Creation by Adam Rutherford Page B

flawed. The notion that the right ingredients in the right surroundings might generate a self-sustaining life-form ignores the underlying principle that life is a far-from-equilibrium process. The chemical activity in a soup can only accede to the second law of thermodynamics: unless it has an external source to maintain an energetic imbalance, it will only decompose. In Stanley Miller’s experiment, the spark of lightning may have triggered the formation of amino acids, but did not power a system of disequilibrium. Once those chemicals had reacted, they would do so no more.
    Bill Martin (University of Düsseldorf) is one of the main critics of soup-based origin-of-life science, and we will come to his work shortly. He proposes an easy experiment to challenge the concept of primordial soup: mash up a life-form of your choosing to the point where any cellular resemblance has been destroyed, but all of the ingredients are still intact. This experiment effectively occurs every time a cell dies, but spontaneous resurrection from this soup, with all of the right ingredients, remains a myth. Any model of the very origin of life that does not take into account the necessity of a continuous flow and manipulation of energy is building upon something that is already dead. Stanley Miller’s iconic experiment remains important, though its comment on the origin of life is limited. 8 It shows, elegantly and incontrovertibly, how biomolecules will arise from basic chemistry in the right conditions. However, it reinforces the view of life as merely an assembly of chemicals contrived into a thing that can reproduce. A primordial soup is not a vital and energetic mix, as it has no way of sustaining an imbalance of energy, whether it is in a warm pond, a pumice raft, a muddy volcano, or any of the other locations that have been proposed for the origin of life. A primordial soup is condemned as a midden: a decomposing dump.
    In a sense, we living things are out of step with the rest of the universe. In the
Origin of Species
, Darwin described the “struggle for existence,” meaning the fight to get food or a mate or the endurance against the elements. But it applies at a more basic level. To be alive is to struggle against entropy. Life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, not at all. We cannot beat it, as that is the invincible force of scientific laws. In death we all submit to the will of physics, and our atoms accept their universal fate: to decompose and to be recycled, ultimately into less energetic states. Entropy strives to make the universe both more chaotic and more balanced. In doing so, entropy always increases; just like in casino gambling, the house always wins.
    But by being alive, we have the opportunity to take something back from the house, or at least slow down its inevitable victory for a while. Life has evolved to extract energy from our surroundings and use it to maintain our vital information against the universal slide toward equilibrium by swapping and pumping protons from one side of a membrane to another inside a cell. Our lives, all lives, conspire to manipulate the fundamental forces of nature, and strive to do so continuously and forever. Jack Szostak is probably right, and tearing our hair out trying to encapsulate the essence of a life is merely a distraction from trying to trace back the path we know it took. But this indulgence into physics is crucial for understanding the origin of life. We know we can’t go back in time and observe it. How it once happened is lost to science and history, so we do what we can to emulate it in conditions that gave rise to life’s enduring imbalance. At some point, that imbalance acquired or created a system that allowed energy capture to be sustained independently. In that hatchery, the beginnings of encoded Darwinian descent could begin. But life-forms are first and foremost a sophisticated collection of chemical behaviors underwritten by