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From: ecl@hocsj.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.bio,net.origins,net.philosophy,net.sci,net.sf-lovers
Subject: The missing step -- self-reproducing organisms
Message-ID: <241@hocsj.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 9-Nov-84 13:11:37 EST
Article-I.D.: hocsj.241
Posted: Fri Nov  9 13:11:37 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 10-Nov-84 21:06:01 EST
Organization: AT&T Information Systems Labs, Holmdel NJ
Lines: 60

I have been giving some thought to the process of the first development
of life and this morning I realized that I had been leaving out an
important step.  I had been more or less thinking of it as a process
with two major steps.  One is the creation of life from amino acids on a
micro-level, the other is the evolution of that life into an intelligent
being.  Both are very low probability events and each model must be
repeated mega-many times before intelligent life can come about on a
planet.  Because of this, I find it highly unlikely that any two
intelligent races will ever meet in the universe.  There may be more
than one intelligent, race but the probability of them being close
enough to find each other is very low, in my estimation.  (Not to
mention the low probability that they would recognize each other as
intelligent.)  The first step, I am told is not quite as amazing as I
thought because the constituents of life as we know it, the amino acids,
are more common than we may have thought in the past.

That was my thinking up to this morning.  Now it strikes me that I have
been glossing over a pretty complex step, one which is likely to have a
lower probability than either of the ones mentioned above.  That is the
step of going from something that is merely alive to a self-reproducing
(SR) cell.  This, it seems to me, is the biggest step of the three.  It
is one thing for the amino acids to form something that in some abstract
sense is alive, it is quite another for this thing to be an SR organism.
I have never looked into the mathematics of SR automata, but my guess is
that it is pretty complex.  In the evolution of life on a planet, it is
not sufficient that life come about, but also that it can outlive the
single organism.  Even assuming that lightning strikes the right amino
acids and they start squirming, that is a long way from the organism
created actually being SR.  Of the three probabilities:

    P(life forming)
    P(new organism is SR given that it is alive)
    P(SR, living organism evolves into an intelligent form of life)

I judge the second to be the lowest.  It is hard to judge the first
which seem almost mystical, but I can accept that it is a matter of
amino acids forming and adding electricity as was whimsically described
in the Julia Child Primordial Soup film some of you might have seen.
The tide of opinion in articles (and films) seems to be that it might
not be such a low probability event.  I have come to accept that the
third probability is not all that low.  Nobody talks much about it that
I have heard, but the second probability it seems to me could well be
the smallest of the three.  Any comments?

[Incidentally, anyone wishing to build up brownie points with their
personal deity by claiming credit for Him/Her/It for having done it all,
you can send these comments to me directly by writing them into
/dev/null.  I don't rule out the possibility, of course, but it all
comes down to faith and has little place in a scientific discussion.
Usually the arguments come down to say I should read what some person
said in a book rather than going out to nature and looking at the
evidence that the deity, if there is one, created with His/Her/Its own
hand.  It is another whole farble, of course, but if someone believes in
a God, then they should believe the fossil record was created by that
God much more directly than any book ever printed.]

					(Evelyn C. Leeper for)
					Mark R. Leeper
					...ihnp4!lznv!mrl