Time Immortal

Slowly, scientists are beginning to piece together some of the details about what processes were involved in the emergence of life on Earth. Of course, that’s a far cry from actually understanding how non-living material — even complex proteins — somehow made the jump to being somehow “alive” — that’s something we’ll probably never really know how to explain fully. Well…not without consulting Scripture, at least. And even then.

The basic idea has been recognized for over a century, but the work of Stanley Miller was cited for triggering the modern era of scientific work on the topic. Since the classic Miller-Urey experiments, science has steadily expanded the range of essential molecules that can be produced under conditions that might reasonably expected to have been present on the early Earth.

Ellington emphasized that progress has been slow — we knew how cyanide could react to form the DNA component adenine in the 1960s, but it took over three decades to recognize that a few more reactions converted it to its relative, guanine. And the roadblocks continue to fall. After all attempts to produce sugars created a tar-like sludge, someone eventually found that a small amount of borate could help ethanol form large amounts of ribose, another component of RNA.

The first molecules that could replicate led directly to modern life

With the components of nucleic acids in place, Ellington traced a path through the RNA world to a molecule that could self-replicate. Past attempts to jump to a complex, self-replicating RNA molecule seem to have been on the wrong track. Short palindromic RNA sequences can apparently help catalyze the formation of complementary sequences, meaning what’s needed is actually an RNA that can link these short sequences into longer, more complex ones. A number of such sequences, termed RNA ligases, have been identified. Several labs have shown that these ligases can then be improved by an essentially Darwinian process of random mutation followed by selection for increased efficiency.

It’s all very interesting, although one cannot help but notice that what is basically being described here is a whole lot of dominos very necessarily falling into a very definite pattern. It’s becoming increasingly hard to accept that a truly random process could have led to the emergence of even something as simple as the first single-celled organism, let alone something as complex as a human being and the capability for reason thereof.

Reason…discussions thereof always become so much more interesting when one looks at human origins, and more so again when one looks at life’s origins. If in fact we emerged via a few random interactions in some early chemical soup, and if in fact we persist today and are primarily governed by random or hormonally influenced chemical reactions in our brains, it is a supreme act of faith to assume that we are even capable of true reasoning — what we call our ability to be rational may, in fact, just be one more opportunistic chemical reaction that has no purpose, no meaning, and which we have no ability to control.

In other words, if the atheists are right, there is no reason. To have reason, one necessarily needs faith…which shouldn’t really come as that much of a surprise. We need something external to us to lift us up from the mud, after all. That a human being is capable of reason is, I think, yet another compelling argument in favour of the existence of a rational God.