56 Self and the Phenomenon of Life
b2726 Self and the Phenomenon of Life: A Biologist Examines Life from Molecules to Humanity “9x6”purpose because of its stability, but this could not have happened before
the reduction of ribose to deoxyribose, and the methylation of uracil
to thymine. Therefore, the history of information transfer during the
formative stage of life would be protein → mRNA → DNA, the reverse
of the Central Dogma.
3.19 Issue Number Two: Spontaneous Organization
In addition to the question of which molecules came first, there is
another issue in the origin of life, and that is spontaneous organization.
That in the living system matter interacts to generate complexity is a
given, but how this happens is puzzling. Complexity is an emergent phe-
nomenon that cannot be explained by simple physical laws, including
thermodynamics.66,67
Using computer modeling, Stuart Kauffman showed that a self-
sustaining, autocatalytic process can be spontaneously generated from
a group of interacting chemicals, provided that they are of sufficient
diversity, and that the system is constantly supported with energy input.
As Kauffman stated: “Life is a natural property of complex chemical sys-
tems. When a number of different molecules in a chemical soup passes
a certain threshold, a self-sustaining network of reaction — an autocat-
alytic metabolism — will suddenly appear.”^68 However, its application
to real life is problematic, as we do not know which empirical data to
select for the input. Science writer M. Mitchell Waldrop has the follow-
ing description: “No matter how many calculations and computer sim-
ulations he (Kauffman) carried out on the origin of life, they were still
just calculations and computer simulations. To make a really compelling
case, he would have had to take the experiments of Miller and Urey one
step farther, by demonstrating that their primordial soup could actually
give rise to an autocatalytic set in the laboratory. But Kauffman had no
idea how to do that. Even if he had had the patience and knowledge to
do laboratory chemistry, he would have had to look at millions of possi-
ble compounds in all conceivable combinations under a wide range of