At the Mail Online, Allan Hall reports (November 23, 2009) on the case of a man who was conscious for 23 years, but no one knew because he was paralyzed.
A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time. Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them - but could make no sound.
I think doctors should be much more careful with the "persistent vegetative state" (PVS) diagnoses than they sometimes are - if consequences follow. Some people - like Rom Houben, above - can be conscious without being mobile. We aren't even sure what consciousness is , after all, so why be definitive about who has it?
Here are some more articles about persistent vegetative state:
Spiritual Brain: Me 'n YouTube: Discussing my "Hot Apple Cider" essay
Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).
At Britain's Telegraph (November 04, 2009), Tom Chivers advises that "Darwinian evolutionary theory will help find alien life, says Nasa scientist.
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution may give pointers in the search for alien life, says a Nasa astrobiologist." Here, we learn two competing views:
And so the limits of Darwinian evolution will define the range of planets that can support life - at least Earth-like life."
but
... alien life may not be entirely Earth-like. Dr Baross said: "I'd like to point out there are many different ways for non-Earth-like life to not use light or chemical energy but use some other form like radiation energy, wave energy, or ultraviolet energy."
. And then how can we know that the way they proceed is by Darwinian evolution?
We also learn
"I think all of us really believe that rocky planets, like Earth, are going to be found at some point," said Baross.
Well, lots of people have really believed lots of things that never happened. I happen to agree with him re rocky planets, because in a galaxy the size of ours, we will doubtless find lots of things, possibly extraterrestrial life ...
I am a little more concerned about the underlying agenda in some cases. NASA could be undermining its chances via Darwin worship.
Some more exoplanet stories:
Does our solar system occupy a unique position in the universe or just an ordinary one?
Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).
The search for extra-terrestrial life has been a passionate focal point of space exploration for decades. While the idea of aliens eking out an 'other-world' existence continues to fuel scientific and religious debate, most recently with the Pontifical Academy of Sciences' astrobiology conference (1), a similarly concerted search for life has focused on primitive unicellular organisms (2). Astrobiologist Richard Hoover and others have long advocated the idea that simple life exists outside of our own earth (3-4). Since NASA's Galileo spacecraft flyby mission to Jupiter's moon Europa in 1998, there has been no end to discussions over whether or not this ice-bearing moon might today harbor bacteria (5-6).
The notion that life could simply evolve wherever appropriate environmental conditions are to be found is of course one that entails an enormous 'leap of faith'. It is a notion that pushes aside a multitude of critical factors not least of which is the origin of some sort of information-rich genetic material. As Stephen Mojzsis from the University of Colorado analogized, just because the stage is set in a theater does not mean that the actors are present and ready to play their respective roles (7). What processes would have been operational to take a maelstrom of chemical compounds to the required level of minimal function upon which Darwinian natural selection could get a hold?
Paleontologist Niles Eldredge captured the pertinence of this question in his discourse on evolutionary tempos when he wrote how "there is a tremendous difference between a collection of organic molecules unable to abstract the energy needed to catalyze their own replication and an organized system that can do precisely that" (8). Prominent thinkers such as Paul Davies have made their appeal to chance by espousing the idea that life was able to begin precisely because it 'managed' to liberate itself from the shackles of physical laws and the deterministic, algorithmic world (9). Davies argues that for genomes to become as information-rich as they are, life would have had to have originated from random polymers since, according to Davies, an initial randomness is the only way that we could have arrived at specified biological complexity (9). Still, how could chance-generated polymers that lacked any functional and replicative activities have gained such activities purely through random events?
The last twenty years have given us some interesting avenues of research in the field of catalytic RNA. Experiments in the late 1980s and 1990s revealed that certain types of RNA had intrinsic catalytic activities (10). Renowned RNA biochemists such as Tom Cech, Dan Hershlag, Luc Jaeger and Anne Marie Pyle provided key details on how RNA could fold into catalytically active forms (10-12). With the demonstration of its enzyme and information-bearing capabilities, RNA became a hot candidate for the molecule that might have kick started the beginnings of life (13). The message promulgated by supporters of the much-publicized 'RNA World' was that through Darwinian natural selection random mutations might have produced catalytic activities that were further improved through successive generations of replication (13).
Perhaps to the disappointment of 'RNA Worlders', Duke University chemist David Deamer and others convincingly discredited such a message on the grounds that those processes necessary for the formation of RNA polymers would have been highly inefficient on a lifeless earth. Their conclusions were profound:
"It is now clear that an RNA world (or even its molecular precursor, pre-RNA) would be difficult to achieve directly from simple organic molecules dissolved in a global ocean (Joyce, 1991). Even if it were possible to generate chemically activated nucleotides capable of polymerizing into RNA in solution, in the absence of some concentrating mechanism these would be greatly diluted, and no further reactions could occur...[Such] inherent inefficiencies would seem to be inconsistent with moving beyond the initial stages of generating monomers and perhaps random polymers." (13)
My own research during my time at the University of Strasbourg served to further strengthen my own skepticism over the role of RNA in biological origins (14). Using RNA folding algorithms, I worked with others to design special catalytic RNAs called ribozymes that would target and cut highly defined mRNA sequences within the cell (See Figure Below; Ref 15). As I soon found out, not only did these molecular 'scissors' have to meet strict sequence requirements if they were to discriminate between target and erroneous mRNAs but they also had to be short enough so as to free themselves from their reaction products and become available for further rounds of cutting (16). This latter point is of critical importance if catalytic RNA is to exhibit what enzymologists call 'multiple turnover' behavior- that is, the ability to repeatedly catalyze a given reaction (17).
FIGURE: 12% Polyacrylamide Gel showing: Lanes 1,3- target RNA; Lanes 2,4- ribozyme RNA; Lanes 5-7- Time course of in vitro ribozyme digestion (note the cleavage products in the lower half of gel)
One could hardly claim that my meticulous crafting of RNA into functional catalysts paralleled the Darwinian process of selection. Had I not chosen my sequences carefully I would not have obtained the desired effects when I introduced these RNAs into the cell. My own findings echoed the sentiments of protein structuralist Thomas Creighton who commented how "the primary difficulty with the scenario of the RNA world is that it is difficult to explain how RNA molecules could have been synthesized chemically in the primordial soup" (18).
While several types of activity have now been identified in synthetic ribozymes including peptide bond formation and RNA ligation, the range of such activities pales in comparison to the extensive repertoire of known protein functions (19). To what extent can we therefore consider catalytic RNA to be sufficient for the formation of components that might later assemble into the simplest forms of life? Moreover, achieving such activities in the laboratory is only possible through the directed guidance of random RNA molecules towards pre-determined functional end points (19, 20).
Writing in the 1970's, Richard Dawkins cooked up the following 'requiem to naturalistic causation':
"[The Primeval Soup] must have become populated by stable varieties of molecules; stable in that either the individual molecules lasted a long time, or they replicated rapidly, or they replicated accurately. Evolutionary trends toward these three kinds of stability took place in the following sense: if you had sampled the soup at two different times, the later sample would have contained a higher proportion of varieties with high longevity/fecundity/copying-fidelity. This is essentially what a biologist means by evolution when he is speaking of living creatures, and the mechanism is the same- natural selection." (21)
Thirty years on we still have no meat on the bones of Dawkins' dreamy peregrinations. From an RNA World perspective at least I remain thoroughly unconvinced.
7. Stephen Mojzsis spoke on the origins of life in a NOVA documentary that aired on PBS on the 28th of September 2004, entitled "Origins: How Life Began"
8. Niles Eldredge (1987) Life Pulse: Episodes From The Story of The Fossil Record, Facts On File Publications, New York, p.30
9. Paul Davies (1999) The Fifth Miracle, The Search for the Origin and The Meaning of Life, Simon & Schuster, New York, pp.250-257
10. T. R. Cech and D. Herschlag (1997) Group I Ribozymes: Substrate Recognition, Catalytic Strategies and Comparative Mechanistic Analysis, Nucleic Acids and Molecular Biology, Vol 10 pp.1-17
11. L. Jaeger, F. Mitchel, E. Westhof (1997) The Structure Of Group I Ribozymes, Nucleic Acids and Molecular Biology, Vol 10 pp.33-51
12. A.M. Pyle (1997) Catalytic Reaction Mechanisms and Structural Features of Group II Intron Ribozymes, Nucleic Acids and Molecular Biology, Vol 10 pp.75-107
13. David Deamer, Jason Dworkin, Scott Sandford, Max Bernstein, Louis Allamandola (2002) The First Cell Membranes, Astrobiology, Vol 2 pp.371-381
14. Robert Deyes (1998) Unpublished observations, Work done at LPCCNM-UPRES 2308, Faculte De Pharmacie, Universite Louis Pasteur, Illkirch, France
15. Michael Zuker (2003) Mfold web server for nucleic acid folding and hybridization prediction, Nucleic Acids Res, Vol 31 pp.3406-15 (this is an update on the version I used in my research)
16. Daniel Herschlag (1991) Implications Of Ribozyme Kinetics For Targeting The Cleavage Of Specific RNA Molecules In Vivo : More Isn't Always Better, Proc. Natl, Acad, Sci. USA, Vol 88 pp.6921-6925
17. Thomas Creighton (1993) Proteins, Structure and Molecular Properties, W.H. Freeman and Company, New York, p.387
18. Ibid, p.107
19. Michael P. Robertson and William G. Scott (2007) The Structural Basis of Ribozyme-Catalyzed RNA Assembly, Science, Vol. 315 pp.1549-1553
For Uncommon Descent Question 12: Can Darwinism beat the odds?, we have declared a winner, and it is Philip W at 11.
Philip W must provide me with a valid postal address* via oleary@sympatico.ca, in order to receive the prize, a free copy of the Privileged Planet DVD.
Philip W tells me that he is a pilot, and I liked his analysis of issues around flight:
Darwinian evolution can not possibly explain the life which we find on this planet. Let's explore one of these methods by asking the question "How, and why, did flight originate?" Before any creature took to the air there was nothing there to eat and so why would any creature, even an intelligent creature, want to fly. There could have been no powerful survival benefit in flight beyond perhaps escaping a predator to recommend it. Also, there are many other and far simpler ways to escape a predator. Flight is perhaps the most complicated and sophisticated activity that any creature possesses which means that it would have taken an extraordinary number of attempts by random evolutionary methods to make it a reality. There is another and even more fundamental question which underlies biological flight. Did nature, completely unguided by intelligence, just somehow know that flight was even possible or achievable? Humans, with their intelligence, were able to make gliders and toy airplanes long ago but they had an objective and they also had the model of the birds to follow. Even at that it took a long time to achieve human flight despite the huge cost in time, effort, and treasure which they were willing to expend. No amount of tinkering, especially without a conscious objective, could possibly account for biological flight. There are simply too many things which would have had to happen all at once for that to be possible. Remember that nature had no way of knowing that flight was possible and it certainly had no previous conception of flight. Without having an objective how can random tinkering achieve anything?
Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).
I loved Aussie ID's information about the specifics of attempts to restore the thylacine - he calls it a Tasmanian tiger. Possibly due to culture issues, I am more familiar with hearing the animal called a Tasmanian wolf. But anyone interested should review his information.
I'd love to know what a staked out* sled pack in northern Canada would make of the marsupial Tasmanian. He doesn't look to me like he has three coats of hair, so he might need to work in the office.
I also appreciated Nakashima's thoughtful reflections on the question of how behaviour might not follow the physical recreation of an animal. I suspect he's right; it's an open question indeed.
Each of you must provide me with a valid postal address** in order to receive the prize, a free copy of Steven Meyer's Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009).
If you go here, you will get a bit of background on the contest, and read many interesting contributions, but for now, here is the skinny:
This one's a bit of fun, but there is a serious purpose behind it.
In "A Life of Its Own: Where will synthetic biology lead us?" (September 28, 2009 New Yorker mag), Michael Specter reports, "If the science truly succeeds, it will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with one created by us."
Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).
My concern with "neurolaw" (the attempt to scan brains to identify criminal behaviour) is this: Law is, or should be, concerned with "intent", not "motive."
Yes, yes, in detective fiction, everything hinges on motive: Cousin Harry murdered Aunt Sally to get her fortune; plain Jane murdered pretty Kitty because Kitty got the man; squadron leader Beeder murdered that guy because of a long ago wartime betrayal ....
However, real law depends on design inferences, not speculations about motive. Here is the story I sometimes tell to explain that:
Tom and Dick are enjoying beer and wings in a pub.
Suddenly, the conversation becomes loud and animated.
Tom seizes a dinner knife and tries to plunge it into Dick's chest. He is restrained by burly patron Harry and several others.
The whole thing is caught on videocam.
Mid-uproar, the bartender calls the police, who charge Tom with attempted manslaughter.
The police need not know his motive, only his intent - which was pretty obvious. That's a design inference.
Later, the investigating officer learns how the quarrel began: Dick had informed Tom that he was seeing Tom's girlfriend, so Tom should just buzz off. Tom didn't like that idea.
Knowing a person's motive certainly helps us understand the story. But intent - the demonstrated attempt at murder in this case - is what matters in law.
Here's the difficulty: Suppose Tom had just got up from the table and left, and spent three months fantasizing in the wee hours about killing Dick - without ever seeing either Dick or the former girlfriend again. He has plenty of motive, but the fact is, he never did anything.
Then Tom is of no interest to the law, as it now stands - though his family doctor should be concerned. Tom needs a more constructive way to deal with rejection. (He also needs a more faithful girlfriend, but all in good time.)
However, in a materialist environment, I would hardly be surprised to hear theories about Tom's violence genes and violence neurons, some based on neuroscience techniques - even if all the violence was inside his own head. Some may argue for action against Tom "pre-crime". That's where the threat to civil liberties comes in.
Neurolaw seems like materialism applied to law, hence a threat to civil rights, because it can easily confuse motive with intent - overturning centuries of progress in justice.
Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).
As Casey Luskin reveals in this episode of ID the Future, eminent biologists have said that they must continually remind themselves that what they see in biology evolved, and was not designed. But now engineers are turning to biology to replace human technology because biological pathways provide superior solutions to biomedical-technological needs. Is this trend more consistent with an evolved biosphere, or an intelligent designed one? Listen to this podcast and decide for yourself.
Yes, but sometimes people don't see the forest for the trees. The majority of humans think, where it is safe to do so, that there is a God, based on personal experience. No surprise there. If there is a God, he can communicate with humans when he wishes to do so, just as Elizabeth, Queen of England, can do*. And she would be the first to say that her rank is at a fundamentally much lower grade.
The question is, why is this controversial? Why should it be any surprise? Why do I keep running into efforts to prove it is not true?
If that is really science (space aliens, multiple universes), I could not distinguish it from witchcraft or some other foolishness. I think we'd just get more done if we accepted, with Antony Flew , that There IS a God and got on with useful projects in science, like cures for AIDS and non-polluting sources of energy. Oh, and weight loss programs for people who used to suffer from famine but are now afflicted with obesity - an outcome of modern science.
*I still have my father's commission, courtesy Elizabeth's father, advancing him to the rank of officer.
On this episode of ID the Future, CSC's Rob Crowther interviews Casey Luskin about his in-depth response to Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, correcting fourteen major factual and logical errors in Mooney's chapter on intelligent design. How can Chris Mooney be so wrong on this issue? Listen in and find out.
Yes, well, I don't know why anyone should be surprised. Darwinism has morphed into a major public enterprise and anyone who wants his finger in the pie ... I think we can wait a long time before a guy like Chris Mooney even needs to get anything right.
More stories from the Post-Darwinist:
Interesting design inference concerning a historic photo
Morning coffee!! Bear meets cat ... No! No! Not what you think!
Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy, with comments
Darwinism and popular culture: A tour of the textbooks
(Note: This series may sometimes be interrupted by news from the crisis in intellectual freedom in Canada. If you are not interested, just scroll down.)
Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).
Last Thursday, the new Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities James A. Leach gave an address at the University of Virginia with the catchy title, "Is There an Inalienable Right to Curiosity?"
Taking his cue from Thomas Jefferson's "trinity of inalienable rights: 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,'" Leach reasoned that even though Jefferson never wrote about curiosity, "a right to be curious would have been a natural reflection of his own personality."
Interesting, considering that academic freedom is under huge assault these days.
I have said in private correspondence as follows:
It is good to be curious about the exact cause of Alzheimer syndrome or whether that fellow hanging around in the parking lot has lawful business around here.
It is not good to be curious about whether my neighbour is a closet racist or having an affair with the letter carrier.
I'd say curiosity is an inescapable and necessary human quality that must be steered in an appropriate direction.
Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose PS: I know a bit about cats. Curiosity does kill cats sometimes. But kidney disease is their biggest problem. Cats are obligate carnivores. So they generally last as long as their kidneys - or so a vet once told me, and in my experience it is certainly true.
Also just up at The Mindful Hack, my blog on neuroscience issues:
Do you really need a refrigerator when you have this?
Materialism and popular culture: The human brain as a machine?
Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).
Neuroscience is, unfortunately, increasingly taken over by what I often describe as neurobullshipping. You know, neuroeconomics,, neurolaw ... It basically amounts to determining which regions of the brains of carefully chosen subjects light up when certain propositions are introduced.
Relief at last!
Here, at New Humanist, Raymond Tallis rallies the neuroskeptics ("Neurotrash", Volume 124, Issue 6, November/December 2009). 'Bout time someone did, I'd say. What's really good is that it comes from an unexpected quarter, at least for me.
He writes,
Hardly a day passes without yet another breathless declaration in the popular press about the relevance of neuroscientific findings to everyday life. The articles are usually accompanied by a picture of a brain scan in pixel-busting Technicolor and are frequently connected to references to new disciplines with the prefix "neuro-". Neuro-jurisprudence, neuro-economics, neuro-aesthetics, neuro-theology are encroaching on what was previously the preserve of the humanities. Even philosophers - who should know better, being trained one hopes, in scepticism - have entered the field with the discipline of "Exp-phi" or experimental philosophy. Starry-eyed sages have embraced "neuro-ethics", in which ethical principles are examined by using brain scans to determine people's moral intuitions when they are asked to deliberate on the classic dilemmas. Benjamin Libet's experiments on decisions to act and the work on mirror neurons (observed directly in monkeys but only inferred, and still contested, in humans) have been ludicrously over-interpreted to demonstrate respectively that our brains call the shots (and we do not have free will) and to point to a neural basis for empathy.
Yes, pop neuroscience is beginning to sound more like "evolutionary" psychology all the time.
Responding to Tallis's article's title, "Neurotrash", I wrote to friends to say, more or less,
What we need is a really big neuro-trash can.
The result of all this nonsense is that neuroscience gets discredited when it is, used appropriately, an immense help in medicine.
Remember, it was neuroscience that established that stroke victims were losing use of limbs through learned helplessness, not irreversible brain damage. Jeffrey Schwartz, Vince Paquette, Mario Beauregard and others have also demonstrated that non-drug, non-invasive treatments of mental disorders actually work - especially important for those disorders that cannot be effectively treated by drugs or surgery. (I am sure there are others whose work I do not know.)
Here's what I know for sure: I remember the rows on rows of beds in the chronic care hospital I used to volunteer at in the 1960s. Compare that to the much more favourable prospects brought about by the Decade of the Brain (1990s)! But it wasn't easy. One neuroscientist all but lost his career introducing the "learned helplessness" concept (why stroke patients, in many cases, lost the use of limbs through simple non-use). Only neuroscience could really have uncovered that.
That's the real story, and Tallis talks about it. We should stick to it.
It's also why I always say neuroscience should stay close to medicine and far from silliness - like which area of the brain lights up if a woman decides to buy the flaming yellow pants with movie star decals instead of the quiet brown pair*.
Seriously, however, in the justice system, neuroscience, inappropriately used, could be quite dangerous. Cf neurolaw.
If we can't convict an alleged perpetrator of a crime on the external evidence, we should not be trying to scan his brain.
Who cares what that guy thinks anyway?
It's not a crime around here to think, only to act in a way that is outside the law. If the prosecution can't prove he did it, then ... they can't make their case, and that's just too bad for them.
And, as I like to say, if you don't like English Common Law (= whose basic principle is that the accused is innocent unless proven guilty), please live in some jurisdiction where no one has ever heard of it. We like it here.
Review Of The Ninth Chapter Of Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer ISBN: 978-0-06-147278-7; Imprint: Harper One
By Robert Deyes ARN Correspondent
Former Nature editor Philip Ball once commented that 'there is no assembly plant so delicate, versatile and adaptive as the cell" (1). Emeritus Professor Theodore Brown chose to wax metaphorical by likening the cell to a fully-fledged factory, with its own complex functional relationships and interactions akin to what we observe in our own manufacturing facilities (2). In recent years the seemingly intractable problem of explaining how the first cell came into existence through chance events, otherwise known as the 'Chance Hypothesis', has become more acute than ever as scientists have begun to realize that a minimum suite of functional components must exist for cells to be operational. Stephen Meyer's summary of the current state of this so-called 'minimal complexity' research is profoundly insightful:
"The simplest extant cell, Mycoplasma genitalium - a tiny bacterium that inhabits the urinary tract requires "only" 482 proteins to perform its necessary functions and 562,000 bases of DNA...to assemble those proteins...Based upon minimal-complexity experiments, some scientists speculate (but have not demonstrated) that a simple one-celled organism might have been able to survive with as few as 250-400 genes" (p.201).
For renowned biochemist David Deamer the first cell would at the very least have needed a polymerase enzyme to transcribe from a template such as DNA, a constant source of supplementary materials notably nucleotides, amino acids and ATP and enzymes that faithfully carry out DNA replication during cell division (3). To suppose that even a hypothetical first cell would just come together from a gimish of prebiotic compounds undergoing continuous destructive dilution is to appeal to the miraculous (4). Attempts to reconstruct such a cell start off from a fairly elaborate point of departure in which enzymes and other catalysts are already present and functional (5).
Just how important these functional enzymes are was brought to bear in a study led by University of North Carolina biochemist Richard Wolfenden (6). Wolfenden's team was able to demonstrate how a reaction with a half life of 2.3 billion years occurred in milliseconds when supplied with the necessary enzymes. Such spectacular differences are not uncommon. As Wolfenden remarked:
"What we're defining here is what evolution had to overcome...the enzyme is surmounting a tremendous obstacle, a reaction half-life of 2.3 billion years...Without catalysts, there would be no life at all, from microbes to humans. It makes you wonder how natural selection operated in such a way as to produce a protein that got off the ground as a primitive catalyst for such an extraordinarily slow reaction." (6)
Through a molecular technique known as random mutagenesis, scientists have now quantified the amino acid sequence variability that functional proteins can tolerate. Worthy of note in this field is the work of former Cambridge biochemist Douglas Axe whose data forms a pillar for the case that Meyer presents in his book. Using locally-randomized sequence libraries of a portion of the antibiotic resistance enzyme Beta lactamase, Axe calculated that somewhere between 1 in 10exp50 and 1 in 10exp77 150 amino acid-long protein folds form configurations with a Beta lactamase function (7). Of these one in 10exp50 to 1 in 10exp74 form folded structures that might perform any number of alternative functions (7).
Based on the structural requirements of enzyme activity Axe emphatically argued against a global-ascent model of the function landscape in which incremental improvements of an arbitrary starting sequence "lead to a globally optimal final sequence with reasonably high probability" (7). For a protein made from scratch in a prebiotic soup, the odds of finding such globally optimal solutions are infinitesimally small- somewhere between 1 in 10exp140 and 1 in 10exp164 for a 150 amino acid long sequence if we factor in the probabilities of forming peptide bonds and of incorporating only left handed amino acids.
In a 1981 legal challenge involving the Arkansas Board Of Education, astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe appeared for the defense as an expert witness. Taking on the dogmatic neo-Darwinist view on the origins of life, Wickramasinghe unwaveringly proclaimed that the probability of obtaining the information necessary for making the simplest cell by chance was 1 in 10exp40,000 (8). These estimates not only exceeded by many powers of 10 the total number of atoms available in the universe but also closely matched the minimal complexity predictions discussed above. By pulling together these probabilistic threads of evidence in Signature In The Cell, Meyer has relegated naturalistic life origin models to little more than fanciful speculation. His piece-by-piece dismissal of the chance hypothesis is beautifully executed as is the personal narrative that interconnects the various portions of his scientific story.
Additional Literature Cited 1. Philip Ball (2001) Life's Lesson In Design, Nature, Vol 409 pp. 413-416 2. Theodore Brown (2003) The Art of the Scientific Metaphor, The Scientist, Volume 17, Issue 21, p. 10 3. David Deamer, Jason Dworkin, Scott Sandford, Max Bernstein, Louis Allamandola (2002) The First Cell Membranes, Astrobiology, Volume 2, pp. 371-381 4. Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger Olsen (1984) The Mystery of Life's Origin: Reassessing Current Theories, Published by Lewis and Stanley, Dallas, Texas, pp.42-68 5.Tamsin Osborne (2008) 'Artificial Cell' Can Make Its Own Genes, New Scientist,1 April, 2008, See http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13568-artificial-cell-can-make-its-own-genes.html 6. Without Enzyme, Biological Reaction Essential To Life Takes 2.3 billion Years: 2008 UNC Study, See http://www.med.unc.edu/www/news/2008-news-archives/november/without-enzyme-biological-reaction-essential-to-life-takes-2-3-billion-years-unc-study/?searchterm=Wolfenden 7. Douglas D. Axe (2004) Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds, Journal Of Molecular Biology, pp. 1295-1315 8. See Chandra Wickramasinghe's testimony at the 1981 Arkansas trial on creation which can be found at http://www.panspermia.org/chandra.htm
