
In the beginning was
the Word and the men (mostly) who could read it best ruled the world. In time,
however, it turned out that the Word was not enough, or too many people read it
differently. Revelation provided dogma but it turned out there was more than
one version of that. Also, you either believed it without question or it had to
be forced down your throat. In a way, it was flattering because it put us at
the centre of the universe. Everything revolved around us, until the facts
began to intrude.
When the heliocentric
theory showed, to the contrary, that earth on which we stood revolved around
the sun, reducing our place in nature, all hell broke loose in the firmament.
But after the fuss had dissipated it also showed the improbability of
Revelation, which is fixed, frozen in time, allowing neither for change nor
improvement. So it cannot admit that understanding evolves as our search for it
intensifies. That is the principal reason for its virtual irrelevance today as
a knowledge system, except among the Bible thumpers and others of their ilk
around the world.
The ascent of secular
systems has transformed our view of the universe. We know today that we are not
the centre of it but a fragment of rock circling a medium sized star in a
corner of the Milky Way, an unremarkable spiral galaxy amid billions of others
in an expanding universe. For a long time, however, we were convinced that on
earth at least we were the chosen species. Now even that belief, for those who
would follow the evidence, has been shown up as a delusion caused by the hubris
of ignorance. We are neither more nor less than one part of a process that
began more than four billion years ago as a single cell and, through a
combination of evolution and climatic cataclysm, arrived at this point in
history.
It is true that today
we are masters of the planet, unchallenged by any other species, but that
position seems about as preordained as the triumph of the dinosaurs. They were
undone by a major climate disaster that made their world uninhabitable. Their
extinction was our opportunity though we took 65 million years and wandered
down many blind alleys before we got here. Those who see a divine hand in our
ascent might pause a while to reflect that our capacity for socialisation
allied to genocidal violence may also have played a part.
Secular knowledge systems, whether it is the ancient discipline of philosophy or the newer sciences, have succeeded precisely because they give us so many ways of changing things to our advantage. A water mill or a pair of spectacles makes our lives easier in ways that the Hitopadesha does not.
Secular knowledge
systems, whether it is the ancient discipline of philosophy or the newer
sciences, have succeeded precisely because they give us so many ways of
changing things to our advantage. A water mill or a pair of spectacles makes
our lives easier in ways that the Hitopadesha does not. In fact the former
would make life easier for everyone everywhere, whereas the latter is more likely
to be effective in places where people follow the creed. All the first two need
is a simple but detailed manual while the other requires an emotional
investment, which is a far harder task. Following it also requires a judgement
whose benefits or disadvantages are hard to quantify. But if you’re
short-sighted (or its opposite) there’s no question about the effect of
spectacles.
There is more to this
business than mere personal gratification, however. The Hitopadesha is a
collection of fables in Sanskrit of uncertain vintage which has proverbs and
worldly wisdom on everyday morality in simple language for everyone, like the Thirukkural,
which is about the “everyday virtues of the individual”. It has been a
definitive influence on culture across continents, from Europe to Southeast
Asia. Its appeal is essentially emotional, intended to make better people of
us. The title in fact stands for “Beneficial Advice”. But it resists analytical
treatment and all definitions sound circular. And that is true of a whole class
of words, notions, ideas. Take happiness, for one. The Greek thinker Aristotle defines
it in terms of moral virtue, which
he says is a disposition to behave in the right manner and as a mean between
extremes of deficiency and excess, which are vices.
In psychology, happiness is
a mental or emotional state of well-being which can be defined by,
among others, positive or pleasant emotions ranging from contentment to intense
joy. But such statements virtually defy further analysis except as tautology.
This is a major problem with philosophy, whether it is introspective or based
on empirical evidence. At some point, the limitations of language make further
investigation impossible. Fortunately, this is where the sciences take over.
For a scientist a
concept such as happiness in general would be meaningless. But the tools at his
disposal make further investigation entirely possible. He can, at least in
principle, look at this feeling I call happiness in terms of biochemistry or
neurochemistry and provide a detailed description of my state of being at this
point, something that neither a priest nor a philosopher can do. He is clearing
fresh ground and shining a light on a previously unknown aspect of this
concept. New perspectives and new information should enrich even a
philosopher’s synthesising.
If philosophers look a
little distraught these days it is because theirs is a declining world. It is
being taken over by scientists who are asking the Big questions and giving the
answers piecemeal more often than ever before. These answers are less
speculative because they hypothesise from an empirical, not introspective,
background. Nothing is outside their province, not the shape of the universe,
the history of creation or even the human condition. But their contribution
usually breaks new ground because it has new information which often provides a
fresh look at old questions.
Why is life the way it
is; a question that the philosopher has been asking for generations and
answering in partial generalities that are in equal parts moral and
ontological. The biochemist Nick Lane asks the same question in The Vital
Question but it is a scientific inquiry. If or when his thesis is validated
it is possible that his inquiries will have profound implications for our
essential natures; for now such questions are irrelevant. Lane is not talking
about us at all, he is more interested in the facts of cellular organisation.
That is the irreducible minimum of what we know as a living organism and his
primary interest is in discovering why the cell is the way it is in shape,
structure, function and complexity. These are questions that can be answered
because they can be expressed in quantities and we have the tools for this
investigation. It takes time and patience and there is much stumbling and
fumbling in between but the end is conceivable.
It is worth noting
that he does not worry about definitions of living organisms. He starts with
the collegial consensus in his discipline, that cells are living organisms.
This is one of the positions of science; exact definitions can wait, exact
descriptions are more important. The reason for asking the question is
simplicity itself. “There is a black hole in the heart of biology. Bluntly put,
we do not know why life is the way it is. All complex life shares a common
ancestor, a cell that arose from simple bacteriological progenitors on just one
occasion 4 billion years ago. Was it a freak accident…? We don’t know.”
The approach to the
problem is riddled with uncertainties. He is looking at a time that is almost a
blank slate. No one is sure what kind of atmosphere earth had four billion
years ago, or if it had one at all. We can’t say there was any land or if it
was all water. On the composition of water we are on more solid ground but here
too we cannot claim ironclad certainty. For that reason he approaches the solution
in probabilities. Given what we know from the consensus, what was the probable
path of cellular genesis? In this way he lays out a probable map from
non-living planet to complex cells and beyond. He could even be entirely wrong
but this is an occupational hazard for those breaking new ground.
Darwin’s theory of
evolution was reviled by the church but even other scientists challenged it on
various grounds. Its major shortcoming was the lack of a mechanism for
inheritance, that is, for an organism to pass on its distinctive
characteristics. Gregor Mendel’s “particulate theory of inheritance” was
unknown in Darwin’s lifetime and DNA of course unheard of until the 1950s. So
in his lifetime Darwin was unable to refute the simple arithmetic of a Scottish
engineer, Henry Jenkin, who demonstrated that every new variation would be
halved in every succeeding generation and cease to have any effect within half
a dozen generations. It was not until stable units of heredity were identified
that Darwinism became synonymous with evolution.
If an exobiologist was
looking for life outside the solar system how would he start his search? What
would he look for? One answer could be chemical complexity and a state that is
not in equilibrium. Earth, for instance, is in a state that is far from equilibrium,
chemical, thermal, or mechanical. The chemical and electromagnetic signals it
sends into space would show a constant state of flux in contrast with Venus,
which is near-equilibrium. An alien intelligence observing the solar system
would find the difference striking. It is thus possible that any planet that
signals continuing chemical complexity and a constant energy flux is, like
earth, a living system. No matter how far away, no matter how unpromising (from
our point of view) its chemistry, if a planet emits these two types of signals
we can assume it is “alive”. If we can confirm these observations a sufficient
number of times we could elevate these two attributes to Universal Axioms for
Proof of Life.
A century’s worth of
astronomy has confirmed to us that the laws of physics hold at every level
throughout the known universe. The most spectacular recent example of that is
in the detection of gravitational waves, theoretically predicted by General
Relativity in 1917. Lane’s ultimate goal seems to be to produce a few simple
statements that will stand as laws of biology and lay out the conditions for
life across the universe. In his own words, “One day it may be possible to
predict the properties of life anywhere in the universe from the chemical composition
of the cosmos.”
For this reason The
Vital Question has no interest in talking about evolution in the Darwinian
sense. His focus is trained on the cellular level, the foundation of life. The
quest begins with an examination of the conditions that favoured the emergence
of simple unicellular organisms such as bacteria and then complex cells, from
which the rest of creation such as plants, insects, animals and the great apes
rose.
“What does it take to
make a cell? Six basic properties are shared by all living cells on earth. All
need:
A continuous supply of
reactive carbon for synthesising new organics;
A supply of free
energy to drive metabolic chemistry—the formation of new proteins, DNA and so
on; Catalysts to speed up and channel these reactions;
Excretion of waste, to
pay the debt to the second law of thermodynamics and drive chemical reactions
in the correct direction;
Compartmentalisation—a
cell-like structure that separates the inside from the outside;
Hereditary
material—RNA, DNA or an equivalent to specify detailed form and function.”
Note that Lane’s list
includes items particular to earth as well. We are all carbon-based organisms;
it is central to our structure. The reason is quite simple. “Each carbon atom
can form four strong bonds, much stronger than the bonds formed by silicon.
These bonds allow an extraordinary variety of long-chain molecules, lipids,
sugars, proteins and DNA.” Carbon is, in short, the most suitable, most
efficient material for these products indispensable to life. The other five are
more general in nature and all lead to continuous chemical complexity as well
as a constant flow of energy.
The first simple cells
are believed to have emerged 4 billion years ago, about 750 million years after
the formation of earth. There are many theories for how they came to be,
including extraterrestrial arrival by asteroid. He rules this out as a decisive
influence as any organic molecules that arrived on earth would be merely
augmenting earth’s existing stock rather than bringing something new. The
arrival of whole cells from the stars, he argues, is no help because he has set
himself to discover the principles that must govern cell evolution, on earth or
anywhere else. Panspermia as an answer is worse than useless for this project;
it is irrelevant.
Then he approaches
primordial soup, everyone’s favourite theory of genesis. The objections are
two-fold: “While our early planet [4 billion years ago] lacked oxygen it was
not rich in gases conducive to organic chemistry—hydrogen, methane and ammonia.
This rules out tired old ideas of primordial soup…”. The evidence for this
confident statement comes from zircons, crystals of zirconium silicate that
contain traces of the environment in which they were formed.
The second objection
has to do with the energy requirements. For soup to produce amino acids, the
building blocks of life, they must be enormous. He calculates that to sustain
the production of organic molecules even in a small biosphere before
photosynthesis became a reality would require lightning strikes at the rate of
four bolts a second for every square kilometre of ocean. That means millions of
volts of energy every second for prolonged periods of time, perhaps millennia.
How likely is that and how much evidence that it happened? In Lane’s view
invoking extreme environments to explain the formation of stable organic
molecules is a mug’s game.
The keyword is
“stable”. A few random lightning strikes might create the precursors of life
but these conditions must be sustained reliably for long periods if greater
complexity is the goal. Lightning just doesn’t cut it in these circumstances.
Lane finds his ideal environment for the production of both organic molecules
and the first cells in the deep ocean alkaline hydrothermal vents, such as exist
in the Atlantic.
The reason he chooses
this environment rather than any other is that it provides stable conditions.
“Alkaline hydrothermal vents provide exactly the right conditions required for
the origin of life: a high flux of carbon and energy that is physically
channelled over inorganic catalysts,... And vents persist for millennia, at
least 100,000 years in the case of Lost City [in the Atlantic].” He provides a
systematic explanation for his choice of the most probable of all theatres for
the advent of life. Every part of this argument is ultimately testable and
provides a benchmark in our search for the origins of life. For that reason it
is an argument worth considering even if it is only to tear it apart. And if
100,000 years seems a long time, consider that we took 4 billion to arrive.
The outstanding
feature of The Vital Question is an account of the prodigious energies
that are required at every stage by living organisms, whether at the cellular
level or the gross body. The ability of any entity to metabolise energy and
maintain a stable biochemical profile is one of signatures of life. Lane at one
point says “Life is a side reaction to a main energy-releasing reaction.”
“Under normal
circumstances it costs energy to make amino acids and other building blocks
from simple molecules such as CO2 and O2. It costs energy
to join them up into long chains, polymers such as proteins and DNA…that’s what
living is all about—making new components, joining them all together, growing,
reproducing, transporting material in and out of the cell.”
The outstanding feature of The Vital Question is an account of the prodigious energies that are required at every stage by living organisms, whether at the cellular level or the gross body. The ability of any entity to metabolise energy and maintain a stable biochemical profile is one of signatures of life.
Energy transactions at
a stable, constant rate are thus the central fact of a living system. We would
not be wrong in defining it as an orderly complex whose improbability makes it
stand out. A perfectly folded protein is less probable than a broth of amino
acids and a living, breathing human being even less so, but all three
metabolise energy. All three are a complex of identical chemicals but to a
sensor that is tuned finely enough each complex sends distinctive signals. It
is possible in principle to build a machine that detects an ascending order of
metabolic signatures that would inform the observer of an ecosystem of
energy-using carboniferous forms that seems to show purpose. What the observer
would do with that would of course depend on whether they metabolise carbon
directly or need to turn it into energy before that.
Reduced to the
simplest elements Lane’s project has three basic requirements—rock, water and
energy, in whatever form, heat, light, electricity or radioactivity. If our
exobiologist can say from observing the interaction of these three that there
is an orderly biochemical and energy flux then we can all hope that there is
life beyond, among the stars. But what if only two of the conditions are
fulfilled, rock and energy or water and energy and so forth? We can say nothing
except that in time (geological) the third condition will also present itself
and then be worthy of our interest.
It is also possible that life is not everywhere the same, that intelligences that can manipulate physical reality can also be bodiless or in other ways beyond our perceptive range but we are getting ahead of ourselves. The programme outlined in The Vital Question is not so different from that of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), orderly interruptions in the normal pattern of signals. The difference is that it is also much more. It is first an attempt to provide a reliable story of origins for the emergence of life on earth and then a possible blueprint for anyone who wants to boldly go further afield.