The Cosmic Serpent (33 page)

12
Artaud (1979, p. 193). The French original is “Je me livre à la fièvre des rêves, mais c'est pour en retirer de nouvelles lois.”

13
The contents of this famous soup are problematic. In 1952, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey did an experiment that was to become famous; they bombarded a test tube containing water, hydrogen, ammonia, and methane with electricity, supposedly imitating the atmosphere of the primitive earth with its permanent lightning storms; after a week, they had produced 2 of the 20 amino acids that nature uses in the construction of proteins. This experiment was long cited as proof that life could emerge from an inorganic soup. However, in the 1980s, geologists realized that an atmosphere of methane and ammoniac would rapidly have been destroyed by sunlight and that our planet's primitive atmosphere most probably contained nitrogen, carbon dioxide, water vapor, and traces of hydrogen. When one bombards the latter with electricity, one does not obtain biomolecules. So the prebiotic soup is increasingly considered to be a “myth” (see Shapiro 1986).

14
Reisse (1988) writes about panspermia “that this theory presents a major defect. No acceptable criterion allows one to measure its quality: by essence it cannot be refuted. Moreover, panspermia in its modern version displaces the location where life originated but leaves the fundamental problem of its origin intact” (p. 101). De Duve (1984) writes: “If you equate the probability of the birth of a bacterial cell to that of the chance assembly of its component atoms, even eternity will not suffice to produce one for you. So you might as well accept, as do most scientists, that the process was completed in no more than 1 billion years and that it took place entirely on the surface of our planet, to produce, as early as 3.3 billion years ago, the bacteriumlike organisms revealed by fossil traces” (p. 356). Watson et al. (1987) write in their chapter on the origins of life: “In this chapter, we will assume, as do the vast majority of practicing biologists, that life originated on Earth” (p. 1098).

15
In the early 1980s, researchers discovered that certain RNA molecules, called “ribozymes,” could cut themselves up and stick themselves back together again, acting as their own catalysts. This led to the following speculation: If RNA is also an enzyme, it could perhaps replicate itself without the help of proteins. An RNA that is both gene and catalyst would solve the old chicken-and-egg problem that has haunted the debate on the origin of DNA and proteins. Scientists went on to formulate the theory of the “RNA world,” according to which the first organisms were RNA molecules that learned to synthesize proteins, facilitating their replication, and that surrounded themselves with lipids to form a cellular membrane; these RNA-based organisms then evolved into organisms with a genetic memory made of DNA, which is more stable chemically. However, this theory is not only irrefutable, it leaves many questions unsolved. Thus, to make RNA, one must have nucleotides, and for the moment, no one has ever seen nucleotides take shape by chance and line up to form RNA. As Shapiro (1994b) writes, the “experiments conducted up until now have shown no tendency for a plausible prebiotic soup to build bricks of RNA. One would have liked to discover ribozymes capable of doing so, but this has not been the case. And even if one were to discover any, this would still not resolve the fundamental question: where did the first RNA molecule come from?” (pp. 421-422). He adds: “After ten years of relentless research, the most common and remarkable property of ribozymes has been found to be the capacity to demolish other molecules of nucleic acid. It is difficult to imagine a less adapted activity than that in a prebiotic soup where the first colony of RNA would have had to struggle to make their home” (p. 421). Kauffman (1996) writes: “The dominant view of life assumes that self-replication must be based on something akin to Watson-Crick base pairing. The ‘RNA world' model of the origins of life conforms to this view. But years of careful effort to find an enzyme-free polynucleotide system able to undergo replication cycles by sequentially and correctly adding the proper nucleotide to the newly synthesized strand have not yet succeeded” (p. 497). Laszlo (1997) writes: “The origin of life is more a question of metaphysics than a scientific problem. The experimental facts gleaned by different well-established authors allow only for scenarios, in an unlimited number, all of which are fictive” (p. 26). Regarding clay-based speculations, see Cairns-Smith (1983); regarding oily bubbles, see Morowitz (1985); regarding self-replicating peptides, see Lee et al. (1996).

16
Trémolières (1994) writes: “Despite these terrible paradoxes, the scientific world agrees that there must have existed something before the current organization of life, and more precisely that there were ‘living' or ‘pre-living' forms that did not yet contain the genetic code, or in any case, not the code that we know. And science has strangely developed its branches in a direction where nothing exists any longer; this is the contrary of futurology—which is apparently a science—or of science fiction, which is an art” (p. 70). Shapiro (1986) writes: “Scientific explanations flounder, however, and possibilities multiply when we ask how this first cell arose on earth. Competing theories abound—which seems always the case when we know very little about a subject. Some theories, of course, come labeled as The Answer. As such they are more properly classified as mythology or religion than as science” (p. 13).

17
Shapiro (1994a, p. II). Watson et al. (1987) write: “Unfortunately, it is impossible to obtain direct proof for any particular theory of the origin of life. The sobering truth is that even if every expert in the field of molecular evolution were to agree on how life originated, the theory would still be a best guess rather than a fact” (p. 1161). Wade (1995c) writes: “With a handful of trivial exceptions, all forms of life have the same, apparently arbitrary code through which DNA specifies protein molecules. If life arises so spontaneously, why don't we see a variety of different codes and chemistries in earth's creatures? The universal nature of the genetic code implies a one-time event, some narrow gateway through which only a single entity or family of related life forms was able to pass. One possibility is that life evolved independently several times on earth and creatures with our genetic code destroyed those based on all other codes. But there's no evidence for such a code war. Or maybe the emergence of life is indeed so improbable that it only happened once. Strange, then, that life seems to have arisen at the earliest moment possible, almost immediately after the primitive earth had cooled enough” (pp. 22-23).

18
Sullivan (1988, p. 33).

19
Chuang-Tzu (1968, p. 43).

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