Three Big Bangs Read online

  Proactive Genetic Information and Order

  How are we to understand this second big bang? Resulting from the first big bang, there were two metaphysical fundamentals: matter and energy. Einstein reduced these two to one: matter-energy. In the rapidly expanding universe, there is conservation of matter, also of energy; neither can be created or destroyed, although each can take diverse forms, and one can be transformed into the other. In the biological big bang, the novelty is that matter-energy enters into information states. The biologists also claim two metaphysical fundamentals: matter-energy and information. The latter is radically novel: proactive information about how to compose, maintain, communicate, and elaborate vital structures and processes. This is information about directed use, which was not present in the previous physico-chemical results of the first big bang.

  The information is coded in DNA, and we do not know how DNA-coded life originated. Various scenarios have been proposed, such as the earliest life being RNA based. But since we do not know how life originated on Earth, it is difficult to say whether the second big bang was unlikely, probable, or inevitable. Most scientists think quite unlikely. George M. Whitesides, a chemist, asks:

  How remarkable is life? The answer is: very. Those of us who deal in networks of chemical reactions know of nothing like it…. How could it be that any cell, even one simpler than the simplest than we know, emerged from the tangle of accidental reactions occurring in the molecular sludge that covered the prebiotic earth? We… do not understand. It is not impossible, but it seems very, very improbable. (Whitesides 2008:xiii, xvii)

  Francis Crick agrees: “In some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to be satisfied to get it going” (Crick 1981:88).

  Because these events are molecular and so small scale, and also because this may be called “primitive” life, we may fail to recognize how dramatic and complex these steps were. Further, at the startup there was no natural selection in any Darwinian sense, since this requires a population of individuals who are reproducing with heritable variation, competing for resources, with differential adapted fit, resulting in differential survival (Gabora 2006). Coded, proactive, environmentally adapted reproduction cannot be used to start up itself, although once started, it can elaborate itself. Lynn Margulis puts this pointedly: “To go from a bacterium to people is less of a step than to go from a mixture of amino acids to that bacterium” (quoted in Horgan 1996:140–141).

  Finding a second genesis of life on another planet, or repeated genesis elsewhere, would make life seem more likely, even if we did not know the details of its origins. In developing genetics, such information escalates, crossing critical thresholds. We will return to the question whether, once life is launched, there will be headings or tendencies.

  Now there appears a new type of order. A crystal is ordered (formed) spontaneously. There is repeated spontaneous structure formation. A protein molecule is ordered because it is “ordered” to form under the “informed” direction of a DNA molecule, switched on by the organism with its needs. The various spontaneously assembled phenomena in physics and chemistry, for example those called dissipative structures (such as Bénard cells that form in liquids with high temperature gradients) have a physical order but nowhere approach this biological sense of order. Nothing is transmitted from one generation of Bénard cells to the next. In similar circumstances such cells generate again, but they do not regenerate. There is no increasing complexity in the course of reproduction. Similarly with what are called “biomorphs,” crystalline structures that resemble biological forms such as curled leaves or worms (García-Ruiz et al. 2009; Kunz and Kellermeier 2009). To be alive requires bounded localized modular assembly (a cell, cells) that continuously regenerates itself (metabolism), replicates itself (reproduction), and is capable of evolving.

  Two decades ago what needed to be explained was the generation of complexity. In recent decades scientists have come to focus more on the information required for specifying and generating such complexity. Norbert Wiener, a founder of cybernetics, insisted: “Information is information, not matter or energy” (Wiener 1948:155). The physical world is composed of matter and energy, with the two united in relativity theory—so physics and chemistry have insisted. But the earthen world, biologists now insist, is composed by information that superintends the uses of matter and energy.

  This biological sense of information is proactive, agentive. Such vital information is carried in the genes. What makes the critical difference is not the matter, not the energy, necessary though they are; what makes the critical difference is the information breakthrough with resulting capacity for agency, for doing something. Something can be discovered, learned, conserved, reproduced on Earth, but not on the moon. Afterward, as before, there are no causal gaps from the viewpoint of physicist or chemist, but there is something more: novel information that makes possible the achievement of increasing order, maintained out of the disorder. The same energy budget can be put to very different historical uses, depending on the information in the system. What makes the critical difference is not the chemistry, necessary though this is; it is that reagents become agents.

  In Earth’s big bang, singularly different from the primordial big bang, nature wonderfully, surprisingly, regularly breaks through to new discoveries because there is new proactive information emergent in the life codings. These achievements are, if you like, fully natural—they are not unnatural; they do not violate nature. But they also are novel achievements of “know-how,” of agentive power. Something higher is reached, something “super” to the precedents, something superimposed, superintending, supervening on what went before; there is more where once there was less. The “super” for scientists is “cybernetic.” For the philosophers, what is added is “telos.” For the theologians, what is added to matter-energy is “logos.” Genes do not contain simply descriptive information “about” but prescriptive information “for” the vital processes of life. There is natural selection “for” what a gene does contributing to adaptive fit. Stored in their coding, genes have a “telos,” an “end.” Magmas crystallizing into rocks and rivers flowing downhill have results but no such end. Genes are teleosemantic.

  That differentiates physics from biology, and, biologists argue that they need to be alert to this. George C. Williams is explicit: “Evolutionary biologists have failed to realize that they work with two more or less incommensurable domains: that of information and that of matter…. The gene is a package of information” (quoted in Brockman 1995:43). In living things, concludes Manfred Eigen, this is “the key-word that represents the phenomenon of complexity: information…. Life is a dynamic state of matter organized by information” (1992:12, 15). John Maynard Smith says: “Heredity is about the transmission, not of matter or energy, but of information” (Maynard Smith 1995:28).

  James A. Shapiro concludes: “Thus, just as the genome has come to be seen as a highly sophisticated information storage system, its evolution has become a matter of highly sophisticated information processing” (Shapiro 2002:10; 2005). The genome, a reservoir of previously discovered genetic know-how, is both conserving this and constantly generating further variations (new alleles), tested in the life of the organism (the phenotype). The better adapted (better informed) variants produce more descendants.

  What is novel on Earth is this explosive power to generate vital information. In this sense, biology radically transcends physics and chemistry. It is not just the atomic or astronomical physics, found universally, but the middle-range earthen system, found rarely, that is so remarkable in its zest for complexity. Massive amounts of information are coded in DNA, a sort of linguistic or cognitive molecule. Now the semantic content is critical, as it was not in the minimal, mathematical, physical sense of information.

  Genes are sometimes executive, as with the assembly of an embryo. But when the organism has been constructed and is launched into ongoing meta
bolism, the phenotypic organism becomes equally executive. The organism uses its genes as a sort of Lego kit where it finds the assembler codes for the materials it comes to need. Such complexity involves emergence. The mutual interactions of the components and subsystems results in a capacity and behavior of the whole that transcend and are different from those in the parts and unknown in the previous levels of organization. This proactive networking of genes and organism in environment involves a top-down causation (Noble 2006:42–54). There are hierarchal levels of control and the behavior of the phenotype (hungry and hunting) governs the metabolism (adrenalin levels or glucose use). The stored genetic information makes possible layered modular structures with complex functionality sensitive to environmental context.

  The world of matter-energy, inherited from the first big bang, when taken over by the world of life at the second big bang, proves to be plastic enough for an organism to work its program on—as well as, at the third big bang, for a mind to work its will on. Although we cannot imagine any life without matter and energy, an organism has achieved the power to constitute the conditions under which appear the material energetic phenomena with which it interacts. Within this interaction, it can coagulate affairs this way and not that way, in accordance with its cellular and genetic programs. The macromolecular system of the living cell is influencing by its interaction patterns the behavior of the atomic systems.

  Physicists find that a laboratory apparatus that humans have fabricated can constitute the conditions under which some phenomena appear, and within those conditions, can further coagulate these and not those specific phenomena from among the superposed quantum states. The actual phenomena that come to pass are interaction phenomena, if sometimes also, in other ways, random phenomena. Something similar is going on in organisms, but it is much more sophisticated than in the relatively crude physicist’s machinery, which converts the atomic events into a photographic trace or a Geiger counter click.

  The organism converts the phenomena into life. This is taking place with instrumental control much closer to the atomic level in a pervasive, systematically integrated way in the organism, while in the bulky physicist’s apparatus we can manipulate processes and fabricate the materials of our instruments directly at the gross macroscopic levels, and only very indirectly at the molecular levels. But the organism is fine-tuned at the molecular level to nurse its way through the quantum states by electron transport, proton pumping, selective ion permeability, DNA encoding, and the like. Catalysis is especially impressive; of the thousands of metabolic reactions, virtually none would occur without an appropriate enzyme—mostly complex proteins. The organism via its information and biochemistries participates in forming the course of the microevents that constitute its passage through the world. The organism is responsible, in part, for the microevents, and not the other way around.

  The organism has to flow through the quantum states, but it selects the quantum states that achieve for it an informed flow-through. The information within the organism enables it to act as a preference sieve through the quantum states, by interaction sometimes causing quantum events, sometimes catching individual chance events that serve its program, and thereby the organism maintains its life course. The organism is a whole that is program laden, that executes its lifestyle in dependence on this looseness in its parts. There is a kind of “downward causation” that complements an upward causation (Campbell 1974), and both feed on the openness, if also the order, in the atomic substructures. The microscopic indeterminism provides a looseness through which the organism can steer itself by taking advantage of the fluctuations at the micro levels. Life makes matter count. It loads the dice. Biological events are superintending physical ones. The organism is “telling nature where to go.” Biological nature takes advantage of physical nature. The discovery that information is a critical determinant of organic-evolutionary history has thrown the causal/contingency debate into a new light.

  Some leading theoretical biologists are now calling this genetic information “intentional,” using that word in a nonconscious sense. John Maynard Smith claims: “In biology, the use of informational terms implies intentionality” (Maynard Smith 2000:177). That word has too much of a “deliberative” component for most users, but what is intended by “intentional” is the directed life process, going back to the Latin: intendo, with the sense of “stretch toward” or “aim at.” Genes have both descriptive and prescriptive “aboutness”; they stretch toward what they are about. Kim Sterelny and Paul E. Griffiths speak of “intentional information” in contrast to “causal information.” “Intentional information seems like a better candidate for the sense in which genes carry developmental information and nothing else does” (Sterelny and Griffiths 1999:104).

  Intentional or semantic information is for the purpose of (“about”) producing a functional unit that does not yet exist. Here there arises the possibility of mistakes, of error, and genes have some machinery for “error correction.” None of these ideas makes any sense in chemistry or physics, geology or meteorology. Atoms, crystals, rocks, weather fronts do not “intend” anything and therefore cannot “err.” A mere “cause” is pushy but not forward looking. A developing crystal has the form, shape, location it has because of, on the cause of, preceding factors. A genetic code is a “code for” something, set for “control” of the upcoming molecules that it will participate in forming. There is proactive “intention” about the future. This line of analysis confirms the actively cybernetic nature of biology.

  Explosions: Combinatorial and Evolutionary

  With the coming of life with such informational capacities, there appears another kind of explosion: combinatorial explosion. The numbers in astronomy are huge, on the order of 1080, the number of protons in the visible universe (Barrow 2002:97–118). But when amino acids are linked together to construct proteins, the possible structures are immense (often defined as greater than 10110) for proteins of about 100 amino acids; most proteins are over twice that long. “Because there are 20 different amino acids and a typical protein comprises some 200 of them, the number of possible proteins is greater than 20200 [or about 10260]…. All of the matter in the myriad galaxies of the universe falls far short of that required to construct but one example of each possible protein molecule” (Scott 2002:297).

  Living organisms can sometimes construct proteins quite fast, in fractions of a second. But the universe from big bang to present would have to be repeated 1067 times to create each one of these possible proteins just once. Typical DNA strands in mammals, with some hundred million base pairs, can be arranged in 10 raised to the 108 power different ways (Scott 1995:29–30). There is an explosion of possibilities in complication. Such vast possibility space is a mathematical computation; many of these theoretical possibilities are not in actual, empirical possibility space in the living world, owing to various constraints in construction and function. Nevertheless the possibilities are immense (Noble 2006:23–32). Consider in analogy the number of sentences that can be typed on a keyboard with 26 alphabetical letters, upper and lower case, some punctuation marks, spaces, numerals, a number in the range of 100 keys. Nature on Earth rings the changes on these biomolecular possibilities, exploring biodiversity in adaptive fit.

  Astronomical nature and atomic nature, profound as they are, are nature in the simple. At both ends of the spectrum of size, nature lacks the complexity that it demonstrates at the mesolevels, found in the earthen ecosystem, or at the psychological level in the human person. Astronomical nature is incredibly vast and energetic, but primitive. Such a statement will seem odd, on first reading, for the theories and calculations by which the mind probes such nature are among the most sophisticated known to science—for example, relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Physics is no simple science, and the stuff of its observations is abundantly mysterious, as the considerations we undertook in the previous chapter should reinforce. But that energetic matter, compared with life and mind, is as primitive as it
is basic. We encounter advanced forms of natural organization only at the middle ranges and in the other sciences. We humans do not live at the range of the infinitely small, nor at that of the infinitely large, but we may well live at the range of the infinitely complex.

  There is in a typical handful of humus, which may have 10 billion organisms in it, a richness of structure, a volume of information (trillions of “bits”), resulting from evolutionary processes across a billion years of history, greatly advanced over anything in myriads of galaxies, or even, so far as we know, all of them. Information accumulates across the spectrum of species, stored genetically. Further, there emerges, explosively with the development of neurons and brains, powers of acquired learning. These combine in an especially impressive way in humans. The human being starts out as a single cell and the information in that genome generates with increasing complexity a highly functional organized body with 1013 to 1014 cells of more than 200 cell types. If the DNA in the myriad cells of the human body were uncoiled and stretched out end to end, that microscopically slender thread would reach to the sun and back over half a dozen times. The human being is the most sophisticated of known natural products. The human brain, built by DNA, is the most complex entity known in the universe, a consideration we will further develop with the third big bang.

  You may reply that this took several billion years, so thinking of life on Earth as a genetically based explosion is misplaced. The main idea in evolution is incremental, gradual unfolding bit by bit. Half of the history of life was as one-celled procaryotes, which may not seem explosive, although recent estimates find microbial biodiversity immense. By one account, evolution is characterized by millions of years of stasis, punctuated by relatively brief periods of rapid change (Gould and Eldredge 1977). Evolution is seldom rapid; mostly it is quite boring. Nor is it always expanding. Mass extinctions can cause great loss of diversity.