Of Beer, Sailing, alien life, And Some Practical 'Every Day' Implications Of a New Theory

Don’t take my word for it. It’s a proven fact of science. Self-replication has never been demonstrated in the laboratory. That is, I suspect, why the authors in the Cambridge study, one of the references I site HERE, are deliberately "hedgy" with such statements as “It's great progress…but we’re still far short of a molecule that replicates itself.*” Progress. What does it mean? The word doesn’t mean that you’ve arrived, in fact it doesn’t (necessarily) mean you’ve even gotten close. You might have just started, or just thought about starting a journey. It's actually rather ambiguous. If you stand outside on a dark night and jump away from the earth as hard as you can, does this mean you’re making "progress" in getting to the moon? It’s a good analogy I believe closer to the physical reality of the problem than it might portend, and not such a ridiculous analogy as I'll explain in a moment.

I’ll give you one more that's relevant to encapsulating the true meaning of such "progress" and that’s the mathematical paradox of always getting “halfway there..”explained to me some time ago by an algebra teacher who was a bit of a comedian. It goes like this: If the distance you traverse is always defined as half way between the point you start at and the point at which you finish, you are correct in saying that you are "making progress" but do you ever get to your destination? The corollary I remembered was: You can’t get anywhere by half-assing it. Both are excellent analogies if not metaphors, for depicting the so-called “progress” that so many peer reviewed articles seem to convey  or believe they are making, despite the fact that there is no known agreed to theoretical basis for believing it is possible.** The first statement is factual, but the subtle take-home point im attempting is that there's no such thing as achieving the "partially" impossible.

There is a good reason for all of this, and I’m providing a new theory to explain why that is HERE "Does Life Violate The Second Law of Thermodynamics? Implications of Virtual Closed Systems". The problem of life’s origins is steeped heavily in a messy intimidating science called thermodynamics. But thermodynamics is not actually so intimidating or messy or even theoretical. It is exactly the kind of science that you may have discussed, unknowingly with friends while you were taking a trip in your car and you debated about the most ‘economical’  route to take from here to there. However, I think a very good practical example of this sort of science of energy accounting is in sailing. The confounding problem I have had many interesting debates about is “is it possible to make a sail craft move directly upwind, even slowly?” One of my favorite sail contraptions to test the idea, is not a sail, but involves a kind of spinning wheel with cupped sails on it, that rotates in the wind because the "cups" pick up more wind on one side (going with) than on the other (going against), and so it drives a propeller. It should be easy to steer such a craft into the wind, just ease the tiller. After one realizes all the various contraptions that might do the job, the gut feeling is that you’re breaking some kind of law of nature. And you are. Well that in essence, is in layman’s terms what the theory I’m describing is about, it is applicable to those same more tangible and conversable issues as “sailing into the wind”. But a talk about how life might spontaneously emerge from a mucky film of organics on a rock or in a pond, is also what I would classify as “beer conversation” which can be had on a boat or at a barbecue. It’s that practical. But unfortunately in my paper, there are no beers. Just the same,this article is labeled appropriately, “beers sold separately.”

Briefly, I’ll diagram according to the specifics of my paper, why the exhibitioners at the booth, the ones you may or may not have the luxury of seeing at the “Royal Society” exhibit in London town, have it completely wrong in terms of trying to sail “straight into the wind” and defy the laws of nature. (and don’t take my word for it, only. that’s what they meant by “we’re making progress”. You can make progress too, in going straight into the wind, the only problem is, it’s really no progress at all in terms of NET result. The only way you get to go a bit straight up into the wind, is because you already went off in a direction AWAY from the wind, so your NET progress reveals that you actually lost distance, not gained. That is why NET is so important in my paper and anyone else’s, (especially when a few beers might be involved).
And what these researchers are claiming, in papers like these, is precisely that they making progress in making self-replicating molecules, but the problem is that they are not showing you what the NET result is. They do not include the fact that they are adding work and energy to set up such experiments, that would be the DOWNWIND requirement, as we just explained, we have to go downwind a lot in order to then steer back up wind. These researchers don't include that bit in their equation, and that is the point I make in my paper, though it's indirectly implied by the formula. The other derivation of my paper would take it a bit further, however. And I believe if one truly understands what it is I'm theorizing, my analogy I make between spontaneous self-replication and jumping hard to get to the moon will make sense. Perhaps these are more examples" than analogies!

My belief is that if a theory of science is actually real, if it has certain operational aspects to it, it should be applicable to many different scenarios, because it is interconnected. In other words, you CAN get anywhere from here, if you’re willing to use the not so ridiculous metaphor (more analogous) that we can "walk" via the thermodynamics of energy flow from any point to another point. Energy is always accounted for, it is never lost, just altered. The point is, you can follow energy around, just like matter, and see where it goes and what it’s doing. When we truly "follow" what these researchers are claiming, we can see that they do not include a very critical picture in terms of where the energy came from to make their molecules do things on the bench. That also, is in layman's terms another principal I discuss in another blog.

I said I’ll be brief and already I’m heading towards 2-3 pages! So I better wrap it up. Let’s go back to the conept of NET gains, and specifrically if we can to what it is they claiming over at the exhibit in London. They say:

"Reactions between water, CO₂ and the rock mineral olivine in these oceanic melting pots can give rise to the organic building blocks needed from life, from amino acids needed for proteins to the lipids found in cell membranes. These organics can be concentrated by convection within these vents, theoretically giving rise to protocells and complex organic molecules including DNA."

Which isn’t at all different from what’s already been done and said many times before, it’s just a new fangled variation. This represents in thermodynamic terms, a "contraption" or scheme for how to sail into the wind. The fact that it's chemical makes no difference in thermo science. Which isn't frankly much different than what everyone else is doing, or has been attempting for over a hundred years.

In a “nut shell” they’re talking about self-assembly and stating that if you have some random molecules, say rich organics just like Haldane’s (of 1929), [or some rich organic molecules I've made in the lab] if we shine light on it and give it heat, long enough, it will generate more complex molecules, which may then organize to form even “protcells” and DNA, but at that point we can assume that they mean a proto-form. That’s a bit more complex that saying you can “sail directly into the wind.” But not much. That is the simplicity of mathematics and physics. Well we can apply the diagram from my paper to show this won’t work. Wee can put the theoretical ocean with its broth (think something like vegemite only more diluted, AND supernova gamma irradiated, or perhaps like comet residues or the dredgings from a Europan lake) in that bubble and expose it to heat energy from a source, say the sun. The ‘bubble’ or virtual closed system, is really just a convenient way to calculate NET gains of energy or loss. We have energy going in and energy leaving, it’s very simple. What we want to see is if we’re making progress over time. (let me say one more thing, this isn’t about THEM specifically, the well meaning siceintist manning the booth, it’s about this one idea in question, and we’re trying to see if it’s really practical or not). So heat and energy have been flowing into the bubble, into the virtual closed system, and have we made progress? Well, hardly anyone, including myself can just look at molecules and tell you if they’ve improved or not, howeer, fortunately we don’t require the normal sophisticated tests for measuring if S is more negative or not, another intimidating word Entropy. We can in fact, simply take the molecules and see if we can do any work with them, in other words if we put them in a machine, one that is VERY efficient and doing the least possible effort (possible), can we measure any work energy? This can be measured in simple calories the same calories used everywhere. The answer is or should be, if my model is correct, and theirs is wrong, no. After we allow the system to cool for a few minutes to room temp” i.e. the surroundings, we should not be able to extract any work from those molecules. But the other thing I haven’t specified is how long we let it go. Keep in mind that we are taking the organic molecules as is, from the broth, and exposing them to heat energy of the sun for a period of time. We measure different time point, say after 1 day, and 5 days, and a month, and then plot our progress.

How are we measuring a NET gain? That is automatically “calculated in” with our experiment. This is because we are taking ground state materials, from the sea water, and then measuring if these molecules can do work. The difference in work will be the NET gain in work, relative to the environment. One can criticize this experiment by saying “well, all of the molecules received sunlight!” how can there be a difference? That would be a good question to ask of their theory. We can repeat the experiment and illuminate different parts for different times, let them sit for a few hours to equilibrate, (assume the sun sets) and then measure them. We should not have differences in work. And again, we have not even attempted to form a form of life, just more complex molecules capable of doing useful work. How does it relate to sailing? The “wind” in this experiment was the sunlight, the energy supplied by it. And our “sailboats” were…?

The reason my paper is worth a read, is because I am dealing for the first time ever, with WHY this result is possibly expected. That it is expected is more or less highly probable. Frankly I find it rather absurd that they continue to get mileage out of this approach, for example, of claiming "progress" and I've criticized it as doing something akin to perpetual energy, (which I believe it is virtually doing just that, and one can see why that is with a Virtual Closed System). 

And the other criticism I've leveled at them is the fact that they refuse to describe the chemistry, it is instead usually just "smoke and mirrors" and hand waving. If we truly HAD such chemical systems, in which we simply put a random mixture of organics into a vial and added heat or light to make them “evolve” and "select themselves" we would already have these types of chemistries everywhere. But we don’t. So that’s a question to ask the booth exhibitors, why aren’t there spontaneous generators? Because most chemists know that putting a random broth of chemicals in a bottle outside in the sun doesn’t make new useful polymers. There is a good reason that these experiments have failed since Leduc and others in the 1890’s (P Leduc 1911 "Mech of Life). The fact is that thermodynamics is not well understood, and the territory has been opened up greatly by the unspecified nature of this arena. Though it has been stated in different forms, that nothing can violate the second law, it does not put boundaries on how much entropy can be made. Living things are considered as variations of dis-equilibrium phenomenon, the current position. It has never been shown, theoretically, or in a practical sense, why it won’t work- not until now. It is perhaps hard to believe how a theory can have implications to sailing, how life might arise on other planets, and even beer, but that is the fascinating aspect of this basic theory.


 

 *(Note that they [physicists] did believe that the Higg's boson was real, in theory, and then were successful in proving it physically)

 

 

1.  Regarding "self-replicating" molecules here's a good article-

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/10/25/quest-for-self-replicating-rna-edges-closer-to-origin-of-life/Nature Chemistry, 2013. DOI: 10.1038/NCHEM.1781

 **Their conclusion regarding RNA replication (2013) was the following: "It's great progress, but the result still comes far short of a molecule that can copy itself. For one thing, the ribozyme tended to stop short of the end of the molecule it was copying, mostly because the two fell out of contact."

2. P. Leduc 1911, "Mechanism of life" https://archive.org/details/mechanismoflife029804mbp