Life Is Earths Waste Dump
Exclusive Most evolutionists and philosophers recognize the origin of life as one of the most difficult questions to broach from a materialist standpoint. Dr. Michael Russell, however, made it sound very easy to a large audience gathered in JPL’s auditorium on February 4. In a talk titled confidently, “How Life Began on our Water World Over 4 Billion Years Ago,” he argued that the emergence of life is a geological issue. In a classic statement of reductionism, he began, “Metabolism or life is chemistry’s answer to the physics of convection.” He repeated this theme later in the lecture:
To my mind, metabolism is chemistry’s answer to the physics of convection. It’s a way of distributing energy back into and lowering the energy levels, generating waste products – generating a little chaos if you like – because the universe is running down, and life just obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics and is just helping the planet to run down chemically.
For illustration, he had a lava lamp on stage. The thing never did start convecting despite his prediction. Presumably, he meant to imply that the people in the auditorium were glorified lava lamps, helping the planet generate waste products and run down chemically.
Dr. Russell spoke on this topic at JPL three years ago (see 12/03/2004) but now has funding to build a hydrothermal reactor at the lab to test his ideas. Russell advocates the “metabolism-first” view of life’s origin, as expounded by Robert Shapiro (02/15/2007), a view roundly criticized by Leslie Orgel (01/26/2008) and others who advocate the “genetics-first” view. Russell believes in the RNA world scenario, but only after a metabolic form of life emerged. He did not explain where the RNA came from.
He also swept through the topic of how ATP synthesis emerged. He agreed ATP is vital, but made it seem as if all earth needed was a proton motive force to get it started – a gloss that startled David Nicholls two years ago (03/31/2006). Russell also portrayed homochirality as unnecessary at the beginning; one hand just won out after multiple experiments going on at deep-sea vents all over the planet. He explained this is like having automobiles, some of which are driving on the right side of the road, and some on the left; eventually, to keep order, one side would prevail. One could imagine human beings coming to such an agreement, but it is unclear how or why mindless molecules would do it.
Russell confused natural causes with intelligent causes again by personifying geology as an experimenter. When asked how long he thought it would take for cycles to emerge, he said,
Something like 100 years. I’m being a bit glib, but think about what 35,000 postdocs could do, 365, 24×7, for 35,000 years. It’s not going to take long. It’s got to be quick, because otherwise you’re going to run out of steam, so to speak; you’re going to run out of fuel.
Necessity is the mother of invention, however, for intelligent inventors. Russell did not explain why a chemical reaction, if depleted of fuel, would find it necessary to solve the problem and keep going – or even recognize a problem existed. Most chemical reactions when depleted of reagents simply reach equilibrium and stop, shedding no tears about it.
Whether Russell’s clouding of the distinction between minds and mindlessness was merely pedagogical or fallacious was not clear; he resorted to personification several times. At another point, he said, “That’s what a planet needs – to make acetate and methane, and eventually oxygen.” Life, to him, was almost a geological necessity. He embraced this kind of geological/biological determinism. He called the metabolic stage of chemical evolution a Lamarckian stage, before the Darwinian stage could ensue with RNA and DNA.
This lecture was advertised as part of a “Science 101” series for the non-scientist. Russell used pithy analogies to keep the audience on track. Prius owners could relate:
The earliest metabolic vehicle is a hybrid. And now comes the vehicle’s regulator or computer. Eventually we need the RNA to help guide these reactions so that they don’t just happen chaotically. So we get to the RNA World.
That’s one giant leap for atomkind, though (see 07/11/2002). Russell portrayed metabolism as a kind of life that forms first, then gets fancier with computer controls and regulators later.
Russell preached that we should be concerned less with what life is, but rather by what it does. When asked for a definition of life, he deflected the question by saying,
The philosopher never asks that question… the philosopher asks of a puzzle, what does it do? What does life do? Life takes carbon dioxide and hydrogen, sinks the oxygen into it (it found a way of using the oxygen in photosynthesis) and makes organic molecules. That’s what life does. It’s a process…. It’s understanding what it does that matters.
No one asked the follow-up question about what life does: “Does life understand reality in ways that are true, universal, necessary and certain?” To be consistent, Russell would have to say that scientific explanations also are mere processes that emerged from planetary physics and chemistry. If so, then maybe scientific explanations are some of the waste products of convection.
It was sad to see an audience of fairly well-educated engineers and scientists take this all in with smiling faces and expressions of rapture. They laughed at his jokes and gave him hearty applause. Most of them didn’t seem to notice they were being had by a fast-talking charlatan. Read our earlier commentary on his previous JPL talk (12/03/2004).
This lecture was followed a couple of days later by a presentation on a more technical level by a colleague of Russell, Dr. Dieter Braun. Braun’s goal was to explain how the concentration problem in origin-of-life studies could be solved in geothermal vents. The concentration problem is how to get enough prebiotic molecules close enough together to interact. Both Russell and Braun recognized this as a serious problem. In fact, Russell was emphatic in his talk that the old Miller spark-chamber scenario was unworkable. The early earth would have had no land, and the ocean surface would have been too turbulent for a thin film of molecules to aggregate, whether delivered by comets or by lightning. This again illustrates how the genetics-first and metabolism-first parties falsify each other.
Braun focused only on how thin tubes in hydrothermal vents convect and concentrate molecules – any molecules (in his experiments, he used polystyrene beads). Like Russell, he glossed over numerous problems along the way. When faced one-on-one with questions afterward about chirality, harmful cross-reactions, the difficulty of getting essential molecules and keeping unwanted ones out, the origin of ribose for RNA and DNA, the nature of information and information transfer, functional information, probability and other serious matters, all he could do was say he was only trying to show how molecules can be concentrated in a realistic prebiotic environment. He was lectured that shoving off the miracles for someone else to solve (playing intellectual hot potato) does not necessarily constitute scientific progress.