What is Life, Part III

Even armed with NASA’s pragmatic definition of life, it is almost impossible to know what Earth’s very first life form was like. One very real possibility is that planet Earth’s earliest life may have been vastly different from anything we know today. Many experts suspect that the first living entity was not a single isolated cell, because even the simplest modern cells incorporate bewildering chemical complexity.

Most researchers assume that the first life form did not use DNA, given its exceedingly intricate mechanism. It may not even use proteins, which today act as the chemical work horses of cellular life. Naturally, experts propose different ideas regarding Earth’s first life form. Geologists propose that the Earth’s earliest living entity which fits NASA’s definition was an extremely thin molecular coding on a rock. It is easy to imagine the simple behavior of such flat life. It would have just spread across minerals in a layer of only a few billionths of a meter thick. Flat life would have exploited energy-rich mineral surfaces, and slowly spread outwards, from rock to rock.

Whatever that life form looked like, it must have arisen from chemical reactions among the oceans, the atmosphere and rocks.

Our Tendency to Dichotomize

The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss investigated the mythologies of many cultures. In the process, he recognized deep human tendency to reduce all sorts of complex situations to oversimplified dichotomies. We tend to divide people into friend and enemy. We divide the afterlife into heaven and hell. We divide actions into good and evil. We all know that most situations are much more subtle and complex.

The long history of sciences reveals that scientists are in no way immune to the trap of this kind of oversimplification. In the 18th century, for example, one group of naturalists called the “neptunists”, favored a watery origin for rocks. They fought many battles with the “plutonitsts”, who favored heat to describe the origin of rocks. It turns out that both were right. Rock sometimes form by the action of water, and sometimes by the action of heat, and sometimes even by a combination of both.

A similar contentious and misleading dichotomy raged between 18th century geologists was the one between catastrofists and uniformitarians. Catastrofists espoused the view that brief and cataclysmic events like earthquakes and floods dominated the geological history of Earth. Uniformitarians countered that geological processes are for the most part gradual and ongoing. Again, both groups were correct. Geological changes occur gradually over millions of years, but discrete catastrophic events, like the impact of big asteroids, also influence Earth’s history.

Similarly, there was a time when sharp distinctions were seen between plants and animals, and between single celled and multicellular organisms. Now, those sharp distinctions have become blurred.

I believe that any attempt to formulate an absolute definition of life, one that tries to differentiate between “life” and “non-life”, must represent a similar false dichotomy. Here’s why. It is obvious that the first living cell did not just appear fully formed with all its chemical complexity and genetic machinery. Rather, life must have arisen through a stepwise sequence of emergent events. I see life’s origin as a process of increasing chemical complexity.

What now looks to us as a divide between non-living matter and living cells tends to obscure the fact that the chemical evolution of life occurred in a stepwise sequence. Most of that history is lost, because when modern cells emerged, they quickly consumed all traces of the earlier stages of chemical evolution. They ate the evidence.

Our challenge is to use every available clue to establish a progressive hierarchy of emergent steps, leading from a prebiotic Earth rich in organic molecules to clusters of molecules, to self-replicating molecular systems, to encapsulation and membranes, to cellular life.

This view of life as a stepwise sequence of emergent events also informs the central question “what is life”. Any attempt to define the exact point in which a system of gradually increasing complexity becomes alive is intrinsically arbitrary. Where you or anyone tries to draw such a line is a question more of perceived value than of science. For example, if you value the intrinsic isolation of each living thing, then, for you, life’s origin probably would correspond to the stage when encapsulated cell membranes appeared. Perhaps you most value life’s ability to reproduce. If so, self-replication would be the demarcation point for life.

Many scientists today place special value on information as the key to life. They argue that life began with a genetic mechanism to pass information from one generation to the next. In this context, the question “what is life” becomes fundamentally a semantic question. It’s a subjective matter of taxonomy, rather than any absolute divide. Nature supports a rich variety of complex emergent chemical systems. Scientists are learning to craft a wide variety of those systems in the laboratory as well, but no matter how curious or noble the behavior of these systems may be, none of them comes with a label “life” or “non-life”.

Don’t get me wrong, labels are extremely important. They are vital for effective communication. However, I think that defining life is not helpful because there is so much we don’t know. Early attempts to classify animals purely by their color or shape ultimately failed. Similarly, early efforts to classify chemical elements according to their physical state (solid, liquid or gas) were unhelpful in elaborating a chemical theory.

We are in no position to define life. We don’t know if life’s biochemistry is highly constrained, or if there are many chemical solutions to life. It is much better at this point to keep an open mind and just describe the chemical characteristics of whatever we find.

What is Life, Part II

So, here we continue with the “what is life” issue. A general definition that’s able to distinguish all imaginable living objects from the diversity of non-living objects remains elusive. Even today, we know relatively little about the cellular life on Earth. It’s been said that a shovel full of soil would contain hundreds of microbial species that are unknown to science. That’s not to mention the vast range of plausible non-cellular life forms that might be discovered elsewhere in the universe.

I have to conclude that endorsing any sweeping definition of life based on so little knowledge is like trying to define music after listening to a single Elvis Presley song.

Top-Down and Bottom-Up

So, what do we do? As you can imagine, scientists crave a definition of life. Such a definition remains elusive, but they adopted two complimentary approaches in their efforts to distinguish that which is alive from that which is not. On the one hand, many scientists have adopted the top-down approach. Top-down refers to the effort to scrutinize all modern living organisms and fossil entities to identify the most primitive forms that are or were alive. It turns out that primitive microbes and ancient fossils have the potential to provide relevant clues about life’s early chemistry.

I must say that I find this top-down strategy inherently limited. At least so far, all known life forms are based on biochemical sophisticated cells containing complex molecules, including DNA and proteins. Any definition of life based on top-down research is limited to what appears to be modern biochemistry.

By contrast, a small but determinate army of investigators adopt the so-called bottom-up approach. The principal objective of bottom-up researchers is to device laboratory experiments to mimic the emergent chemical process of environments in the ancient Earth. Ultimately, the bottom-up goal is to synthesize a self-reproducing chemical system in the laboratory. That’s an effort that might help clarify the ancient transition from non-life to life.

You might think that all bottom-up researchers hold a common view of what would constitute the first synthetic life form, but research actually leads to an amusing range of diverging opinions regarding what’s alive. Each scientist has a tendency to define life primarily in terms of his or her own chosen chemical or biological specialty. One notable group focuses on the origin of cell membranes. To them, life began when the first encapsulating membrane appeared.

Other well respected research teams study the emergence of metabolic cycles. Those are the process by which cells gather and use atoms and energy. Naturally, for them, the origin of life coincided with the origin of metabolism. Lots of other groups investigate the origin of primordial RNA, which many experts consider to be the first genetic material. For them, the origin of RNA is equivalent to the origin of life.

There are many other workers who focus on viruses, minerals or even artificial intelligence; and each researcher advocates his own definition of what constitutes life.

NASA’a Definition

Into this mix, quite a few philosophers, theologians and science fiction writers have injected a variety of more abstract views and speculations on the possible phenomena that might said to be alive. The possibilities seem endless: counscious clouds in space, high temperature silicate minerals, a self aware internet. Such proposals sound at times farfetched, but there is so much we don’t know.

Consequently, the scientific community, with the support of NASA and other governmental agencies, holds regular meetings to explore the definition of life. After all, if one of NASA’s primary missions is to look for life on other worlds, then we’d better have a clear definition for planning future missions. It’s amazing how the “what is life” question sparks passionate arguments.

Gerald Joyce, a biologist working at the Scripps Research Institute, developed a widely accepted definition for life, at least in the context of NASA’s space exploration. He concluded that “life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution”.

According to this opinion, life incorporates three distinctive characteristics. First, all life forms must be chemical systems. That means that computer programs or robots are not alive. The second characteristic is that life grows and sustains itself by gathering energy and atoms from its surroundings. That’s the essence of metabolism. Finally, all living entities must display some sort of variation. According to the concepts of Darwinian evolution, natural selection of more fit individuals inevitably leads to evolution and the emergence of more complex entities. A system that does not have the potential to evolve does not fit this definition of life.

There’s still so much we don’t know, but this NASA inspired definition is probably as general, useful and concise as anyone is likely to come up with, at least until we discover more about what’s actually out there.

The Origin of Life, Part I; Miller's Experiment

As Richard Dawkins puts it, “the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the Earth goes round the sun”. We can also be sure that all of the diverse forms of life we see around us today have arisen from some common, primitive, single original living entity. Our first problem is, then, how this living “thing” originated. In 1953, Stanley Miller conducted his famous (or infamous) experiment. At the time he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. For decades, scientists had speculated whether the complex organic compounds characteristic of living things could have somehow been generated spontaneously on the early Earth. Spontaneous generation of organic compounds can’t happen today. This is because organic compounds are too fragile.

It is possible that, given enough time, a complex compound might just come together. If it did, however, it would immediately be taken apart. This is because today our planet is just filled with oxygen. Oxygen breaks down organic compounds. Oxygen pulls electrons out of organic compounds and turns them into inorganic compounds.

How can we even get the formation of any kind of organic compound, if as soon as anything begins to arise by chance, it is immediately taken apart? Well, this one is easy. If oxygen is bothering you, just get rid of it.

Before the Miller-Urey experiment, two scientists, Alexander Oparin and J.B.S. Haldane, independently suggested that the early Earth actually did not have much or any oxygen. Oxygen is all around us in the atmosphere, but they suggested that when the planet was formed, the first atmosphere that developed was entirely composed of just a few gases: hydrogen, methane, ammonia and water vapor. This would be as the atmospheres of the moons of other planets that have been described.

Oparin and Haldane independently suggested that the problem of spontaneous generation of organic compounds wasn’t really a big deal, because the early Earth did not have an oxidizing atmosphere. To test this hypothesis, what Miller did was set out to reproduce the conditions presumed to exist on the early Earth before life have arisen, and see if he could get the spontaneous production of organic compounds.

A Simple Experiment, Powerful Results

Miller’s experiment was set up this way: He had two flasks connected by a series of glass tubes. He had a lower flask in which he put water, and he heated this water gently with a little flame. He would cause the water to evaporate and create water vapor, which would circulate into a higher flask. In the upper flask, Miller also added a number of other gasses. He created an atmosphere similar to the one of the early Earth, consistent of hydrogen, methane, ammonia and wáter vapor.

The Experiment. Souce: Wikipedia.

Miller also exposed the gases in this upper chamber to a lot of energy by putting two electrodes that would create electrical sparks. He knew that he needed energy to create any kind of compound, certainly organic compounds.

This is actually a pretty simple experiment, and you can almost do this in your own house. All of these materials are easily available. You could replicate Miller’s experiment and results, which were spectacular. In only a couple of days, he found he could synthesize a whole range of different organic compounds, including some very complex ones, like amino-acids.

The scientific community immediately set out to replicate this. Many people replicated the experiment and it quickly became clear that depending on starting conditions, it was possible to spontaneously, without any preexisting organic molecule, produce all of the amino-acids that are normally found in living material. Most intriguingly of all, you could create nucleotides, which are the building blocks of nucleic acids, DNA and RNA.

The implication of Miller’s experiment and those that followed was that there appeared to be no trouble at all for complex organic compounds to arise spontaneously on the inorganic early Earth. This is a first stepping stone to the origin of life from non-living matter.

On the other hand, as exciting as this result was, the organic compounds that Miller created were still relatively simple compared to the stuff that we are made of. What else do we need to get something that we would call “living”? We have to take our synthesis of organic compounds even farther, beyond these organic building blocks, to get the varied extremely complex molecules that living systems are really made of. We will see how that was possible in the early Earth next time.

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