Page 34 - The Origin of Life and the Universe - International Conference 2016

The Origin of Life and the Universe

This is what Paul Davies an astrobiologist has said about the RNA
World Hypothesis: “As far as biochemists can see, it is a long and difficult
road to produce efficient RNA replicators from scratch. This conclusion has
to be that without a trained organic chemist on hand to supervise, nature
would be struggling to make RNA from a dilute soup under any plausible
prebiotic conditions.” (P. Davies, The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the
Origin and Meaning of Life, New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1999,
p. 131) Evolutionary biologist Simon Conway Morris goes one step further:
“Many of the experiments designed to explain one or other step in the origin
of life are either of tenuous relevance to any believable prebiotic setting or
involve an experimental rig in which the hand of the researcher becomes for
all intents and purposes the hand of God.” (Simon Conway Morris, Life's So-
lution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, Cambridge University
Press, 2003, p. 41)
This is ironic, the very experiments that the scientists perform to try
to demonstrate that validity of chemical evolution and a blind watchmaker
approach to the origin of life have unwittingly demonstrated that intelligent
agency is the key ingredient in the transformation of non-living molecules
to life. This conclusion, and I’m going to close in just a minute, this
conclusion is further illustrated by work in synthetic biology. Synthetic
biology is relatively new area in biology where the goal is to create artificial
life in the lab. And one of the goals is to make protocells. Starting with
simple chemicals and try to make cellular entities. And it becomes readily
apparent when you examine this work how important intelligent agency is.
And let me illustrate this by talking about a study done a few years
ago where researchers were trying to make an enzyme from scratch unlike
anything that existed in nature.
An enzyme could be thought of just a small component in the overall
machinery of the cell. It took a team of quantum chemists, computational
chemists, protein engineers, biochemists and molecular biologists to pull
this off and it required hundreds of hours of supercomputer time to
model the chemistry. And they had to use structural motifs from biology
to build the proteins. It required highly skilled scientists working in highly
controlled conditions in the laboratory utilizing sophisticated chemical
instrumentation. That itself was intelligently designed to pull this off.