Customer Reviews

Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In the Origin of Life debates, most books take one side or the other and argue that point. eg, Behe says God did it. Dawkins says evolution did it. Shapiro doesn't really present a point of view as to "This must be the way it started". Rather, he goes through all the evidence in a witty yet lucid style, and really gives you an appreciation of how complex life is. By the time you've finished reading this, you won't know how life started, but you'll want to read any book you can find and examine all the theories. At least I did. It's a shame this book is out of print, as its without doubt the best introduction to the subject around, even 15 years after it was written.

This is a well written introduction to the question of how to approch the issue of life's origination on Earth.

Shapiro starts with some comments about the nature of science and of life. Next is a discussion of the age of the Earth. Yes, it is a "little indelicate" to ask the Earth for her age, but we do that anyway.

After that, we get into some early speculations about the origin of life, including the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis. This involved a reducing atmosphere and a prebiotic "soup." Some of its assumptions now appear invalid. Shapiro also attacks the fact that the step from abiotic to biotic forms is too quick, requiring a stroke of luck which is far more than astronomical, even worse than the numbers Hoyle and Wickramasinghe came up with. We can get better numbers just by producing a random replicator rather than an enitre organism, but that still can't be done spontaneously. Theories that simply produce nucleic acids by chance don't make sense. We need to find something that gets us there another way, with more plausible steps. Perhaps there is a substrate that can lock the ingredients in place, where they can evolve chemically. And the author mentions some ideas here. I think the most important point should be that it is always dangerous to say that a process can't happen because you haven't thought of a mechanism for it yet! A mechanism may well exist. You or someone else may think of such a mechanism in the future.

Shapiro then gets to Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's ideas about life reaching Earth from outer space. And maybe the best part of the book is the way he shoots down some of their specific ideas and claims on the subject. This, of course, does not disprove the idea that life on Earth came from outer space (although at even odds, I'd bet against it). It just means that Hoyle went badly astray here.

After that is a discussion of creationism, where the author points out that creationists are "not so much interested in advocating the practice of religion, which they can do in many other, less controversial ways, but rather are trying to subvert the practice of science in areas where the conclusions reached by scientists do not please them." Shapiro also shows that the creationists really have no evidence to base their views on. Making snide comments about the evidence of others does not suffice to constitute evidence for their own views.

Shapiro then returns to the question of which came first, nucleic acids or proteins. He feels the nucleic acids couldn't have been first, and I agree, although I feel far less sure about it than he does. He concludes that life appears to have originated on Earth, and that the complicated molecules and structures that we observe in life today are the result of a long process of evolution. That's a sensible conclusion. He adds some speculations about substrates which are plausible as well.

I recommend this book.

It's amazing to me that a scientist has to write a book about getting back to the scientific method in the search for how life originated on earth, and it is all because of an eight-hundred pound gorilla called DNA.

Robert Shapiro, a leading DNA scientist, says that our genetic coding is so complex that it is a major problem for the theory of evolution. That doesn't mean that science should give up, he says, but that real scientific method should be pursued, instead of religious or scientific mytholology, or unproven beliefs that are strongly held. It shouldn't matter to science how faithfully people believe in the Creation Story of the Bible, that God created everything in seven days, or in the theory of panspermia, that the seeds of life came from outer space. Science, instead, should be about science; it should be about looking at the evidence critically, obtaining proof, being able to repeat results, and standing up to skepticism, or negative questioning of the results. A lot of this is simply not being done, in his opinion. By the way, he sees no conflict between believing in a Creator and science at the same time, but that the two should be separated for purposes of scientific study. You can believe in God and evolution at the same time. I couldn't agree more.

The first DNA molecule did not have enough time for 'spontaneous generation' given the overwhelming odds of 1 chance in 10 to the 40,000th power (1 followed by 40,000 zeros). Nobel Prize contender Dr. Fred Hoyle, who coined the term `Big Bang' in the 1940's, came up with this number. In fact, Shapiro says the odds are much greater than that, 1 chance in 10 to the 100 billionth power. These odds have been calculated based on the complexity of the 2000 enzymes in the cell, each consisting of 100 to 1000 specific amino acids linked together in a specific sequence. Hoyle assumed already-assembled amino acids in the pre-biotic soup, and Shapiro assumed `reduced' chemicals instead. Bottom line, either way, DNA just didn't happen spontaneously.

Shapiro gives us a history lesson of where we have been scientifically and where we might go from here. He starts with the famous, but overrated Miller-Urey experiments where only a couple of amino acids were produced in an attempt to simulate the pre-biotic condition of early earth, a very long way from the completion of a DNA module. He goes through a lot of scenarios about the early earth and how the principal chemicals got together with the right energy sources to produce that first cell. He admits that it is all conjecture and that it would have to be proven in a laboratory. He goes over the theory that bubbles or mud in the soup could have combined and been exposed to the right chemicals and conditions for something to happen. He proposes looking into the Random Generator that could possibly be a sort of intermediate step in the creation of DNA. He considers the initial, start-up reversal of the Central Dogma of microbology: from DNA producing RNA producing protein, to protein producing RNA producing DNA. He finally hits the subject of panspermia, which says that life on earth originated from outer space. Bizarrely, the noted Dr. Chandra Wickramasinghe even proposes a hierarchy of creators, including a silicon chip. Do we start to see some desperation?

A lot of what he writes is technical, and I had to look up words like caovercate, eukayotic, lipid, enzyme, ribosome, organelle, etc. I also had to dust off my college chemistry memories and do some searches on Google to make sense of what he was saying. I don't believe he was at all showing off or talking down, but was making a valiant effort to communicate a complex subject. Frankly, I would have liked a little higher-level explanation of the detailed subject matter, but I'm sure he is writing for an audience that varies in its knowledge of science and DNA workings. He comes across as a humble man who admits he doesn't have all the answers.

He likens all this to `unbaking a cake' to find out how DNA got here. I liken it to de-compiling a multi-billion line program, going backward from the machine code to the source, something I've never seen done.

DNA and its first appearance is THE issue that won't go away for the origin of life on earth. It is still the eight-hundred pound gorilla.

Robert Shapiro is professor emeritus of chemistry at New York University, and is best known for his work on the origin of life.

He states in the Preface to this 1986 book, "Why then am I adding yet another book to the collection? Because a need exists for a clear explanation, comprehensible to the general public, of what science does and does not understand about how life first began.... The guiding spirit on this entire quest is the scientific approach, and the way in which it views and explores the world. If the reader takes from this book not only a sense of wonder at the unsolved riddle of our existence, but also a preference for doubt in place of dogma and a keen appreciation for the proper practice of science, then I will have achieved my purpose."

He observes dryly, "On perhaps no other point in origin-of-life theory could we find such harmony between evolutionists and Creationists as in opposing the relevance of the experiments of Sidney Fox." (See The Emergence of Life: Darwinian Evolution from the Inside, for example.)

He is strongly critical of the theories of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe (e.g., Evolution from Space: A Theory of Cosmic Creationism), saying, "As their suggestions became more and more extravagant, however, so did the quantity of technical supporting data diminish. The most grandiose statements were put forward virtually on their own authority."

In the final chapter ("The way to the Answer") he ventures "A Guess" as to the origin of life, stating, "I hope that my ideas are not taken as dogma, as the field has no need of additional mythology."

`We may be closer to the answer than we think.' These are the concluding words of this really excellent enquiry into the origins of life on our planet, and they mark one of the book's main characteristics as being optimism. Its other two distinguishing features are patience and honesty. Professor Shapiro has been at great pains to make the arguments and the evidence intelligible to the lay reader. This is not some easy read, for all his efforts, nor could any serious treatment of such a topic be anything of the sort. It was published in the late 1980s, and I don't know where the arguments have gone since this book's time, but Shapiro comes down in favour of nucleic acids as being the best place to look for the full answer. Even so he records a conversation with Francis Crick in which they agree that proteins might, just might, have provided an earlier link in the chain before the evolutionary process switched to the nucleic acids. Other theories are given thorough examination prior to dismissal, the examination sometimes more courteous than the theories deserve in my own opinion. At the serious end there is the hypothesis of Cairns-Smith that silicon and clay might be at the root of it all, then there are various attempts to find our origins extraterrestrially, some fairly reputable but also including the later ravings of no less than Fred Hoyle, in which he seems to have lost his marbles altogether. And then of course there is the joker in the pack, creationism. Oh dear, creationism.

However, back to honesty and intellectual respectability. Professor Shapiro brings on at intervals a Greek-chorus-like persona called the `Skeptic', aka, on the dustcover of the British hardback edition, the `Sceptic'. The Sceptic's job is to demand that the scientific method be unflinchingly applied at all times. The scientific method requires that all hypotheses be tested so far as this is possible, and that a high standard of proof be invoked. Ideas and theories in the realm of chemistry or biology or physics or astronomy may qualify as `science' in ordinary discourse, but people are only human and the votaries of this or that pet idea are liable to slip off the strait and narrow of the scientific method, often without realising. However there have always been attempts by powerful and interested parties to prostitute the science outright in the name of non-scientific or pseudo-scientific doctrines. Stalin, through his toady Lysenko, bent evolutionary theories to support dialectical materialism. Then of course there is creationism, which has a longer history than I had appreciated, although the name may be fairly new. Oh dear, creationism.

I am myself much too polite to call creationism nauseating drivel that dishonours the human intellect. Professor Shapiro is even politer than I am, but he states categorically enough that to proclaim any doctrine true simply on the basis of authority - i.e. just because someone said it - is the complete antithesis of the scientific approach, and the creationists are not entitled to misappropriate the term `science' for their doctrines. `Science' requires evidence that can be validated or falsified, and the biblical account of creation is a fable that does not operate in that sphere. Nor does it help matters to claim that `God' said it. Who says God said it? Some very human scribes said it, at a rather early stage of culture and education, and to claim that sort of thing as some word of God strikes me as close to downright blasphemy. It may of course be Professor Shapiro's compelling courtesy that leads him to treat religion with kid gloves in the way he does. If there is any point at which he may be missing a trick, I think this is it. It would be worth outraging some regular believers by saying that there is no legitimate connection whatsoever between Genesis and any rational belief in a Creator of the cosmos, and none between Genesis and the moral teachings of the scripture, by which many atheists try to regulate their own conduct. We might as well believe Hesiod, except that the study of the ancient classics has declined these days.

This book is, I would say, a volume that any serious enquirer into the matter of our ultimate progenitors ought to read. Professor Shapiro has been nothing if not thorough at least as far as the date of writing, and it is another sign of the accommodating thoughtfulness that marks his tone also that he has taken so much trouble to bring some distinctly arcane arguments within the comprehension of the lay public.