Are we able to and will we forever be able to produce life? The answer is: yes, if we can understand it. Can we understand life?
Biology is not a science about the essence of life, but a science about the phenomenon of life – about life as an object, as a product.
The same incongruence that we established earlier between animal and man is met again, but one degree lower, on the level of “matter” versus life. On one side, we see homogeneity, quantity, repetition, causality and mechanism; on the other side, we find originality, quality, growth, spontaneity, organism. Life does not manifest itself as a continuance of matter – neither mechanically nor dialectically, nor as its most organized and most complex form. Looking at some of its qualities, life is contradictory to our conceptions and understanding of matter in its very definition. The nature of life is the opposite of matter.
According to biologists, entropy is the crucial point in the definition of life. All laws of nature go back to entropy, which means universal disorganization, the ultimate state of inert uniformity. On the contrary, the basic characteristic of living organism is the state of “anti-entropy,” its ability to create the complex out of the simple, order out of chaos, and to maintain a system – even temporary – on a higher level of energy. Every material system moves toward a higher degree of entropy, and every living system follows the opposite direction because “life is a movement against the wind of mechanical laws,” as Kuznjetzov, a Russian scientist in the field of cybernetics puts it.
Not being a biologist, I will confine myself to quoting some authorities in this field. The failure of biology to explain life is a fact which cannot be passed over in silence. I would like to point out that this comes as no surprise.
In 1950, André George put only one question to biologists, doctors, and physicist: What is life? All the answers he received were indefinite and cautious. We may take the answers by Pierre Lapin and Jean Rostand as typical examples. “The mystery remains complete. Our lack of knowledge makes every explanation of life less clear than our instinctive knowledge of it.” “So far, we do not know what life is. We are not even able to give a complete and exact definition of the phenomenon of life.”[i]
Due to its ability to evade quick decomposition to an inert state of uniformity, the organism shows itself so mysterious that people from the most ancient times believed that a special nonphysical and supernatural force (vis à vis, entelecheia) acted in the organism. In what way does a living organism fight against its decline? Each process, or event, or development in the world, all that happens in nature means at the same time an addition of entropy… The organism can retain that process – that is, survive – only by the constant taking of negative entropy from the outside… Therefore, the organism feeds on the negative entropy.”[ii]
French paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin writes very similarly: “Indeed, in spite of many obstacles, the curve running from the big molecules toward polycell organisms continues incessantly: this is just the one along which the indeterminations, self-arrangements, and consciousness emerge… Hence the question: is there a connection between this mysterious movement of the world toward states more and more complex and internal and the other movement (better studied and better known) which pulls the same world toward the more and more simple and external states? … The essential secret of the universe might be formulated in this question.”[iii]
“The spontaneous ability of cells to create the organs and social behavior of some insects are among the basic facts which we learned by means of observation. We cannot find an explanation of them in the light of our present understanding.”[iv]
Karl Jaspers, in his General psychopathology writes about the aforementioned inverse character of the living as follows: “Psychic facts appear as quite new and in a fashion that cannot be understood. They are coming one after another and not one from another. The phases of psychic evolution of a normal life, as well as of an abnormal life, give such unintelligible successions in time. So, a longitudinal cross section of the psychic cannot be understood, even approximately in its emergence. The psychic facts cannot be studied from outside as the natural facts cannot be from inside.”[v]
In the same book, Jaspers also points out the difference between “to comprehend” (verstehen), which can be achieved by psychological penetration, and to explain (erklaren), which means to uncover the objective connection between cause and effect by natural science. Jaspers concludes: “Here we are talking about the ultimate sources of our knowledge which deeply differ one from another.”[vi]
Louis de Broglie, the French physicist and Nobel Laureate, said in 1929: “We cannot explain life with our present knowledge of chemistry an physics.”[vii]
The Swiss biologist Guyenot maintains that there is an essential difference between physio-chemical relations and life:
Physicists must realize that although we biologists have worked hard to explain life in physical and chemical formulas, we have come across something that we could not explain. That is life. Life has found an organized form. And not only once, but a million times during billions of years. Here we are faced with a constructive ability which can be explained neither physically nor chemically.
André Lwoff, the French biologist and Nobel Prize winner in 1965, well-known for his work on the genetical mechanism of viruses and bacteria, said:
Life can be defined as a quality, or a manifestation, or a state of an organism. An organism is an independent system of mutually dependent structures and functions which is able to reproduce itself… It has often been said that a virus is the connection between organic substances and living matter. In reality, living matter does not exist. One element of a cell, such as albumen, an enzyme or nucleic acid, is not a living substance. Only an organism is alive, and this organism is much more than the sum of its parts. We have succeeded in creating a synthesis of viral nucleic acid. On the basis of this, we cannot talk about a synthesis of life, because in all these experiments one substance lent to the virus, which is genetical matter specific to the nucleotide, takes part… Sometimes life is born spontaneously. It is easy to synthetically produce some parts of albumen or nucleic acid, but up to now it has not been possible to create an organism… To reproduce one single bacteria – that is still beyond out reach…[viii]
The famous Russian psychologist and experimenter Ivan Pavlov expresses similar skepticism:
Already for thousands of years, mankind has been investigating psychological events, phenomena of spiritual life, the human soul, and not only are psychologists and specialists working on this question, but also all forms of art and literature – these mechanical expressions of mankind’s psychological life – deal with this problem. Thousands of pages have been filled with descriptions of man’s inner world, but so far we have not been successful in this effort. We have not been able to find any law that regulates man’s psychological life.[ix]
Alexis carrel doubts man’s ability to understand fully the life within the cell:
The methods which are used by the organs in their own construction are strange to the human mind… All this material emerges from one single cell, which would be like a whole house being produced from a magic brick, which would then spontaneously produce the other bricks… The organs develop in a way which has been used by fairies in children’s fables… Our reason can by no means find itself in that world of inner organs.[x]
Also, somewhat further:
So far, we have not been able to reach the secret of the organization of our body, its food, or its nervous and spiritual energy. The laws of physics and chemistry can be fully applied only to dead matter and only partly to man. We should free ourselves completely from the illusions of the nineteenth century and Jacques Lobe’s dogmas – those childish physio-chemical theories about human beings which, unfortunately, many physiologists and doctors still believe in.”[xi]
Life is a miracle rather than a phenomenon. Look, for instance, at the human eye. The human eye is lying in a cavity filled with fat. It is protected by an upper and lower lid, eyelashes, eyebrows, mucous membranes, and the conjunctiva. The movement of the eye in all directions is made possible by motor muscles, two straight ones and two oblique ones, and it is aided by the tear apparatus which consists of the lachrymal gland, the lachrymal sac, and the tear canal which keeps the eye humid and protects it from infections. The eyeball consists of three coats. The outer one is the compact and nontransparent white of the eye, which is transformed into the transparent cornea on the front side. The vascular net lies under the white of the eye and through it flow the blood vessels which nourish the eye. For the function of the eye, the most important part is the third layer, the retina. This is where the sensory cells are situated – the rods and cones, connected with bipolar cells and fibers that collectively form the optic nerve. The interior of the eyeball is filled with an elastic, transparent, and watery fluid. The crystalline lens attached to the iris and connected with the ciliar body lies in the front part. When rays of light pass through the cornea, they change their shape to enable focusing at the back of the eye and an upside down picture is transmitted to the optical center of the brain. Each eye receives the image from a different angle. These nerve impulses from both eyes travel over the optic nerve. Collective impulses arrive at midbrain junctions on either side of the brain and travel over fibers which ramify to the occipital lobe where the impulses are “seen.” For the functioning of the eye, tears are very important, they are produced by the lachrymal gland, and they keep the cornea wet. Among other substances, tears contain lysozyme, an antibacterial substance which protects the eye from infections. The flow of the tears is controlled by the seventh cranial nerve, the nervus facialis. As a bactericide, the human tear is more effective than any pharmaceutical product and is supposed to destroy more than 100 different kinds of bacteria. This ability is retained even when diluted up to 600 times.
Likewise, the liver has several different functions. As a gland, it produces bile which helps in food digestion. The liver is an incomparable chemical plant. It can modify almost any chemical substance. It is a powerful detoxifying organ, braking down many kinds of toxic molecules and making them harmless. It is a blood reservoir and a storage organ for some vitamins and for digested carbohydrates (in the form of glycogen) which is released to sustain the blood sugar level. It is a manufacturing site for enzymes, cholesterol, proteins, vitamin A, blood coagulation factors, and other elements. Under some circumstances, it can even resume its embryonic function of red blood cell production.
Our blood transports nutriments to the different parts of the body, carries oxygen from the lungs to the cells, and carbon dioxide away from the thirty trillion cells of the human body. Moreover, it transports the hormones and antibodies which form our internal defense. Blood also influences the regulation of body temperature. The white blood cells destroy, digest, and ingest invading bacteria as well as nonbacterial particles.
The brain consists of the cerebrum which is divided into two hemispheres: the thalamus, including the medulla oblongata and the spinal cord. The brain is protected by three coats: the hard, the soft, and the connective tissue. The mass of the brain consists of grayish-white substances. The gray tissue contains nerve cells, and the white is the end station of the motor and sensory fibers. The medulla oblongata forms the relay and reflex center and connects with higher brain centers via the pons. The cerebellum is concerned with equilibrium, muscular coordination and the automatic execution of fine movements. The “seeing center,” known as the occipital lobe, is located in the back part of the brain. Areas for hearing and smelling are located in the temporal lobe at the side of the head. The most conspicuous part of the brain is the massive cerebrum. Its outer rind, the cerebral cortex, is a grayish layer of nerve cells. Beneath is white tissue, at the base of which is an extra small center of gray substance called the basal ganglion. “Gray matter” is not necessarily superior to white, or vice versa; it is concerned with the distribution of impulses across selected synapses while white matter sees to impulse conduction along fibers. Together they enable the creation of main psychological functions and conditional reflexes. The average weight of a human brain is about 1,300 to 1,450 grams, and it contains about 14 to 15 billion cells.
Animals possess apparatus which are often stronger and more perfect than tools manufactured by man. There are many examples: the lights of some birds, the violin of grasshoppers, the cymbal of crickets, and whole sets of traps, nets, snares, glues, and so on. André Tetry has written a whole book on this subject. Les Qutils chez les êtres vivants. It is evident that evolution did not progress blindly or mechanically as Darwin thought. Evolution seems to have followed the principle of usefulness, the direction which was helpful for the individual. This point to a certain idea which cannot be found in materia.[xii]
The rattlesnake has an extraordinary ability to feel infrared rays. Scientists at Colorado University in the US have proved that this infrared detector is placed on the head of the snake, and that it consists of very thin nerves with specific cells which change while the light shines on them. Experiments have shown that within 35 milliseconds after the rays are sent, the snake reacts. This is a record reaction time for any biological system known so far.
In a similar way, sharks have a very sensitive electric antenna on their nose which enables them to find food hidden in the sand on the sea bottom. All organisms in the sea transmit weak electric waves which sharks intercept with the help of their sensitive antennas.
Dr. Alexander Gorbovsky, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, readopts the old idea which, Einstein among others, supported that there are some enigmatic traits in the structure of the cosmos and matter. I will quote here some interesting instances from his work:
Many thousands of termites cooperate to build a termite hill. When completed, it is a very complicated construction with an area of more than a hundred square miles of channels, storage for wood, rooms for eggs, and so on.
The following test was performed: a termite hill, the construction of which had just been started, was partitioned into two parts so that the termites would be completely separated from each other. In spite of this, the construction continued successfully and all passages, channels, rooms, and stores were built identically in both parts, and they even had common connections…
We might think that every termite was very well informed of his neighbor’s work in the other part, as they had worked in exactly the same way. However, he had no knowledge of his neighbor’s work, for he could not communicate with him. Let us try to explain this phenomenon…
It is obvious that the individual termite does not possess all the information on the construction of a termite hill. Each individual ‘know’ only a part of the complete process in which he is involved. Accordingly, we may conclude that only the population as a whole has the complete knowledge. In other words, only individuals as members of the group have the ‘great knowledge.’ Individually, they do not possess it…
For a long time it was thought that flocks of migratory birds on their way to warmer regions were guided by older and more experienced birds, but this has not been confirmed by facts. Professor Jamoto Hirosuke, a Japanese ornithologist, has found that a flock of birds has no guiding bird. If there happens to be a bird in front, it is not necessarily guiding the flock. Sometimes, a very young and even featherless bird is in front. It is evident that such a bird ‘does not know’ the traditional route and cannot direct the others who know their way very well.
Gorbovsky continues:
It is a known fact that, from the biological point of view, the relation between newborn males and females is equal. If this normal relation is upset, a spontaneous process of adjustment occurs. If there are less females in a society, there will be more females born, but if we have less males, their number will increase successively. This process will continue until the balance is reestablished…
It is obvious that the individual independent organism cannot influence the sex of its offspring. In other words, again we have phenomenon with laws of its own. We are again confronted with an influence coming from outside of each individual organism…
This is a phenomenon well-known to mankind. Demographers call it ‘the phenomenon of war years’. During and after wars many men are killed, but very soon after a war the number of men born always increases until the balance is reestablished.
The preceding examples are taken from the first biology textbook that was at hand. These true miracles in nature are explained by religion as acts by the Highest Reason – God. All scientific explanations can be summarized as miracles created by themselves. Is it not the greatest superstition intruded on the human mind? To ask one to accept that something as perfect and complex as man’s eye and brain were created by chance, by themselves, is to ask one to accept Greek mythology as truth. Let us conclude, therefore, with the words of the great Islamic philosopher Muhammad Al-Ghazāli that all miracles are natural and all nature is miraculous.
What then about ‘self-organizing mater’ and ‘the self-creation’ of all these very complex systems of which the living world is full?
Let us look at the self-organizing (creation by accident) of one molecule of albumen which is the basic material of all living organisms known to us.
The Swiss physicist Charles Eugene Guye has tried to make a probability count of the accidental creation of one molecule of protein. It is known that a molecule of protein consists of at least four different elements. To simplify the count, Guye assumed that a molecule of albumen consists only of two elements of 2,000 atoms with atomic weight of 10 and with the molecule dissymmetry of 0.9. With these simplified preconditions, the probability that protein could be created accidentally amounts to 2.02 x 10 – 231 according to Guye’s calculations. If we consider this result within the age and size of our planet, the creation of such a molecule would take 10243 billion years under the condition of 5.1014 vibrations per second. Consequently, there is no possibility that life could have been created accidentally during the 4.5 billion years the earth is supposed to have existed.
The count was repeated by Manfred Eigen of the Max Plank Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, a Nobel Prize winner of chemistry in 1968. he has proven that all the water of our planet is not sufficient to accidentally produce one molecule of protein. Even if the whole universe were full of chemical substances which were permanently combining with each other, the ten billion years since the creation of the universe would not have been enough to produce any type of protein. Faced with this fact, Eigen formulated the hypothesis of evolution before life – that is life before life as this theory is called – because he admitted that nucleic acid has a kind of life capability. A principle of order, selection and adaption is all at once attributed to matter – a principle which by no means enters the definition of matter.
When two British scientists, Fredric Hoyle, the former President of the Royal Society of Astronomy, and Chandra Vikrama of the University of Cardiff, studied the same problem, they defined the hypothesis that life was not created on earth but was imported with the help of cosmic dust clouds from the depth of the cosmos. According to them, the biological activity in the cosmos must have started before the creation of the earth.
The Russian scientist Balandin writes: ‘if a million laboratories on earth worked for a few million years combining chemical substances, the probability of creating life in a test tube would be minimal. According to Holden’s calculations, the chance is one to 1,310.”
This is how things stand with the self-organizing of one molecule of protein which, compared to a living organism, is as one brick compared to the completed building.
Science, especially molecule biology, has managed to reduce the huge gap between living and dead material to a very small space, but this small space has remained unbridgeable. To underestimate it would be scientifically unsound, but this is a tendency of the official materialism.
How can the following paradox be explained? If, in an archeological excavation, we find two stones put in a certain order or cut from some purpose, all of us would surely conclude that it is the work of a man of older times. If, near the same stones, we fined a human skull incomparably more perfect and complex than the stone tools, some of us would not think that it is the work of a conscious being. They look upon this perfect skull or skeleton as being created by itself or by accident – that is, without the intervention of a brain or consciousness. Is not man’s negation of God sometimes capricious?
Modern man’s narrow-mindedness is best shown in his belief that there is no riddle before him. His wisdom is the sum of his knowledge and his ignorance, of which he is not aware, he accepts it as knowledge. Even in the face of the greatest mystery, he behaves self-consciously and conceitedly. He does not even see the problem. It is in this that the true measure of his ignorance and prejudice is manifested. In autumn, the swallows fly from Europe to Africa. In springtime, they return to the same roof where they set their nest. How do they know that they have to go and when they must leave? Coming back, how are they able to find the same roof among thousands of roofs in a big town? To this question, our conceited man answers that it is instinct which leads them, or that it is a question of natural selection – only the birds which “understood” that they had to move to warmer regions survived. The others who did not “understand” this died out. Their instinct to migrate is the result of the accumulated knowledge of thousands of generations.
The problem does not lie in this empty answer. It lies in the fact that our disputant thinks that he gave an answer at all: he eliminates questioning which is the first condition for exploring the truth. The appearance of the general theory of relativity is due to the fact that Einstein saw a problem where everything seemed clear ad defined.
The meaning of art, philosophy, and religion is to direct man’s attention to riddles, secrets, and questions. It sometimes leads to a certain knowledge but more often to an awareness of ignorance or to transforming our ignorance of which we are not aware into ignorance of which we are not aware. This is the dividing line between the ignorant and the wise. Sometimes both of them know very little about some question, but the ignorant, contrary to the wise, takes his ignorance as knowledge and behaves accordingly.
He is simply blind to the problem and, in our case, blind to the miracle. This situation sometimes has tragic consequences in practical life: ignorant persons are very sure of themselves, while the wise behave in a Hamletian way, which gives the first group obvious advantages. This state of affairs is the exact opposite of the state of meditation. No meditation is needed of the so-called “mass-man.” This type of man does not litter his mind with any riddles or secrets. He does not wonder nor admire when confronted with the unknown. If a problem arises, he terms it and goes on living, believing that the problem has been solved in this way. Such terms are “instinct,” “self-organizing matter,” “complex form or highly organized matter,” and so forth.
We cannot explain life by scientific means only because life is both a miracle and a phenomenon. Wonder and admiration are the highest forms of our understanding of life.
[i] Jean Rostand, Life, The Great Adventure (New York: Scribner, 1956).
[ii] Erwin Schrodinger, What is Life? – The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1945).
[iii] Pierre Teilhard de Chrdin, Activation of Energy, trns. Rene Hague (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971).
[iv] Alexis Carrel, Man; The Unknown (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939).
[v] Let us remember Hegel’s sentences: “Material is outside itself,” “The soul has its center in itself,” “The soul is the existence inside itself,” and so forth. See, Georg W. F. Hegel, Samtliche werke, ed. Herman Glochner (Stutgart: F. Frommann, 1961).
[vi] Karl Jaspers, General Psychopathology, trans. J. Hoenig and Marian W. Hamilton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).
[vii] Louis de Broglie, “Address Delivered at Stockholm on Receiving the Nobel Prize, December 12, 1929,” Matter and Light: The New Physics, trans. W. H. Johnson (New York: Dover Publications, 1946). P 165-179.
[viii] Andre Lwoff, Of Microbes and Life, ed. Jacques Monod and Ernest Borck (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971).
[ix] Pavlov, “Experimental Psychology.”
[x] Carrel, pp. 127-128.
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] For more information on this subject, see Lucian Cuenot’s Invention et Finalite en Biologie (Paris: Masson et Cie. Editeurs, 1951).
