Science

Have you ever heard of the ancient and mystical “Uroboros”? Originated in Egypt and Greece, it has counterparts throughout the world. It’s a serpent curled in a closed circle, with its tail in its mouth. It just goes on endlessly around the circle, eating its own tail and producing more serpent. It’s supposed to exemplify the cyclic nature of life (what goes around comes around).     A major problem with the Uroboros, of course, is how could it ever have gotten started, how could it ever have come into being before it had itself to eat? This is the problem with the chance origin of life from non-life as well. As far as we know today, all living organisms make use of pre-existing living things (proteins) to produce more living things (proteins and organisms). Life begets life. But what could a non-living thing have used to make a living thing before there were any living things?

And that’s just to produce one life form, the very first organism able to replicate itself. To then follow Darwin’s theory of evolution not just one but at least two such complex living organisms, appropriately one “male” and one “female”, had to be created, in close proximity to each other in both time and space, in order to be able to mate and create offspring. Science claims to know of no other mechanism to produce such self-perpetuating organic species. Including that complexity, the likelihood of creation by accident becomes many times more unlikely.     The statistical arguments usually admit that the chances of that happening are very small, like one in some trillion-billion, but go on to argue that given enough time and enough molecules much more than a trillion-billion chances will occur. In that case, it is said, statistics seem to prove that such far-out sets of circumstances will in fact occur, and the result will in fact yield that self-perpetuating life system.     But wait a minute here, aren’t we missing a major point? Science says that given quarks, protons, neutrons, atoms and molecules of exactly the right size, shape, charge and spin, a scenario can be postulated that yields life. Isn’t that like saying, “Given all the necessary parts of a ‘67 Chevy, in good working order, a scenario can be postulated that yields a drivable ‘67 Chevy?” Isn’t the really important point even more how all the necessary interdependent component parts came to be, all remarkably crafted so they fit and work smoothly together? And how did the molecules and atoms that make up those component parts come to be? And how did the quarks that make up … (etc.).     I like the analogy of the jigsaw puzzle. That same kind of statistics says that if you throw the whole puzzle up in the air enough times there is no question that one time it will land on the floor fully assembled, picture-side up. But what if the pieces of the puzzle were not pre-cut so they fit together? What if a few pieces were missing? And there has to be a picture painted on one side.     In addition, one should also note that there are a number of possible life forms other than the one with which we are familiar. For example, when we construct amino acids in the laboratory we always form equal amounts of “right- and left-handed” (mirror images of otherwise identical) molecules. For reasons no one understands, living systems are based exclusively on the left-handed variety There appears to be no viable alternative life form based on virtually identical right-handed molecules. In addition, there appear to be several chemical elements (for example, sulfur) which could serve to internally transport and convert energy to support life but only the phosphorous-based form is actually found, in all forms of life.     So the same statistics that are said to virtually guarantee the accidental origin of left-handed, phosphorous-based life (because it’s there) seem to be refuted by the absence of life based on right-handed molecules and sulfur-based energy management (because it is not there). Those same statistics prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that such alternate life systems had to form -- but they did not. One can, of course, decide to believe that there was something different or wrong in those other cases but one should certainly not call such an unsupported belief “science”.     Now science can hypothesize endlessly in this manner but cannot really know these answers. No one was around billions of years ago to observe that first miraculous event. And man has never created life from non-life in the laboratory so that hypothesis has never been tested, replicated and verified -- it is not falsifiable. The fact that life exists today does not in any way prove the self-organizing (“natural”) hypothesis. By the very definition of science, then, that hypothesis cannot be considered within the realm of science.     Fortunately, today it seems that science no longer has the courage to make a “scientific” statement at all about the origin of life from non-life. Nearly all seem to agree that “first life” originated billions of years ago but that no one was there to make observations and to take data, and subsequently no one has ever created life from non-life. As a result, today it seems clear that the question of the origin of life lies outside of science, that science simply can have nothing authoritative to say on that subject, at least unless and until someone demonstrates controlled creation of life from non-life.     No one really “knows” how life got started.

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