The Magic of Life
Here I’ll be discussing an article by physicist Paul Davies in New Scientist¹ earlier this year. It is refreshing to read a professional scientist describing life as magical or, to be more precise, since he obviously could not bring himself to say exactly that, “something special — almost magical”. By “almost magical” he presumably means incomprehensible from the reasoning of conventional science. Other formulations which he uses, to avoid actually calling life magical, are “an enigma”, and “its organised, self-sustaining complexity seems to fly in the face of the most sacred law of physics, the second law of thermodynamics”.
The specific problems he finds incomprehensible are:
- the baffling nature of the genetic code, in that the information constructed from the four letter alphabet A, C, G, T (adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine) is mathematically encrypted: “For a sequence of bases encoding a gene to be expressed, and thus contribute to an organism’s characteristics, it must be read out, decoded and translated into a 20-letter amino-acid alphabet used to form proteins”.
- “how a mishmash of chemicals can spontaneously organise itself into complex systems that store information and process it using a mathematical code. The known laws of physics provide no clue as to how chemical hardware can invent its own software. How can molecules write code?”
He therefore wants to search for a “secret ingredient”, proposing “a radical theory of what makes things alive”, and in this search he is inspired by Erwin Schrödinger who contemplated the possibility that there might be “something fundamentally new at work in living matter, beyond our existing conception of physics and chemistry”.
Davies is a conventional scientist, who wants to seek naturalistic, ‘scientific’ explanations - even when this means pushing the boundaries of science - and resist supernatural ones. He is unusual, however, in that he is very open-minded and does not try to sweep inconvenient problems under the carpet, witness his frank acceptance of these difficult problems. This is excellent news for commentators, since it gives us a chance to evaluate just how credible any proposed scientific explanations are.
On this occasion he does seem to be forcing a naturalistic explanation. He suggests “a profound new vision of life” in which “information has primacy”, but wants to treat “information as a physical quantity with its own dynamics”, seeking a new type of law that links biology to physics, which would treat “information not as a mere abstraction, but as a physical quantity with the clout to change the material world”.
But can we really consider information to be physical? Obviously it can be stored physically, but is its nature physical? The problems with Davies’s approach are:
- He seems to be saying that life is incomprehensible from a materialistic worldview, but that is exactly what he is trying to fit life into. His subtitle is revealing: “How does inanimate matter come to breathe, thrive and reproduce? Explaining this magic means overhauling nature’s laws”. But is matter inanimate? Or does it merely appear to be inanimate? The spiritual viewpoint is that there is no such thing as inanimate matter, because everything that exists is a manifestation of the divine consciousness. There is a hierarchy of levels of livingness, but nothing of a fundamentally different nature. The philosophical term which best expresses this is animism, which has become a scientific heresy, even though it would address the problem that Davies is trying to solve: “It doesn’t explain how living matter can do things far beyond the reach of non-living matter, even though both are made of the same atoms”.
- Davies refers to the “mindlessness of the real world”. Is the material world mindless? Perhaps not. Many modern thinkers are returning to the ancient viewpoint, sometimes called panpsychism, that consciousness is primary.
Davies notes that, to describe life, scientists often use analogies with computers, physicists and chemists tending to use the language of hardware, whereas biologists use that of software. He says that “many scientists recognise the equation ‘life = matter + information’ ”, synonyms for which could easily be hardware and software. So why do these scientists therefore not ask the questions, who or what invented the computer, and who is the programmer? That would obviously invite onto the stage the heretical notion of some kind of intelligent design, which presumably cannot be contemplated at any price. As he says, “the information part is downplayed, seen simply as a convenient way to discuss the biology”, thus avoiding any implication of supernatural intelligence.
To return to his original problems, noted above:
- the baffling nature of the genetic code. All the words I’ve italicised there suggest intelligence at work, but Davies, as just noted, considers the nature of the “real world” to be “mindlessness”.
- “How can molecules write code?” Perhaps they don’t. If we are using the computer analogy, it is obvious that hardware cannot write software. So who or what is the programmer? Perhaps there is a hidden, non-material intelligence at work.
As Schrödinger says, there might be “something fundamentally new at work in living matter, beyond our existing conception of physics and chemistry”. Indeed, and perhaps that secret ingredient is something supernatural.
And, as an afterthought, the alternative explanation for what Davies calls the “almost magical” nature of life is the neo-Darwinian one, adopted by the Humanists, that humans are “the result of unguided evolutionary change”. Can anyone seriously believe this when life is so complex, and as Davies puts it, almost magical?
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Footnote:
1) “Life’s secret ingredient: A radical theory of what makes things alive. How does inanimate matter come to breathe, thrive and reproduce? Explaining this magic means overhauling nature’s laws”, New Scientist issue 3215, February 2nd 2019. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24132150-100-lifes-secret-ingredient-a-radical-theory-of-what-makes-things-alive/
