By Babatunde Jose
Does it not stand to reason that you cannot bring out of a thing that has not been first placed in it? In other words “you cannot evolve that which was not first involved.
What is the mystery of life? Truly we may say that life is the great mystery, and the study of life the greatest study of all. The understanding of the phenomena of life will surely be the crowning glory of science, towards which all our present chemical and physical knowledge forms but the preliminary steps.
Man as a rational being must from his earliest existence have questioned Nature as to its meaning. We today are asking similar questions, and seeking an answer to ” the Riddle of the Universe” and to its greatest problem “What is Life?”
Organisms have well-defined molecular assemblies, redox potentials across membranes, and metabolic pathways—all operating in exquisite states that we call ‘life’. Chemistry, by contrast, is utterly indifferent to whether anything is alive or not. Without a biologically derived entity acting upon them, molecules have never been shown to “evolve” toward life. Never.
While organisms exploit chemistry for their own ends, chemicals have never been seen to assemble themselves into an organism. Origin-of-life research keeps attempting to make the chemicals needed for life, and then to have those assembled toward something to which they are inherently indifferent. But try as they might, without preexisting life no researchers have ever seen molecules assemble into a living cell, or anything even remotely resembling a living cell.
Contrary to the hyperbole of press reports, any synthetic molecularly derived structures that have been touted as being cell-like are in reality far from it. This situation might change in the future, but it is unlikely to change under the current course of research. Scientists have no data to support molecular “evolution” leading to life. The research community remains clueless.
Many scientists and professors who are outside ‘boutique origin-of-life’ circles have been led astray by researchers’ claims and the subsequent press, thinking that far more is known about life’s origin than really is known. This has affected the highest seats in the academy where even some science professors confuse origin of life with biological evolution.
Like a muddy prebiotic cesspool, confusion abounds in academia. Two-thirds of a century since the 1952 Miller-Urey experiment, where some racemic amino acids were formed from small molecules and an electrical discharge, the world is no closer to generating life from small molecules—or any molecules for that matter—than it was in 1952.
Consider what has occurred in other fields since Miller-Urey performed their experiments: Human space travel, satellite interconnectivity, unlocking DNA’s code and its precise genetic manipulation, biomedical imaging, automated peptide and nucleotide synthesis, molecular structure determination, silicon device fabrication, integrated circuits, and the internet, to name just a few.
By comparison, origin-of-life research has not made any progress whatsoever in addressing the fundamental questions of life’s origin: All that has been generated are more suggestions on how life might have formed. Nothing even resembling a synthetic cellular structure has arisen from its independent components, let alone a living cell. Not even close.
Although Earth remains the only place where life is known, the science of astrobiology seeks evidence of life on other planets. The 2015 NASA strategy on the origin of life aimed to solve the puzzle by identifying interactions, intermediary structures and functions, energy sources, and environmental factors that contributed to the diversity, selection, and replication of evolvable macromolecular systems, and mapping the chemical landscape of potential primordial informational polymers.
The advent of polymers that could replicate, store genetic information, and exhibit properties subject to selection was, it suggested, most likely a critical step in the emergence of prebiotic chemical evolution. Those polymers derived, in turn, from simple organic compounds such as nucleobases, amino acids, and sugars that could have been formed by reactions in the environment. A successful theory of the origin of life must explain how all these chemicals came into being. We are yet to have one.
Even professors have been misled by this. Nor do the scientists themselves understand anything more about life’s origin than they did before they performed their experiments, because their experiments offer no solution to the fundamental questions needed for a path to life.
A book by the famous science writer Ed Regis, entitled What is Life? Investigating the Nature of Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology, attempts to describe life’s origin from molecules: “Life began with little bags of garbage, random assortments of molecules doing some crude kind of metabolism. This is stage one. The garbage bags grow and occasionally split in two, and the ones that grow and split fastest win.”
Few origin-of-life researchers would state it so shamelessly; nonetheless, “little bags of garbage” are precisely what origin-of-life researchers have been making. Those “little bags of garbage” have no more resemblance to living cells than a big bag of garbage resembles a horse.
As soon as Man’s intellect was awakened, and he became capable of abstract thought, his mind must have been turned towards something more than the mere supply of his animal wants and desires; it must have been affected by those mysteries of nature which were everywhere about him. He could not have failed to notice the wonderful variety of both animate and inanimate existences; the strange differences between the living and the non-living, and above all between himself and all other living beings; and he could hardly have failed to speculate as to the meaning of all these things: What was their origin, and their purpose?
We today are still engaged with the same or similar questions. The modern man of Science and the Philosopher find themselves confronted by the same great mysteries, and are engaged, even as were the speculators of the by-gone ages, in seeking for a solution of the ‘Riddle of the Universe’ and its greatest problem, the difference between living and dead matter, the question What, is Life? Is it a principle or an agency like the so-called “physical forces,” or as they are more generally termed “forms of energy?” Can we compare Life to heat, to Light, to electricity, to Magnetism, to Chemical or to mechanical action? Man is a Spiritual being and differs not only in degree but fundamentally from the lower animals.
During the past century there has been a tendency of scientific thought towards a purely physical explanation of all Life including vital action, even thought, the operation of the human mind, and it has been suggested that life has arisen in non-living matter, in obedience to changeless and resistless physical laws, bringing about, amidst the clump of moving atoms, the Evolution of Life, Thought, Emotion and Will: Or as an alternative that the power of Life is immanent in all Matter, Will, Consciousness and Intellectual actions, being but forms or modes of matter and motion.
The Materialists tells us that, “Matter itself is equal to do all that is implied in the doctrine of ‘Final Causes’, that Matter contains a self-originated something, which is called’ Natural Law,’ and is possessed of Material Energy, and in-working quality, which, independently, of non-material guidance, has realized all living forms which ever were or are now on the earth or in the sea, Life itself therefore being regarded as one of the qualities of Matter.”
Now there are three ways of accounting for the existence of things, they are either the result of 1, Chance or Accident; 2, they are of Necessity; or in the 3rd place they are of Design, that is the Work of Mind.
That the Universe is the work of chance or accident is too wild a theory to be for a moment accepted by any reasonable being. That a “fortuitous concourse of atoms” could have evolved the marvelous order of nature, and have given rise, not only to that Order, not only even to Organization and Life, but to all the phenomena of rational Thought, Consciousness, and Will, is surely inconceivable.
But equally inconceivable, it will seem to many, if not to all, is the theory that all things are of necessity what they are, and that the Universe never had a beginning: Yet this is the teaching of Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel German zoologist, naturalist, eugenicist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist, and artist, 1834-1919, who said that, “Matter and Force are different aspects or attributes of one and the self-same thing, which he calls ‘Substance,’ Substance being, he supposes, uncreated and eternal; and all things are imagined having evolved through the working of forces belonging to eternal matter. All individual forms are regarded as transitory accidents, or modes of “Substance.”
The alternative to these theories is that the whole universe, in all its aspects, is the work of a Designing Mind, and is as it has been strikingly expressed, “the Externalization of the Thought of God.” “All the facts and phenomena of natural and physical science are but as the steps of a ladder planted on earth, but reaching unto the Presence of Him who has made all.”
This is the only rational explanation of the great Mysteries of Nature, and it is the one that has commended itself not only to theologians, but to many of the greatest Scientific thinkers and Philosophers, who have found themselves compelled to see, the more deeply they have studied the universe, that from beginning to end, from the primordial electrons of the Atom to the circling Planet, from the structureless Bioplasts to Man, through all, in all, there is: “A Manifestation of Creative Power, a Directive Mind, and an Ultimate Purpose.”
Can science therefore explain the origin of life? The study of the origin of life is a very active research area in which important progress is being made, although the consensus among scientists is that none of the current hypotheses has thus far been confirmed.
O humanity! Be mindful of your Lord Who created you from a single soul, and from it He created its mate, and through both He spread countless men and women. And be mindful of Allah—in Whose Name you appeal to one another—and ˹honour˺ family ties. Surely Allah is ever Watchful over you. (Quran 4:1)
Barka Juma’at and a happy weekend.
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