Synthetic Life.

Spontaneous living cells in a test tube from simple ingredients?
Well no …..not quite…. we supply the carefully made membranes….oh and the 36 enzymes…. Oh and also the ribosomes…..oh and also the genetic information! But we are nearly there!

At least this is the illusion that some origin of life researchers seek to indicate.

Dr. Giovanni Murtas from the Synthetic Biology and Supramolecular Chemistry group at RomaTre University says:

"We can prove at this point that we can have protein synthesis with a minimum set of enzymes - 36 at the moment."

The fluescent green colouring indicates that these "primitive cells" can synthesize a protein from the supplied genetic information.

According to the guardian account this result “will teach us about the earliest stirrings of life in Earth’s primeval slime some 3.5bn years ago.”

Yerrr sure!

I would have thought that to any unbiased observer this result simply reminds us all that there is no hope that the primeval slime…no matter how exotic and how many billion years you give it will ever produce a living organism with minimal information and functioning protein machinery.

The information to specify such elegant structures as these does not hang around in primeval slime waiting for 36 enzymes and a few ribosomes to arrive.


I am not against this kind of work at all... I applaud it! What I am against is giving the impression that the solution to the problem of the origin of life is nearly solved and it is just a matter of time before we crack it.

Abiogenesis and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

Previous related posts:
Andy MacIntosh and the 2nd Law.
The idea of unintelligent Abiogenesis.
Is Abiogenesis Falsifiable?

This post is based on Walter Bradley’s chapter on “Information, Entropy and the Origin of Life.” In “Debating Design” Edited by Ruse and Dembski and published by Cambridge University Press.

Walter L. Bradley was one of the authors of “The Mystery of Life’s Origin.” which remains as the best selling advanced level text on the Origin of Life.

Bradley states that the second law of thermodynamics (2lot) and the theory of evolution are two of the three major scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century with Maxwell’s field equations for electricity and magnetism being the third. He is intrigued that the theory of evolution and the 2lot appear to be in conflict. The 2lot suggests a progression to disorder from order, from complexity to simplicity. Evolution involves progression to increasingly more complex forms of living organisms.

Erwin Schroedinger noted that living systems are characterized by highly ordered, aperiodic structures that survive by drawing “negentropy” from their environment and feeding on it! Today we recognise Schroedinger’s ordered structures as the complex biopolymers of protein and nucleic acids.

Living organisms use information stored in these biopolymers to resist the pull of the 2lot towards equilibrium. They are able to store information, to replicate with minimal information loss and they are able to feed on “negentropy.”

The existence of these three abilities allow us to understand how living organisms can continue to exist without violating the 2lot but the difficulty is understanding how these three abilities came to exist without violating the 2lot. This is the greatest mystery in science. At the heart of this problem is the difficulty of explaining how the complex specified information within these biopolymers can originate.

Bradley discusses the significant quantities of Shannon information that are stored in cytochrome c and in the E.coli bacterial chromosome.

At best the 2lot gives a very small yield of unsequenced polymers that have no biological function. The sequencing required for function is not facilitated by the 2lot.

Bradley then goes on to discuss the various origin of life scenarios that have been proposed in the light of the problem of the need for information and the pressure of the 2lot towards disorder.

He concludes: The origin of life seems to be the ultimate example of irreducible complexity. I believe that cosmology and the origin of life provide the most compelling examples of Intelligent design in nature. I am compelled to agree with the eloquent affirmation of design by Harold Morowitz (1987):

“I find it hard not to see design in a universe that works so well. Each new scientific discovery seems to reinforce that vision of design. As I like to say to my friends, the universe works much better than we have any right to expect.”