Why our Al overlords will never possess a "Logos".

 Human Exceptionalism — Why Artificial Intelligence Will Never Tell a Story

Peter Biles

One of the biggest contentions in the current debate over OpenAI’s new Large Language Model (LLM) ChatGPT is its purported ability to create a story, to speak and communicate narrative like a human storyteller. If you ask ChatGPT to write an Edgar Allan Poe-esque story, it will generate something spooky, gothic, and darkly poetic. Ask it to write a Shakespearean sonnet, and out comes a fourteen-lined poem about nature and romance. Need a horror thriller like The Shining or It by Stephen King? You got it.

For all its scary impressiveness, and the guarantee that the technology will only get better, the chatbot extraordinaire fails and will always fail to tell a story. In fact, it can’t be expected to generate meaningful art and literature whatsoever. Why? In short, ChatGPT isn’t a person.

AI Lacks Understanding

Critics might interject and say that LLMs are starting to match the dexterity and even beauty of human poetry and art. AI can crank out verse in the spirit of Milton and Donne (or maybe not quite, but it can approximate the style) and write your freshman composition paper for you. To be fair, it can do a lot. And some entry-level writing jobs may inevitably fall to AI. The technology journal CNET has already employed an AI system to generate articles, although the results have been a bit disastrous, to say the least.

But while AI can generate poems, stories, and essays, it can never grasp the meaning of what it produces. It’s not a sentient mind (despite former Google employee Blake Lemoine’s claim to the contrary) intent on communicating truth, goodness, and beauty to you. Instead, it’s pulling from a preexistent database and giving you approximations of what you’re asking for. It’s algorithmic. The AI optimists (and those declaring doom for all writers and artists) might just be misunderstanding the purpose and nature of language and art.

Josef Pieper on the Purpose of Language

Josef Pieper, a 20th-century philosopher, outlined the two primary functions of language. In his excellent little book Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, he writes:

First, words convey reality. We speak in order to name and identify something that is real, to identify it for someone, of course — and this points to the second aspect in question, the interpersonal character of human speech (p. 15).

For Pieper, language has a “two-fold purpose”: it conveys reality through the word and establishes relationships among persons. It connects us through shared meaning. Can AI do this? Sort of. It can scrape the Internet and produce a coherent sentence. However, Pieper would be skeptical of its ability to fulfill either function, since AI cannot be interested in “reality.” He writes further, “Because you are not interested in reality, you are unable to converse. You can give fine speeches, but you simply cannot join in a conversation; you are incapable of dialogue” (p. 17). Here, Pieper is talking about the “sophists” in Plato’s era. They were witty rhetoricians but had more interest in persuasion and manipulation than in telling the truth.

So, is ChatGPT simply technological sophistry, drawing on a bizarre Internet landscape, designed to give you fancy distortions of the world? Robert J. Marks, Senior Fellow at the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence, writes in his book, Non-Computable You:

When discussing artificial intelligence, it’s crucial to define intelligence. Computers can store oceans of facts and correlations; but intelligence requires more than facts. True intelligence requires a host of analytic skills. It requires understanding; the ability to recognize humor, subtleties of meaning, and symbolism; and the ability to recognize and disentangle ambiguities. It requires creativity (p. 16).

The Question of Consciousness

Christina Bieber Lake, Clyde Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College, expresses a similar conviction about the limits of computed “intelligence,” particularly in relation to literature. She writes in her book Beyond the Story:

Computers can be programmed to “write” stories, but since they do not have first-person consciousness, they cannot reasonably be said to have intended them. Whatever meaning such stories can be said to have is limited by the parameters of the programmer — who is necessarily a language animal (p. 14).

Bieber Lake turns the issue into the fundamental question of consciousness. “First-person consciousness,” she contends, is a uniquely human quality, and in Robert Marks’s terms, it can never be “computed.” No algorithmic complexity will ever be able to generate consciousness, regardless of how humanoid our robots become. She writes:

All art, and especially story, depends on a relationship between conscious persons. For any story to exist, much less to have meaning, conscious persons must be intentionally interacting with each other. There is always an I and a you and a thing — usually another you — for the I and the you to focus on.

She further notes that intent is always shared “by one person with another person.” The personal, communicative nature of storytelling rules out AI as a legitimate author. It can’t intend meaning and can’t speak to you as a person to a person.

The Person Behind the Word

Her comments lead to the perennial question of authorial “intent,” or whether the author’s intended meaning in a text should have any bearing on its interpretation. Robin Phillips writes that if language is common, comprised of words with definite meanings (although words can change meaning, and their combinations be subject to differing interpretations), intent matters significantly. He observes:

If we were attending only to the meaning of a poem as an isolated collection of words rather than as a work of communication and art, then it would not make any difference whether it was written with artistic intent, that is to say, by a human being rather than a computer or an ape. Hence, all the predicates we might apply to the meaning of the poem we should be able to use whether or not it had a human creator. But this is not how we engage with art, for many aesthetic predicates that we commonly apply to poems would be meaningless when predicated to the computer-generated poem. Consider such predicates as “witty,” “intelligent,” “insightful,” “controlled,” “suppressed,” “overdone,” etc., which presuppose a creative intelligence behind them. To attend to the poem as an artwork is, therefore, to already be aware of more than merely the meaning of the words themselves: it is to be aware of their meaning as an intended artwork.

If we consider ancient oral cultures, where storytelling and myths were primarily communicated by mouth and received by ear, we might get a better sense of the human uniqueness of language. When we read a story, or a poem, or study a painting, we might come away with different impressions, or even various interpretations, but one aspect is evident: a personal consciousness was responsible for creating it, affirming the wisdom of a quote often attributed to C. S. Lewis, “We read to know we are not alone.”

Rise of the Corsican.

 

Stars powered by the dark?

 

On the role of imaginary numbers in describing/explaining the real world.

 Intelligent Design in Imaginary Numbers

Eric Hedin

The concept of imaginary numbers can seem like an especially esoteric or detached-from-reality notion, perhaps dreamt up in the overactive imaginations of mathematicians. The absurdity of the concept doesn’t improve when one learns that the origin of imaginary numbers comes from trying to take the square root of a negative number.

Positive numbers have a pleasing solidity to them, in that they correspond to countable “things.” Five apples, ten people, and even fractional amounts, such as 2.2 pounds of rice. The number zero becomes less concrete, referring merely to the absence of something — such as, zero cows in the barn. Although most people are more comfortable with negative numbers than imaginary numbers, when we encounter a number like negative five, we have already departed from a simple association of the number with tangible things. 

The ancients rejected negative numbers as being without meaning because they could see no way physically to interpret a number that is less than nothing….As late as the sixteenth century we find mathematicians referring to the negative roots of an equation as fictitious or absurd or false.1

Nonetheless, we learn fairly early on in school how to do simple arithmetic with negative numbers. In particular, we learn that the square of any (real) number is positive. So, how could a negative number even have a square root? Surely, the label “imaginary” is appropriately applied to the result of any such endeavor.

Why Bring Up Imaginary Numbers? 

I raise the issue simply because imaginary numbers have shown themselves to facilitate, despite their moniker, mathematics without which we would be seriously impeded in our ability to describe and quantify reality. To understand their nature, it will help to introduce complex numbers. If the square root of -1 is designated with the letter i, then a complex number, z, might be written as z = a+bi, where a and b are real numbers. So, a complex number has two parts, a real part, a, and an imaginary part, b. 

We are accustomed to real numbers being laid out on a “number line,” typically with the positive numbers to the right of zero and the negative numbers to the left of zero. In this sense, real numbers are one-dimensional, with a number corresponding to every point on the line. Analogously, it can be useful to consider complex numbers as two-dimensional quantities, with a complex number corresponding to every point on a plane.

This is exactly how complex numbers are visualized — as points on a so-called complex plane. The familiar number line makes up the x-axis, or real axis, so any point on this line has its imaginary part b=0. Points in the plane above or below the real axis have a positive or negative imaginary part, respectively. Since complex numbers correspond to the points in a plane and the entire real number axis is just a single line in that plane, it makes sense that learning to work with complex numbers should lead to expanded functionality in mathematics.

And Such Is the Case!

What kind of practical benefit has come to us through the use of complex numbers? 

When people first considered taking square roots of negative numbers, they felt very uneasy about the problem….They certainly would not have believed that the new numbers could be of any practical use. Yet complex numbers are of great importance in a variety of applied fields; the electrical engineer would, to say the least, be severely handicapped without them.2

Solving mathematical problems involving fluid flow, oscillatory motion, and quantum mechanics are all facilitated through theorems and procedures for handling functions of complex variables. At this point, someone might object to all this by asserting that the physical world corresponds to real things, so how could invoking imaginary numbers avoid a departure from reality? Remember, however, that the form of a complex number, z = a+bi, contains two real numbers, a and b, and it’s these real numbers that end up corresponding to actual properties of real-world phenomena.

An electrical engineer can analyze an alternating current circuit by assuming a complex-number form of the electrical current. The actual current corresponds to just the imaginary part, but the complex resistance, known as the impedance, has physical meaning in both its real (ohmic resistance) and imaginary parts (capacitive and inductive impedance).

The term, imaginary, for the part of a complex number that lies off the real number axis may contribute to our sense that mathematicians are dabbling in something out of a fairy tale. René Descartes, in 1637, is credited with being the first to assign this label to results involving the square root of a negative number.

Before Descartes’ introduction of this term, the square roots of negative numbers were called sophisticated or subtle.3

I think these earlier labels would’ve actually been more appropriate, considering the enormous benefit complex number theory has given us in mathematical descriptions and calculations of many aspects of the physical world. Exploring the possibilities found in the realm of complex numbers (perhaps not too dissimilar, after all, to an adventure in fairy land) we reach a particularly magical point known as Cauchy’s integral formula. This ultimately useful mathematical result comes from doing calculus with complex numbers.

Almost Insurmountable Difficulty

Anyone who has taken a calculus course learns the process of integration for finding the area under the curve described by a mathematical function. One also learns, however, that integrating certain functions poses almost insurmountable difficulty. Cauchy’s integral formula, however, melts the difficulty of doing a wide class of integrals by taking advantage of the two-dimensional number space of complex numbers.

When I’ve taught complex variable theory as part of an advanced mathematics course for physics majors, introducing this topic to students feels something like giving them a secret power to do math. The author of the book already referenced on imaginary numbers describes his first encounter with Cauchy’s formula while studying at Stanford University:

For me, complex function theory was a revelation bordering on a mystical experience….With Cauchy’s theory of complex integration one could almost without effort, calculate the values of a seemingly endless number of incredibly odd, strange, and downright wonderfully mysterious-looking definite real integrals….Such calculations were to me, then, seemingly possible only if one had the powers of a sorcerer.4

One example of a practical application of Cauchy’s formula for complex variables is in solving an integral from the equation of motion for a planet with an elliptical orbit, which leads to the famous result of Kepler’s Third Law of Planetary Motion. A completely different use of complex numbers arises in the research field of computational nanoelectronics. Analyzing electron transmission through nanoscale structures routinely includes considering information revealed by the imaginary part of the complex variable associated with the energy of the electrons. The following statement is from an article on currents circulating around a benzene ring molecular structure.

The positions of the transmission zeros and poles in the complex energy plane, and their possible interference or even complete cancellation of each other, are shown to correlate with the amplitude and resonance structure of the circular transmission resonances.5

What Does All This Have to Do with Intelligent Design? 

I think that the discovery of the almost unbelievably practical applications of complex number theory — derived from the bold intellectual extension of real numbers into the two-dimensional realm — is so “wonderfully mysterious” that it seems more consistent with a buried treasure we were intended to find than a prodigious bit of unexpected luck encountered by accidental beings in a happenstance universe.

For centuries, mathematicians discounted the “imaginary” solutions of equations involving the square roots of negative numbers. But when these nonsensical outcomes of mathematical manipulations were tentatively embraced and explored, they revealed a hidden usefulness without which our quantitative formulations of reality would be severely curtailed. If the extension of our familiar one-dimensional number line to a two-dimensional complex number plane proved fruitful, who’s to say that a further extension of numbers to encompass a complete three-dimensional volume might not disclose further unimaginable treasures?6

Notes

Paul J. Nahin, An Imaginary Tale: The Story of √(-1), (Princeton University Press, 1998), 5-6.

Mary L. Boas, Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences, 3rd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006), 47.

Boas, Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences, (2006), 6.

Nahin, An Imaginary Tale, (1998), 188.

Eric R. Hedin, Arkady M. Satanin, and Yong S. Joe, “Circular transmission resonances and magnetic field effects in a ring of quantum dots connected to external leads in the meta-configuration,” Jnl. of Computational Electronics, June 2019, Volume 18, Issue 2, pp 648–659. DOI 10.1007/s10825-018-01291-2.

A speculation on what a 3-dimensional number might correspond to is suggested by the mathematical impossibility of the square root of a negative number, which led to the two-dimensional plane of complex numbers. Another mathematical “impossibility” is the problematic case of division by zero, giving infinity. Perhaps the three-dimensional space above and below the complex number plane is populated by quantities (call them complete numbers) that correspond to complex numbers divided by zero. This hint is not without basis, as complex numbers that lead to infinities in real quantities (such as the transmission amplitude) have turned out to have practical significance (signifying the energy width of the transmission resonance). Furthermore, Cauchy’s formula, referred to above, actually exploits the existence of points in the complex plane that lead to infinites. 

Bioelectricity vs. Darwinism.

 Bioelectricity Gives Biologists a Jolt

David Coppedge 

We’ve explored bioelectricity in cells. We’ve looked at bioelectricity within the human body. Now, functional use of “electrical engineering” is being found in the realms between.

Physicists learn about electrostatics, the laws governing stationary charges. Then they learn about electrodynamics, the laws governing moving charges. Biologists are finding that life utilizes both systems of laws at all scales, from within the cell to tissues, organs, and entire organisms. Here are some recent discoveries in the emerging science of bioelectricity.

Electric Transportation

How does that tick jump from its twig onto your clothing as you walk through brush? The answer, says Current Biology, is by hopping on an electrostatic bullet train. A cow or other host animal walking through the bushes carries a net static charge. The tick, regardless of its own charge polarity, is “pulled by these electric fields across air gaps of several body lengths.” 

Images in the paper show that a rabbit or cow literally glows with an electric field as it walks through vegetation. “Live ticks are passively attracted by the electric fields of their hosts,” the scientists found through experiment and measurement. It may not be good news for us, but the discovery suggests ways to fight back.

We also find that this electrostatic interaction is not significantly influenced by the polarity of the electric field, revealing that the mechanism of attraction relies upon induction of an electrical polarization within the tick, as opposed to a static charge on its surface. These findings open a new dimension to our understanding of how ticks, and possibly many other terrestrial organisms, find and attach to their hosts or vectors. Furthermore, this discovery may inspire novel solutions for mitigating the notable and often devastating economic, social, and public health impacts of ticks on humans and livestock.

Electromagnetic induction was one of the major discoveries made by the devout scientist Michael Faraday in 1831 (published independently in America the following year by another devout scientist, Joseph Henry). Yet here we see a tiny arachnid making use of electromagnetic induction. We can’t blame the tick for this trick. It doesn’t intentionally carry disease germs. It’s just taking advantage of a transportation system to hitchhike around, the way a cocklebur does when its Velcro-like seeds latch onto the fur of a passing cow. Pretty clever, actually.

Roundworms also know about this trick. In another paper in Current Biology, scientists wondered why dauers [larvae] of the common roundworm C. elegans come equipped with electrical sensors. The answer: “electroreception helps these microscopic worms to attach themselves to insects for transportation.” Leave it to scientists to design clever experiments to test and measure this trick! They charged bumblebees up to 724 thousand volts per meter!

The electric field strength (200 kV/m) required to induce leaping behavior in C. elegans far exceeds the upper limit of those seen in aquatic animals. It is also worth noting that air is a good electrical insulator compared with the aquatic environment, which makes it possible for terrestrial animals to carry significantly more electrostatic charges. Thus, it is highly possible that dauers can electrostatically interact with other animals in nature. To directly test this theory, the authors used bumblebees that are known to be highly electrostatically charged in the wild. These bumblebees were artificially charged by rubbing them against a Canadian goldenrod flower. Further experiments confirmed that the charge of bumblebees obtained in the lab was comparable to those observed in the wild. When the charged bumblebees were put close to the nictating dauers, leaping behavior was detected (Figure 1A). The electric field strength calculated was about 724 kV/m, exceeding the 200 kV/m leaping threshold. Strikingly, as many as 80 dauers were able to leap at the same time (Figure 1B). The leaping distance between dauers and bumblebees was about five times the dauer body length, which is also biologically meaningful.

Plant Electrodynamics in the Venus Flytrap

The involvement of electricity in the well-known traps of Dionaea muscipula, the Venus flytrap, are becoming increasingly appreciated. Researchers at Linköping University in Sweden speak of the flow of electrical signals in these amazing plants — and probably to some extent in all plants.

Most people know that the nervous system in humans and other animals sends electric impulses. But do plants also have electrical signals even though they lack a nervous system? Yes, plants have electrical signals that are generated in response to touch and stress factors, such as wounds caused by herbivores and attacks on their roots. As opposed to animals, who can move out of the way, plants must cope with stress factors where they grow.

For a plant studied by Darwin, it’s remarkable how much remains unknown about electrical propagation in the Venus flytrap. How can a plant, without neurons, conduct electricity? This team found some new things.

Electrical signalling in living organisms is based on a difference in voltage between the inside of cells and the outside environment. This difference in voltage is created when ions, i.e. electrically charged atoms, are moved between the inside and the outside of the cell. When a signal is triggered — for instance by mechanical stimulation in the form of bending a sensory hair — ions flow very fast through the cell membrane. The rapid change in voltage gives rise to an impulse that is propagated.

Their results, published in Science Advances, add to knowledge about plant electrophysiology. They carefully observed the “action potentials” of the traps, and how the signal is propagated in the leaf. Using 30 delicate electrodes arranged in a “neurogrid” attached to the inside of the trap, the team found that the action potential (AP) spreads first, followed by a calcium ion wave. It begins at the trigger hair, as expected, but then propagates radially outward at 2 cm/s across both lobes of the trap without a particular direction. 

Biologists have long known that the trigger hairs must be touched twice within thirty seconds for the trap to close. This trick allows the traps to ignore non-living stimuli, but how that threshold is encoded is not clear. Did I hear codes?

In addition, any combination of hair stimulations induces faster AP propagation during the second stimulation, indicating that the excitability information must be encoded across the entire trap, rather than coupled with the stimulated hair alone. The nature of this information encoding remains unclear.

This is the first time that biologists have applied methods of measuring electrical transmission in plants that have normally been performed on animals, such as on rodent brains. The authors are excited about the possibilities of learning more about plant electricity. What about Darwinism? They apparently have no need of that hypothesis.

More on Microbes

More findings about intercellular electricity in bacteria have come forth. In May, Phys.org published the “First experimental confirmation that some microbes are powered by electricity.” In “electrosynthesis,” bacteria can make alcohol using carbon dioxide and electricity, but how they do it has been unclear. The new research in Germany was “able to confirm experimentally for the first time that the bacteria use electrons from hydrogen and can produce more chemical substances than previously known.” A report on this research at ChemEurope.com says it may lead to harnessing bacteria to make useful chemicals for industry. Feed the microbes hydrogen and watch them run their power plants.

A month earlier, Duke University reported that a “previously unknown intracellular electricity may power biology.” Specifically, that article says that electric fields may underlie the formation of biological condensates that bring interacting molecules together. Read about condensates in my earlier article here.

The future of bioelectricity looks bright. Here, an unexpected series of discoveries opened the door to new ways of looking at biological processes. And with it, as in previous revelations, biologists are finding codes, communication of information, and exquisite engineering. 

Conserving function from root to branches of a "tree of life"

 Quiz: Is This a Prediction from the Tree of Life?

Paul Nelson

The three-domain Tree of Life (TOL) geometry below is textbook orthodoxy, due largely to the work of the late Carl Woese on patterns in 16S rRNA.

Okay — here’s a quiz:

On the basis of this TOL geometry, what would you predict as the genome content for the Last Bacterial Common Ancestor (LCBA) — the hypothetical entity occupying the branch near the red circle?

Or, to turn the puzzle around — this is the actual quiz question — if the LCBA existed, what would you expect to find in the “core genomes” of bacterial groups at the tips of the branches within the domain Bacteria? Should every bacterial group conserve the same core set of orthologous genes?

Give your answer, then read on…

Now refer to a new article in Genome Biology, “Reconstruction of the last bacterial common ancestor from 183 pangenomes reveals a versatile ancient core genome” (open access). From the article:

core genomes differed greatly at the gene-level, with no single OG [orthologous group] observed in all 183 core genomes, consistent with previous observations that biochemical functions rather than individual genes tend to be conserved.”

Conservation of function, but not genes, can be understood with an analogy to natural language. Consider two sentences:

The hulking great lorry skirted round an enormous chasm in the roadway.

The massive truck dodged a huge pothole in the street.

The individual words in these sentences — e.g., “lorry” vs. “truck” — are functional synonyms, but not direct variants of each other (such as “color” and “colour”). Varying “lorry” letter by letter will take a LONG way to get to “truck,” with nearly all of the intermediate character strings not referring to large commercial vehicles.

Is conservation of function, without conservation of genes, a TOL prediction? It would seem not.

Physicists still on the quest for JEHOVAH'S Mind?

 Barbieri’s Dilemma: Biological Information without Intelligence

Denyse O Leary

Last week, we looked at a most interesting paper, by University of Ferrara theoretical biologist Marcello Barbieri. He was discussing the discomfort biologists feel with the vast amount of information in life forms, which — in the view of many — “does not really belong in science.” The divide, he says, is between biologists who insist that life is chemistry only and those who, like him, see it as chemistry plus information. The problem is obvious: Information is by its nature immaterial. It is measured in bits, not kilograms or joules. It is understood in terms that invoke mathematics and probability more than chemistry and physics.

A physicalist biologist ignores or discounts the role of information. Barbieri wants to show that information is fully compatible with current assumptions in biology. So, in his 2016 paper, he tries his hand at incorporating it into a materialist origin-of-life story:

It comes from the idea that life is artefact-making, that genes and proteins are molecular artefacts manufactured by molecular machines and that artefacts necessarily require sequences and coding rules in addition to the quantities of physics and chemistry. More precisely, it is shown that the production of artefacts requires new observables that are referred to as nominable entities because they can be described only by naming their components in their natural order. From an ontological point of view, in conclusion, information is a nominable entity, a fundamental but not-computable observable.

BARBIERI MARCELLO 2016 WHAT IS INFORMATION? PHIL. TRANS. R. SOC. A.3742015006020150060

HTTP://DOI.ORG/10.1098/RSTA.2015.0060, 13 MARCH 2016

Wait. Artifacts, are made by intelligent, purposeful agents. Almost all artifacts are, of course, developed by humans, using abstract thinking. Some other animals use artifacts in the form of simple tools. But these life forms are not prebiotic chemistry; they are already highly developed life forms.

That Raises a Question

If the James Webb Space Telescope required many human intelligent agents, why should we simply accept that the development of early cells, also complex, could be managed by chemistry alone — when such a development has never happened in nature since? That is, there is no spontaneous generation, as far as know.

Barbieri uses terms like “manufactured” and “naming” freely but they are only meaningful if we suppose intelligent agents. Some may blame the limits of human language for that. But there is a reason why language features those limits: When writing for a serious purpose, we don’t attribute decisions that clearly require intelligence to non-intelligent agents.

A Speculative History

Barbieri sketches a speculative history of the molecular machines that, he argues, preceded life:

The origin of protein life, on the other hand, was a much more complex affair, because proteins cannot be copied and their reproduction required molecular machines that employ a code, machines that have been referred to as codemakers. The evolution of the molecular machines, in short, started with bondmakers, went on to copymakers and finally gave origin to codemakers.

BARBIERI, 2016

It’s an interesting story. It sounds a bit like the history of a human industry. Which again raises the problem: If these makers were themselves unintelligent and non-purposeful, some other entity must have been using them as instruments. Complex, specified artefacts don’t just “happen” to get built. When Barbieri tells us that “The divide between life and matter is real because matter is made of spontaneous objects whereas life is made of manufactured objects,” he sounds like an intelligent design theorist. Unpopular but right.

The resemblance becomes even clearer when he offers,

Both the sequence of nucleotides in a gene and the sequence of letters in a book are carrying information: hereditary information in genes and syntactic information in language. In both cases, the information is digital (because it is made of discrete units) and linear (because the units are arranged in a linear order).

A book? Yes. He cites photos and music as well. Then, “Finally, we can represent letters, numbers, pixels, musical notes and many other symbols with the characters of computer language… ”

Indeed We Can!

Immaterial ideas can be represented in any number of ways. But now, as to the origin of immaterial ideas…

Barbieri, of course, would not want to associate himself with intelligent design theory! Instead, he cites in his defense eminent biologist Ernst Mayr (1904–2005): “There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years!” Also, information theorist Hubert Yockey (1916–2016) who “tirelessly pointed out that no amount of chemical evolution can cross the barrier that divides the analogue world of chemistry from the digital world of life, and concluded from this that the origin of life cannot have been the result of chemical evolution.”

He senses that there is something missing from Yockey’s summation:

At this point, one would expect to hear from Yockey how did linear and digital sequences appear on Earth, but he did not face that issue. He claimed instead that the origin of life is unknowable, in the same sense that there are propositions of logic that are undecidable. This amounts to saying that we do not know how linear and digital entities came into being; all we can say is that they were not the result of spontaneous chemical reactions. The information paradigm, in other words, has not been able to prove its ontological claim, and that is why the chemical paradigm has not been abandoned.

BARBIERI, 2016

Exposing the Problem

In doing so, Barbieri exposes the problem: “Life is chemistry” is an accepted dogmatic proposition that flies in the face of the evidence of large amounts of information in life that did not get there only by chemistry.

But defenders of the evidence for information, like Barbieri, are stymied. Complex, specified information does not originate without underlying intelligence. But the defenders do not wish to acknowledge that intelligence and anyway, they wouldn’t be allowed to. They would be speaking an unspeakable truth and would lose their membership in the establishment. 

Therefore, it is said, they have not proved their case. Either the information does not exist or anyway, it can be treated as if it did not. And all is well.

Note: As it happens, intelligent design theorists consider Yockey’s work a “primary contribution to the ID movement,” though an unintentional one, to be sure.

Next and last in this three-part series: Can information be separated from intelligence? Barbieri’s dilemma seems to be that he can’t give information its rightful place in life without acknowledging truths he cannot afford.

On physicists' search for the mind of God.

 John Horgan on the Madness of “Scientific Omniscience”

Paul Nelson 

I only saw physics Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg in person once — at Baylor University, in April 2000, at the big conference on “The Nature of Nature” organized by Bill Dembski and Bruce Gordon before the Polanyi Center ran into problems. Weinberg (third from left in the photo above) had the supreme self-confidence of a scientific Alpha Male, leaning on the speaker’s lectern from the side and dismissing design with ill-concealed contempt, except when he got onto the topic of the mysterious value of the cosmological constant. Then he paced the stage from one end to the other, not looking at the audience, muttering to himself and staring at his feet. The cosmological constant definitely bothered him.

Puzzles and Mysteries

Nonetheless, as science writer John Horgan explains in an article, Weinberg was one of the leading promoters of a “final theory” — the bedrock scientific account which would once and for all drive away all the remaining puzzles and mysteries. From, “The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience”:

Does anyone still think science can explain, well, everything? This belief was ascendant in the 1980s, when my career began. Bigshot scientists proclaimed they were solving the riddle of existence. They would explain why our universe exists and takes the form it does, and why we exist and are what we are. …

Stephen Hawking was the most influential know-it-all. In his 1988 mega-bestseller A Brief History of Time, Hawking predicted that physicists would soon find an “ultimate theory” that would explain how our cosmos came into being. He compared this achievement to knowing “the mind of God.” This statement was ironic. Hawking, an atheist, wanted science to eliminate the need for a divine creator.

I suspect Hawking, who had a wicked sense of humor, was goofing when he riffed on the ultimate theory. The success of Brief History nonetheless inspired copycat books by physicists, including Theories of Everything by John Barrow (1991), The Mind of God by Paul Davies (1992) and Dreams of a Final Theory (1993) by Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg.

Weinberg, a deadly serious man, was definitely not kidding when he envisioned a final theory. He argued that with the help of a new “supercollider” in Texas (which ended up being canceled), physicists might soon “bring to an end a certain kind of science, the ancient search for those principles that cannot be explained in terms of deeper principles.” Like Hawking, Weinberg hoped the final theory would crush, once and for all, our superstitious faith in an all-powerful, beneficent deity. “It would be wonderful to find in the laws of nature a plan, prepared by a concerned creator in which human being played some special role,” Weinberg wrote. “I find sadness in doubting that they will.”

Physicists were not the only scientists bewitched by the dream of omniscience.

As examples of “bewitched” scientists, Horgan mentions Peter Atkins, Francis Crick, and Richard Dawkins. Of note, he writes: “As for life, Dawkins’s claim that it is no longer a mystery is absurd. We still don’t have a clue how life began, or whether it exists elsewhere in the cosmos. We don’t know whether our emergence was likely or a once-in-eternity fluke.” Horgan himself bought into the final theory idea, at least for a time. Now he regards the notion as a species of insanity.

The edge of spacetime?

 

And still yet more on the business of war

 

Matthew's gospel according to the King James Version.

 

Science: the one enterprise that is better than those administering it?

 Science Is Self-Correcting? Time for a Reality Check

Denyse O Leary

Many of us grew up with the claim “Science — unlike religion — is self-correcting!” Why so many science boosters dragged religion into it was never clear to me. It sounded too much like saying “The chemistry department, unlike the (stupid) philosophy department, is self-correcting!”

Oh? Well, Let’s See Then

Self-absorbed nonsense often followed, which only heightened suspicion. 

The recent resignation of neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne, president of Stanford University, over yet another peer-reviewed research scandal has forced science thinkers to accept a, perhaps unaccustomed, moment of serious self-reflection. Here’s a sampling from recent news, first from veteran whistleblower Ivan Oransky:

You may have thought, given the voluminous coverage of this case, that Tessier-Lavigne’s defenestration demonstrates such failures are highly unusual and typically lead to significant sanctions.

Neither is true. If — and given the history of such episodes, that’s a big if — journals end up retracting the three papers Tessier-Lavigne has said he has agreed to retract (two in Science and one in Cell), the number will represent less than a tenth of a percent of the retractions we expect to see this year. We at Retraction Watch, which tracks retracted papers, estimate that figure to be about 5,000 — a tiny fraction of how many retractions should happen but don’t. And the careers of most researchers whose names are on the retractions that do happen haven’t suffered a scratch. The ones whose papers haven’t been retracted have even fewer worries.

IVAN ORANSKY, “SCIENCE CORRECTS ITSELF, RIGHT? A SCANDAL AT STANFORD SAYS IT DOESN’T,“ SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, AUGUST 1, 2023.

Oransky reasonably wonders, why do prestigious journals suffer no loss of reputation as these incidents multiply? You know they are having problems in this area when, as he reports, it is often volunteer sleuths whose efforts bring down questionable papers. Tessier-Lavigne was brought down by student journalist Theo Baker.

But It’s Worse than That

As he and fellow Retraction Watch whistleblower Adam Marcus note at The Guardian, journals passively enable flawed work:

Journals and publishers also fail to do their part, finding ways to ignore criticism of what they have published, leaving fatally flawed work unflagged. They let foxes guard the henhouse, by limiting critics to brief letters to the editor that must be approved by the authors of the work being criticized. Other times, they delay corrections and retractions for years, or never get to them at all.

IVAN ORANSKY AND ADAM MARCUS, “THERE’S FAR MORE SCIENTIFIC FRAUD THAN ANYONE WANTS TO ADMIT, THE GUARDIAN, AUGUST 9, 2023.

Veteran science journalist Matt Ridley surveys the scene:

Gloriously, in June this year, a study of honesty itself was accused of being dishonest. Professor Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School had claimed that people who signed truthfulness declarations relating to tax or insurance at the top of a page were more honest than those who signed at the bottom of a page. Her co-author says he has been shown ‘compelling evidence’ of data falsification. Gino denies the accusation and filed a lawsuit against Harvard last week.

MATT RIDLEY, “SCIENCE FICTION: THE CRISIS IN RESEARCH,” SPECTATOR, 12 AUGUST 2023.

Yes, That’s Another Factor

Increasingly, researchers facing retraction and possible consequences have begun resorting to lawsuits. Their chances of winning may be small but if accusers must run up a big legal bill defending themselves, they may well back off and let the whole matter drop. 

Flawed but accepted research has even attracted a parody paper, a Sokal hoax-style entry that attempted to test just how bad the situation really is:

In 2015 John Bohannon published a deliberately misleading study showing that chocolate could cause weight loss and submitted it to multiple journals from a fake institute to see how many would publish it. It was a real study but its design, with a small sample size and a large number of variables tested, was a ‘recipe for false positives’. It was accepted within 24 hours by a journal that boasts that it ‘reviews all papers in a rigorous way’ and published unchanged. With the help of a press release, it was soon all over the media, for which any diet story is irresistible clickbait.

MATT RIDLEY, “SCIENCE FICTION: THE CRISIS IN RESEARCH,” SPECTATOR, 12 AUGUST 2023 HERE’S MORE ON THAT PAPER. 

Reading about proposed remedies in Times Higher Education is dispiriting (i.e, when the ship is on fire, rearrange the deck chairs). It’s as if Top People don’t understand how serious the problem is.

Here’s How Serious It Is

Stanford statistician John Ioannidis pointed out in 2005, “most published research findings are false.” And not much has changed. Spurious correlations, data mining, and data torturing, etc. go on as before because there is no true incentive to tackle the problem at the root. The incentive is simply to slap the wrists of the worst offenders. For example, Tessier-Lavigne is expected to remain a tenured professor at Stanford.

Here’s what may be changing though. Decades ago, it was the better informed people who trusted ongoing science research. Less well-informed people relied on unexamined truisms, folk beliefs, etc. Today, especially in the wake of utter debacles like the official response to COVID-19, “Trust the Science!” is becoming, in many places, a jibe — and for good reason.

Time will tell if the problem is even fixable in a world of philosophical and political wars on math and wars on science. Stay tuned.

The caste system is impeding the rise of India?

 

A blow for the right to repair?

 

Building a Cathedral to chance and necessity?

 Is the Cosmos One Big Happy Accident?

David Klinghoffer

And are science and religion mortal enemies? On a classic episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin talks with Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Jay Richards about distortions and outright falsehoods presented in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s reboot of the Cosmos TV series. Dr. Richards discusses how Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey presents science and religion as enemies by misrepresenting the lives of key figures in the history of modern science. “If you’re going to tell that story of the warfare between Christianity and science, you absolutely have to have a martyr,” says Richards. Both Copernicus and Galileo died peacefully, so the show spends an unusual amount of time animating the story of Dominican friar and mystic Giordano Bruno and his persecution by the Catholic Church. The problem? Bruno isn’t a central character in the story of modern science, and he was executed for alleged theological crimes, not scientific ones. Richards goes on to discuss the show’s misrepresentation of scientific giant Isaac Newton and even of the monotheistic ideas of the ancient Chinese philosopher Mozi. “What you get is the sense that religion and Christianity were either an enemy of science or at best they were incidental beliefs to early modern science that made no difference to scientific discovery. It’s just not true.” Download the podcast or listen to it here.

A house more divided than ever?

 Right-wing Catholics interrupt Mass for LGBTQ World Youth Day pilgrims

Christopher White

The same day Pope Francis told half a million Catholics gathered in the Portuguese capital for a major youth festival that the church must be a home for everyone, ultra-traditionalist Catholics interrupted a Mass for LGBTQ pilgrims in protest of the organizer's efforts to put the pope's message into action. 

When some two dozen Catholics gathered for Mass on Aug. 3 at the Church of Our Lady of the Incarnation here in Lisbon, a group of protesters began to chant "a reparatory prayer" in an effort to disrupt the gathering. 

According to noted British theologian Fr. James Alison, an openly gay priest who was one of three concelebrants of the Mass, the group of a dozen protesters wore long mantillas and held crucifixes and increasingly raised their voices in an effort to drown out the priests and congregants during Mass. 

Police who had already been notified of a potential disturbance were soon on the scene to escort the protesters out of the church, and the Mass continued without further incident. Alison told NCR that the interruption highlights the challenges that LGBTQ Catholics face in trying to practice their faith. 

Those roadblocks began several days earlier, when the organizers of the Mass, the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics and a local Portuguese LGBTQ Catholic group, had to scramble to find a new location to hold the Mass after their original hosts grew anxious after calls for protests began to circulate online. 

Much of the protesters' motivation, Alison said, was their mistaken belief that Jesuit Fr. James Martin would concelebrate the Mass. While Martin — a prominent LGBTQ Catholic advocate — had been in Portugal for Jesuit-related events ahead of World Youth Day, he had already left the country. 

Despite the forced change of venue and the interruption, Alison said that he has no ill will toward the protesters. 

"I was terribly sorry to see these people who have been led to this terrible ideology of hatred," he said. "They live in a weird, alienated world and did not look happy. We were principally sad for them." 

"I don't blame them," Alison added. "I blame the intellectual authors who seem to bear the responsibility for this." 

Alison said that the fact that the protest occurred on the same days that Francis — who arrived in Portugal Aug. 2 for a five-day visit for World Youth Day — used three speeches to repeatedly emphasize that everyone has a home in the Catholic Church, showed that the Mass for LGBTQ Catholics was "clearly in line with the Holy Father's message." 

Since the start of his pontificate in 2013, Francis has walked a tightrope on LGBTQ issues — continuing to uphold traditional church teaching, which prohibits gay relations, while repeatedly offering calls for everyone to be welcomed in the church and personally befriending a number of openly gay Catholics. 

On Aug. 4, the Spanish Catholic news weekly, Vida Nueva, published an interview with Francis, in which the pope reflected on his meetings with transgender people.

"The first time a group of transsexuals came to the Vatican and they saw me, they came out crying, saying that I had given them a hand, a kiss … as if I had done something exceptional with them," he told the magazine. "But they are DAUGHTERS(?) of God!"

An ancient superpower remembered.

 

On the dark arts of branding

 

In search of mindless information?

 Is Life Just Chemistry, or Chemistry Plus Information?

Denyse O Leary

In 2016, University of Ferrara theoretical biologist Marcello Barbieri wrote a rather interesting open access paper on a key philosophical conflict in biology: Is life only chemistry or is it chemistry plus information? In it, he says that many biologists see information in life forms — biological information — as something that “does not really belong to science.” 

How did they get there from here?

Author of Code Biology: A New Science of Life (Springer, 2015), Barbieri offers a history, a critique, and a proposed solution. In this and two upcoming articles, I will look at all three elements.

First, the History

Molecular biology understands genes as transferring linear sequences of information to proteins that carry out instructions. That’s information as it is generally understood. But some biologists, surveying the vast, complex, specified structures it builds, appear spooked by the thought:

This implies that there is an ontological difference between information and chemistry, a difference which is often expressed by saying that information-based processes like heredity and natural selection simply do not exist in the world of chemistry. Against this conclusion, the supporters of the chemical paradigm have argued that the concept of information is only a linguistic metaphor, a word that summarizes the result of countless underlying chemical reactions. The supporters of the information paradigm insist that information is a real and fundamental component of the living world, but have not been able to prove this point. As a result, the chemical view has not been abandoned and the two paradigms both coexist today.

BARBIERI MARCELLO 2016 WHAT IS INFORMATION? PHIL. TRANS. R. SOC. A.3742015006020150060 HTTP://DOI.ORG/10.1098/RSTA.2015.0060, 13 MARCH 2016

Barbieri offers a solution, which we will look at later. But for now, note the nature of the conflict: “Information can’t be real if chemistry doesn’t completely subsume it” versus “information is real, apart from chemistry.”

He points to origin of life researcher Günter Wächtershäuser as a leading exponent of the first view: “If we could ever trace the historic process backwards far enough in time, we would wind up with an origin of life in purely chemical processes.” The physicalism that Wächtershäuser espouses here may cause us to overlook the fact that we really have no idea how to trace the “historic process” that far back in time. His claim is simple but not easily researchable. And in these times, that fact alone gives his chemical paradigm a certain weight. A dominant idea that cannot be proved can also not be disproved.

Of course, as Barbieri notes, Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double helix suggested the image of life forms as “information-processing machines.” That image was not welcomed in many places:

This is one of the most deeply dividing issues of modern science. Many biologists are convinced that biological information and the genetic code are real and fundamental components of life, but physicalists insist that they are real only in a very superficial sense and that there is nothing fundamental about them because they must be reducible, in principle, to physical quantities.

BARBIERI MARCELLO 2016 WHAT IS INFORMATION? PHIL. TRANS. R. SOC. A.3742015006020150060

HTTP://DOI.ORG/10.1098/RSTA.2015.0060, 13 MARCH 2016

He realizes that conventional biologists’ most serious intellectual commitment is to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection acting on random mutation — a commitment he appears to support. So he reassures readers that Wächtershäuser’s “life is just chemistry” approach doesn’t really accord with Darwinism after all because “natural selection, the cornerstone of Darwinian evolution, does not exist in inanimate matter.” He does not seem to grasp that the two theories get on very well precisely because both purport to explain how bewilderingly complex and highly specific life forms can come to exist in a universe that is devoid of intelligence.

So What Type of Material Substance Is Information?

The problem he does not address is that information, unlike chemistry, is fundamentally immaterial. A USB stick that contains vital information weighs the same as one that contains nothing or strings of random numbers. And the content, meaningful or not, is measured using concepts like bits and bytes, not physical attributes like kilograms and joules. And, unlike other quantities, information can convey meaning.

Meaning is a term Barbieri uses a good deal:

The existence of meaning in the organic world may seem strange, at first, but in reality it is no more strange than the existence of a code, because they are the two sides of the same coin. To say that a code establishes a correspondence between two entities is equivalent to saying that one entity is the meaning of the other, so we cannot have codes without meaning or meaning without codes. All we need to keep in mind is that meaning is a mental entity when the code is between mental objects, but it is an organic entity when the code is between organic molecules.

BARBIERI MARCELLO 2016 WHAT IS INFORMATION? PHIL. TRANS. R. SOC. A.3742015006020150060

HTTP://DOI.ORG/10.1098/RSTA.2015.0060, 13 MARCH 2016

No, actually. Meaning is an aspect of conveying information to an intelligent being, as in “The meaning of James’s earlier actions became clear to us when he suddenly switched sides.” If anything in life forms has a meaning, an intelligent agent will be needed to recognize it. 

And if the chemistry-only faction is at all consistent, it should have no truck whatever with the idea that “meaning is a mental entity when the code is between mental objects.” True physicalism denies that there are any mental objects. The mind is an illusion generated in the brain via natural selection, one that happens to further human survival. Meaning is merely a part of that illusion.

Barbieri seems to want biology to combine physicalism with an acceptance of information — information that is stripped of its relationship to intelligence and thus somehow belongs to science after all. But, as we shall see, it can’t be done.

Next: Can information be separated from intelligence? Barbieri tries for an origin of life theory that allows for information but tries to separate it from intelligence. Does he succeed? I will consider that question in a subsequent post.

Yet another Battle Royale of Titans.

 

On Darwinian apologists' "what Cambrian explosion" defence

 Fossil Friday: Did the Cambrian Explosion Really Happen?

Gunter Bechly

When confronted with the argument from the sudden appearance of animal body plans in the Cambrian Explosion about 540-515 million years ago (e.g., early arthropods like the featured trilobite Redlichia), the newest fad among anti-ID activists and hardcore Darwinists is to boldly deny that this event ever happened. A good example is the silly rant by YouTuber Dave Farina against Stephen Meyer’s book Darwin’s Doubt. These deniers of the well-established scientific consensus rest their argument on the recent publications of a few maverick paleontologists, who indeed made similar claims about the Cambrian Explosion and the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event being nothing but a mirage, i.e., an artifact of incomplete preservation, undersampling, and sampling bias. I have already responded to several such claims in previous articles (e.g., Bechly 2022a, 2022b) and have shown why they are unconvincing and based on obfuscating language and ambiguous redefinition of common terms.

No Reasonable Doubt

I also established in my articles with numerous quotes from up-to-date peer-reviewed scientific literature that there is no reasonable doubt about the reality of the Cambrian Explosion and its status as a fatal problem for Darwinism (also see these articles by Luskin 2013, Luskin 2023 and Coppedge 2023).

Now, a new study by the above-mentioned team of maverick authors (Servais et al. 2023) has regurgitated the revisionist views, and this was of course accompanied by sensational press releases with catchy headlines like “Did the Cambrian explosion really happen?” (Heidt 2023). The main claims of this paper are:

The early Palaeozoic accommodated a single long-term radiation.

Continental fragmentation exerted a first-order control on this long-term radiation.

The Cambrian biodiversification was not a sudden burst (“explosion”) of diversity.

The Great Ordovician Biodiversification “Event” was not a single “event.”

Terms such as “radiation” or “biodiversification” are more suitable terms.

The general fallacy of this paper is the conflation of the traditional understanding of the Cambrian Explosion as the sudden appearance of animal body plan disparity with the mere rate of biodiversification in terms of species diversity more or less continuously increasing from the Cambrian to the Ordovician. In other words: They are knocking down straw men.

But It Get’s Worse

In  fact, the real data do not support their main point at all. What the scientists did in this study is simply screen two large paleontological databases, which collectively contain about 2 million entries about fossil biodiversity. Based on these data, which actually contradict their thesis, “the authors assert that these resources aren’t truly global …” and claim that “Were they to put the same effort into studying this period, the existence of two individual events would likely melt away” (Servais quoted in Heidt 2023). This is of course nothing but ad hoc special pleading and mere speculation about potential biases to explain away the inconvenient actual data. It is fishy indeed and suggests that the whole point of this endeavor is the protection of Darwinian evolution against empirical evidence. It certainly isn’t solid science!

So, it is hardly suprising that other experts remain utterly unconvinced and object that “there is actually quite good evidence that there was a Cambrian explosion, as we would typically call it” (Nanglu quoted in Heidt 2023). This will of course not prevent our dear opponents from misrepresenting the new paper as alleged proof that science has shown that the Cambrian Explosion never happened. Cherry picking and confirmation bias anyone?

References

Bechly G 2022a. Untangling “Professor Dave’s” Confusion about the Cambrian Explosion. Evolution News November 29, 2022. https://evolutionnews.org/2022/11/untangling-professor-daves-confusion-about-the-cambrian-explosion/

Bechly G 2022b. Dave Farina Criticizes Intelligent Design but Doesn’t Understand It. Evolution News December 5, 2022. https://evolutionnews.org/2022/12/dave-farina-criticizes-intelligent-design-but-doesnt-understand-it/

Coppedge D 2023. Evolutionists Spin the Cambrian Explosion — But Alas, All in Vain. Evolution News July 26, 2023. https://evolutionnews.org/2023/07/evolutionists-spin-the-cambrian-explosion-but-alas-all-in-vain/ (originally published 2015)

Heidt A 2023. Did the Cambrian explosion really happen? LiveScience July 8, 2023. https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/evolution/did-the-cambrian-explosion-really-happen

Luskin C 2013. How “Sudden” Was the Cambrian Explosion? Evolution News July 16, 2013. https://evolutionnews.org/2013/07/how_sudden_was_/

Luskin C 2023. FAQ: The Cambrian Explosion Is Real, and It Is a Problem for Evolution. Evolution News May 19, 2023. https://evolutionnews.org/2023/05/faq-the-cambrian-explosion-is-real-and-it-is-a-problem-for-evolution/

Servais T, Cascales-Miñana B, Harper DAT, Lefebvre B, Munnecke A, Wang W & Zhang Y 2023. No (Cambrian) explosion and no (Ordovician) event: A single long-term radiation in the early Palaeozoic. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 623(9):111592

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.J.Palaeo.2023.111592

On matter's evil twin?

 

The UBS is superior to the TR? Pros and Cons.

 

The Umayyad dynasty a brief history.

 

The spectre of homochirality continues to loom over OOL science.

 Origin of Life: The Challenge of Achieving Homochirality in a Prebiotic World

Carl Linnaeus

 It's  a challenge crucial for research on the origin of life. Among the many obstacles to generating biologically relevant polymers abiotically, achieving homochirality is perhaps the most difficult impediment to overcome. What is homochirality? Well, all macromolecules in life are composed of building blocks that exist as mirror images. The analogy of left and right hands is most commonly used to convey this chemical concept. With very few exceptions, life only uses one of these forms. 

The chemical properties of mirror imaged compounds are equivalent for all practical purposes. The production of these building blocks in a prebiotic world, using very simple compounds as starting material, would therefore be expected to result in a racemic mixture, or 50/50 distribution, of these building blocks. This has already been confirmed from analysis of organic compounds retrieved from an asteroid, as I wrote here back in May. 

Producing polymers consisting of only one configuration from this mixture is obligatory if a prebiotic origin of life on Earth is be convincingly explained to the scientific community. Proposing chemical schemes that produce polypeptides (proteins) or RNA using homochiral building blocks is the task at hand. Performing such a feat in solution appears unfeasible, so the prebiotic soup approach has been abandoned by many origin of life (OOL) scientists. A better alternative, widely investigated, is the use of mineral surfaces where adsorption of organic chemicals could theoretically select preferentially one configuration of a pair of chiral molecules. 

Here I will briefly discuss this experimental approach, noting where the relevant studies have led. I’ll first consider polymerization of amino acids to form proteins, followed by attempts to achieve this feat using RNA precursors.

From Racemic Amino Acids to Homochiral Proteins

Among studies showing efficacy in obtaining short lengths of amino acids to form oligopeptides, one of earliest was reported in 1978 (Lahav N., White D., and Chang S. (1978) Science 201: 67-69). The system employed, to facilitate the condensation reaction to form peptide bonds between amino acids, was the use of clay minerals (kaolinite and bentonite). Repeated cycles of heating, evaporation, and rehydration were invoked, which are conditions likely present on a prebiotic Earth. Using the simplest amino acid, glycine (having no chiral center), diglycine was found to be produced at low levels with progressively lower amounts up to pentapeptide lengths. Notably the heating-drying phase of this cycle apparently facilitates the condensation reaction, enabling peptide bond formation. 

A Long Way from the Goal

was a start, but still a long way from producing polypeptide lengths of any biological relevance. Small proteins should reach at a minimum 100-200 amino acids to effectively contribute to biological function. After this initial glimmer of hope, many other laboratories undertook similar approaches, testing out different mineral surfaces and a variety of reaction conditions. The highest achievers managed to produce polypeptides up to decamers. It became clear from these studies that the longer the polypeptide produced, the harder it was to retrieve it from the mineral surface, as it was tightly bound via a multitude of chemical bonding forces spread over a long chain of amino acids. Success at making long polypeptides seemingly dooms the polymer to remain fixed to the surface instead of being released into solution as needed by life.

A major flaw with the studies described above is that they did not attempt to account for how homochiral selectivity could be enforced by this route. Synthesizing polypeptides with a racemic mixture of amino acids offers prebiotic life nothing in terms of functionality. For proteins to assume specific and reproducible structures, a homochiral set of amino acids must be used. With this goal in mind, one laboratory reported that enantiomeric pairs of aspartic acid preferentially adsorb to opposing faces with mirror symmetry of calcite (calcium carbonate). It was proposed that aspartic acid, having three functional groups (two carboxylic acids and one amine group), orients itself with homochiral selectivity to the exposed chemical groups of calcite. This follows logically to account for the ~90 percent chiral enrichment observed. 

It works for aspartic acid in this case, but what about glutamic acid? It has the same functional groups but they are spaced apart a little differently. There is no guarantee that the corresponding chiral glutamic acid also binds selectively to the same surface. Sadly, this was not reported. Among the 20 amino acids, only 11 possess at least three functional groups required for appropriate spatial positioning to the mineral interface. The remaining nine have only two, one carboxyl and one amine group. This leaves little room for attaining homochirality for all amino acids as needed to construct proteins. 

To give this laboratory credit, they did mention that alanine, valine, and lysine do not exhibit chiral selection on calcite. The lack of data for most remaining amino acids leads one to believe minerals in general are another dead end for the homochirality problem that OOL protein researchers are trying to solve. In contrast to the conclusions I draw from these observations, the authors were not dissuaded from making bold claims about how this model might help account for homochiral polymerization of amino acids on mineral surfaces in general.

Mineral Models to Select Ribose for RNA

The carbohydrate ribose, required to make RNA, presents a highly problematic situation. Ribose has four chiral centers, unlike amino acids with just one. Therefore, D-ribose found in RNA has seven other chemical partners differing in their spatial arrangement of atoms. Ribose has one advantage to assist the OOL researchers. It most often exists as six- or five-membered ring structures where the functional hydroxyl groups are positioned geometrically to one side of this chemical framework. Minerals such as rutile can accommodate hydrogen bonding, presenting an opportunity to preferentially bind ribose over its other carbohydrate competitors. Such a model has been proposed with the caveat that a third dimensional force must be applied to effect separation of ribose from the other sugars. 

The first two dimensions are accounted for by quasi-planar interactions of sugar rings to the mineral interface. In simpler terms, this mineral needs to be applied to a separation technique called chromatography. The tighter binding of ribose, by virtue of its hydroxyl groups all pointing to the mineral surface, would permit tighter retention where the other sugars would proceed more rapidly through this chromatographic separation. 

There are several problems with this innovative proposal. Setting up a chromatographic separation does not happen naturally. It requires a specific design where all molecules must enter the chromatographic medium simultaneously. In other words, an external agent is required to carry out this exercise. Assuming that chromatography proceeds as hoped, the last 5-carbon sugar eluting from the chromatographic medium will be D- and L-ribose. There is still a racemic mixture of ribose that must be contended with. Finally, as discussed in my earlier article, appropriately linking a nucleobase and finally phosphate to D-ribose is an extremely difficult task without the use of specifically engineered catalysts, e.g., enzymes. This is highly unlikely to happen in a prebiotic scenario. 

The Task at Hand

I have addressed here the potential minerals proposed by OOL researchers to abiotically synthesize the first functional biopolymers. Simple principles discounting these proposals can be applied to other comparable scenarios in this area, but that would require a much longer and more technical article. Suffice it to say there are sound counterarguments to the plethora of schemes that OOL researchers devise in trying to account for how life could have emerged abiotically. Critically examining these schemes is the job with which scientists on the other side of the field are tasked.