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Explaining Life's Origins
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12034 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1987 |
3,170 Words |
| Author
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James G. Osborn
James G. Osborn is natural science editor for THE WORLD & I |
ORIGINS
A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth
Robert Shapiro
New York: Bantam Books, 1987
332 pp., $9.95 (paperback)
Where do we come from? The scientific community has given the difficult question of the origin of life less attention than perhaps any other. In fact, until 1953 the creation stories of the various religions held as much weight among scholars as any theory that chemists or biologists had come up with.
The origin of life is difficult to pursue because all life, even the most primitive, is so complex. To qualify as a living thing, a being must satisfy three basic criteria: It must be able to (1) trap and use energy from the environment; (2) reproduce; and (3) defend itself against attack. All organisms currently alive or ever found embedded in ancient rock have very sophisticated systems for accomplishing all three of these tasks. That this kind of life originated from the nonliving elements of our planet seems miraculous indeed. With this in mind, scientists who are searching for the way life first came into being are examining the most primitive systems that might qualify as living.
Ironically, since Stanley Miller and Harold Urey published their classic research findings in 1953, the popular press and many general science texts have assumed that science had the origin of life sewn up. Miller had assembled a flask containing what he considered the main constituents of primitive earth: methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water.
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