Lorraine Ford
To try to explain the seemingly magical properties that life has, Paul Davies speculates that life might involve new laws of physics that do not contradict existing, known laws of physics. He asks:
- Do we need new physics to explain life?
- Do biological systems hint at what this new physics might be?
Then, seemingly as a way of framing the problem, he details what is known about life on Earth, the “Dirty Secrets”, summarised as:
- All life on Earth is not known to be the same life.
- Life cannot be fully understood using ball-and-stick chemistry.
- We have not made life in the lab, or got anywhere near doing it.
- Most of mesoscopic biophysics is “make-believe”.
- The Darwinian principle – survival of the fittest – does not (alone) explain biological complexity. The big issue is arrival of the fittest. Lamarckism isn’t dead.
- There is little reason (to date) to think that life may have happened more than once in the observable universe. If we do not know the process that transformed non-life into life, we cannot estimate the probability for it to happen. “… we don't know how to think about the transition from non-life to life.”
- The fact that life started quickly on Earth does not prove it must form readily. “… as Brandon Carter pointed out.”
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However, a description of “dirty secrets”, i.e. superficial knowledge about life on Earth, goes no way towards explaining life: how it arose, and why it continues to exist.
I think that rather than new physics being required to explain life, what is required is a new way of appreciating the world:
• Forget about how life knows its surroundings: how come a particle or a molecule knows about its surroundings? How do we represent knowledge?
• Forget about how life moves in response to its surroundings: quite apart from law of nature relationships, how come the world is moving at all (1)? How do we represent this movement, which is NOT representable by the equations that represent law of nature relationships?
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- Apparently, the late physicist John Archibald Wheeler once said to his students: “You see, these equations can’t fly. But our universe flies. We’re still missing the single, simple ingredient that makes it all fly.” https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/John+Wheeler