I remember the time when I first read The Da Vinci Code on an airplane to China. Though I had in the 80ies read The Holy Blood, the Holy Grail and knew theory of Jesus’ descendants, I could not leave Browns book before finishing it. It was the first action thriller I had read for a very long time, being at that time still a diligent researcher, and the book had surprising turns all the time, later I noticed that this is just the character of the genre.
The Da Vince Code made people question of the origins of Christianity. I consider the theory presented in the book as wrong, but after studying the topic for twenty years I think there is something like a conspiracy behind the origins of Christianity, the Messianic plan. It is not the God’s plan for human salvation as known in Christianity. It is the plan that later led to creating holocaust and Israel, the esoteric one.
The name of this new book by Dan Brown is Origin, so one should take a new look at the origin of life. The name refers to the eternal question “where did we come from”. First Brown discards the Miller-Urey experiment for the origins of life (i.e., Darwin’s old proposal that life was born spontaneously in a soup-in-the-sea by lighting and UV-energy) and then proposes a new controversial theory by a young Jewish scientist, Jeremy England. England has made simulations and modeling of systems, which are simplified versions of the early Earth atmosphere. The simulations show that under certain conditions atoms will spontaneously rearrange in order to dissipate energy, that is, to increase entropy. England claims that the reason for life to be spontaneously born on the Earth is that life is an efficient way to increase entropy. The theory goes around the problem that life, which creates order, is seemingly in contradiction with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that entropy always increases in a closed system.
In the school we were told that life is an open system and therefore not in contradiction with the thermodynamic law. This is still the correct scientific answer after 50 years, but it is not this question England addresses. He tries to answer the question how life was created from non-life and uses the thermodynamic law for it. When I was in school there were two theories: the primordial soup theory and the panspermia theory, and they did not have anything to do with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but in England’s theory they have.
If I understand correctly England’s theory, dissipation-driven adaptation, uses large fluctuations facilitated by external energy and some of them reach steady state points far from equilibrium. That is, chemical reactions can be driven to either direction by external conditions and external energy often drives reactions to a direction that in normal conditions they would hardly ever go. For instance, magnesium can be produced from magnesium oxide and ferrosilicon in a high temperature (external energy), while in normal temperature the reaction is reversed. External energy drives chemical reactions to form more complex compounds, which then would start life, that is, be self-replicating. This is all in Miller’s experiments, he exposed simple chemicals to external energy. England admittedly modeled it mathematically, but the new issue is the next one.
If I correctly understand what Dan Brown writes when describing this theory and if Brown got it right, the new thing is that England assumes that the nature tries to maximize entropy. Under this assumption the simulation create some kind of life.
The problem I see is that the nature does not maximize or minimize anything. That would require intentions, which the nature does not have, and in order for the nature to notice that life dissipates energy efficiently, it would have to be intelligent, a god, so to say. Let us think of a stone which falls to the ground. It does minimize its potential energy on the ground level and maximize dissipated energy, as the lost potential energy turns to heat, but the reason why the stone falls is that a force, gravitation, pulls it down and there is no supporting force to oppose gravitation. A force is primary, potential is a derived property. A force acts locally, all interactions must be local. Minimizing or maximizing a potential is global, it cannot be a primary cause. There is no known force that could create life from non-life, nothing but random fluctuations, thus there is no way the nature can maximize the amount of dissipated energy by creating life as an efficient way to dissipate energy.
I hope Brown explained it correctly, but I think he did. Under that assumption, this theory is nonsense.
I also discard the theory that fluctuations could be the origin of life on the Earth. Cells are far too complicated to have been created by any fluctuations. Something much simpler would be needed, but before there is a clear theory of what this more simple would be, it is far too early to say if creation of such compounds is possible. RNA is the simplest self-replicating molecule known, but that mechanism is far from simple.
There is a Youtube video telling of Jeremy England’s theory. It has only 160,000 views, so nothing like Kirch’s web broadcast in Dan Brown’s book:
Dan Brown’s answer to the second eternal question “where are we going” is disappointing. Kirch predicts that in the future humans live in symbiosis with machines. I heard this type of an answer so many years ago from a colleague professor who was trying to get funding to his nanotechnology project. He predicted how humans will have nanoparticles in their veins, how there will be robot arms and legs, everything connected all the time, we all get older and need machines, that is the future! Yes, it may be true, I hope not, but already I heard it before and there should be a new twist in a good thriller of Brown’s genre.
Probably I should have scanned the pages of this book in the book store before buying it. There is a plot where the Neanderthal man has a smaller cranium than a modern man. This error could have warned me that this new book is not based on anything as well though as a theory of the The Holy Blood, the Holy Grail, but after all, I first time heard of Jeremy England’s theory. Though, on the other hand, that theory is most probably nonsense.
It is very risky to say that some theory is nonsense, but it is even more risky for someone to claim to have found the origin of life. I say it is nonsense.
As for literary merits as a thriller Origin does not surprise at any point, but a good thriller should. I started the book three times and finally forced myself to finish. It is simply boring. You can guess too much and there are no turns of plot that would keep the reader interested. All Dan Brown books are similar in the main theme: professor Langdon escapes with a beautiful woman (but they never have a romance), a killer belonging to some sect (usually the Catholic Church) is hunting them, the police is hunting them, and Langdon solves a great mystery. Only this time the mystery and its solution are not so interesting or well presented.
It is too easy to guess the murderer in this book. I think that it could have been better if Winston would not have revealed his real nature at the beginning. Close to the end it could have become apparent to Langdon in a discussion showing that Winston lacks human ethics and must indeed be a computer program. Then the truth of what actually happened could have been constructed in a more surprising way. Artificial intelligence is a potentially fruitful topic for a thriller, but this book made no good use of it. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was so much better and so were the Terminator and Matrix movies.
Movie. I can imagine that as a movie the book can be quite good, or as good as any of the movies made from Dan Brown books. The action takes place in Barcelona and there are many beautiful views, which surely will look good in a movie.
So, to me at least, the merits of this book are in presenting the problem of the origin of life. Let us continue investigating it.
The Miller-Urey experiment in 1953 produced several amino acids. Later it was considered discredited because Miller had used an atmosphere that was not realistic and with a more realistic atmosphere the repeated experiment in 1982 failed to produce amino acids. However, in 2007 his student added iron to the atmosphere and did manage to get amino acids. The experiments created 20-25 amino acids from simple chemicals, which probably were available in the early atmosphere. It was also shown that amino acids can be linked to form peptides. The experiment created an equal mix of L and D forms, while in life most amino acids are in L form, but this is not fatal: some other experiments have managed to create more L types.
Nevertheless, all this is very far from creating a single living cell. Let us just evaluate what Miller showed. These experiments showed that many common organic molecules are not so difficult to create by chemical reactions assuming one applies energy. Living cells produce these molecules all the time, without lots of energy but with the help of catalyst, which does the same thing. Why in the world should these molecules be so difficult to create? Many must be easy to create, thus the experiments showed noting at all. The test is to make a cell, or a self-replicating precursor to a cell. That is not done.
Earth is believed to be 4.54 billion years old and life started before 3.77 billion years ago, possibly 4.4 billion years ago. There are 3.5 billion years old fossils said to contain cyanobacteria. It has been calculated that if life was born spontaneously from non-life, it happened in 200-300 million years. This relatively short time seem to suggest that life had time to start in many places of the Earth, yet there is only one root to all life. The last universal common ancestor to all life on the Earth had at least 355 genes.
200-300 million years is not that much. It should be possible to simulate the origin of life, without assuming that the nature tries to maximize entropy or anything else funny. The theory that life was created from non-life has a great gap and if there is a so great gap there is no theory.
The warm pool where life started was Darwin’s suggestion. What about Darwin’s evolution theory? Nobody is today denying that Darwinian natural selection is a mechanism influencing the evolution of species. Equally well nobody claims that natural selection is the only mechanism influencing evolution. Evolution requires mutations of the DNA (sometimes RNA) and mechanisms that can make a mutated allele become more common (or less common) include genetic drift, bottlenecks, natural selection, sexual selection, group selection, cultural selection and so on.
The origin of new species is not natural selection. It is separation of the population by some obstacle into two or more populations and random mutations, which get selected for a number of reasons. For instance, bonobo and chimpanzee are two species which separated one million years ago. Bonobos and chimpanzee live in different sides of the Congo river. This river is much older than 1 million years, but in some way a sufficient number of apes got to each side of the river. Later their populations evolved differently. One of the reasons was natural selection. There were other mechanisms. Bonobos and chimpanzees created very different dominance and mating habits. Anyway, the environment was almost the same for both populations and they developed very different dominance and mating habits.
It is easiest to think that the main force was sexual selection, but it could have been something else. It is easy to think that cultural selection has changed modern humans, but we really do not know.
We cannot even explain these simple things, so what to say of something like how probable is it that from a single ancestor cell arises all these different species we see now. It is clear that there will be different species, as there are barriers causing separation and there are mutations, but why the result is not only a large number of different bacteria? How would bacteria with non-sexual reproduction even mutate to animals with sexual reproduction? It is possible, but is it probable and if so, how probable? Can it happen in the allowed time scale?
The answer to all questions is that scientists do not know. It is a philosophical position to insist that life had to be born from non-life and there cannot be anything what we do not see. As this is philosophy and philosophy and propaganda are sisters, the evolution theory is no scientific theory. The eternal questions have not yet been answered. Naturally this does not mean that I expect to find the answer from a book of revised myths and rewritten history.