My Scientific Discussion of Evolution for the Pope and His Scientists
On reading the open letter of October 1996 of Pope John Paul II to the
Pontifical Academy of Sciences (The Scientist May 12, 1997), I am
struck by his concern about "the subject of the origin of life and its
evolution." This shifts the emphasis from evolution only to papal
mention of origin of life, and its interdigitation with subsequent
evolution.
My own contact with this question was to present for the first time a
scientific theory of origins to the Pope and the papal scientists as
derived from repeatable experiments. These occurred in 1984, 1985, and
1990, when I was a guest of three groups in Rome, the trips being
supported by Academia Lincei, IBM, and the National Foundation for
Cancer Research.
Why was Pope John Paul II interested in what I might say? I can think
of three main answers. The first is that, like anyone else, he is
curious about where he came from, or to put the question in its most
ancient time frame, what did he come from? Secondly, the Pope
recognizes that, with forward extrapolation, synthesis of primitive
life in the lab is a natural equivalent of Genesis in the Bible; as
Pope he must therefore prepare for new arguments. The third explanation
is one I received in Rome from many scientists of several faiths who
surround and advise Pope John Paul II. This answer, related to the
second one, is that Pope John Paul II wants not to repeat the mistake
of the predecessor church who had excommunicated Galileo.
My round-trip to Rome from Miami was paid three times, each time to
answer a major question. I shook hands with the Pope on the first
occasion in 1984. After his stroll in the audience, he retired to the
chairman's table at which sat several of the organizing scientists.
While I had special discussions with the scientists after my
presentations, the Pope, as I was informed, held his own subsequent
discussions with them. This indirect process was thorough enough that,
as I believe, Pope John Paul II and his associated scientists have a
far better grasp and more up-to-date awareness of natural genesis than
the funded scientists whom I know on this side of the Atlantic. There
are signs also that the most up-to-date awareness in the subject can be
found ne ar Rome, in Padova, and Trieste especially.
For me, these enjoyable sessions relating research generously supported
by NASA and others in 1960 to 1992 came twenty years after an earlier
unpleasant and dramatic introduction to the science-religion interface.
In that 1963 encounter, I was on an American Chemical Society lecture
tour, speaking on how our group had recently learned to make a kind of
protein under terrestrial conditions that existed before there were
cells on Earth to make protein. In Colorado, on my tour, I encountered
a well-known professor of chemistry. I had respect for this man through
having read his papers on analysis of proteins. I found in Colorado
that he did not have respect for me and my claim to having made
protein-like molecules under conditions of the Earth. In the middle of
my lecture he rose in the audience and announced emotionally, "Only God
can make a protein!" He had to be led from the audience by a companion
so the meeting could continue. He evidently belonged to the 40 percent
of scientists who cling to some form of theistic religion.
In the first of my three lectures for the papal group, we considered
self-organization of matter into living beings. This process had been
predicted by the French Catholic scientist, Louis Pasteur, in an 1864
debate in the Sorbonne on what was then called spontaneous generation,
Pasteur asked: "Can matter organize itself? In other words are there
beings that can come into the world without parents, without ancestors?
That is the question to be resolved."
The right kind of matter to organize itself is known now as thermal
protein, protein made from amino acids on Earth by heat. This was first
suggested from the work of Alfonso Herrera of Mexico City in his
laboratory of Plasmogeny, where he showed in 1924 to 1942 how to make
amino acids and sulfobes, a kind of cell, under terrestrial conditions.
This synthesis has much more geological pla usibility than that of the
amino acids of Harold Urey and Stanley Miller, which are produced in
assumed atmospheres in closed flasks, and which are much better known
due to publicity. The thermal amino acids also fit into a single
thermal continuity. The second step toward a cell after amino acids is
the formation of protein. This is where we came in, in a context of
protein, not thinking at that time of this as a stage of life's origin.
As a young professor of protein chemistry, I wanted to kno w if it were
possible that amino acids such as had been produced by Herrera, and
later by Miller, could yield proteins on the primitive Earth even
before there were living cells to make protein. So we tried heating
amino acids, even though heat was known to decompose amino acids.
We learned that we could avoid the decomposition if we included in the
mixture to be heated a sufficient proportion of one or both of two
amino acids: aspartic acid and/or glutamic acid. The results of
indiscriminate heating is seen as a dark tarry mass in Figure 3. When
only a small proportion of these two amino acids in included we get an
amber-colored product. For years we thought the amber component
contaminated the kind of white product that professional polymer
chemists obtain, such as in styrofoam. In 1979, Dr. Klaus Dose and
associates of Mainz, Germany, showed that the amber color was due to
flavin, formed by heating amino acids together. We then remembered
that flavins are significant in energy metabolism of all cells; indeed
riboflavin is standard in the human diet and even in supplements in the
drugstore. The experiments indicate that flavin was there from the
beginning.
The main product of heating the amino acids is protein, so listed under
protein, subheading thermal, by Chemical Abstracts since 1972. The
nomenclature came into existence a year after a special report on
existence of characteristics common to protein and to thermal proteins
was published in Chemical and Engineering News.
The expectation of protein chemists, which we shared, is that thermal
protein, then called proteinoid, would be randomly disordered. What the
experiments and analyses showed is almost the opposite.
In Figure 4 we see analyses of products of heating three amino acids
together. In the top the three amino acids are glutamic acid, glycine,
and tyrosine. These were separated on what is known as an HPLC
apparatus. If the products were random, we should observe a low-lying
horizontal line. The nearly vertical lines are individual thermal
peptides, or thermal proteins. They represent individual peptides. This
nonrandom result is highly reproducible. If we replace the amino acid
glycine-G by another one, alanine-A, we get a similar product that is
perceptibly different. However, each of these analytical pictures is
highly reproducible.
The third lecture in Rome (1990) concerned restating that the
arrangement of amino acids in thermal polymers is and was orderly.
After the papers emphasizing that amino acides can order themselves
with high precision when heated, the Polish chairman expressed interest
in seeing that DNA and RNA were unnecessary. More recently than 1990,
the leading investigators in the RNA-first and DNA-first hypotheses
acknowledged the uselessness of their approaches. Francis Crick, famous
for the DNA double he lix for example, stated in 1994, "The point about
DNA is that it goes back not to the origin of life." By 1993, a number
of RNA-first investigators, for example James Ferris, had made similar
statements for RNA not being primary.
In each case the amino acids determine their own arrangements. No
outside agent such as RNA or DNA makes any difference during a heating
process, as the late Cyril Ponnamperuma showed in 1990. The
possibilities with DNA and RNA were the scheduled sub ject of my second
paper for the papal scientists on the visit to Rome in 1985. The papal
scientists had arranged this as a debate with a collegial friend from
California, who at that time postulated nucleic acids as arising first.
He gave his talk in the morning, and left at noon to visit someone
elsewhere in Italy. As a result, the scheduled debate did not follow my
lecture in the afternoon. There was no debate then, as there is none
now.
The list of the properties of these protocells as presented to the Pope
in the first meeting are in Table 1. At the bottom of the list you will
notice excitability. We had just begun to study the kind of
RESPONSIVENESS to stimuli that is followed by implanting
microelectrodes into microspheres as if they were nerve cells. By
displaying growth, metabolism, reproduction, and response to stimuli,
the microspheres meet definitions of life in some textbooks and in
Webster's Dictionary.
Table 1. Salient Properties of Proteinoid Microspheres
In trains of electrical spiking action potentials are beginning to have
a bedside flavor for a cardiology ward. Dr. Yoshio Ishima of the Tokyo
Medical School studied those displaying regular rhythm and said he
could not distinguish some from the recording of a heart. Hundreds of
types of microspheres made from thermal protein all exhibit electrical
activity. The principal ways in which the laboratory protocell meets
the definition of life in the dictionary are in displaying growth,
metabolism, reproduction and responsiveness in cells made by synthesis.
By the process of cellular engineering, we can do a more meaningful job
of arriving at a definition of life than by describing behavior of
modern cells. This is a theme in a recent book tit led Defining Life
edited by Professor Martino Rizzotti of Padova, Italy, 1996.
One relationship of this work to religion lies in its providing a
natural description of Genesis. The Bible has supplied, for most
people, answers to questions that everyone asks. I think it was
beautifully written for its time. More than half of all scientists now
prefer to explain genesis by evolution rather than by revelation. Some
of the scientific uncertainities in the transmutation of species are
overcome by retracing the primary conversion of inanimate to animate as
I have done here and to the Pope and to members of the pontifical
academies. The results are in hundreds of textbooks, and I am informed
that thousands of high-school students have repeated the main
experiments, in the vein of a most fundamental requirement of science:
repeatability. Our beautiful Bible is not up-to-date. It does not
mention microscopes or cells. Accordingly, it could not in its time
honor evolutionary theory, which is now a natural sequence from
molecules to cells to plants and animals, all in a synthetic
direction.
At this point we leave the experiments to focus on interpretations,
which are more variable. Here we can cite Einstein (Clark, 1971) and in
his wake Linus Pauling and others. Although others have called him an
agnostic or an atheist, Einstein regarded himself in his later years as
a disciple of Cosmic Religion. He did not attend church or synagogue,
but he made frequent reference to a deterministic God, by which he
clearly meant nature. There is no doubt that he regarded nature with
reverence. Determinism is common to Einstein's view of sci ence and to
divine determinism. However, Einstein's emphasis on determinism was
opposed by most of the developers of the quantum theory, a theory that
he initiated. As I see it, our experimental results support Einstein
that everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end.
Einstein believed in a God who was, however, Spinoza's God. But
Spinoza's God was natural, not supernatural.
A Catholic leader of Einstein's time, Bishop Fulton Sheen, represented
the opposing point of view. In the early 1930s, Sheen said of an
article written by Einstein that it was the sheerest kind of "stupidity
and nonsense". There is only one fault with his (Einstein's) cosmical
religion; he put an extra letter in the word -- the letters 's'" To
Einstein, what was cosmic was to Sheen comical. Einstein focused on as
fact what we find as a common principle in both science and religion:
determinism. Einstein did not regard determinism as divine determinism,
but due only to natural forces. In 1929 he said: "Everything is
determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we
have no control. It is determined for the insects as well as the star.
Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious
tune intoned in the distance by an invisible piper." In this
statement, Einstein appears not only as a scientist but as a
philosopher and a poet.
Einstein also said: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in
the oderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself
with fates and actions of human beings."
The words the famous philosopher, Benedict Spinoza, used to define God
(Ethics, 1677) were: "By God I understand a being absolutely infinite,
that is,. a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which
expresses eternal and infinite essence."
In the 1600's, Spinoza could not involve chemistry as we know it to
specify "substance," because chemistry was yet in its alchemy days;
amino acids were unknown. I would like to be able to ask Spinoza if he
would accept an updating of his definition in which God is a family of
substance (as has been described) consisting of infinite attributes."
Or would he rather refer to a single type of substance, thermal
protein, from which infinite attributes seem to flow? Certainly, we can
see that what is new since Spinoza's time is the cell as the sine qua
non of all life, and the use of experimental synthetic retracement to
answer biological questions. And we propose to replace Spinoza's
undesignated "substance" by a family of substances of defined
constitution in a modern way, the amino acids, or perhaps by thermal
protein, which is itself already an article of biomedical research and
industry. In this offshoot, thermal proteins are a subject of more than
one hundred patents (Bahn and Fox, 1996) since 1990.
ADDENDUM
While our experiments agree with Einstein's interpretations in the
main, he was a hard determinist, whereas the experiments lead me to a
kind of soft determinism. This thinking results from the belief that if
Einstein had known of thermal protein, he would have anticipated that
thermal protein would be a single substance.
If we honor thermal protein as the original progenitor, we must
recognize that it is not a single substance but rather a family of
closely related substances. This permits the act of selection. Some
would cite this fact as a basis for free will. Another interpretation,
however, is that the whole range of thermal proteins in one batch is
determined. Since the substance thermal protein is several substances,
"free will" and determinism may both be rooted in thermal protein.
The base in the whole picture is still molecular determinism, which is
a kind of molecular religion that extends into Einstein's cosmic
religion. The same May 12 issue of The Scientist in which the Pope's
open letter is reprinted contains a response of Dr. David S. Thaler
which includes the statement that "the next Galileo may be a
microbiologist." In his letter the Pope states that "theories
considering the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter...are
incompatible with the truth about man." The fact that the cells made
from thermal protein behave as neurons indicates that this problem
exists now.
Finding thermal proteins was the product not of the usual hypothesis.
It was a testing of terrestrial conditions and substances. The
experimenter did not ask the experiments to check on hypothetical
products; rather the experiments talked to the obsever.
The development from thermal protein as mother substance is a
rediscovered advance. It calls to mind the rediscovered science of
genetics. Gregor Mendel published the results that are the basis of
genetics in 1845. In the 1870 and 1880's this advance was covered up by
others. The rediscovery did not occur until 1900, after Mendel's death.
In the case of protobiogenesis, the initial discovery reached a plane
of completion by 1971. The finding into the background lasted from the
middle 70s until the middle 90s. In this subject the answer of the
1960's to 1970's was subjugated to a presumed field that placed RNA-
first and DNA-first center stage and inadvertently covered up the
earlier thermal proteins-first.
"Protest Dinoflagellates": Mesozoic Society Against Perverted Practices.
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Sidney W. Fox, Ph.D.
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