Hello Dr. Charlton, I discovered your blog a few weeks ago and have been reading several of your posts. It is fresh air compared to the typical atheism found in academia these days. I have read a couple of books about the origin of life and evolution. Your description of not one but several inverted pyramids as the origin of life is more or less what biochemist Michael Behe of "irreducible complexity" fame has proposed in his second book entitled "The Edge of Evolution". He argues that evolution can produce changes within species only to a certain degree. It cannot create a lot of different forms of life and this limit is the "edge of evolution". The edge apparently is somewhere between species and orders in the taxonomic rank. Thus known evolutionary mechanisms cannot explain all the observed diversification from a single universal ancestor.Hence the need for many initial inverted pyramids as you suggest. Behe main point was developed in his first book "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution" where he explains in detail and with examples the irreducible complexity of life at molecular level, the almost impossibility for it to be generated randomly, and the intervention of an intelligent designer to account not only for jump-starting the process but also for much of the diversity of life. In other words God created the initial vertices of the many inverted pyramids.
@DH - When I mentioned the idea of 'several' pyramids I was thinking of the deep undersea forms of life beside volcanic vents - which seem to have had a separate origin and existence. Maybe there are others.
But the picture I was proposing here was not primarily several pyramids, but these innumerable brief sparks of life - only a few of which expand and persist.
30 September 2014 at 21:54
*
The question of the origins of life has become neglected in biology, low status; and is now the interest of a really tiny minority. This is probably simply an index of the catastrophic decline of the subject of biology, rather than active hostility - but there are some fundamental questions raised by the origins of life which are disturbing.
What is life? For 'cutting edge' biology since Schroedinger it has implicitly become focused on reproduction of organisms, replication of genes - and the process of natural selection. That which is subject to natural selection is 'life' even when the entities are not 'alive'.
So, from a biological perspective, the first 'living' things were non-biological - were some kind of inorganic molecules replicating themselves, transmitting their structure or patterns of interaction to 'offspring' - growing in numbers and spreading by copying or extension of their structures or processes.
*
Insofar as the origins of life are treated from a biological perspective I think it would be fair to generalize that by the mainstream modern biologist, the problem is seen as one of creating a 'breakthrough organism' - either one or a few - which then expanded and evolved to fill the planet, branching-off into sub-types to make the many types of organisms visible today (plus those which have become extinct).
So the picture in the mind is of an inverted pyramid - a few instances of life at the origins at the base of the pyramid, the breakthrough organisms - supporting a vast variety of later later which came later in evolutionary history.
And the reason the pyramid has a small base is that the origin of life is seen as rare and difficult. THE big problem is getting-replication-going: of creating a breakthrough organism.
Therefore, the 'classic' picture is that it is difficult for entities to replicate - but once replication is established, then it becomes easy for replicators to fill the planet and be naturally-selected to make many types of organism.
In brief summary, the mainstream biological view is: hard to make life, easy to sustain life. And especially easy to sustain life in the primitive world of the earliest forms of life, where there was so much less competition.
*
I suggest we may have this the wrong way around. And that it is easy to make life, but hard to sustain it.
And it was especially hard to sustain in in the primitive world of the earliest forms of life, where there was so much less competition and constraint. Because (biologically) competition and constraint is good!
Competition helps build organisms that can sustain themselves over multiple generations, because competition maintains the integrity of the replicators (by eliminating corrupted replicators) and without competition rapid extinction is extremely likely.
Thus competition - of particular types - is usually necessary for the survival of a species (a replicating entity) beyond a few generations.
*
So instead of an inverted pyramid, the picture of the origins of life I would like to paint is more like...
a globe sparkling with many random dots of light, sparks of life - life flashing into brief existence here, there, and (almost) everywhere - but almost immediately extinguished.
Extinguished by mutational meltdown, because the populations are small and the lineages of life have not evolved a mechanism for purging mutations (random variations) from each generation. Life can form, but it cannot keep its integrity, cannot keep its structure, cannot maintain the networks of communication.
The information being replicated or propagated is corrupted by error (entropy), like making an analogue audio-tape recording from an analogue tape of an analogue tape... after a few cycles there is nothing left but noise. Life easily emerges, and as easily goes extinct.
Until after a while a population devises a way of dealing with this tendency to extinction and maintaining its information intact for enough generations, to make a big enough population, that it is protected from extinction, and can devise a wholly effective way of purging errors (e.g. deleterious mutations) from each generation of its system of replication: so errors do not accumulate and this intrinsic cause of extinction is abolished.
*
So, when viable life originates, on the globe, a spark does not flash out of existence, but becomes a steady point of light which grows and changes and leads to more growth and change. This happens here and there until the whole globe is covered with light of many hues - flickering and competing (growing, pulsing in size, or receding to nothing).
*
Of course, new and viable life is then confronted by all the other causes of extinction upon which biologists have traditionally focused - change in climate or environment, pressure from predators and prey, within-species competition and so on. But that can only happen after solving the primary tendency for life to self-extinguish, to be a mere spark .
"Two very different pictures of the origins of life"
2 Comments -
Hello Dr. Charlton,
I discovered your blog a few weeks ago and have been reading several of your posts. It is fresh air compared to the typical atheism found in academia these days.
I have read a couple of books about the origin of life and evolution. Your description of not one but several inverted pyramids as the origin of life is more or less what biochemist Michael Behe of "irreducible complexity" fame has proposed in his second book entitled "The Edge of Evolution". He argues that evolution can produce changes within species only to a certain degree. It cannot create a lot of different forms of life and this limit is the "edge of evolution". The edge apparently is somewhere between species and orders in the taxonomic rank. Thus known evolutionary mechanisms cannot explain all the observed diversification from a single universal ancestor.Hence the need for many initial inverted pyramids as you suggest.
Behe main point was developed in his first book "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution" where he explains in detail and with examples the irreducible complexity of life at molecular level, the almost impossibility for it to be generated randomly, and the intervention of an intelligent designer to account not only for jump-starting the process but also for much of the diversity of life. In other words God created the initial vertices of the many inverted pyramids.
30 September 2014 at 19:31
@DH - When I mentioned the idea of 'several' pyramids I was thinking of the deep undersea forms of life beside volcanic vents - which seem to have had a separate origin and existence. Maybe there are others.
But the picture I was proposing here was not primarily several pyramids, but these innumerable brief sparks of life - only a few of which expand and persist.
30 September 2014 at 21:54