[Home] [Updates] [Site map] [Quotes, Unclassified, Classified]
The following are quotes added to my Unclassified Quotes database in February 2007 (1). The date format is dd/mm/yy.
See copyright conditions at end.
[Jan, Feb (2); Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec]
1/02/2007 "Arrhenius (1908) proposed that spores had been driven here by the pressure of the light from the central star of another planetary system. His theory is known as Panspermia. Kelvin suggested that the first organisms reached the Earth in a meteorite. Neither of these theories is absurd, but both can be subjected to severe criticism. Sagan (Shklovski and Sagan, 1966; Sagan and Whitehall, 1973) has shown that any known type of radiation resistant spore would receive so large a dose of radiation during its journey to the Earth from another Solar System that it would be extremely unlikely to remain viable. The probability that sufficiently massive objects escape from a Solar System and arrive on the planet of another one is considered to be so small that it is unlikely that a single meteorite of extrasolar origin has ever reached the surface of the Earth (Sagan, private communication)." (Crick, F.H.C. & Orgel, L.E., "Directed Panspermia," Icarus, Vol. 19, 1973, pp.341-346, p.342. Emphasis original) 1/02/2007 "The local galactic system is estimated to be about 13 x 109 yr old (See Metz, 1972), The first generation of stars, because they were formed from light elements, are unlikely to have been accompanied by planets. However, some second generation stars not unlike the Sun must have formed within 2 x 109 yr of the origin of the galaxy (Blaauw and Schmidt, 1965). Thus it is quite probable that planets not unlike the Earth existed as much as 6.5 x 109 yr before the formation of our own Solar System. We know that not much more than 4 x 109 yr elapsed between the appearance of life on the Earth (wherever it came from) and the development of our own technological society. The time available makes it possible, therefore, that technological societies existed elsewhere in the galaxy even before the formation of the Earth. We should, therefore, consider a new "infective" theory, namely that a primitive form of life was deliberately planted on the Earth by a technologically advanced society on another planet." (Crick, F.H.C. & Orgel, L.E., "Directed Panspermia," Icarus, Vol. 19, 1973, pp.341-346, p.342. Emphasis original) 2/02/2007 "We now have no difficulty in seeing how amino acids, nucleotides, sugars and the like could arise. It is more of a problem to understand how they could become aggregated so as to form the first living cell." (Sneath, P.H.A., "Planets and Life," The World of Science Library, Thames & Hudson: London, 1970, p.78) 2/02/2007 "We cannot tell whether life originated once (in one particular coacervate or clay particle) or whether the same steps were being repeated all through the early seas and pools. But at some stage the power to multiply arose, probably in the form of a nucleic-acid chain similar to those we know today, and presumably using something very like the present genetic code. One would then expect the most successful eobionts to multiply and over-run any other incipient organisms. At this stage metabolism would depend on energy provided by the organic molecules which the eobionts decomposed anaerobically. These eobionts, between 3,000- and 4,000-million years ago, might have been something like bacteria, though lacking many features of present-day bacteria. They would possess a cell membrane, within which would be enzymes and nucleic acids. They would use as building blocks the preformed amino acids and nucleotides which were dissolved in the seas. As time went on, and some building blocks became scarce, these eobionts would have to develop processes for making them from other organic molecules, or else would have to adapt to use substitutes. Natural selection would act to perpetuate the most successful forms, and evolution would begin." (Sneath, P.H.A., "Planets and Life," The World of Science Library, Thames & Hudson: London, 1970, p.80) 2/02/2007 "These eobionts presumably possessed three major attributes. They had self-copying nucleic acids, they had enzymes, and they had a membrane. In what order did these arise? This is, of course, just speculation, but it seems most likely that they arose in the order given above. The copying mechanism came first, because it is this that defines the continuity of structure which is implied when we say it came first. The nucleic acids then acquired the power to absorb amino acids and form them into proteins, while the membrane was then evolved to stabilize the whole. Recently, however, it has been plausibly suggested that the first nucleic acids formed on a protein chain (which may not have been an enzyme in the usual sense), so that one could envisage an early period when the self-copying molecules were a complex of nucleic acid and protein." (Sneath, P.H.A., "Planets and Life," The World of Science Library, Thames & Hudson: London, 1970, p.80) 2/02/2007 "There is much discussion at present on how the genetic code originated. The third base of the nucleotide triplets ... usually does not alter the amino acid that is coded for, and this suggests that in eobionts the first two letters only were read, and that the third was utilized later to distinguish certain pairs of amino acids. The eobionts may well have had a limited repertoire of amino acids. But it seems rather unlikely that the original code consisted of twin letters only, because of the difficulty of changing from a twin to a triplet code. But whether the first code contained only adenine and thymine, or only guanine and cytosine, no one knows." (Sneath, P.H.A., "Planets and Life," The World of Science Library, Thames & Hudson: London, 1970, p.81) 2/02/2007 "The other alternative was most convincingly advocated by the great Swedish chemist S. Arrhenius, who called it the panspermia hypothesis. Arrhenius suggested that life arrived on the earth in the form of germs such as the spores of micro-organisms, and that these had been carried across the depths of space from elsewhere in the universe, propelled by the weak but continued pressure that is exerted by light rays on minute particles. ... Arrhenius showed theoretically that light pressure would be able to move small particles over very great distances. He also showed that violent volcanic eruptions might carry such particles into the stratosphere, from whence they might be driven into interplanetary space. He calculated that particles might reach the nearest stars, the Alpha-Centauri group, in some thousands of years. However, larger particles would tend to fall by gravitation into the sun. Arrhenius thought that the earth may have received its first life from spores transported from planets elsewhere in the universe, and believed that the extreme cold of outer space would not cause them to perish during their journey, nor would the transient heating as they entered the earth's atmosphere. Indeed there are many plausible arguments in the panspermia theory, and the astronomer Carl Sagan of Harvard University has re-examined many of these points. A spore of diameter 0.4 to 1.2 microns (1 micron = 1/1000th of a millimetre) is of the right size to be pushed out from the solar system by the sun's light. It would reach the orbit of Mars within a few weeks, and the nearest stars, as Arrhenius said, in some tens of thousands of years. A spore rather larger than this would be attracted to the sun (because for it the gravitational pull would be greater than the radiation pressure), and might hit the earth en route. Spores of quite a variety of sizes could be expelled from other planetary systems, depending on the mass and brightness of their suns. In outer space bacterial spores might survive for thousands or even millions of years, provided they had some protection against ionizing radiation, such as might be afforded by adsorbed dust particles. The most serious difficulty is that of space itself. Space is so vast that even if cubic miles of spores were liberated in it they would become so dispersed in the enormous volumes of space that there would be little chance that a planet such as the earth would ever capture any of them. In any case the great majority would be burned up by the stars or in hot gas clouds. Such calculations are necessarily speculative, but they would make it seem very improbable that life could have reached the earth from elsewhere. There may, however, be some possibility of transport from the earth to other planets in the solar system. Thomas Gold has suggested an alternative method of transport: the earth may once have been visited by an expedition from some advanced civilization elsewhere in our galaxy, and microbes may have been left behind!" (Sneath, P.H.A., "Planets and Life," The World of Science Library, Thames & Hudson: London, 1970, pp.74-75) 2/02/2007 "It now seems unlikely that extraterrestrial living organisms could have reached the earth either as spores driven by the radiation pressure from another star or as living organisms imbedded in a meteorite. As an alternative to these nineteenth-century mechanisms, we have considered Directed Panspermia, the theory that organisms were deliberately transmitted to the earth by intelligent beings on another planet. We conclude that it is possible that life reached the earth in this way, but that the scientific evidence is inadequate at the present time to say anything about the probability. We draw attention to the kinds of evidence that might throw additional light on the topic." (Crick, F.H.C. & Orgel, L.E., "Directed Panspermia," Icarus, Vol. 19, 1973, pp.341-346, p.341) 2/02/2007 "We've discussed the Circumstellar Habitable Zone in our Solar System and the larger-scale Galactic Habitable Zone. But there's a still larger-scale framework, which we can call the Cosmic Habitable Age (CHA). When we consider the universal properties of the observable universe, age is more basic than location. Not all places and times around a star or within a spiral galaxy are equally habitable. Similarly, not all ages of the universe are equally habitable. This is obvious in the very early universe prior to decoupling. At that epoch the universe was a dense, hot plasma of elementary particles and light nuclei. Stars had not yet synthesized the heavy elements that make up our bodies. It was a dreadfully hostile environment for life of any sort. But the beginning is not the only no-man's land. If we think of everything an environment needs to support life, especially complex life, then, cosmically speaking, probably only a fairly short period in the history of the universe is habitable. The life-essential elements heavier than helium weren't present in the universe until they were made in the first stars and then ejected from their interiors. The first generation of stars began seeding their environment perhaps a few hundred million years after the beginning of cosmic time. The life-essential elements concentrated more quickly in the larger galaxies, especially in their inner regions. So even if some stars had Earth-size planets only a few billion years after the beginning, they would have been stranded in the most dangerous neighborhoods. Unlike our present, the early universe was poor in heavy elements and rich in high-energy quasars, star births, and supernovae. Early-forming planets in the inner regions of galaxies would have been bathed in lethal levels of gamma ray, X-ray, and particle radiation. ... In short, the universe has been getting more habitable." (Gonzalez, G.* & Richards, J.W.*, "The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed For Discovery," Regnery: Washington DC, 2004, pp.181- 182) 2/02/2007 "As we gaze out into the distant universe, we now know we are peering back in time to an epoch close to the Big Bang event. We're inclined to marvel at the scientific ingenuity that has allowed us to decode such information. But we shouldn't forget the remarkable conditions necessary for such ingenuity. Our location in the Milky Way allows us to view the distant universe and also the many different kinds of nearby stars, a prerequisite for understanding other galaxies. But for scientific discovery, time may be as important as location at the largest scales. Hypothetical and bizarrely hearty residents of the early universe-say, a billion years or two billion after the beginning-would have had a front row seat to a spectacular fireworks display of nearby supernovae and quasars, their central black hole engines fed by abundant gas falling in toward their deep gravity wells. The Hubble Deep Fields reveal a young universe filled with distorted galaxies, disturbing one another through close encounters. Partly as a result, the intense heating from the many massive stars and supernovae bequeaths to the galactic dust a bright and sometimes beautiful glow. So when most of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy formed, hot dust blocked the view of the distant universe. If they could have existed, early cosmic residents might have enjoyed the show. But they wouldn't have seen far beyond it." (Gonzalez, G.* & Richards, J.W.*, "The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed For Discovery," Regnery: Washington DC, 2004, pp.185-186) 3/02/2007 "Organic material was regarded until the nineteenth century as stuff produced solely by living organisms. Inorganic material, on the other hand, was the stuff of the non-living world. Because the two were regarded as distinct, it was argued that life cannot be produced from non-life, and so life must have been created as such deliberately by a creator. This doctrine of 'vitalism' is said in writings on the history of chemistry to have been destroyed by Friedrich Wohler in 1828. Wohler synthesized urea, a principal component of urine, from ammonium cyanate. At the time, urea was regarded as organic because of its presence in the excretion products of animals, while everybody accepted that ammonium cyanate was inorganic. So here was a supposed counterexample, proving, it was said, that organic material can indeed be made from inorganic material. Exit vitalism, to the delight of its many opponents. To begin with, the case against vitalism seemed reasonably argued, but with the discovery of bacteria ... the situation darkened perceptibly. The ammonium radical in the ammonium cyanate used by Wohler in his preparation of urea came from some naturally occurring deposit of an ammonium salt. But where had such a deposit come from? And in particular, where had the nitrogen in the ammonium radical come from? With the application of chemistry to agriculture becoming of greater and greater relevance to society, it eventually emerged that nitrogen in the atmosphere is the source of nitrogen in the soil, and that it is the growth of certain kinds of plant (e.g. peas and beans) that causes this change of venue for the nitrogen. Nitrogen passes from air to ground through the action of plants, not through the action of inorganic processes (except possibly in very small quantities: for example, small quantities of nitrogen oxides might be produced in lightning flashes and become subsequently washed out of the air into the soil). When plants responsible for this so-called fixing of nitrogen die, their remains are acted on by bacteria, and the ammonium radical is produced as a by-product. Hence deposits of ammonium salts in the soil are overwhelmingly the result of the action of denitrifying bacteria, and the ammonium cyanate used by Wohler was therefore almost surely of biological origin. The supposed preparation of an organic material from an inorganic one was therefore an illusion, for the supposed inorganic material was not truly inorganic: it had a biological and therefore an organic source. Wohler had used a material with an organic origin to prepare another organic material, which was not what the anti- vitalistic argument had claimed. Seen in broader perspective, life had been used to make the ammonium cyanate, and there was nothing anti-vitalistic in that because the intervention of biological organisms was just what the vitalists had always claimed to be necessary. When these further facts eventually came to light, chemists and biologists did not review the matter as they should have done. They did not apologize to the vitalists for a mistake which began inadvertently, but which by the end of the nineteenth century had become quite distinctly deliberate. The deliberate mistake continues to this day. Every chemistry student is still given the wrong interpretation of Wohler's experiment. This is an example of the illusions and dogmas in the education system ..." (Hoyle, F. & Wickramasinghe, N.C., "Our Place in the Cosmos: The Unfinished Revolution," [1993], Phoenix: London, Reprinted, 1996, pp.25-26) 3/02/2007 "By following trains of thought such as these, it can be shown that the old vitalistic doctrine is very nearly true. No way has yet been found for converting truly inorganic materials to organic ones in anything other than trace quantities without the intervention of living organisms. When this does happen, enormous amounts of organic material can be produced, at great speed in favourable conditions. The prospects for converting inorganic materials to organic appear to be worse in space than on the Earth, because inorganic catalysts which on Earth have to be prepared with the greatest care would be quickly poisoned under astronomical conditions by corrosive gases by sulphur compounds in particular. In space, pressures are low, while in the atmospheres of planets like Jupiter and Saturn temperature are low, causing inorganic reactions to be slowed to a crawl." (Hoyle, F. & Wickramasinghe, N.C., "Our Place in the Cosmos: The Unfinished Revolution," [1993], Phoenix: London, Reprinted, 1996, p.27. Emphasis original) 3/02/2007 "These remarks provide the background to the rest of this chapter which examines the all-important question of how, according to present scientific lore, life is supposed to have begun. Let us first see how the case is usually presented, before we come to the holes in the argument. In 1952-3 Stanley Miller and Harold Urey performed an experiment which seemed at the time to support the idea that life could have originated gradually from inorganic chemical substances The experiment was based on a recreation of the physical condition that were supposed to have prevailed on the newly formed Earth about 4 billion years ago. It was thought that an atmosphere existed that would be poisonous to most modern life-forms: methane, ammonia, carbon monoxide and dioxide, nitrogen and possible hydrogen cyanide, together with an ample supply of water. Conditions were taken to be highly disturbed, with frequent huge electrical storms and much volcanic activity. In the experiment, high-voltage sparks were passed through d mixture of gases representing the supposed early terrestrial atmosphere, often for many days at a time. The results were widely applauded as demonstrating almost beyond doubt the answer to the question of the origin of life. Many organic life-associated molecules were found in the resultant 'soup', among which were two basic biochemical building blocks: amino acids - the constituents of proteins - and nitrogenous bases, constituents of DNA. This first experiment was followed by others, and by now a large number of different organic molecules have been obtained. In the Earth's early oceans and lakes these molecules would have accumulated, it is argued, because there were no living organisms to consume them. The oceans would have been brimming with complex organic molecules, with about a third of the concentration found in chicken broth, whence the term 'organic soup'. All this is dreadfully wrong, however. The methane used by Urey and Miller was almost surely obtained from natural gas, and so was of biological origin. The ammonia was also of suspect origin, just as it was in Wohler's experiment. So what was actually done was to start with biomaterials and from them produce other biomaterials, a far less impressive outcome than it seemed at the time. If Urey and Miller, and their successors, had used only materials that were genuinely inorganic in the terrestrial context and had obtained similar results, the achievement would have been more impressive. The correct materials to use would have been water, nitrogen, and carbon monoxide and dioxide, for the reason that these substances might have occurred quite naturally on the early Earth before the onset of biological processes." (Hoyle, F. & Wickramasinghe, N.C., "Our Place in the Cosmos: The Unfinished Revolution," [1993], Phoenix: London, Reprinted, 1996, pp.27-28. Emphasis original) 3/02/2007 "We have serious doubts, moreover, even about the claim to have produced high concentrations of life- associated molecules, a claim made in our view without adequate documentation by later investigators. What we think happened was the following. Suppose one thinks of a long experiment divided into many episodes. In each episode a small amount of life-associated material is produced extracted and set aside, so being protected from the destructive effect of high-voltage sparks occurring in subsequent episodes. Such a procedure, given enough episodes, might well produce the claimed high concentration, but under conditions without relevance to a natural state of affairs, where life-associated molecules would break up as fast as they were produced. It is precisely their inherent lack of stability, compared with water, nitrogen and carbon monoxide, which gives such molecules their life-associated properties. Deliberately setting aside the organic molecules, protecting them from disruption, would be a deception. It would be equivalent to what in physics is called introducing Maxwell's demon. Maxwell's demon is like Aladdin's genie. Given Maxwell's demon, almost anything becomes possible - like making one half of an ice-cold room grow hot without supplying heat or energy from outside the room." (Hoyle, F. & Wickramasinghe, N.C., "Our Place in the Cosmos: The Unfinished Revolution," [1993], Phoenix: London, Reprinted, 1996, pp.28-29) 3/02/2007 "Deceptions in science come in two forms: overt and inadvertent; another name for overt deception is of course cheating. Deceptions often begin as inadvertent and then later become overt. It was inadvertent that Urey and Miller did not realize the essence of life to be its structure, not its building blocks. It is the precision arrangements of different amino acids in long chains that is the big issue. To take just one example, the protein histone-4 has essentially the same chain of 102 amino acids in all life-forms. If you had random shots at assembling this particular chain from a supply of individual amino acids to suit yourself- one shot for every atom in every star in every galaxy visible in the largest telescopes, your chance of successfully finding histone-4 would be like backing a horse at odds of 5 x 10132 (that is, 5 followed by 132 zeros) to 1 against [sic. 20102 = 10132], and histone-4 is just one of very many critical proteins. In 1952-3 the science of microbiology was still in its infancy, and so Urey and Miller knew nothing of the real heart of the problem of the origin of life when they carried out their first experiment. Consequently, seemed exciting to find some of the building blocks of life emerging from that experiment. Today, almost half a century on, so much is known about the structures of complex biomolecules like histone-4, and the essence of life can be seen to lie in the many remarkable properties which arise from the arrangements the basic building blocks, which themselves can be quite simple." (Hoyle, F. & Wickramasinghe, N.C., "Our Place in the Cosmos: The Unfinished Revolution," [1993], Phoenix: London, Reprinted, 1996, pp.29-30) 3/02/2007 "... the essence of life can be seen to lie in the many remarkable properties which arise from the arrangements the basic building blocks, which themselves can be quite simple. This is distinctively the case for sugars and their derivatives. Carbon monoxide and hydrogen are the two commonest molecules in the Universe. Combine one of each and you have a molecule of formaldehyde, possessing only a very slight measure of stability against splitting apart into carbon monoxide and hydrogen, a property with astonishing consequences. It is just because the normal human stance is upright, in a position with little stability, that an expert human skier can ski a downhill race on an uneven snow-covered mountain side. The horse stands in a very stable position, but fit four skis to the hooves of a horse and set it off on the same downhill run...it would be hopeless! The same is true for molecules. Because molecules near the margin of stability can go in many directions, remarkable things can happen Liquid formaldehyde is somewhat unpleasant stuff in which biological specimens are often preserved. But take a number of formaldehyde molecules, usually five or six, join them together with a few interchanges of atoms, and you have a sugar, the sweet stuff of chocolate. Still more remarkable, carrying out the joining and interchange processes in various ways will produce all the sugars, including the particular case of ribose. A derivative of ribose deoxyribose-is what the D stands for in DNA. So here is another building block of life, a block that when analysed into smaller components can be seen to be a product of the commonest molecules in the Universe. Joining similar sugar molecules with linking oxygen atoms produces the class of substances known as carbohydrates, with different sugar molecules giving different carbohydrates. One gives starch, the basic foodstuff of much of animal life. Another gives cellulose, which plays a critical role in giving mechanical strength to plants permitting trees to grow to heights of a hundred metres and more, and providing the wood without which most man-made buildings would look very bare. Joining sugars via nitrogen-atom links yields yet another class of substances, including the hard material of a lobster shell and the beaks of birds." (Hoyle, F. & Wickramasinghe, N.C., "Our Place in the Cosmos: The Unfinished Revolution," [1993], Phoenix: London, Reprinted, 1996, p.30) 3/02/2007 "Only six of the chemical elements play major parts in the basic structures of living organisms: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur. Pairs of sulphur atoms join in a strong disulphide bond, and it is these bonds, often situated at widely separated places in the chain of amino acids forming a protein, that give a comparative rigidity to the characteristic shape into which a protein curls, a characteristic shape that is crucial to its biochemical properties. Disulphide bonds in a protein have to be just right if the protein is to behave in an interesting way, serving as a catalyst (far more effectively than man-made catalysts) in a biochemical process which may be crucial to life. There are thousands of examples of proteins crucial to life, each one depending on shapes which have to be just right. Phosphorus plays a role in DNA somewhat similar to that of sulphur in proteins. Together with oxygen, phosphorus links the deoxyribose molecules into a structure whose shape is crucial, the famous double helix. But it is not just a question of obtaining any old double helix: the two component helices have to be correctly positioned with respect to each other so as to permit only one set of ties and their matching counterparts to join them. If linking ties could occur higgledy-piggledy, DNA could not carry information, and there would be no genetic code - just as there could be no information in writing, if the letters of the alphabet were sprayed around higgledy-piggledy. Phosphorus plays a critical role in ensuring that this does not happen." (Hoyle, F. & Wickramasinghe, N.C., "Our Place in the Cosmos: The Unfinished Revolution," [1993], Phoenix: London, Reprinted, 1996, p.31) 3/02/2007 "In addition to the six main chemical elements of life, there are 16 others which are present in living systems in smaller quantities, minor factors who nevertheless are important to the play during the moments they are on stage. Magnesium atoms, each held individually between six nitrogen atoms in the green substance chlorophyll, builds sugar molecules by photosynthesis. This is a device for going against the thermodynamic tendency of a chemical system to seek its lowest energy level, which necessarily applies to systems wholly at terrestrial temperature, say 25°C. The trick is to use light from the Sun, a source with a temperature of about 5500°C, thereby standing ordinary thermodynamics for 25°C on its head. By synthesizing sugars a potential source of energy is created, a source that is subsequently used in an inverse sense (sugars breaking down into their constituents), either by plants themselves or by animals that eat the plants. A similar arrangement with individual iron atoms, each held between four nitrogen atoms, provides the active centre of haemoglobin. The critical property again has reversibility, the reversibility of both storing and yielding a supply of oxygen, which again is used by animals in the release of energy. The element calcium plays a very different part, however. It is used to give strength to bones and, as calcium carbonate, to form the shells of many sea creatures. And so on for the other, often highly specialized activities of the remaining 13 elements."(Hoyle, F. & Wickramasinghe, N.C., "Our Place in the Cosmos: The Unfinished Revolution," [1993], Phoenix: London, Reprinted, 1996, pp.31-32) 3/02/2007 "Seen in retrospect, to have produced some of the building blocks of life in experiments of the Urey-Miller type was of no relevance to the origin of life, especially as some of the materials used in the experiments were already biological in origin, since no one doubts that life can give rise to life. The building blocks of life are commonplace. It is the structures to which they can give rise that are remarkable, and where the problem of the origin of life really lies. Not to have realized this in 1952-3 was understandable, but not to realize it today is inexcusable. Not to realize it today amounts to overt deception, at least on the part of research scientists who have ample time and opportunity to study the matter in depth. Students, on the other hand, can be excused, yet likely enough it will be from students that a general realization of the deceit will first come. The deceit has strong motivation. It is to avoid the question of whether the situation, as facts have uncovered it to be, can sensibly be regarded as accidental. Is it reasonable to suppose that the commonest elements should by chance alone have such a range of properties as have been determined from biochemical studies, as for instance in the properties of enzymes? Or is there a teleological component, a purposive component, even in the properties of the chemical elements, let alone in the origin and development of life? If so, we are instantly thrown into very deep waters indeed. The creationist exclaims forcibly, to the point of shouting, that there is indeed a purposive component, while the soi-disant [self-styled] respectable scientist shows, not by shouting but by tricks, that of course it is not so." (Hoyle, F. & Wickramasinghe, N.C., "Our Place in the Cosmos: The Unfinished Revolution," [1993], Phoenix: London, Reprinted, 1996, p.32) 3/02/2007 "A typical trick is the so-called anthropic principle - that if the situation is not exactly the way we find it we would not be here to discuss it. Therefore, remarkable as the accidents may look at first sight, our presence is a guarantee that they occurred. But our presence could just as well be a guarantee that life is purposive, planned. The situation is decidedly unproven, with the anthropic principle no more than a tautology." (Hoyle, F. & Wickramasinghe, N.C., "Our Place in the Cosmos: The Unfinished Revolution," [1993], Phoenix: London, Reprinted, 1996, pp.32-33) 3/02/2007 "Biological systems, on the other hand, have a crucially different mode of expansion. Instead of being linear, they are exponential in character - one makes two, two makes four, four makes eight, and so on. Biological expansion is explosive, becoming more and more extreme as it feeds on itself. Let us start with a single bacterium, and suppose that it and its progeny are supplied with suitable nutrients. A typical time for replication under favourable conditions would be two or three hours. In a day, the initial bacterium would have expanded by one makes two, two makes four ..., each step requiring two or three hours, into a colony of about 1000 bacteria, still much too small to be seen by the unaided eye. In two days the 1000 bacteria would become 1,000,000, a colony just visible to the eye, about a tenth of the diameter of a pinhead. In four days the original bacterium would have become 1,000,000,000,000 bacteria, together weighing about a gram. In five days the colony would be approaching a kilogram in weight. So it would proceed, with three zeros added to the numbers for every day that passed: a tonne after six days, 1000 tonnes after a week, the mass of Mount Everest after eleven days, that of the Earth after thirteen days, our galaxy after nineteen days, and the whole of the visible Universe in twenty-two days - roughly a three-week job, starting with the single bacterium." (Hoyle, F. & Wickramasinghe, N.C., "Our Place in the Cosmos: The Unfinished Revolution," [1993], Phoenix: London, Reprinted, 1996, p.35) 3/02/2007 "No problem exists about the mode of production of the organic matter, only about its location. We have to find the places where the environmental conditions favour explosive bacterial expansion. The places cannot be interstellar space, judging from the requirements for bacterial replication found here on the Earth. Either the presence of liquid water or an atmosphere with relative humidity above 60 per cent is usually found necessary for the replication of microorganisms (although diatoms have been reported to replicate in ice). The temperature range for replication appears to be typically from about minus 20°C to plus 80°C, although the presence of living bacteria at temperatures above 100°C in deep-sea `black smoker' chimneys associated with volcanic vents shows that the upper limit of temperature probably exceeds 80°C by a considerable margin under high pressures. A supply of suitable nutrients is of course also essential. Depending on the species of bacterium, nutrients can vary widely. It is the essential characteristic of a large class of so-called chemo-autotrophic bacteria that they replicate from inorganic substances alone. Indeed, one can say that wherever inorganic substances exist under natural conditions with the possibility of energy being obtained from them by a chemical reaction, then a bacterium exists to exploit the situation. This is provided the reaction occurs only very slowly under purely inorganic conditions. Otherwise the opportunity for bacteria would not exist, because the reaction would occur inorganically and the substances, the nutrients, would be gone. Chemo-autotrophic bacteria manage to exploit energy-producing reactions that are otherwise too slow to happen inorganically by nonbiological means. The trick is to speed up such reactions immensely by the use of extremely subtle catalysts, the proteins called enzymes. Granted that only a little energy is available, so little that inorganic reactions cannot unlock it, bacteria can live on almost anything, which they do through the amazing properties of proteins." (Hoyle, F. & Wickramasinghe, N.C., "Our Place in the Cosmos: The Unfinished Revolution," [1993], Phoenix: London, Reprinted, 1996, pp.35-36) 3/02/2007 "Bacteria are exceedingly hardy in every respect one can think of. They have remarkable tolerance to temperature, to pressure, to nutrients and to radiation damage. ... The properties of bacteria are not at all of the kind that could possibly be explained by evolution in a terrestrial environment, because in many respects their properties have no relation to conditions encountered naturally on the Earth, for instance in their resistance to exceedingly low temperatures and pressures, and their resistance to immense doses of destructive radiation. There has never been a terrestrial environment in which such properties could have evolved, and so, according to the Darwinian mode of evolution they simply should not exist But in fact they do." (Hoyle, F. & Wickramasinghe, N.C., "Our Place in the Cosmos: The Unfinished Revolution," [1993], Phoenix: London, Reprinted, 1996, pp.36-37) 3/02/2007 "Microorganisms recover from damage to their basic genetic material in a subtle way. The method of repair turns on there being two helices in DNA. Damage at a particular site on the DNA nearly always occurs to only one of the two helices and/or its attachments. A battery of enzymes is first called out to remove the damaged region. Then other enzymes take a look at the undamaged helix and its attachments, from which it is possible to work out what the site of the damaged helix (now removed) should properly be. With the proper form decided, enzymes first construct a correct new bit of helix together with the correct attachments to it. This is fitted into place, and the double helix is returned to its proper form. No such complex process could possibly arise, in our opinion, unless there had been an imperative necessity for it - such as certainly exists in space but not on the Earth, where biological systems are shielded by the atmosphere from the critical source of damage in space, namely X-rays of solar and cosmic origin. Biological systems on the Earth can be hit by a cosmic-ray particle, but such events for a target as small as a microorganism are exceedingly rare. No complex process of repair is required for rare events, since an assembly of bacteria with immense powers of replication could easily afford the wholly trivial losses that would arise from unlikely accidents. Humans, with their vastly larger target area for cosmic rays and other stray low-level sources of damage, manage quite well without having a repair mechanism to equal that of bacteria." (Hoyle, F. & Wickramasinghe, N.C., "Our Place in the Cosmos: The Unfinished Revolution," [1993], Phoenix: London, Reprinted, 1996, pp.37-38) 3/02/2007 "Between 2-6 % of the insoluble organic matter of meteorites has been found by Drs J. Brooks and G. Shaw of Bradford University to resemble sporopollenin. Sporopollenin is the very stable material of which pollen capsules are made. It is this substance that enables pollen to survive in ancient sediments. ... At best one cannot be absolutely certain that, whatever one finds in a meteorite, it did not originate on the earth itself. Even if the meteorite were to have been collected soon after landing and if it had the minimum of handling, one can never be sure that it hadn't picked up biological material from a previous encounter with the earth. It is now known that some meteorites collide with the earth's atmosphere and are immediately ejected back into space, only to return many years later. ... The fact that the Apollo lunar samples failed to indicate biochemicals confirms the view that life is only present here on earth. If meteorites were loaded with biochemicals then one would have expected to find a thick layer of organic dust on the surface of the moon. This was not so. I believe there is a simple explanation for the presence of biochemicals in meteorites They arise from contamination by pollen grains. Immense quantities of pollen are driven up into the upper atmosphere by air currents. During the descent of any meteorite the pollen grains become embedded into its surface cracks. Within the pollen shell are an abundance of amino acids. They are all of the L- type, but as the meteorite becomes hot, the amino acids racemize. Finally, as it passes through layers of cloud, water droplets wash out the amino acids from the pollen grains to leave a shell of sporopollenin. What Brooks and Shaw had found was indeed sporopollenin. Proof of this suggestion comes from an inspection of the types of amino acid found in meteorites. They resemble very much the amino acids present in honey; take for example, pipecolic acid, α-amino butyric acid and ß-alanine. These amino acids arise in honey from pollen. In fact the amino acids found in meteorites are characteristic of pollen. Pipecolic acid, for instance, is characteristic of grass pollen. The presence of biochemicals in meteorites does not indicate, as many would like to think, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, nor indeed extraterrestrial chemical evolution. They arise from pollen grains that are picked up by the meteorite as it falls to earth." (Croft, L.R., "How Life Began," Evangelical Press: Durham UK, 1988, pp.110-111) 3/02/2007 "On the contrary there is no evidence that a `primeval soup' ever existed on this planet for any appreciable length of time. If a `soup' had existed, the very basis of the Chemical Evolution Theory would require that it would have had to contain large quantities of nitrogen-containing organic compounds (amino acids. nucleic acid bases, etc.). Such materials in laboratory experiments are readily absorbed on sedimentary inorganic particles and would therefore under normal geological conditions and in an environment that did not contain life unquestionably sediment along with the rock and mineral particles. The result of this should have been the formation of vast areas of sediments containing organic compounds-since the theories of Chemical Evolution demand that large quantities of such compounds should occur over long periods of time, so that chance might have an opportunity to exert its influence on the various chemical processes which are assumed to have led to a living system. It would of course be inevitable that such sediments would undergo normal diagenetic processes when we would then expect to find significant quantities of `nitrogenous- cokes,' trapped in various sediments. The formation of such `cokes' is the normal result obtained by heating organic matter rich in nitrogenous substances. No such materials have yet been found in Precambrian rocks on this planet. In fact the opposite seems to be the case. The nitrogen content of Precambrian organic matter is exceptionally low (<0.2%). The insoluble organic matter (`kerogen') present in Precambrian sediments generally contains largely carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen with very little organic nitrogen or sulphur. We can therefore conclude with some degree of certainty that: a) There never was any substantial amount of `primitive soup' on Earth when ancient Precambrian sediments were formed; and that b) If such a `soup' existed it was only for a brief period of time. If we subtract the idea of a substantial amount of `primitive soup' and a long period of time from the basic concept of the Chemical Evolution Theory, there is very little left." (Brooks, J. & Shaw, G., "A Critical Assessment of the Origin of Life," in Noda, H., ed., "Origin of Life: Proceedings of the Second ISSOL Meeting, the Fifth ICOL Meeting," Center for Academic Publications: Japan, 1978, pp.597-606, p.604) 3/02/2007 "The geochemical investigations indicate that throughout the early Precambrian there is ample evidence in the rocks that living systems were present at the time of their deposition and were photosynthesising and undergoing biochemical reactions similar to those of current living systems. Thus photosynthesising microorganisms were present in the lower and upper Onverwacht Group and banded iron formations have been discovered in the West Greenland ancient Archaean rocks. The oldest preserved sediments in the world probably formed about 4.0 x 109 years ago, before the major metamorphic events dated at 3.75-3.85 x 109 years ago. The banded iron formations in the Godthaab and Isua metasediments may indicate that living systems were active about 4.0 x 109 years ago. Prior to this the Earth is considered to have been at too high a temperature (> 600°C) to support life or for that matter to allow the stable existence of complex bio- molecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids. This leaves ever decreasing amounts of time for conventional Chemical Evolutionary processes to occur. The time scale is very different from that normally suggested for Chemical Evolution models. Since there is no clear geochemical evidence to support current theories of Chemical Evolution, one must strongly consider that life on Earth may have originated extra-terrestrially. It could be that further exploration of extraterrestrial materials (such as carbonaceous chondrites, Martian and other solar planet materials) might help throw light on the problem. Certainly, the sure discovery of any form of life in extra-terrestrial materials would add great weight to the concept of an extra-terrestrial origin for life on Earth." (Brooks, J. & Shaw, G., "A Critical Assessment of the Origin of Life," in Noda, H., ed., "Origin of Life: Proceedings of the Second ISSOL Meeting, the Fifth ICOL Meeting," Center for Academic Publications: Japan, 1978, pp.597-606, pp.604-605) 3/02/2007 "The surface of the earth is molten rock. The oceans are steam or superheated water. Every so often a wandering asteroid slams in with such energy that any incipient crust of hardened rock is melted again and the oceans are reboiled to an incandescent mist. Welcome to Hades, or at least to what geologists call the Hadean interval of earth's history. It is reckoned to have lasted from the planet's formation 4.6 billion years ago until 3.8 billion years ago, when the rain of ocean-boiling asteroids ended. The Isua greenstone belt of western Greenland, one of the oldest known rocks, was formed as the Hadean interval ended. And amazingly, to judge by chemical traces in the Isuan rocks, life on earth was already old." (Wade, N., "Genetic Analysis Yields Intimations of a Primordial Commune," The New York Times, June 13, 2000) 3/02/2007 "Everything about the origin of life on earth is a mystery, and it seems the more that is known, the more acute the puzzles get. The dates have become increasingly awkward. Instead of there being a billion or so years for the first cells to emerge from a warm broth of chemicals, life seems to pop up almost instantly after the last of the titanic asteroid impacts that routinely sterilized the infant planet. Last week, researchers reported discovering microbes that lived near volcanic vents formed 3.2 billion years ago, confirming that heat-loving organisms were among earth's earliest inhabitants." (Wade, N., "Genetic Analysis Yields Intimations of a Primordial Commune," The New York Times, June 13, 2000) 3/02/2007 "The chemistry of the first life is a nightmare to explain. No one has yet devised a plausible explanation to show how the earliest chemicals of life -thought to be RNA, or ribonucleic acid, a close relative of DNA -- might have constructed themselves from the inorganic chemicals likely to have been around on the early earth. The spontaneous assembly of small RNA molecules on the primitive earth `would have been a near miracle,' two experts in the subject helpfully declared last year. [Joyce G.F. & Orgel L.E., "Prospects for Understanding the Origin of the RNA World," in "The RNA World," Gesteland R.F. & Atkins J.F., eds. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press": Cold Spring Harbor NY, 1993, p.19]" (Wade, N., "Genetic Analysis Yields Intimations of a Primordial Commune," The New York Times, June 13, 2000) 3/02/2007 "A third line of inquiry into the beginnings of life has now also hit an unexpected roadblock. This is phylogeny, or the drawing of family trees of the various genes found in present-day forms of life. The idea is to run each gene tree backward to the ancestral gene at the root of the tree. The collection of all these ancestral genes should define the nature of the assumed universal ancestor, the living cell from which all the planet's life is descended. The universal ancestor would lie some distance away from life's origin from chemicals, but might at least give clues to how that process started. The phylogenetic approach worked beautifully when first applied in 1981 by Dr. Carl Woese of the University of Illinois to a single gene. Dr. Woese chose a gene that makes an essential component of the cell's machinery for synthesizing proteins. The tree derived by analyzing the versions of this gene found in many different species showed an orderly branching into the three primal kingdoms of life known as the bacteria, the archaea and the eukarya. The archaea are singled-celled organisms often found in hot places like scalding springs and deep oil wells; the eukarya include all multicellular forms of life like plants and animals. But the picture has become much less clear now that some 30 genomes from species in the three kingdoms have been decoded. For one thing, all of these genomes have turned out to contain far more novel genes than had been expected. And if all of these genes had forebears in the last ancestor, that primeval cell would have been implausibly complex." (Wade, N., "Genetic Analysis Yields Intimations of a Primordial Commune," The New York Times, June 13, 2000) 3/02/2007 "For another, family trees drawn on the basis of other genes showed a quite different pattern to that of Dr. Woese's protein-making gene. Biologists have not despaired of restoring the universal ancestor with phylogenetic trees, but the unveiling will not take place nearly so soon as expected. The puzzle that different genes yield different family trees, even though there can only be one family tree of evolution, is easily explained in principle: some genes must have been transmitted horizontally instead of vertically. In other words, instead of being inherited by one generation from another, certain genes must have been exchanged between lineages of organisms, just as living species of bacteria pass around among each other the genes that confer resistance to antibiotics. The horizontal exchange of genes seems to have started before the three kingdoms of life diverged from each other and the universal ancestor. Indeed, it was so pervasive, Dr. Woese suggested recently, that the universal ancestor was probably not a single-celled organism but a commune -- a loosely knit conglomerate of diverse cells that exchanged genetic information. These pieces of the genetic information would have been short modules carrying several related genes, not the long chromosomes carrying thousands of genes that are seen in most living organisms. Also, in Dr. Woese's view, they would have had a primitive and rather sloppy system for copying their genetic material, not the highly accurate, proof-read mechanism of DNA replication enjoyed by living cells today. But at some point, in Dr. Woese's reconstruction, the mechanism for translating genetic information into proteins would have become more accurate and powerful, and the members of this ancestral community would have evolved to a stage at which it was difficult to incorporate new material into their genomes. The commune members would have started to evolve independently. This would have been the moment when the family tree of the bacteria, archaea and eukarya began. The ancestral commune theory explains why the three kingdoms seem to have a largely common set of protein-making genes, as reflected in Dr. Woese's original tree, but a smorgasbord of other gene categories." (Wade, N., "Genetic Analysis Yields Intimations of a Primordial Commune," The New York Times, June 13, 2000) 3/02/2007 "Dr. Eugene V. Koonin, a computational biologist at the National Center for Biotechnological Information, agreed that Dr. Woese's idea was a useful framework and that the horizontal transfer of genes was probably more common in life's early days than now. `It is not so preposterous anymore to think of the common ancestor as a sort of Noah's ark, where pretty much every protein domain has been represented,' Dr. Koonin said. The proteins of living organisms are composed of mix-and-match functional units known as domains. Still, Dr. Woese's idea is a disturbing concept. Evolutionists are accustomed to portraying the evolutionary process in terms of neatly branching trees, not Noah's arks." (Wade, N., "Genetic Analysis Yields Intimations of a Primordial Commune," The New York Times, June 13, 2000) 3/02/2007 "The horizontal transfer thesis has been taken even further by Dr. W. Ford Doolittle, an evolutionary biologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. In a February article in Scientific American, titled `Uprooting the Tree of Life,' Dr. Doolittle argued that extensive horizontal transfers of genes occurred even after the emergence of the three kingdoms, making the origin of life look more like a forkful of spaghetti than a tree. Gene-based trees drawn for living animals can usually be dated by estimating the rate of DNA change and anchoring at least one branch of the tree to a fossil of known age. But the rate of DNA change has probably not been constant throughout evolution, especially in its early days, making it hard to known if gene-based trees like Dr. Woese's do indeed extend to the last common ancestor as they seem to on paper. Dr. Doolittle believes the trees may reach back only a billion years or so, not to the four-billion-year point when life began. `So many people wanted to believe we can run the clock right back to the beginning,' he said. But Dr. Koonin thinks the trees hold very ancient information, even if their dates are not certain. `We can see very far,' he said. `We can see beyond the last common ancestor.' He cites the fact that certain genes, like those for the proteins known as helicases and amino acid synthetases, are duplicated in all three kingdoms, and that these duplications must have occurred in the common ancestor, before the kingdoms split." (Wade, N., "Genetic Analysis Yields Intimations of a Primordial Commune," The New York Times, June 13, 2000) 3/02/2007 "Several of the earliest branches on Dr. Woese's original tree lead to present-day bacteria or archaea that live in extremely hot places. Since the early earth also was hot, it is tempting to think that the earliest forms of life may have emerged in places like the volcanic vents that pierce the ocean bed. Last week, Dr. Birger Rasmussen, a geologist at the University of Western Australia, reported in Nature that he had discovered the `probable fossil remains' of microbes that lived in volcanic vent deposits laid down 3.235 billion years ago. These are by far the oldest known vent-associated microbes, although the oldest fossils of any kind are of bacteria that lived 3.5 billion years ago. Dr. Rasmussen found these microscopic filaments of life in the Pilbara Craton of northwestern Australia. This and a formation in South Africa are the only two known Archaean age rocks in which fossils have survived. All other rocks of the Archaean age, which lasted from 3.8 billion to 2.5 billion years ago, have been so heated and reworked that any fossils have perished. In part because life must have originated well before these oldest known fossils, many biologists accept as the earliest evidence for life the traces of possibly biologically processed carbon in the Isuan rocks of Greenland. But at least one expert, Dr. J. William Shopf of the University of California at Los Angeles, is doubtful. The traces `could equally well be charred dregs of primordial soup, the remains of nonbiologic organic matter formed on the early earth or brought in with meteorites or comets,' he writes in `The Cradle of Life' (Princeton University Press, April 2000)." (Wade, N., "Genetic Analysis Yields Intimations of a Primordial Commune," The New York Times, June 13, 2000) 3/02/2007 "Though there are several lines of evidence about life's origins, none yet provides a clear view of the critical events. The fossil evidence fades out at 3.5 billion years ago. The phylogenetic evidence is for the moment blurred by horizontal gene transfer. The best efforts of chemists to reconstruct molecules typical of life in the laboratory have shown only that it is a problem of fiendish difficulty. The genesis of life on earth, some time in the fiery last days of the Hadean, remains an unyielding problem." (Wade, N., "Genetic Analysis Yields Intimations of a Primordial Commune," The New York Times, June 13, 2000) 5/02/2007 "Geological evidence often presented in favor of an early anoxic atmosphere is both contentious and ambiguous. The features that should be present in the geologic record had there been such an atmosphere seem to be missing. Many of the features advanced in support of an anoxic model can be ascribed to diagenetic alterations, and most diagenetic environments are reducing. Recent biological and interplanetary studies seem to favor an early oxidized atmosphere rich in CO2 and possibly containing free molecular oxygen. The existence of early red beds, sea and groundwater sulphate, oxidized terrestrial and sea-floor weathering crusts, and the distribution of ferric iron in sedimentary rocks are geological observations and inferences compatible with the biological and planetary predictions. It is suggested that from the time of the earliest dated rocks at 3.7 b.y. ago, Earth had an oxygenic atmosphere." (Clemmey, H. & Badham, N., "Oxygen in the Precambrian Atmosphere: An Evaluation of the Geological Evidence," Geology, Vol. 10, March 1982, pp.141–146, p.141) 5/02/2007 "All conceptions of the `primordial soup' from which life arose agree in that it included not only the particular sugars, amino acids and other substances that are now essential biochemical reactants but also many other molecules that are now only laboratory curiosities. It was therefore necessary for the first organizing principle to be highly selective from the start. It had to tolerate an enormous overburden of small molecules that were biologically `wrong' but chemically possible. From this background the organizing principle had to extract those molecules that would eventually become the routinely synthesized standard monomers of all the biological polymers, and it had to link them dependably in particular configurations. The total amount of potential organic material was immense. If the carbon now found in coal, carbonate rocks and living matter were uniformly distributed in all of the present ocean water, it would make a carbon solution as concentrated as a strong bouillon. Geophysical processes such as weathering, evaporation and sedimentation must have acted then as they do now to create a diversity of environments. Evidently at least one of these environments was suitable in temperature and composition for the origin of life. The primitive soup did face an energy crisis: early life forms needed somehow to extract chemical energy from the molecules in the soup. For the story we have to tell here it is not important how they did so; some system of energy storage and delivery based on phosphates can be assumed." (Eigen, M., Gardiner, W., Schuster, P. & Winkler-Oswatitsch, R., "The Origin of Genetic Information," Scientific American, Vol. 244, No. 4, April 1981, pp.78-94, pp.78-79) 5/02/2007 "REPLICATION OF DOUBLE-STRAND DNA is much more `sophisticated' than that of RNA and includes mechanisms for detecting and correcting errors. Twenty or more enzymes are involved. At the replication fork an unwinding protein separates the two parental strands; single-strand-binding protein keeps them apart. Because replication proceeds along both template strands in the 3'-to-5' direction the process is discontinuous for one of the strands .... A mobile promoter provides a recognition site for a primase that lays down a short RNA primer (which is later replaced with DNA). Polymerase III adds DNA monomers to elongate the strand; polymerase I `proofreads' the sequence, excises incorrect nucleotides and inserts the correct ones. Finally the enzyme ligase fills in the gaps between the daughter-strand fragments. In the absence of proofreading, DNA replication is no more accurate than RNA replication." (Eigen, M., Gardiner, W., Schuster, P. & Winkler-Oswatitsch, R., "The Origin of Genetic Information," Scientific American, Vol. 244, No. 4, April 1981, pp.78-94, p.85. Emphasis original) 5/02/2007 "The difficulty is not whether there has been evolution, but what has brought about the evolution. ... Darwinism, the theory that evolution has conic about by the survival through natural selection of the fortuitous variations most suited to the environment, has had the support of many of the greatest zoologists of the last seventy years ... But there have always been those who were dissatisfied with the theory, and the number of those who consider Darwinism to be the main factor in evolution is probably much less to-day than thirty years ago. Bateson has strongly opposed Darwinism; and so has D.M.S. Watson. Many others who are apparently dissatisfied with Darwinism do not seem very willing to express their opinions. Curiously enough, Darwin himself was not an extreme Darwinian, and was inclined to believe that use and disuse were important factors, and that acquired characters were inherited. Of course all Darwinians have to admit that