Posted on 02/06/2006 8:18:27 AM PST by SirLinksalot
Here is how he concludes his ( very long ) essay :
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At the conclusion of a long essay, it is customary to summarize what has been learned. In the present case, I suspect it would be more prudent to recall how much has been assumed:
First, that the pre-biotic atmosphere was chemically reductive; second, that nature found a way to synthesize cytosine; third, that nature also found a way to synthesize ribose; fourth, that nature found the means to assemble nucleotides into polynucleotides; fifth, that nature discovered a self-replicating molecule; and sixth, that having done all that, nature promoted a self-replicating molecule into a full system of coded chemistry.
These assumptions are not only vexing but progressively so, ending in a serious impediment to thought. That, indeed, may be why a number of biologists have lately reported a weakening of their commitment to the RNA world altogether, and a desire to look elsewhere for an explanation of the emergence of life on earth. “It’s part of a quiet paradigm revolution going on in biology,” the biophysicist Harold Morowitz put it in an interview in New Scientist, “in which the radical randomness of Darwinism is being replaced by a much more scientific law-regulated emergence of life.”
Morowitz is not a man inclined to wait for the details to accumulate before reorganizing the vista of modern biology. In a series of articles, he has argued for a global vision based on the biochemistry of living systems rather than on their molecular biology or on Darwinian adaptations. His vision treats the living system as more fundamental than its particular species, claiming to represent the “universal and deterministic features of any system of chemical interactions based on a water-covered but rocky planet such as ours.”
This view of things—metabolism first, as it is often called—is not only intriguing in itself but is enhanced by a firm commitment to chemistry and to “the model for what science should be.” It has been argued with great vigor by Morowitz and others. It represents an alternative to the RNA world. It is a work in progress, and it may well be right. Nonetheless, it suffers from one outstanding defect. There is as yet no evidence that it is true.
It is now more than 175 years since Friedrich Wöhler announced the synthesis of urea. It would be the height of folly to doubt that our understanding of life’s origins has been immeasurably improved. But whether it has been immeasurably improved in a way that vigorously confirms the daring idea that living systems are chemical in their origin and so physical in their nature—that is another question entirely.
In “On the Origins of the Mind,” I tried to show that much can be learned by studying the issue from a computational perspective. Analogously, in contemplating the origins of life, much—in fact, more—can be learned by studying the issue from the perspective of coded chemistry. In both cases, however, what seems to lie beyond the reach of “the model for what science should be” is any success beyond the local. All questions about the global origins of these strange and baffling systems seem to demand answers that the model itself cannot by its nature provide.
It goes without saying that this is a tentative judgment, perhaps only a hunch. But let us suppose that questions about the origins of the mind and the origins of life do lie beyond the grasp of “the model for what science should be.” In that case, we must either content ourselves with its limitations or revise the model. If a revision also lies beyond our powers, then we may well have to say that the mind and life have appeared in the universe for no very good reason that we can discern.
Worse things have happened. In the end, these are matters that can only be resolved in the way that all such questions are resolved. We must wait and see.
David Berlinski, the author most recently of Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics (Modern Library), is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute. The present essay, the second in a three-part series, follows “On the Origins of the Mind” (November 2004), now anthologized in The Best American Science Writing 2005, edited by Alan Lightman (Harper Perennial). A final installment, on the origins of matter, is scheduled for later this year.
See here for an archive of his articles and essays on the origin of life.
the next goalpost?
A philosophical preposition of what science should be cannot be logically deducted to science. Science is already defined. "What science should be" would require new definition and method and would not be science but a thing that is different. It would require unknown new philosophical thought which is possible but not likely.
>how much has been assumed: First, that the pre-biotic atmosphere was chemically reductive...
Gee, what a leap of faith... that the early Earth was just like the rest of the universe.
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