on the origin of life, I determine I will never write another one, because there is too much speculation running after too few facts.
Life Itself (1981) p.153 I have no doubt, as will emerge
later, that this loss of faith in Christian religion and my growing attachment
to science plays a dominant part in my scientific career, not so much on a
day-to-day basis but in the choice of what I have considered interesting and
important. What
Mad Pursuit (1988) p.11 Biologists must constantly keep in
mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved. It might be
thought, therefore, that evolutionary arguments would play a large part in
guiding biological research, but this is far from the case. It is difficult
enough to study what is happening now. To figure out exactly what happened in evolution
is even more difficult. Thus evolutionary achievements can be used as hints to suggest
possible lines of research, but it is highly dangerous to trust them too much.
What
Mad Pursuit (1988) pp.138-139 Michael Crichton (b.
1942)
Web
Amazon
GBS I sometimes think scientists really don't notice that their colleagues have flaws. But in my experience scientists are very human people: which means that some are troubled, deceitful, petty or vain.
Science
views Media January 25 1999 Briefly
stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an
article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show
business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no
understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong
it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call
these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case,
you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then
turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of
the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you
just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. That is the
Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of
life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you
soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of
falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful
in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is
probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it
almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is
amnesia. Why Speculate
April 26 2002 Most areas of intellectual life have
discovered the virtues of speculation, and have embraced them wildly. In
academia, speculation is usually dignified as theory. Why Speculate
April 26 2002 A wonderful area for speculative
academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor,
but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the
workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the
origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great
stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be
contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these
topics. Why Speculate
April 26 2002 I expected science to be, in Carl
Sagan's memorable phrase, "a candle in a demon haunted world." And
here, I am not so pleased with the impact of science. Rather than serving as a
cleansing force, science has in some instances been seduced by the more ancient
lures of politics and publicity. Some of the demons that haunt our world in
recent years are invented by scientists. Aliens
Cause Global Warming January
17 2003 I want to pause here and
talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called
consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious
development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim
of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid
debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the
consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet,
because you're being had. Let's be clear: the work
of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business
of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who
happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable
by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is
relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great
precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as
consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it
isn't consensus. Period.
Aliens Cause Global Warming January 17 2003 Finally, I would remind you to
notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in
situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of
scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93
million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that
way. Aliens Cause Global
Warming January 17 2003 And so, in this elastic
anything-goes world where science-or non-science-is the hand maiden of
questionable public policy, we arrive at last at global warming. It is not my
purpose here to rehash the details of this most magnificent of the demons
haunting the world. I would just remind you of the now-familiar pattern by which
these things are established. Evidentiary uncertainties are glossed over in the
unseemly rush for an overarching policy, and for grants to support the policy by
delivering findings that are desired by the patron. Next, the isolation of those
scientists who won't get with the program, and the characterization of those
scientists as outsiders and "skeptics" in quotation marks-suspect
individuals with suspect motives, industry flunkies, reactionaries, or simply
anti-environmental nut-cases. In short order, debate ends, even though prominent
scientists are uncomfortable about how things are being done.
Aliens Cause Global Warming January 17 2003 This fascination with computer
models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynmann called it a
disease. I fear he is right.
Aliens Cause Global Warming January 17 2003 In recent years, much has been said
about the post-modernist claims about science to the effect that science is just
another form of raw power, tricked out in special claims for truth-seeking and
objectivity that really have no basis in fact. Science, we are told, is no
better than any other undertaking. These ideas anger many scientists, and they
anger me. But recent events have made me wonder if they are
correct. Aliens Cause
Global Warming January 17 2003 We can take as an example the scientific
reception accorded a Danish statistician, Bjorn Lomborg, who wrote a book called
The Skeptical Environmentalist...The
scientific community responded in a way that can only be described as
disgraceful. In professional literature, it was complained he had no standing
because he was not an earth scientist. His publisher, Cambridge University
Press, was attacked with cries that the editor should be fired, and that all
right-thinking scientists should shun the press... But what are scientists doing
attacking a press? Is this the new McCarthyism-coming from scientists?...Worst
of all was the behavior of the Scientific American, which seemed intent on
proving the post-modernist point that it was all about power, not facts... It
was a poor display, featuring vicious ad hominem attacks, including comparing
him to a Holocaust denier. The issue was captioned: "Science defends itself
against the Skeptical Environmentalist." Really. Science has to defend
itself? Is this what we have come to?...Further attacks since, have made it
clear what is going on. Lomborg is charged with heresy. That's why none of his
critics needs to substantiate their attacks in any detail. That's why the facts
don't matter. That's why they can attack him in the most vicious personal terms.
He's a heretic. Aliens
Cause Global Warming January 17 2003 I
studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that
certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from
society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a
secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened
people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate
religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely
re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to
believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of
the world. Such a belief is religious.
Environmentalism as a Religion
September 23 2003 A B C D
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