Cosmic Chemistry by John C Lennox

Author:John C Lennox [Lennox, John C]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780745981413
Publisher: Lion Hudson
Published: 2021-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

The core problem

The view that such processes, even if they did occur against all the odds that chemists put in their way, somehow give insight into the origin of life itself eventually runs into far greater difficulties that have, once more, to do with the informational complexity of proteins. For the core problem is not that of producing the kind of order that is to be seen in a crystal, honeycomb, or even an autocatalytic reaction. It is that of producing the qualitatively different, language-type arrangement of the chain of amino acids that make up a protein. We saw in Chapter 4 how Paul Davies puts this difference very clearly: in short, self-organization theories cannot cope with the information barrier discussed in the previous chapter. Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer confirms this: ‘Self-organizational theorists explain well what does not need to be explained. What needs explaining is not the origin of order… but the origin of information’ [italics mine].16 This is a key statement.17 It is the concept of language-like information that lies at the heart of the problem of life’s origin.

Most of the rest of my book will be devoted to considering this. Leslie Orgel summed up the position as follows: ‘There are several tenable theories about the origin of organic material on the primitive earth, but in no case is the supporting evidence compelling. Similarly, several alternative scenarios might account for the self-organization of a self-replicating entity from prebiotic organic material, but all of those that are well formulated are based on hypothetical chemical syntheses that are problematic.’18 Orgel therefore echoes the view of Klaus Dose, also a prominent worker in origin of life research, who ten years earlier made the following assessment:

More than thirty years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance.19

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