>
> Well, we all have our preferences about the way things should be. A
> professional scientist, however, is supposed to put aside personal biases
as
> much as possible and let the facts speak for themselves.
>
It is interesting that Behe should write this. When he published an
editorial in the Daily Telegraph in which he said that the inevitable result
of any origin-of-life experiment was goo and not living cells, I wrote to him
and described the research involving proteinoid microsphere protocells.
Having thus demonstrated that at least some origin-of-life experiments result
in living cells instead of goo, I asked Behe if he would retract his
statement. Naturally he refused, but he never once challenged the validity
of the research itself. Indeed, he gave every impression of not only knowing
about the research (thereby demonstrating that he had willfully lied when he
wrote his statement), but also accepting it as valid. Instead he tried to
claim that the research was irrelevent (but when I challenged him to explain
how it was irrelevent, he broke off the discussion). So in point of fact,
Behe doesn't follow the law he would impose on others: rather than letting
the facts speak for themselves, he prefers to follow his own personal biases.
[snip]
>
> The fact is, from all we know of physics and
> chemistry, one undirected origin of life already looks impossible.
>
As I note above, Behe knows that this "fact" is false, yet he pretends
otherwise because of his personal biases.
[snip]
>
> Some of the
> unresolved questions that Davies rediscovers include the following: Amino
> acids can be made under prebiotic conditions, but a whole lot of
interfering
> chemicals get made too, so how does one separate the wheat from the
> chaff?
>
Again, since Behe knows the relevant research, he also knows that this is no
problem. Experiments have been done in which mixtures of amino acids,
including non-proteinaceous amino acids, have been copolymerized in the
presence of a wide variety of other chemical and physical material, yet
proteinoids with catalytic activity still form. In other words, those
"interfering" chemicals in fact do not significantly interfere with the
formation of thermal proteins.
>
> RNA would be a possible candidate to begin life, but since RNA is a
> whole lot harder to make than proteins, where would it have come from?
> The genetic code mediates between the two languages of life - proteins and
> nucleic acids - but how do mindless processes set up "codes" and
> "languages"?
>
Again, since Behe knows the relevant research, he also knows the answer to
this: molecular self-organization. Thermal proteins have nonrandom
sequences, indicating that amino acids can use their own internal structural
and chemical information to selectively polymerize. And there is some recent
(this decade) research which suggests that RNA can be formed in the same way.
>
> Like everyone else, Davies has no answers to these problems, so he passes
> on to the reader whatever speculation has been floated. He recounts the
> suggestion by Carl Woese that the code assignments and the translation
> mechanism evolved together: "Initially there was only a rough - and -
ready
> code, and the translation process was very sloppy." More likely that the
> thinking is very sloppy. Evolving code assignments together with the
> translation apparatus is like pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps,
> instead of all at once, a little bit on the right side then a little on
the left.
>
Again, Behe knows that this is not true. Proteinoid microsphere protocells
are able to synthesize polynucleotides using polypeptides as templates, as
well as synthesize polypeptides directly from polynucleotide templates
without the need for ribosomes or tRNAs. It has also been experimentally
shown that amino acids preferentially bind to specific triplit combinations
of nucleotides; ie, most amino acids can recognize and bind to their codons.
>
> Davies also cites a recent paper that compares the genetic code to
> energy levels of atomic nuclei, but only to concede that the
> "correspondences may be purely coincidental." He even trots out
> Sidney Fox's proteinoids and Cairns - Smith's clay crystal life - ideas
> that are fifteen to twenty - five years old and have led nowhere.
>
Behe implies here that the original work by Fox in the Sixties is all that
has been done, and that researchers have ignored his work. In point of fact,
proteinoid microsphere protocell research has been a highly active field for
the past four decades, and there are still at least two dozen scientists
world-wide who continue the work today. Among other things, they now know
that protocells can create and maintain electrical fields, that they can
utilize light to create ATP, and that they can use that ATP to make
polynucleotides. They also are discovering industrial and biomedical uses
for protocells.
[snip]
>
> Using language reminiscent of William A. Dembski (see "Science and
> Design," FT, October 1998) he writes that "Living organisms are
> mysterious not for their complexity per se, but for their tightly
specified
> complexity....In short, how did meaningful information emerge
> spontaneously from incoherent junk?"
>
Molecular self-organization. Biomolecules, whether simple precursors or
macromolecules, possess specific structural and chemical information that
permits them to selectively self-assemble into biologically useful structures.
>
> As a matter of principle Davies balks at the obvious hypothesis of
specific
> design. "Science takes as its starting point the assumption that life
wasn't
> made by a god or supernatural being: it happened unaided and
> spontaneously, as a natural process." The notion of God pushing molecules
> around strikes him as distasteful. But it would pass muster with science,
he
> thinks, for God (or whoever it is - Davies doesn't like the word "God") to
> make "biofriendly laws" at the beginning and then butt out, allowing life
to
> develop on its own. So from his perspective the key is to find a natural
law
> or laws that would produce life.
>
These laws are already known to exist; even researchers who don't like
proteinoid microspheres know about them and use them for their own scenarios.
>
> This limitation leads Davies into contradictions. He explicitly says that
> laws cannot contain the recipe for life because laws are "information -
> poor" while life is "information - rich."
>
> Can [specified complexity] be the guaranteed product of a deterministic,
> mechanical, law - like process, like a primordial soup left to the mercy
of
> familiar laws of physics and chemistry? No, it couldn't. No known law of
> nature could achieve this.
>
In point of fact, experimental research that refutes this claim has been
around for four decades; Davies either wasn't aware of it or he didn't
understand it, so he ignored it.
>
> Nonetheless, boxed in by his presuppositions, he proposes that there may
> be a new type of "law," an information - generating law for which we have
> no evidence. He thinks the law might be something along the lines of
Stuart
> Kauffman's complexity theory, where systems can self - organize. Davies
> acknowledges that Kauffman's ideas have met with considerable skepticism
> and have little evidence to support them.
>
That may be true of Kauffman's specific theory, but the basic idea that
systems can self-organize was first proposed by Oparin in the Twenties, is
generally accepted as the theoretical basis for modern abiogenesis and has
been experimentally verified for at least six decades, beginning with Alfonso
Herrera's sulfobes and Oparin's coacervate droplets.
>
> He also insightfully points out
> that with Kauffman's ideas there is "a deeper problem of a conceptual
> nature." "Life is actually not an example of self - organization. Life is
in
> fact specified i.e., genetically directed - organization."
>
**Modern** life is genetically-directed, but that does not mean that Life
itself must be genetically-directed. In fact, it has been experimentally
verified that life can be created without genetics, and that genetics is a
later evolutionary development. So in fact life is self-organizing.
[snip]
>
> The bottom line is that life's origin and meaning remain as elusive as
ever,
> at least within the (semi -) naturalistic framework of Paul Davies. Yet
his
> struggle to write a book that sticks to a general-law framework, even
> while marveling at life's extravagant information content, makes The Fifth
> Miracle a valuable and cautionary example of blinkered thought in action.
>
And much the same can be said about Behe's review.
Kevin L. O'Brien