Snowflake Spirituality

I was staring out of my window, watching snow flurries and thinking about the essence of being. Philosophies and religions have long grappled with trying to understand and explain the human spirit, the soul, throughout time. I have a distinct and solid understanding, and thought of a useful metaphor for it as I watched the flurries descend. Definitions of "the soul" generally include total individuality and immaterial nature. It is that which makes each of us unique, it manifests as long as we live, growing and changing within us, and then instantly vanishes from view as we die. In most religions, the question then is asked, "Where does it go?" Consider the snowflake. It begins as a small cluster of water molecules up in a cloud at the boundary of vapor and mist. As it hovers in the wind currents, it grows and evolves. The species (chemical formula) determines the basic nature, a flat hexagon. So why is every one different? Because they grow in subtly different mixes of molecules and temperatures. Each becomes an individual. When they grow heavy enough to drop below the cloud line, they are born as falling snowflakes. But they have not finished growing. They continue to sublime and to collect molecules. As with any system, they increase in complexity and purity as they encounter random or systematic changes in environment. Sometimes they merge, often they fracture. Finally they reach the ground. Some settle into clusters, becoming packed into a solid layer, and even all the way to ice. Others hit something warm and melt. In either case, what has become of the individual essence? It's parts get recycled into other forms, compacted or melted, evaporated or metabolized. Eventually, all of the above. But the unique form is gone. Where did the unique shape of this snowflake go? When we die, our spirit, soul, self is gone. It can remain in the memory of others, carried forward by our neighbors or impressions made on the environment. Like a melted snowflake. In what way is the end of snowflake self any different than the end of a human self? Granted, humans are able to ask this question. And human life is naturally rated more highly by humans than the unique individuality of other creatures and things. But besides that?

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A complex cell’s best friend

When I first studied mitochondria, back when I was a high school student, I didn’t appreciate their importance or their origin. I got a lot smarter recently, especially after reading "The Energetics of Genome Complexity," by Nick Lane and William Martin, in the October 21, 2010 edition of Nature (available online only to subscribers). I now realize that Mitochondria are organelles that generate energy in the form of ATP, and that without mitochondria, humans wouldn't exist. Lane and Martin begin their article by asking: "Bacteria made a start up virtually every avenue of eukaryotic complexity, but then stopped short. Why?” As I indicated, in this article, I learned many things about mitochondria. I have inserted excerpts from the Lane/Martin article in several locations. Mitochondria formerly existed as their own independent life form (they were proto-bacteria), but they now reside within other cells. This combining of mitochondria happened only once about four billion years ago and all eukaryotes descended from that symbiotic occurrence. All Eukaryotes had mitochondria (or once did but lost them).

All eukaryotes share a common ancestor, which arose from prokaryotes just once in 4 billion years. Genomic chimaerism points to the origin of eukaryotes in an endosymbiosis between eukaryotes. All eukaryotes either possessed mitochondria, or once did and later lost them, placing the origin of mitochondria and the eukaryotic cell as possibly the same event.

The host mitochondria were also prokaryotes. This was determined by Russian botanist Konstantin Mereschkowski in 1905 and, as you might expect, he was not believed. [More . . . ]

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Life manufactured in space

Every once in a while, I would read an article that claimed that life originated somewhere else and then came to earth on an asteroid. This claim puzzled me, because it sounded like an eternal regress. If life began on some other planet and then came to earth, how did it originally develop on that other planet? It turns out that I misunderstood the claim, and I have been set straight by a recent article called "Cosmic Blueprint of Life," by Andrew Grant, published in the November 2010 edition of Discover Magazine (this particular article is not yet available on the Internet). The claim is not that life developed on some other planet and then eventually came to earth on asteroid. Rather, the claim is that many of the basic chemicals necessary for life were manufactured in space, and then showered upon earth (and presumably other planets where--presumably--life exists). In this article, Grant writes that:

[The notion that the] underlying chemistry of life could have begun in the far reaches of space, long before our planet even existed, used to be controversial, even comical. No longer. Recent observations show that nebulas throughout our galaxy are bursting with prebiotic molecules. Laboratory simulations demonstrate how intricate molecular reactions can occur efficiently even under exceedingly cold, dry, near vacuum conditions. Most persuasively, we know for sure that organic chemicals from space could have landed on Earth in the past--because they are doing so right now. Detailed analysis of a meteorite that landed in Australia reveals that it is chock-full of prebiotic molecules. Similar meteorites and comets would have blanketed earth with organic chemicals from the time it was born about 4.5 billion years ago until the era when life appeared, a few hundred million years later. Maybe this is how Earth became a living world.
According to Grant, there's two ways to look at the famous 1953 experiment by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey. They prepared a closed environment with the gases they assumed constituted the early Earth atmosphere (methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water). They then simulated lightning strikes through the use of electric sparks. Within a week, the process had produced a variety of prebiotic compounds. As Grant points out, however, the experiment did not show that "all the building blocks of life could have emerged on Earth from non-biological reactions."

Even the simplest lifeforms incorporate two amazingly complex types of organic molecules: proteins and nucleic acids. Proteins perform the basic task of metabolism. Nucleic acids (specifically RNA and DNA) encode genetic information and pass it along from one generation to the next. Although the Miller-Urey experiment produce amino acids, the fundamental units of proteins, it never came close to manufacturing nuclear bases, the molecular building blocks of DNA and RNA.

Grant points out that space was long considered to cold and too low-density to form molecules, but this has now been disproved. Scientists have now found ammonia molecules near the center of the Milky Way using a radiotelescope. They have also found formaldehyde, formic acid and methanol. Laboratory simulations of the environment of outer space had produced "dozens of prebiotic molecules, among them the same amino acids that Miller and Urey found." Further, these experiments have produced "intricate molecular rings containing carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen: fatty acid like molecules that look and behave like the membranes protecting living cells; and nucleic acids or nucleotides, the primary components of RNA and DNA. [More . . . ]

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NOMA is a Myth?

A FaceBook friend just shared a post called The Myth of Separate Magisteria that argues that Steven Jay Gould's premise of Non-Overlapping Magisteria is flawed. He argues,

"One might as well say that conflict arises between men and women only when they stray onto each other’s territories and stir up trouble. Science produces discoveries that challenge long-held beliefs (not only religious ones) based on revelation rather than evidence, and the religious must decide whether to battle or accommodate secular knowledge if it contradicts their teachings.

I usually claim NOMA when pressed on whether Science can disprove God. The realms of revelation vs. evidence can be kept separate as long as religion keeps stepping back as verifiable research claims ever more territory. Scientific understanding will keep stepping on religions skirts until the faithful stick to claims that can only be held on faith, and stop claiming "truth" about things for which there is contradictory evidence. God is a fuzzy and non-falsifiable idea. Science will never disprove God. But it has disproved most of what the Bible claims about God's involvement in nature, the Earth, and the Universe. So these ways of looking at the universe do overlap, until such time as the weaker one bows out of the territory. As with the flat Earth, the Sin theory of gravity, the God's Pillars principle of Earthquakes, God's Wrath principle of extreme weather, the Geocentric universe, the Young Earth, and so on.

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David Attenborough meets Richard Dawkins

This is a delightful and engaging conversation between these two extraordinary thinkers (audio only). Natural selection is the focus, but there is a lot more, including scientific revolutions and fractal animals. Here's an excerpt from the 18-minute conversation:

Can you remember the moment you decided to become a scientist? RD: I only became fired up in my second year of a science degree. Unlike you, I was never a boy naturalist, to my regret. It was more the intellectual, philosophical questions that interested me. DA: I am a naturalist rather than a scientist. Simply looking at a flower or a frog has always seemed to me to be just about the most interesting thing there is. Others say human beings are pretty interesting, which they are, but as a child you're not interested in Auntie Flo's psychology; you're interested in how a dragonfly larva turns into a dragonfly. RD: Yes, it's carrying inside it two entirely separate blueprints, two different programmes. DA: I couldn't believe it! I remember asking an adult, "What goes on inside a cocoon?" and he said, "The caterpillar is totally broken down into a kind of soup. And then it starts again." And I remember saying, "That can't be right." As a procedure, you can't imagine how it evolved.
If you stay around until the end of the discussion, you'll get to hear Attenborough imitating Ernst Mayr.

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