Originally posted by ahrkron
No magic needed. Things are much easier than "Intelligent Design" advocates usually portray it.
This is fun, as you say, and you are apparently paraphrasing Nobel laureate and Harvard University biology professor George Wald and was actually published in the widely read
Journal Scientific American.
However improbable we regard this event (the start of life), or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once. And for life as we know it….. once may be enough.
Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time the “impossible” becomes the possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles.
For decades leading biologists had promulgated the position, stated so well by Wald, that time and chance were the forces behind the miracle of life. It was logically correct. After all, what else could be operating?
Wald’s definitive statement, made on behalf of the scientific community rested firmly on research completed the previous year. In 1953, Stanley Miller, then a graduate student at the University of Chicago, had produced amino acids by a series of totally random reactions. His experiment was simple but brilliant.
Miller evacuated a glass flask and then filled in it with the gasses thought to have been present in Earth’s atmosphere 3.8 billion years ago: ammonia, methane, hydrogen, and water vapor. Free oxygen was not present. It appeared only billions of years later, the product of life itself: photosynthesis. Using electrodes placed through the walls of the flask, Miller discharged electric sparks, simulating lightning, into the gases. Their energy induced random chemical reactions among the gases. After a few days, a reddish slime appeared on the inner walls of the apparatus. Upon analysis, the slime was found to contain amino acids!
The importance of Miller’s experiment was at once apparent. Amino acids the building blocks of proteins and proteins are the building blocks of life. As Wald pointed out, two billion years had passed between the appearance of water on Earth and the appearance of life. If random reactions in a small flask can produce amino acids in just two days, given two billion years of reactions throughout the Earth’s vast atmosphere and oceans, the first forms of life, bacteria and algae, must have been the product of similar random reactions during those eons. The impossible had become the probable and the probable certain. You and me and all other members of the biosphere are living proof of the theory’s accuracy.
The new media worldwide reported the significance of Miller’s seminal experiment. The public had been told the truth: life had started by CHANCE.
Or had it?
Wald’s article was such an important statement that twenty-five years later, in 1979,
Scientific American reprinted it in a special publication titled
Life: Origin and Evolution. The only difference was that this time it appeared with a
retraction. I have seen no other retraction by a journal of a Nobel laureate’s writings. The reaction was unequivocal:
Although stimulating, this article probably represents one of the very few times in his professional life when Wald has been wrong. Examine his main thesis and see. Can we really form a biological cell by waiting for chance combinations of organic compounds? Harold Morowitz, in his book “Energy Flow and Biology,” computed that merely to create a bacterium would require more time than the Universe might ever see if chance combinations of its molecules were the only driving force.
C. Folcome, Life: Origin and Evolution, Scientific American Special Publication, 1979
In short, life could not have been started by pure chance…..
Lest you think that the scientific community has changed its opinion since 1979, the following appeared in the same journal in February 1991, in a review article by John Hogan on the origins of life. “Some scientists have argued that, given enough time, even apparently miraculous events become possible – such as the spontaneous emergence of a single-cell organism from random couplings of chemical. Sir Fred Hoyle, the British astronomer, has said such an occurrence is about as likely as the assemblage of a 747 by a tornado whirling though a junkyard. Most researchers agree with Hoyle on this point.”
Ahkron for your information, since 1979, articles based on your premise that life arose through chance random reactions over billions of years are not accepted in any reputable journals. Articles authored by Nobel laureates are not lightly retracted. The statistical computations by Morowitz may have cast a shadow of doubt over Wald’s claims for the power of chance, but I question whether
Scientific American would have actually retracted the article with letters disagreeing with Miller’s and Wald’s thesis on the random origins of life. Scientific opinion of the day was that life had started via a series of random reactions.
The article was withdrawn because research performed by another Harvard professor proved Wald
wrong. In the 1970s, Elso Baghoorn, a paleontologist, discovered micro-fossils of bacteria and algae in rocks close to 3.5 billion years old. That is also when the first liquid water appeared on Earth, and hence the first time that life could survive. All life on Earth is water based. No water, no life, but with water, life was possible. It had only to develop, and develop it did, immediately in the presence of water. There were no “billions of years’ for the amino acids to combine randomly into life.
Hence, your premise of sudden life on Earth that, the theoretical biologist Francis Crick wrote, “Given the weakness of all theories of terrestrial genesis [the origin of life on Earth], directed panspermia [the deliberate planting of life on Earth] should still be considered a serious possibility. Crick apparently understood the complexity of life.
As time passes, these small changes do add up. The process exponentially favors the continuity of the better replicators, and nobody would expect ineffective replicators to be around for too long.
The reality is a little bit different than continuity by better replicators as I have previously stated. The magnitude of events of cascading interactions will ‘always’ have at least one flawed or ineffective replicator which always leads to a dead end for that first hoped for positive result. Not to mention that for a life form itself, the numbers for that magnitude of events are again zero.
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