Life. The Universe and err!

Last year after moving into our new house I wasted valuable time reading about life and the universe. Phwat, I hear you say. Your problem! I look forward to the discovery or not of the Higgs Boson with some interest and understanding!

One book, Quantum Evolution by Johnjoe McFadden, contained something which did shock me to my little cotton socks.

I am a great believer in evolution. Don’t get me wrong, I know there are problems and more to be discovered and developed. Given the choice between a man with a grey beard sat on a cloud sorting it all out by intelligent design and the developmental imperative of natural selection, mutation and the tricky stuff that we know as DNA, I see the guy on the cloud as a time waster. What’s he doing there anyway?

An interesting aside, I recently found myself arguing against intelligent design across a conference dinner table. After the usual pleasantries to extricate us all from what was becoming a drink fuelled grudge match, I moved on and later complained to a colleague about fucking christians and their lack of rationality. I was castigated for my assumption that I had been debating with a christian, oops!

To return to the plot!
I was disturbed, pleasantly, to learn from the book that the emergence of life, as we know it Jim, is not as I had assumed. Roughly this was that if you get the primordial soup, methane etc., etc, and whack a great charge of lightning through it you get the precursor chemicals of life. Oh no. If you do this in the lab you get a tarry mass. No life, no precursor chemicals, no RNA, DNA, amoebas, or other wiggly things. In fact, if you want to go into detail, the chemical pathway from the most advantageous primordial soup (for life that is) to the most basic set of precursor chemicals for the most elementary forms of life (yes, even more primitive than G Bush Esq.) you require a significant number of catalysed reactions, none of which seem to cascade in the way that they need to in order to deliver - de daan! Life! In fact, if you do the old probability business, you have more chance that Hilary Clinton will be found pleasuring Gordon Brown with a feather duster in a broom cupboard in Downing St… …14 billion, billion, billion billion to 1 or more or thereabouts. Hmmm….

Confessing this discovery on a train journey I was disturbed by the enquiry as to whether I believed in little green men. I do not! I may have seen them in the Eagle but I do not believe in them.

So a conundrum!
A recent article in the New Scientist (04 July 2007 NewScientist.com news service Peter Aldhous) has given me a further excuse to stick my nose in books and articles pondering the mysteries of life, the universe and why I will not be able to do any light dusting for some time to come!