A Brief History of Creation (41 page)

Champions of experimentally derived knowledge can look at the same evidence and see something completely different, even diametrically opposed, because science and the scientist do not exist in a vacuum. They exist in a real world of constantly changing ideas and beliefs. Much has changed since Pasteur's time. Society is different. Religion is different. What we know or believe we know about the world is different. How humanity sees its relationship to that world is different. And consequently, so is what humanity sees in science.

This is evident in no field of science more than the study of life's origin. Most people cannot seem to simply disregard the question, cannot simply say, “I do not know,” as people might once have responded to a question about why lightning occurs, or might now answer a question about the nature of dark matter. We may not know or claim to know the exact details of how life began, but we hold in our heads answers based on philosophy, religion, conjecture, even wishful thinking. We hold these answers because we have to, because the origin of life strikes at the very meaning of what it is to be alive. Scientists are no different. They often cling to their particular answer even in the face of contradictory evidence, even when, in cases like those of Sidney Fox and Charles Bastian, their intransigence means professional loss.

Yet science remains the best method for understanding the world. There is a process of scrutiny, a process of
provando e riprovando
in the spirit of the Medicis' Accademia del Cimento. In the end, the truth is often arrived at. Or, at least, something closer to the truth. Today, almost everyone would agree that flies come from eggs, not rotting meat. Pasteur was right about the existence of airborne germs. Bastian was wrong. One man's views became accepted as common sense; the other's were forgotten. We can say these things are true because, in the long run, science does work in the impartial fashion described by both Pasteur and Dawkins. Its history is filled with figures who chose evidence
over their own beliefs or what may have been convenient. Darwin took no pleasure in his role as what he called the “Devil's Chaplain,” pitted against pious men whom he respected and the church that he attended. He shared his science with the world at large only with great reluctance. Yet ultimately, he did. Our understanding of the natural world has grown exponentially since then.

In the end, science will weed out old falsehoods and will reveal new truths. But the path to such understanding might not always be as clear and straightforward as it appears, and the winners and losers might not always be immediately evident. Writing in
Scientific American
in 1954, biologist George Wald made that observation about Pasteur's great “triumph” in the spontaneous-generation debates of the late nineteenth century:

It is no easy matter to deal with so deeply ingrained and common-sense a belief as that in spontaneous generation. One can ask for nothing better in such a pass than a noisy and stubborn opponent, and this Pasteur had in the naturalist Felix Pouchet, whose arguments before the French Academy of Sciences drove Pasteur to more and more rigorous experiments. When he had finished, nothing remained of the belief in spontaneous generation. We tell this story to beginning students of biology as though it represents a triumph of reason over mysticism. In fact it is very nearly the opposite. The reasonable view was to believe in spontaneous generation; the only alternative, to believe in a single, primary act of supernatural creation. There is no third position.

The history of science is filled with “losers” who clung to a conclusion despite the rejection of their peers. They all possessed a stubbornness that, for some, led to professional disgrace. Nevertheless, they took that road. On the surface, their inability to simply abandon their positions in the face of intense criticism or even contrary evidence smacks of hubris.

Their doggedness may serve a purpose. The naturalist Alexander von Humboldt once remarked that there are three phases of scientific discovery. The first is denial. The second is denial of importance. The third is crediting the wrong person. It takes a certain kind of fortitude to overcome the first step. Truly novel thinkers are often treated as crackpots. When proved wrong,
history decrees that they remain crackpots. When proved right, history recasts them as visionary geniuses. The crackpots of the past may become the visionaries of the future.

T
HE SCIENTIFIC SEARCH
for the origin of life continues. Meanwhile, we see that science, like history, tends to repeat itself. Every generation finds a new messenger with a definitive answer to the question, and every generation finds a new debate. Some bold scientist will push his or her Sisyphean answer up a hill only to find it rolling down again. Something will be seen in the lens of a microscope or in some test tube or fossil or rock, only to be reexamined, rescrutinized, and eventually reinterpreted. And in their search for answers, scientists often find themselves returning to the once-discarded solutions of the past. The debates of Needham and Spallanzani bear a striking resemblance to those between van Helmont and Redi, and between Pasteur and Bastian. During each epoch a definitive “victor” is proclaimed, only to see victory overturned by future discoveries.

For now, the “losers” have all but disappeared from textbook science. But science can have a short memory. Their sagas will be told again and differently, and we do not yet know how the tale will end. The forgotten may be resurrected. New scientists will take up where the old left off. We may still find answers in a discarded idea or discovery that is presently thought to have little, if any, relevance.

W
HEN OR IF
an explanation to the problem of life's origin is found, a solution capable of withstanding all the rigors of scientific scrutiny, we might find that the real answer we have been looking for continues to remain elusive. That is because there has always been a bigger question looming over the search for life's origins. It is the reason the debate has engendered such strong emotions and visceral reactions, and why the question has led so many scientists to throw scientific caution to the wind. For as human beings have searched for the
origin
of life, what they often seem to have been searching for is the
meaning
of life. That, perhaps, is something that science alone will never be able to answer.

APPENDIX: RECIPES FOR LIFE

Johannes van Helmont's Recipe for Mice

Place a dirty shirt or some rags in an open pot or barrel containing a few grains of wheat or some wheat bran, and in 21 days, mice will appear. Adult males and females will be present, and they will be capable of mating and reproducing more mice.

Henry Bastian's Recipes for Microbes

1. Boil a flask containing beef juice for 15 minutes, and then place it under vacuum and hermetically seal it. After 12 days the liquid will contain actively moving bacteria and several monads.

2. Boil a flask containing a rather weak infusion of beef, carrot, and turnip for 15 minutes, and then place it under vacuum and hermetically seal it. After 14 days the liquid will contain yeast-like cells.

3. Boil a flask containing a neutral solution of white sugar, ammonium tartrate, ammonium carbonate, and ammonium phosphate for 20 minutes, and then place it under vacuum and hermetically seal it. After 9 days the liquid will contain yeasts, bacteria, and monads.

4. Boil a flask containing a solution of ammonium oxalate and sodium phosphate for 20 minutes, and then place it under vacuum and hermetically seal it. After 61 days the liquid will contain fungal spores, as well as monads showing “tolerably active movements.”

Sidney Fox's Recipe for Proteinoid Microspheres

Heat 10 grams of
L
-glutamic acid at 175°C–180°C until molten (about 30 minutes). Then add 10 grams of
DL
-aspartic acid and 5 grams of a mixture of the sixteen basic and neutral amino acids. Maintain the solution at 170 ± 2°C under an atmosphere of nitrogen for a few hours. During that time, considerable gas will have evolved, and the color of the liquid will have changed to amber. Rub the mixture vigorously with 75 milliliters of water, converting it to a yellow-brown granular precipitate. This material will form protocells, which should be capable of division and self-replication. Most of these materials can be obtained at your local health food store. We estimate the cost of this experiment to be about a hundred dollars.

Craig Venter's Recipe for a Cell

You will need a DNA synthesizer and a fairly sophisticated molecular biology laboratory. You will need to make, base pair by base pair, a complete bacterial genome, involving the construction of a chain of several million chemical linkages one by one. You will then need to insert this molecule, which, at today's prices, will cost you upwards of a million dollars, into a living bacterium. If you have placed the appropriate markers into the genome you made, you will be able to purify the synthetic descendants of your creation from the natural ones.

NOTES

Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device's search function to locate particular terms in the text.

Chapter 1

Carlo Rovelli's book
The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy
, contains a wealth of information about this most underappreciated of Greek philosophers. Anaximander's views on the origin of life are discussed in Henry Osborn's
From the Greeks to Darwin
. Biographical details of Augustine are taken from Peter Brown's
Augustine of Hippo
.

5
The Greeks have always received a lot of credit:
Patricia Fara provides a superbly comprehensive, non-Eurocentric history of science in
Science: A Four Thousand Year History
.

7
He set his sights on the sun, the stars:
Anaximander's ideas on physics are discussed in David Park's
The Grand Contraption
.

8
In Anaximander's scheme:
Osborn,
From the Greeks to Darwin
, 33–35.

10
Just as the Galápagos would provide:
A beautifully written account of Aristotle's stay on Lesbos can be found in
Darwin's Ghosts
, by Rebecca Stott.

11
“was devoted at all times to magic”:
Charles,
Chronicle of John
, 100.

12
“who persist in applying their studies to a vain purpose”:
Lindberg, “Fate of Science,” 22.

13
Augustine also turned his inquisitive eye:
Augustine,
City of God
, 102.

13
The policy was a result:
Fry,
Emergence of Life on Earth
, 20.

14
Some forty years after
Antony and Cleopatra
:
Cobb,
Generation
, 10.

Chapter 2

Francesco Redi's account of his experience with the Franciscans and their supposed wards against poison can be found in a letter to Athanasius Kircher that was included in Redi's 1687 book
Esperienze intorno
.

15
The grand duke had a reputation:
The relationship between Ferdinando II and Redi is well elaborated in Harold Acton's
Last Medici
.

17
“Doubt often wants to grow”:
Redi,
Esperienze intorno
, 7.

19
A native of Brussels:
A Short History of Chemistry
, by J. R. Partington, contains a great summation of van Helmont's place in the history of chemistry.

20
Many years later, he would write:
Ibid., 44.

20
It involved mixing a sweaty shirt:
Cobb,
Generation
, 10.

21
But Redi had an epiphany:
Redi's
Experiments on the Generation of Insects
contains a firsthand account of the events that led him to conduct his experiments refuting spontaneous generation.

23
The official cause was “apoplexy”:
Acton,
Last Medici
, 106–8.

23
The new grand duke was his mother's child:
Cosimo III's religious extremism is covered by Acton in
The Last Medici
and by Christopher Hibbert in
The House of Medici
.

23
A biographer would later describe Cosimo:
Acton,
Last Medici
, 112.

Chapter 3

A large selection of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's letters is available under the title
The Collected Letters of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek
, although this collection still contains only a fraction of his huge body of correspondence. Clifford Dobell's
Antony van Leeuwenhoek and His “Little Animals”
offers a wealth of additional biographical information.

28
“You are either a Spinozist”:
Duquette,
Hegel's History of Philosophy
, 144.

30
Latin and Greek were virtually mandatory:
Jonson,
Works of Ben Jonson
, 3:287.

31
Simple lenses had been around:
The Roman emperor Nero was said to have watched gladiatorial combat using an emerald as a corrective lens. Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, “reading stones” were crafted in Italy to assist older people with declining eyesight. Tommaso da Modena's 1352 portrait of a bespectacled Cardinal Hugh de Provence is the first image of someone using a lens as a reading aid. Monks often used lenses to assist in illuminating manuscripts, and a Florentine manuscript from 1289 describes glass curved in such a way that it had “great advantage to old people with weak vision.” On account of its oval shape, the writer called such glasses
lenti
, the Italian for lentils. from the Italian
lenticchia
(“lentil”). From
lenti
sprang the world “lens.”

33
By the time
Micrographia
appeared:
Van Leeuwenhoek's house became the subject of a Jan Vermeer painting,
A House in Delft
. It is notable for being the only painting that Vermeer ever set outside the confines of his own study.