58 Self and the Phenomenon of Life
b2726 Self and the Phenomenon of Life: A Biologist Examines Life from Molecules to Humanity “9x6”genesis of life in some remote planets, our life span is far too short to
chronicle the entire drama. The laboratory is a place to simulate, but
the setup is all too artificial, to the extent that very little is natural and
nothing can be considered spontaneous. Simulations can also be made
with computer modeling, but models are not real, and the initial condi-
tions and the algorithms can only be assumed. As of now, our knowledge
of life’s origin remains a fuzzy guesswork whose true nature may not
be known for sometime. Some experts, at some point in their careers,
expressed frustration:
“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now,
could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the
moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which
would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.” — Francis Crick^71
“Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started on the
sere Earth 3.45 billion years ago is a fool or a knave. — Stuart Kauffman^72
“And so, at first glance, one might have to conclude that life could
never, in fact, have originated by chemical means.” — Leslie Orgel^73Unable to explain the origin of life, Darwin compared it to the mys-
tery of gravity. He stated in 1861 in the 3rd edition of The Origin of Spe-
cies: “It is no valid objection that science as yet throws no light on the far
higher problem of the essence or origin of life. Who can explain what is
the essence of the attraction of gravity?”^74 Certainly, we know a lot more
than Darwin did 150 years ago, but the beginning of life on Earth, or
elsewhere in the universe, continues to puzzle us today.
There is also the issue of chance versus necessity. Did life happen
against all odds, an extremely unlikely accident that occurred perhaps
only once in the universe’s lifetime, as Monod suggested?^75 Or is it a
cosmic imperative, something bound to be born no matter what, as de
Duve^54 and Eigen^76 insisted? To this controversy, I can only say that cos-
mic imperative alone would not be sufficient; it rather sets the permis-
sive and restrictive conditions for chance to strike. Life resulted from a
combination of both, but how much each factor contributed, I cannot