Life is a Fascinating Topic

Life is a fascinating topic, don’t you think? What it is, how it came to be, and why, and does it have any purpose outside of itself? Is there a relationship between living and non-living things, between life and the universe-at-large?
Sometimes I think about stuff like that—Kurt Vonnegut Jr. believed that this habit was the result of having “bad chemicals”.
How did life on earth begin? With a bang, they say. There are actually at least four theories I know of.
Spontaneous Generation
Panspermia
Intelligent Design
Seeding by advanced, Extra-Terrestrial Races
Spontaneous Generation is the idea, spawned from the Theory of Evolution, that life was the result of a nearly infinite variations of a complex set of original parameters, including; heat, pressure, electrical energy, and the slow accumulation of more and more complex proteins until somehow, (a huge blank in the theory) a few of these “experiments” managed to wriggle. I call it the “First There Was This Soup Theory”.
Panspermia is the theory that life traveled here on pieces of galactic detritus, like rocks and ice and stuff, from somewhere else, or lots of somewhere else’s, over millions of years, and ended up here by accident, at a time when conditions were pleasing to the spores or whatever they were. (I prefer large, tentacled creatures on the order of Cthulhu).
Intelligent Design is the code word for God, used in order not to damage the pudding-brained sensibilities of people unwilling to acknowledge even the possibility of such a thing. This idea suggests that someone or something, always alive, created life for purposes unknown, perhaps incomprehensible. Opinions vary as to why. Some people think it was part of an ongoing experiment, others believe it was a passing fancy and that whatever started it all has long gone on to other things, and a few of us (two or three billion, more or less) think it was an actual intelligence, with comprehensible motives which include (paternal or maternal) feelings for humans and some kind of plan involving progression, education, experience and a system of punishments and rewards, otherwise known as natural consequences. The details are still being debated.
Seeding by advanced, Extra-Terrestrial Races is the notion that some other life-form, for mysterious, inscrutable reasons, planted the seeds of life here ( and probably elsewhere) and then went on their way. A variant of this idea is that actual, already complex creatures were set down on earth after the planet had agreed to be nice. Hominids, we call these creatures—humans, homo-sapiens.
Here’s the interesting thing; all of these theories are equally valid, relevant, and possible. One reason for this claim is that in an infinite universe everything is possible. What can be imagined, is. Another is that none of them offer any hard evidence as proof (despite the strident claims to the contrary by certain factions of the science community). But only one of them actually addresses the origin of life. Aliens brought us here? Fine, where did they come from? Why do they exist? The same for Panspermia—great, life traveled here on random blocks of rock and ice; but how did the bacteria, virus, spores—whatever—come to be? Spontaneous generation (which is the foundation of modern evolution) does not address itself, in any meaningful way, to the actual process of the formation of life—of dead, inanimate objects transforming into live, animate, organisms. I know, I know, someone out there in reader land is saying;
“Yes we have! We know almost everything about it!” and they will give us a long, detailed description of what probably happened. But they have nothing to explain that moment between not-alive and alive. Did you catch that ‘probably’ thing? We use that word when we don’t know for sure. A certain type of technical mind will insist that it deals with ‘facts’ which makes it’s position on a subject superior to the rest of us. Sometimes we call this kind of mind a scientist. I know several scientists and I respect each of them, enjoy their company and love to listen to them. I am not anti-scientist. I am, however, anti-presumption, arrogance, and conceit. They deal in facts only? Nothing could be further from the truth, and any good researcher will tell you that. Have you ever watched one of those documentaries on dinosaurs or the big bang or black holes or possible disasters, climate change, geological prognostication, early man, the deep ocean, plate-tectonics, the formation of the solar system, etc? Next time you do, keep track of how many times words and phrases like “perhaps, maybe, could have, may have, it can be assumed, we think, we believe, some scientists predict, possible, likely, probable, reasonably certain, assume, promising, feasible, computer models suggest, ad naseum, are used. They like facts, they pine for the absolute, the verifiable, they worship the “proof”, but they actually deal with very few facts. Mostly it is creative guesswork. Extrapolated theory based on observable phenomena heaped on top of a nearly-infinite number of assumptions. And there’s nothing wrong with that—I do it all the time. I just resent the holier-than-thou hubris, the exact same kind of certainty, of wild-eyed confidence they ridicule in other, less empirically-minded people, like, say, religionists. (Nor am I defending true-believers—many of those people have toe-jam for brains).
So lets take a look at this ‘how did life begin’ thing. Did you know more and more researchers are beginning to question the whole “primordial ocean” idea? Look it up.
Supposedly, life began in a thick, nutrient-rich liquid which was being bombarded with cosmic debris on a constant basis, was hot (well, warm anyway) and was being stirred up by thermal vents, volcanic activity and excessive lightening discharges. All this kept mixing and re-mixing until things began to curdle out of the soup. Amino acids, proteins, hydro-carbons, and according to urban legend, Twinkies. None of these things were “alive” however. They wanted to be, they tried. But they just couldn’t quite get the hang of making themselves live. Some very clever scientists back in the fifties or sixties, tried to reproduce these primal conditions in the laboratory, mixing raw ingredients and warming them up, them zapping them with thousands of jolts of electricity. And low and behold! They managed to create amino acids and proteins and hydro-carbons. (Possibly Twinkies as well, but this was repressed in the literature). Except, none of those things were alive either. How dare they not live! Somebody goes to the trouble of getting a grant, setting up a lab where the experiment can take place, mixing stuff in a bowl and plugging in a toaster to toss into the sludge . . . and nothing happens! Now they know how Dr. Frankenstein felt. In, fact, isn’t that what Dr. Frankenstein did, more or less? Put a bunch of inanimate pieces of flesh together (which had at one time actually been alive) and zap them with lightening?
“Elevate me!”
“Right here, Herr Doctor?”
And yet, we call that fantasy, fiction.
Let’s review, shall we? So, we have this sludge full of all kinds of ingredients, and lots of energy being pumped into it and eventually we find “the stuff of life” coagulating into slimy clumps of snot-like objects. But it still isn’t alive, is it? Maybe we need to define life. “I’m not sure what it is but I know it when I see it!” Ba-da-boom.
Okay, as a minimum set of requirements for very simple, one celled “life” let’s try this.
It must be able to ingest nutrients.
It must be able to convert the nutrients to fuel.
It must be able to eliminate waste.
It must be able to reproduce.
It must be able to dance (a well-known pre-requisite to reproduction.)
Soon after it comes into being, but not right away, it must be capable of mobility and defense.
It’s possible to get really close, to form complex chains of protein molecules, have them bunch together and even begin to organize themselves. But that isn’t life.
All this happened over millions and millions of years, so the proto-organisms were able to occur imperfectly, again and again, going through the endless permutations of chaotic, random, chance. It came about gradually. So say the experts.
Really? So . . . one came along that could eliminate waste, but had no way to take in nutrients? Interesting. One came along that could move around but not reproduce? Not even with itself? (thus eliminating the need to dance).
Oh, I get it, eventually, after hundreds of millions of years, and hundreds of millions of failures, something came along one day, at an actual moment, a point in time, and existed with each and every one of these requirements for life, where nothing had existed before. Because, if it couldn’t reproduce, we’re never going to, that’s for sure. And isn’t it lucky that the nutrients it evolved into needing were the very nutrients floating around in its immediate vicinity—because it couldn’t move around yet—not for several million more years. But you know, even with all these characteristics, how did it go from being not alive to alive? From ingredients with no life, to an organism with all of it? Can a thing be a little alive? Almost alive? Can it gradually become alive? (Well, that last one is verified every morning in my classroom . . .).
Vladimir Verdansky (biochemist, geochemist, radiogeologist, mineralogist, cool beard) once said “only life is capable of creating life.” Think about it. Have we ever seen any evidence, ever, that life sprang spontaneously from inorganic, non-living matter? No. Some people assume it did because they can’t think of it happening any other way.
Life is not an intrinsic characteristic of matter. Matter is an intrinsic characteristic of life. We do not find a rock animating itself into a living thing. We don’t even see those hundreds of attempts in the lab, full of energy and promise and all the building blocks life needs, crossing the gap from non-living to living. Think about it some more. It never happened. Not spontaneously, accidentally, randomly. I don’t know what did happen, but I’m just not willing to accept an idea so replete with inconsistencies. I’m really good at the willing suspension of disbelief, but this is way beyond what I can swallow.
“So what did happen, you loud-mouthed, opinionated, obnoxious freak?”
Glad you asked. I have no idea. But! Panspermia and Alien Seeding both have the same basic problem. They can only speak to life on earth, not life itself. The only one left, through a near-genius process of elimination, is Intelligent Design. As yet, I haven’t figured out all the details, but I’m working on it. If someone could prove to me that something came along which was alive, and therefore could somehow pass aliveness on, and did something to the Soup, I could accept that. Barely. But I’m working on an alternative theory. It’s called Genesis.