Foreword
      Introduction
      Chronology
      Evolution Tribes

1 The Altenberg 16
2 Altenberg! The Woodstock of Evolution?
3 Jerry Fodor and Stan Salthe Open the Evo Box
4 Theory of Form to Center Stage
5 The Two Stus
      Stuart Kauffman – Peace, Love & Complexity
      Stuart Newman – The Chess Master
6 The Two Massimos
      Massimo Pigliucci – Evolution & Flamboyance?
      Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini – Evoluzione senza Adattamento
7 The One and Only Richard Lewontin
8 Knight of the North Star: Antonio Lima-de-Faria, Autoevolution
9 The Wizard of Central Park: Stuart Pivar
10 Richard Dawkins Renounces Darwinism as Religion
11 Rockefeller University Evolution Symposium
12 Mainstream Media Doesn’t Get It – Except Vanity Fair
13 Stuart Newman: Evolution Politics
14 The Astrobiologists
      Bob Hazen: The Trumpeter Of Astrobiology
      Roger Buick & Nasa: Follow The H2O Or Energy Not Selection
      David Deamer: Line Arbitrary Twixt Life & Non-Life
      Ex NASA Astrobiology Institute Chief Bruce Runnegar
      NASA Humanist Chris McKay: Where Darwinism Fails

Appendix — Related Stories
      A Stuart Kauffman: Rethink Evolution, Self-Organization is Real
      B Stuart Newman’s "High Tea"
      C The Enlightening Ramray Bhat
      D Piattelli-Palmarini: Ostracism without Natural Selection
      E Niles Eldredge, Paleontologist
      F Stan Salthe: Neo-Darwinians Risking 'Rigor Mortis'

About the Author

July 30, 2008
4:02 pm NZ

After reviewing Robert M. Hazen’s 28-page C.V. of his work as an experimental mineralogist (listing grant $$$ too), as an educator, author of a dozen books and a symphonic trumpeter – I was most charmed to read that a new mineral “precipitated” by microbes in California’s highly alkaline Lake Mono had been named in his honor in March of this year: “hazenite”. Bob Hazen is the Clarence J. Robinson Professor of Earth Sciences at George Mason University. For the last 30 years, Hazen has also been a scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Geophysical Laboratory. He first took his investigations into minerals and the origin of life to NASA’s Astrobiology Institute in 1996, where he continues to play an important role in the Astrobiology program.

His friend, paleontologist Niles Eldredge, attests to Bob Hazen’s talent as a trumpeter (he was president of the MIT Symphony Orchestra in the late 60s). Hazen has appeared as a soloist with the National Gallery Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Esplanade Orchestra, at the Kennedy Center and on BBC-TV and performed with the Metropolitan Opera, Boston and National Symphonies, Orchestre de Paris and the Kirov and Royal Ballets (partial list).

     Hazen is not infrequently on television and radio, most recently in the History Channel’s Origins of Life documentary earlier this summer. He served on the Committee to revise the National Academy of Sciences’ publication Science, Evolution and Creationism (the book has been criticized by some for promoting a dying theory of evolution).

     He lists two pages of awards and honors on his C.V., including National Science Foundation’s Distinguished Public Lecturer (2007). Hazen has also served as president and vice president of the Mineralogical Society of America. His. B.S. and S.M. degrees in Earth Science are from MIT (president of MIT’s Geology Club too) and his Ph.D. in Mineralogy and Crystallography is from Harvard.

Our recent phone conversation about astrobiology follows.

Robert Hazen: Of course astrobiology exists. Any human endeavor “exists” where there’s a group of people, in this case it’s probably 1,000 researchers, who have a common set of goals and aspirations. . .

Astrobiology is a search for the origin, distribution and future of life in the Universe. What its underlying assumptions and hypotheses are is quite clear. First is we know life exists on Earth. In some way there was an origin of life on Earth. As scientists we accept the hypothesis there’s a chemical and physical basis for that origin that is natural, in accordance with natural laws.

Suzan Mazur: Astrobiology includes astronomy, biology, chemistry and geology?

Robert Hazen: Absolutely. And physics too. It’s a very integrated science.

Suzan Mazur: That’s a huge field.

Robert Hazen: It is a huge field, but it is also one fairly well defined in the sense that we have some very specific questions. We want to understand the origin of life.

Suzan Mazur: “What are its laws?” – as philosopher Jerry Fodor has asked.

Robert Hazen: Well, there’s the epistemological. Does every scientific question have to be first rooted in laws? Here’s my take on it.

I did a book some years ago with a distinguished biologist, Maxine Singer. It was basically exploring the unanswered questions in science. Rather than ask what are the laws, what we zeroed in on is the fact that there are four distinct kinds of questions scientists ask about the natural world.

First are existence questions – going out and reporting what’s out there. The astrobiology field is looking for signs of ancient life on Earth as well as elsewhere.

Second is origins. Astrobiology asks, where did life originate?

Third is process. How do things work? Scientists spend most of their time thinking about how systems work. Astrobiology addresses exactly that: How do living things organize themselves? How did they evolve? How did they adapt to different environments?

Finally there are applied questions. Ways in which you can take your understanding of the first three categories and alter or improve human existence. That’s been shown over and over again with astrobiology. For example, in the field of molecular evolution. Used extensively in medicine.

Astrobiology as a field has a core set of fundamental questions; that’s mainstream to what scientists do. So the question: What are the astrobiology laws? is a little bit of a red herring.

The thinking is not that there are laws of astrobiology, so therefore it is a science, rather that there are fundamental questions astrobiologists are asking and attempting to answer through scientific processes – and therefore astrobiology is a science.

Suzan Mazur: Niles Eldredge earlier this year told me that you’re a terrific trumpet player and mineralogist, but that you’re not an evolutionary biologist. So “be careful” he said.

Robert Hazen: Niles is absolutely correct, I’m not an evolutionary biologist.

Suzan Mazur: But I’d like to ask you how scientists can comfortably start in the middle of the evolutionary process – that is, once life is already present, and make accurate assessments, if the connection to origin of life remains elusive? And that’s where you come in as a mineralogist. Right?

Robert Hazen: Yes. Absolutely. And that’s true.

Suzan Mazur: You’re comfortable speaking to origin of life issues.

Robert Hazen: I’m comfortable speaking to origin of life issues because the origin of life is not a biological or evolutionary process. Origin of life is a geochemical process. It involves self-organization – where you’ve brought together rocks and minerals, the atmosphere and the oceans, various chemical reactions that occurred. Some of those processes are deterministic.

We can study them with great rigor in the laboratory. We see there are processes of self-organization – primarily on surfaces. And those surface organization processes you can study quite distinctly and they have been studied a great deal and continue to be a very exciting area of forefront research.

Suzan Mazur: But evolution doesn’t stop after the mineral phase, does it?

Robert Hazen: When we talk about evolution, there are many many definitions.

Suzan Mazur: Well that’s a problem. The semantics.

Robert Hazen: The semantics. I’m not talking about evolution by a biological natural selection genetic mechanism. What I’m interested in is the period before there was a genetic mechanism.

Suzan Mazur: But can you have a separation?

Robert Hazen: Oh you absolutely have to have a separation between the two, I think. The first step in the origin of life – the earliest chemical steps, which is what I’m studying.

Let me make it clear, when I say I’m studying the origin of life, my personal interest and my research is in the earliest stages of what’s known as “chemical evolution” – the chemical synthesis of organic materials and the organization of those. This is not yet a life form in any sense of the modern word.

What we’re looking for is the earliest stages of organization of those chemicals. So this is really a geochemical process of organization. And the reason that astrobiology tackles this is that we say that these early steps are going to occur on any Earth-like planet and moon.

Suzan Mazur: Complexity pioneer Stuart Kauffman said that natural selection exists throughout the Universe wherever there is life. Harvard’s Andrew Knoll, who appeared in the Origins of Life History Channel documentary with you this summer, told me at the Rockefeller University Evolution symposium in May that “It’s natural selection every step of the way.”

However, Stuart Newman in his recent paper for Physical Biology proposes all of today’s 35 or so modern animal phyla emerged as a result of self-organization by the time of the Cambrian explosion a half billion years ago using a pattern language (dynamical patterning modules), with selection following as a “stabilizer”.

What is your position on natural selection?

Robert Hazen: Again, I think there’s a semantics question here. Selection – I’m not talking about Darwinian natural selection in the way that Darwin characterized it as survival of the fittest of the population. That’s very specific.

Just as evolution has many different meanings from change over time to common descent to complexification to the specifics of Darwinian biological natural selection, I think the word natural selection has that ring of Darwinian survival of the fittest, but there’s also a more general use of the term selection. That is, that if you supply selective pressures, which always happens in a natural setting if there are gradients of energy. Or if there are cycles such as day - night, light - dark, hot - cold, wet - dry. And those cycles tend to winnow out certain chemicals and enhance the population of other chemicals. That is a selective process.

It is a natural process. It is not “natural selection” the way Darwin used it. But it is a natural selective process.

I agree with what everybody just said (above). I’m not sure that it didn’t occur before 500 million years ago, because I think we definitely see natural selection going on in microbial populations. We see that today. My assumption – although I’m not an evolutionary biologist – my assumption would be that right from the very first cell that had a genetic apparatus and was replicating and was competing to survive in a whole variety of different environments, that you would have had some kind of logical Darwinian natural selection going on.

Suzan Mazur: So you don’t think that keeping natural selection in the equation may prevent us from seeking life as it may exist elsewhere?

Robert Hazen: When we look for life elsewhere, it’s really a chemical problem. The characteristics of all living things, no matter what you think they are – chemical systems that are imagined, ones that we haven’t yet imagined – the common characteristics of all those different systems is going to be chemical idiosyncrasies.

What I mean by that is that when you have all the prebiotic organic molecules that could be synthesized – hundreds of different amino acids, left-handed amino acids, right-handed amino acids, lots of different sugars, lots of different lipids, etc. – life tends to use a very small subset of all those different kinds of molecules. So in searching for life elsewhere, it’s going to be a search for distinctive suites of organic molecules. It’s not a search for a structure or organization.

I think it’s very unlikely, for example, that we’ll see on Mars some fossil of a thing, even with a microscope. But we may find suites of preserved organic molecules. Like in petroleum where you find a very idiosyncratic suite of molecules. It’s not the thing you expect if you blasted a synthesis out of lots of hydrocarbons.

Suzan Mazur: Are you looking at abiotic oil at all?

Robert Hazen: That is a very different subject, and there are many resources. There is a new book on oil by Eric Roston. I just chaired a conference at the Carnegie Institution, called the deep carbon cycle. It’s on the Carnegie web site. We had experts from all over the world. You can see most of the lectures, including lectures by Russian scientists who believe that petroleum is virtually all abiotic. And hear lectures by American petroleum geologists who think oil is virtually all biological. It’s still an unresolved issue.

Suzan Mazur: Are you familiar with the Astrobiology Primer that NASA/NAI put out that Lucas Mix edited, which only refers to natural selection and neutral selection? Isn’t that a bit limiting?

Robert Hazen: So much of this is semantics. When you talk about selection, some people say no it’s not selection, it’s self-organization. But self-organization is a selection process. It’s not natural selection in the Darwinian sense. The fact that one molecule is responding to its local environment is always a driving mechanism. The whole idea of self-organization of lipid vesicles, for example, of self-organization on a mineral surface – that is a selection process. And very much in the mainstream of what people are thinking about.

Don’t be concerned about a conflict between people who say – “oh, it’s self-organization” or “oh, it’s selection”. To some extent this is really a kind of a. . .

Suzan Mazur: Word game.

Robert Hazen: It’s a word game. The words evolution and natural selection – they have this emotional baggage, which is understandable I think. But it doesn’t have to be a big conflict.

Selection as a universal process starts with the Big Bang. Which isotopes form? What kinds of planets form? How does the core separate from the surface? Those are all selection processes.

Suzan Mazur: I saw your early work with Larry Finger cited in Evolution without Selection (1988), the book by University of Lund cytogeneticist Antonio Lima-de-Faria. It was in a discussion regarding origin of form in minerals, the atomic composition and assembly.

Robert Hazen: I wasn’t doing origin of life work back then.

Suzan Mazur: Lima-de-Faria cites your work in relation to atomic composition and assembly in carbon and the crystallizing as diamond and graphite. He thinks minerals have had their own separate evolution, and that the mineral evolution preceded the biological.

He was saying this 20 years ago, but he’s told me recently that his thinking has not changed. He says it’s important to go back to the atomic, chemical and mineral footprints to get the story right about biological evolution – which he considers the “terminal” phase.

I actually brought this up at a World Science Festival panel on the “Laws of Life” at NYU in June. Synthetic biology pioneer Steve Benner and astrobiologist Paul Davies were on the panel. Rockefeller University president Paul Nurse hosted the previous panel and said he predicted that biology will be looking to physics for answers on evolution.

Benner said he agreed with his “distinguished colleague from Lund” Lima-de-Faria: “But certainly our view of how life originated on Earth is much dependent on minerals being involved in the process to control the chemistry.”

And then Paul Davies said, “There has to be a pathway from chemistry to biology, powerful levels before Darwinian evolution even kicks in.”

Lima-de-Faria thinks “[N]othing essentially new arose as biological evolution emerged.” He says what looks new are the “combinations that seem drastically unrelated, only because they are so severely canalized into a narrow and limited number of variation channels.”

I was just wondering what your response to that is?

Are you still there?

Robert Hazen: Absolutely. I’m listening to you very intently.

Suzan Mazur: Lima-de-Faria says that minerals and simple chemicals like water don’t have genes but “display the constancy of pattern and the ability to change by forming a large number of forms” – they behave like an organism. That neither water nor calcite have genes but “possess mechanisms . . . we consider fundamental gene attributes.” He also writes that “the main types of plant and animal patterns are already present in minerals”.

There was a rustle in the room when I brought up the ideas of Lima-de-Faria, but if the Benner and Davies comments are representative, more scientists are thinking this way.

Robert Hazen: I think I understand what he’s driving at and I don’t want to endorse or reject the points of view cause I’d really need to hear more in detail.

Suzan Mazur: You’ve never read the book?

Robert Hazen: I just finished a paper called “Mineral Evolution” that is now in press in a journal called the American Mineralogist. There are seven co-authors and we talk about this idea of the mineral kingdom going through an evolutionary process. By that I want to make very clear what I mean by evolution. It’s not just change over time. In this case it’s diversification or complexification over time.

Let me give you a brief abstract of this idea: All terrestrial planets like Earth, Mars and Mercury and their moons, etc., begin in a pre-solar cloud of dust and gas. In that pre-solar cloud, there are microminerals – about a dozen different minerals: diamond, graphite, corundum, spinel – all together about a dozen different minerals.

And as you clump those together to form the earliest bodies and meteorites and asteroidal bodies, you get about 60 different minerals through heating of the sun in the primary formation of minerals. About 60 different minerals that form the most primitive minerals in what are called chondrite meteorites.

And then you go through periods of aqueous alteration. And then these planetismals get larger. You get up to about 250 different minerals. You see increasing complexification, from 12 to 60 to 250 to 350 in a place like Mercury, to 500 in a place like the moon.

And with plate tectonics you add more minerals and you go to 1,000. You go to 1,500 and finally when life kicks in on Earth you get maybe another 3,000 known minerals. So about two-thirds of all the known minerals on Earth actually result in a very complex feedback mechanism with life. That’s what we call “mineral evoluton”.

Now it’s not Darwinian natural selection by any means. But it is a change over time. And it follows fundamental laws of physics and chemistry – and selection, leading to a gradual complexification or diversification of the mineral kingdom.

That’s something I see as a process of evolution, which in many ways, is parallel to biological evolution.

Niles Eldredge, who you mentioned, and I have been working on a paper called “Themes and Variations in Complex Evolving Systems”. The idea being that in both natural systems and in non-biological and biological systems, in cornets – which Niles Eldredge talks about – in language, you see similar themes.

You have species. You have diversification. You have extinction. You have punctuation. You have selection. Those five characteristics and others as well are common to all evolving systems whether it be minerals or language or biology or microbes or bears. And the fact is that there are also fundamental differences amongst those different systems.

I’m very sympathetic to people who see echoes of biology in mineralogy or echoes of biology in language.

Suzan Mazur: Here’s something else that Lima-de-Faria said about minerals. “The body of a human like that of any other mammal is built according to a crystal plan. Bilateral symmetry to humans is indistinguishable from the twinning process in minerals.”

Robert Hazen: Hmmm.

Suzan Mazur: “The two halves of the body are built just as contact crystal twins. They are intercharacterized by the fusion of two structures that are identical. They have an axis in common and one half is grown in position which corresponds to a rotation of 180 degrees thereby becoming a mirror image of the other.”

Robert Hazen: I understand the rhetoric. I think there are some inaccuracies in that particular statement. If you look at the internal organs, they’re not all bilaterally symmetric.

Suzan Mazur: He’s saying that the cell was formed by the same atoms in minerals and that the cell continues to receive many of them from this source. He notes that “it’s not surprising that periodicity is present at the biological level.” Things are ordered. The biology behaves according to the previous footprints that were laid down.

Robert Hazen: I certainly agree that the chemical principles that govern rocks and minerals are the exact same chemical principles that govern all living things. All molecules. All living cells. And the interaction of those molecules and biological systems. And that leads to chemical bonding from just a few basic types. And it leads to self-organization of those molecules into larger structures based on energetics. That’s absolutely true. It’s what governs the forms and minerals in the natural world. Because an individual molecule can only respond to its immediate chemical environment. An individual cell can only respond to its immediate chemical environment. So how you go from a single cell in development through the whole amazing developmental process that leads to a complex individual can only be governed by the local immediate chemical forces and mechanical forces that surround an individual thing and that leads to kinds of self-organization. And so what I would say is that there’s a little more nuance.

The more nuanced view might be that, yes indeed, the chemical laws are the same for minerals and for living things. And in each case the local molecules and atoms respond only to chemical environment. However, I would say the biological system is different from minerals. And there are two fundamental differences between a biological cell or organism and mineral.

In a biological cell or organism there are genes that subtly change through mutation. As a result the chemicals involved can change. Quartz is always quartz. It’s always SIO2. The quartz that formed on Earth four and a half billion years ago is the same quartz today. Whereas, a single cell with its genetic complement, which undergoes these mutational changes – presumably the mutations themselves are random, while the selection process is not – so gradually a cell can change from generation to generation. As a result the chemicals that the cell produces change. Now the same chemical principles operate on the cell as they do on the minerals.

Suzan Mazur: Lima-de-Faria (a cytogeneticist) would argue that mutation doesn’t exist, that everything is ordered. All these things respond to a certain order that’s been established through the various evolutions (atomic, chemical, mineral, biological).

Robert Hazen: Again, I’m not an evolutionary biologist but I do teach introductory genetics in my science literacy class and I think it’s very much against the mainstream point of view.

We can sequence your cytochrome, mine and those of a chimpanzee and you can see that there are small characteristic differences and either those were created by design differently, which I don’t accept cause it’s not a scientific explanation, or else there was a mutational process that gradually caused different letters of the genetic code to change. Therefore, different amino acids to be introduced to the protein and therefore those proteins are different chemically, which means that they have different chemical characteristics in terms of their response to their immediate neighbor. That’s the only thing that can really control the behavior of a biological system or a mineralogical system is the local chemical forces that are created by specific atoms and molecules.

If you accept a natural explanation and how the natural world works, then you basically have to talk about interactions among atoms and molecules. And self-organization is a consequence of that. But if you say it’s a chemical process, then you have to be concerned about what those chemicals are. Inasmuch as chemicals can change in a biological system through gradual mutation and therefore genetic changes, different proteins form because there’s a different sequence of amino acids. It’s different with minerals.

Suzan Mazur: In light of what Paul Nurse said at the World Science Festival panel that biology may now be looking to physics for answers regarding evolution and your review of Stuart Pivar’s concept of the toroidal model. By the way, he’s just come back from Santa Fe Institute where he apparently had an enthusiastic reception about his work.

Robert Hazen: Is that someone from the Santa Fe Institute or Stuart who told you that?

Suzan Mazur: He met with a panel of people there, Geoffrey West and others.

Robert Hazen: Have you spoken with them?

Suzan Mazur: That’s all I’ve heard.

Robert Hazen: When I reviewed Stuart Pivar’s book I tried to take it as seriously as I could. I gave him a four and a half page detailed critique. Said this was never to be used except in its entirety. He extracted four or so paragraphs from that – put in juxtaposition – made it sound like I was endorsing his work. Or at least taking it seriously. And I really want to make it clear that I am not in any way a supporter of Stuart Pivar’s work. I think there are aspects of his ideas that could be tested. That it’s very interesting the idea of where different morphotypes come from. And commonality – that’s a fascinating idea that could be explored. But his rhetoric rejecting out of hand Darwinian evolution. . . .

You see, let me take a step back. There’s one thing I want you to understand about where I come from. It’s more philosophical. It’s that the history of science – as you have found out and you’re very good at picking up on this – is often laced with people who establish a position that is very intransigent. This is the way it is. And someone else will say no this is some other way.

You have people who, for example, say it’s gradualism versus punctuation. It is neptunism versus plutonism. It’s uniformitarianism versus catastrophism. And these polarized debates have popped up over and over in the history of science.

It’s a way that someone can make noise. It’s a way that they can establish themselves or take a stand or somehow get behind a particular idea and it gives their career a focus. But what I’m finding over and over again in the history of science is that these dichotomies are false. That it’s a much more nuanced answer.

It’s not uniformitarianism or catastrophism. In fact, the history of Earth is characterized by long periods of gradual changes, punctuated by very dramatic change, like asteroid impact. Both are true. It’s not neptunism versus plutonism. Rocks form both by agencies of water and agencies of heat. It’s not just whether the early atmosphere was nonoxygenic or oxygenic. There was a gradual change from one to the other.

In the case of Stuart Pivar, he is promoting an idea about the structural organization of biology which I think has some very real merit, but he rejects out of hand anything to do with Darwinian evolution.

Suzan Mazur: A lot of people do.

Robert Hazen: People are polarized. It’s not necessary to reject one in order to accept the other. The agency of change in biology over time that we see in the fossil record, that we see in modern life, that we see in microbes in hospitals, that we see in viruses much more rapidly have to do with mutation and accumulated changes. The changes themselves may be random, but the selection process is not. Selection is never random. By definition selection is non-random. In fact, in many cases it’s almost a completely deterministic aspect of change.

Suzan Mazur: How fast is astrobiology growing?

Robert Hazen: Astrobiology is growing tremendously because there is a stable source of funding. Let’s face it. Science is a social endeavor. If people can get jobs, they’re going to go into the field. Right now NASA and other government agencies and also non-governmental agencies are putting money into this. They see this as a very exciting and promising field. We’re also learning things about the natural world, about the extremes of life that have tremendous technological implications. And those technological implications help drive science as well.

Suzan Mazur: Do you have plans to update the content of the History Channel Origins of Life documentary which I think identified Darwinian natural selection as the mechanism of evolution?

Robert Hazen: It first appeared in June so I don’t think they’re going to do anything right away. You know how these things are. People move on to other projects. . . . There are always new shows on origin of life coming along because there are a lot of cable channels and they all have to fill up 24 hours a day.

Suzan Mazur: We haven’t seen these kind of topics emerge on Charlie Rose yet or serious television panels.

Robert Hazen: And the trouble with talking to me as a scientist – I like to bring in nuance. I don’t like black and white. That’s why as much as I have strong opinions about things like intelligent design, I don’t do debates. Public debates. Because it’s just the wrong forum.

Suzan Mazur: Can you address the difference between self-organization and intelligent design. There seems to be a reluctance to talk much about self-organization because of a misperceived connection to intelligent design. In fact, the word self-organization as part of the new “extended evolutionary synthesis,” which the Altenberg 16 kicked off earlier this month in Austria, has been tucked into the umbrella term “phenotypic plasticity.”

Robert Hazen: Maybe that’s true [reluctance to talk about self-organization] in some cases, but not for me because I’ve seen self-organization at work in test tubes, seen it at work under a microscope. Self-organization is just a response to local chemical interactions, chemical bonding. There’s nothing mystical about it. There’s nothing intelligent or designed about it.

I think there’s also a semantics problem here. All the scientists I know accept the basic laws of chemistry and physics. Some of those laws have to do with the interaction of molecules. They’re electrostatic in nature and they form metallic bonding, ionic and covalent bonding, hydrogen bonding, Van der Waals forces and so forth. Those kinds of ways that atoms interact are fundamental to the cosmos. They’re built to the very nature of the electron.

So when you say, do you have to start applying principles of physics as opposed to chemistry, I see it as continuity. I don’t see a division between physics and chemistry. That chemical bonding is a physical process.

Self-organization is just a consequence of minimizing the energy of a system which happens spontaneously. It happens inevitably. It’s a deterministic thing. So how could self-organization not be a part of biology?

Suzan Mazur: What about self-assembly?

Robert Hazen: Self-assembly is the same thing. Semantically self-organization and self-assembly are the same – how big is the module? Self-assembly: does that refer to a bigger piece than self-organization – I don’t know. To me they’re pretty much synonymous terms.

Suzan Mazur: Some people see a distinction.

Robert Hazen: Maybe they’re just doing it on scale. You can talk about the self-assembly of magnets. . . .

Suzan Mazur: Right and as Lima-de-Faria points out if you take a Hydra – a living organism and push it through a sieve, it will reassemble.

Robert Hazen: The same thing is true of a Golgi apparatus. It’s the same set of principles. It’s still physical and chemical interactions at the local scale – whether it’s a piece of magnet or piece of the Hydra or piece of the Golgi apparatus or lipid molecule.

Suzan Mazur: Not enough of this literature has been around in the media. People don’t understand, even the biologists don’t understand what self-organization is. There’s also been an attempt to block the literature like by Eugenie Scott’s National Center for Science Education. She’s told me they don’t support self-organization literature because people confuse it with intelligent design.

Robert Hazen: I saw an article just last week in Science or Nature about self-organization.

Suzan Mazur: That might have been the subscriber-only Science magazine article rereporting what I’ve covered over the last several months about Altenberg, but getting it wrong. You don’t see self-organization being talked about in the popular media. . . .

Robert Hazen: Well, you’re the kind of person who could really build bridges here. And I realize it makes good press to point out where scientists have fundamental disagreements, but so often – as you say – it’s just a matter of communication. I don’t know any scientist who argues against the importance of local, chemical, physical interaction. Whether it be at the level of the atom, the molecule, the cell. Those local interactions lead to what I refer to as self-assembly or self-organization.

I’ve seen it talked about because I’m very much into the “synthetics biology” community where there has to be self-organization. You don’t basically take molecules and put them together piece by piece with glue. You have to put them in a test tube and let them make the cell for you.

And that’s what Jack Szostak (at Harvard) sees and that’s what Dave Deamer (at University of California, Santa Cruz) sees and you can go down the list of the people who are doing this very basic synthetic biology work. Self-organization works.

Now I’m not saying that’s replicating the origin of life on Earth. But if we’re going to make synthetic life in the laboratory in the next 10 years, it’s going to be done through self-organization.

Suzan Mazur: Well thank you for sharing all of this with me.

Robert Hazen: The kinds of things you’re reporting on, you’re reaching a wider audience. It is important in writing to highlight where there may be controversies or disagreements because that is what’s most exciting, that’s what moves science.

Suzan Mazur: Evolution can’t just be an American perspective, can it? What do we hear from the Japanese, for instance, about evolution? There was a group of structuralists for a while in the 1980s called the Osaka Group. Molecular biologist Atuhiro Sibatani, Kiyohiko Ikeda, Pegio-Yukio Gunji. Not all of the group were Japanese, however, I-SIS’s Mae-Wan Ho participated, Brian Goodwin, Gerry Webster, Antonio Lima-de-Faria, Giuseppe Sermonti, Dave Lambert, Leendert Van Der Hammen, Vladimir Voeikov and others were a part of it.

Robert Hazen: I hate boundaries. I hate disciplinary boundaries. Talking about physics versus chemistry. I don’t see a distinction. I hate international boundaries. I hate when people set up walls.

We’ve got to draw the circle wider. Even the idea of a professional scientist versus a knowledgeable reader. There's a continuum here. And we're all part of this search for trying to understand where we come from and who we are.

Suzan Mazur: Thanks so much for sounding the trumpet!

July 27, 2008
9:14 pm NZ

Roger Buick, a native Australian, not only looks like a “rock star” with his long dark hair swept to one side and has the name to match, he actually is one. That is, he studies rocks and evidence of sulfur-eating bacteria and pre-Snowball Earth eukaryotes and such, while thinking about the possibility of life on Mars. Buick is the University of Washington professor of Earth and Space Sciences and Astrobiology, who in 2001, along with Yanan Shen and Donald Canfield, found the oldest visible evidence on Earth (in Australian rock) for a specific metabolic life process. When you see him – we met at the Rockefeller University Evolution symposium in May where his lecture was the crowd pleaser – you get the sense he’s been somewhere you’d definitely like to go.

      During the Rockefeller symposium cocktail hour, Buick informed me I’d upset the carefully delivered lecture of Harvard’s Andrew Knoll (“it’s natural selection every step of the way”) by introducing a question from the floor about Stuart Newman’s hypothesis that the 35 or so modern animal phyla self-organized by the time of the Cambrian explosion a half billion years ago without a genetic recipe.

     In addressing the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting in Seattle in 2006, Roger Buick made this assessment of the budding field of astrobiology:

“We don’t know much yet, but it’s going to be a huge amount of fun finding out. . . And everyone has something to contribute.”

      Buick has a Ph.D. (with distinction) in geology and geophysics, and a B.Sc. (Honors 1st class) in zoology and geology from the University of Western Australia. He also lectured at the University of Sydney’s School of Geosciences (tenured). He was a postdoc fellow at Harvard. For several years along the way he worked with Sipa, BHP and other mining companies as an exploration geologist.

     Our phone interview about astrobiology follows.

Suzan Mazur: NASA mineralogist Robert Hazen mentioned to me yesterday that there are about 1,000 researchers in the NASA astrobiology program. Are you involved in the program and in what capacity?

Roger Buick: Yes. I’ve got grant funding from the NASA Astrobiology Exobiology and Evolution Program and I’m also affiliated with the NASA Astrobiology Institute through the University of Arizona. And when the University of Washington was one of the NAI teams, I was involved in that too. They’re currently not funded.

Suzan Mazur: They’re not funded?

Roger Buick: The University of Washington team isn’t affiliated with NASA Astrobiology Institute anymore. There’s a team called the Virtual Planetary Laboratory, which is a very dispersed team, and the Principal Investigator on that team, Vikki Meadows, is at the University of Washington but nobody else at the University of Washington is supported through NAI.

Suzan Mazur: So your lab at the University of Washington is not supported.

Roger Buick: Not by the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

Suzan Mazur: Can you talk about your lab?

Roger Buick: Yes. We have a great lab. Four of us from different departments have collaborated to build the lab. We now have five mass spectrometers and we can analyze stable isotopes from rocks, liquids, gases for about five or six different light elements. So we can look at oceanographic processes, paleoclimatic processes, atmospheric processes. And also deep time. Biological evolution through biological isotopic fractionation within old rocks.

Suzan Mazur: I’d like to get into more of your work later in the interview, but getting back to the funding aspect of this story – Bob Hazen also said that a lot of money is being put into astrobiology not only from NASA but from other government agencies. I was wondering if you had any concern about academics being co-opted into the program because that’s where the money is? I mean even the American Philosophical Society is partnering with NASA to provide grants.

Roger Buick: I don’t think academics ever get co-opted into anything. But they do tend to follow the money. There’s no coercion in it. Academics are greedy for cash like anybody else.

Suzan Mazur: But there’s a genuine interest in the Astrobiology program, it’s not just that that’s where the money is.

Roger Buick: Oh yes. Before astrobiology was invented, people were interested in astrobiology. You just have to look at the student interest in astrobiology. They’re not following money. They have very little clue about what research money does for science. On the undergraduate and graduate level, there are a large number of students who respond enormously to anything astrobiological.

I teach a lot of courses that aren’t astrobiology, but whenever I throw something astrobiological into one of my non-astrobiological courses – it’s the part of the course that really grabs the student. You can see them light up!

Suzan Mazur: When was astrobiology invented? And what does it consist of – what areas?

Roger Buick: It consists of almost everything. It was invented in about the late 90s.

Suzan Mazur: 1998 or something.

Roger Buick: Yes. Some time around there.

Suzan Mazur: By the way, I had a subsequent conversation with philosopher Jerry Fodor regarding his comment to me earlier this year that “Astrobiology doesn’t exist. What are its laws?” He’s updated his remarks and now says the following: “I did?” Fodor said he doesn’t know the field.

Roger Buick: But the interest has been there since Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. That’s what they were writing about.

Suzan Mazur: If Fodor says he doesn’t know astrobiology, there just may be others . . .

Do you think that the private sector – scholars, for example – should be able to share in a piece of the NASA pie? I think that of the $17.5 billion 2008 budget, something like only $200 million was requested for innovative partnering programs for small businesses, etc. Proportionally a tiny amount.

Roger Buick: I’m not in favor of any government subsidy to private industry groups.

Suzan Mazur: What about private scholars?

Roger Buick: There are very few private scholars in the United States that have the infrastructure with which to be able to participate in astrobiological research in a big way.

Suzan Mazur: Isn’t that un-American?

Roger Buick: Don’t ask me what’s American and un-American or you’ll start me toward politics. Un-American is a very pejorative term and has had a disastrous history in United States politics. I don’t think anyone should ever mention the phrase “un-American”. I think of the House Committee and all that sort of stuff.

Suzan Mazur: You and your colleague Birger Rasmussen are credited with discovering the world’s oldest oil, which you found trapped between mineral grains of rock 3.2 billion years old.

Roger Buick: That’s correct.

Suzan Mazur: Have you approached Sotheby’s?

Roger Buick: No. Even at current oil prices, I think the value of a nano-barrel of oil is infinitesimally small.

Suzan Mazur: Then in 2001, along with Yanan Shen and Donald Canfield you found what’s considered the oldest life on Earth in Australian rock dating to about 3.47 billion years old?

Roger Buick: It’s not exactly the oldest evidence of life. It’s the oldest evidence of a specific metabolic process carried out by life. There are claims for older life in older rocks elsewhere in the world. But what we found was the oldest evidence for specific metabolic style, which implies the organisms responsible were as sophisticated in their biochemistry as modern organisms. It’s a claim for modern-style life. . .

The work with Shen and Canfield was discovering evidence for sulfur-eating bacteria and immediately overlying that there are stromatolites. We don’t know what sort of bugs made them. They could well have been bacteria using sulfur gases for photosynthesis.

Suzan Mazur: There was an NAI report in 2001 that said:

“Buick says that the presence of sulfate-reducing bacteria almost 3.5 billion years old suggests that a wide range of microrganisms has already “colonized the early Earth” forming a rudimentary food chain.”

You’re quoted in that same article saying:

“From spectral analysis we know that there are lots of sulfate minerals on the surface of Mars. If that planet was warmer, wetter and inhabited more than 3.5 billion years ago, we might be able to find older signs of biological sulfate reduction there provided of course that NASA sends a bloody good field geologist with lots of experience of particularly ancient rocks in remote places.”

It sounds as if you have no doubt that life originated elsewhere in the Universe and colonized Earth or were you misquoted?

Roger Buick: No. Not misquoted. But what I was trying to get across is that if life had started on Mars, we might have a better chance of tracing its earliest evolution on Mars than we would on the Earth because there are very few rocks on the Earth from the first billion years of Earth history. And the 3.47 billion year old rocks from Australia that we were working on are pretty much the oldest ones that you can find on the Earth that would show evidence of this sort of metabolism. But on Mars, there’s a good geological record from the first billion years of its history. So Mars might be a better place to explore for how life started and how it initially colonizes the planet than the Earth, if there was ever life on Mars.

Suzan Mazur: Also, I sense that your appearance at the Rockefeller Evolution symposium in May discussing this subject is an indication that the scientific community seems to be siding with you and not UCLA’s Bruce Runnegar. Runnegar didn’t speak at the Evolution symposium. His challenge is that the sulfate in the Australian rock was reduced not by bacteria but from exposure to hydrothermal fluids. Could you comment about that? Is that challenge still there?

Roger Buick: As far as I know the data has never been published except in conference abstracts.

Suzan Mazur: Whose data?

Roger Buick: Runnegar’s. I think the debate has moved on substantially since he was making his comments. There’s a lot of new data.

Suzan Mazur: Supporting your argument and your find?

Roger Buick: Consistent with our find and inconsistent with a hydrothermal origin for that fractionation. You can look at other isotopes of the element sulfur and show that the fractionated sulfur that we found has been through atmospheric processes which would argue against a hydrothermal cause for any isotopic fractionation.

There’s an important paper in Nature by a French group suggesting that not only was microbial sulfate reduction active but also microbes were disproportionating elemental sulfur from those rocks. It that’s correct, that would bear out my contention that there was quite a diverse microbiota living in that environment very early.

Suzan Mazur: Have you had significant dialogue with NASA regarding your involvement in a Mars investigation?

Roger Buick: It’s been suggested to me that I might be a good person to assist in a site selection for the next Mars Rover mission. Apart from that, no. I haven’t been directly involved in Mars research.

Suzan Mazur: On the subject of crystals. This is an area you can speak to?

Roger Buick: It depends on what aspect.

Suzan Mazur: On the subject of mineral evolution in relation to biological evolution, Antonio Lima-de-Faria wrote in his classic 1988 Evolution without Selection – he’s a cytogeneticist from the University of Lund. He thinks we’re in the fourth level of evolution, the biological, which was preceded by the atomic, chemical and mineral and that evolution from minerals to living organisms used four different routes: solid crystalline, liquid crystalline, quasi crystalline and the amorphous.

He points to Shechtmanite, an alloy of manganese and aluminum, displaying a five-fold symmetry that was previously considered to occur only in living organisms. He also thinks life has no beginning, that it’s a process inherent to the Universe. Says we’ve never had a theory of evolution. Can you comment on this?

Roger Buick: There are a number of workers who consider that interactions with minerals and mineral crystals was a significant component of prebiotic chemistry. And those ideas have been around for 50 years I would guess. The first person I can think of is Graham Cairns Smith back in the late 60s, early 70s, proposing that clay crystal surfaces were important for prebiotic chemistry.

A wide range of organic chemical/mineral crystal surface interactions have been proposed as significant in the origin of life. Personally, as a geologist I’m quite drawn by those models. The experimental work that has been done indeed shows that mineral crystal surfaces can assist in plausible prebiotic chemical reaction.

But I’d be surprised if it were the case that crystal surface chemistry is a complete explanation for the origin of life. The world’s a complex place and to try and pin the origin of life on one particular sort of process is a bit presumptuous.

Suzan Mazur: In our search for life elsewhere in the Universe are we looking for the right thing if we continue to insist it happened as a result of Darwinian natural selection?
Roger Buick: I don’t think that the astrobiological search for life elsewhere necessarily presupposes a Darwinian natural selection model for the origin of life. The NASA mantra is: Follow the water or follow the energy. It’s not follow the selection.

I think most astrobiologists are reasonably agnostic about how the origin of life occurred.

Suzan Mazur: It’s interesting that you’re saying this because the NASA/NAI -supported Astrobiology Primer – I don’t know if you saw that.

Roger Buick: Yes.

Suzan Mazur: The editor-in-chief is an Episcopalian priest. Natural selection was the mechanism of evolution cited and there was a small section on neutral selection. I spoke to the editor about this and he did say that there would hopefully be an update of the Primer in the next couple of years.

Roger Buick: I don’t think that particular volume guides NASA space missions for this or that planet or for signs of organized life or NASA’s research agenda in astrobiology. That volume is meant to be for basic education [emphasis added].

Suzan Mazur: Meant for basic education? I think that’s a problem. The Primer editor has a major book on astrobiology coming out next year published by Harvard University Press.

Roger Buick: Hmmm.

Suzan Mazur: I was wondering also, since you discovered the oldest oil, if you could comment on the possible existence of abiotic oil that’s now being talked about a lot.

Roger Buick: It’s an argument that’s been around for a long time. Thomas Gold wrote about it.

Suzan Mazur: I know Bob Hazen hosted a conference on it earlier this year at Carnegie. He mentioned that the Russians were very much behind the existence of abiotic oil. Is the idea of abiotic oil simply a way of prolonging the life of the oil industry? Or is abiotic oil a reality?

Roger Buick: We know that there are several geochemical processes that can synthesize complex hydrocarbons out of very simple molecules and we also know that some of those processes may have been more active on an early Earth that had greater rates of volcanic activity, hydrothermal alteration and things like that.

So it’s at least plausible that the 3.2 billion year old oil we found did in fact have an abiotic origin. We can’t prove it one way or the other.

Suzan Mazur: Why not?

Roger Buick: We can’t chemically analyze the oil because it’s in such minute quantities. But we can go to slightly younger rocks and we can tease apart that oil in those and find out what molecules it’s composed of. And when we go to rocks 2.4 billion years ago (something we published last year and the beginning of this year), you can analyze that oil in detail and you find molecules that could only have been produced by living organisms. Really complex multi-ring hydrocarbon molecules.

And if you go to every oil deposit we know of on the Earth today and you analyze that oil – it also has these biological indicator molecules. Abiotic oil might be produced now. It might have been more significant in the past. But it’s not a significant component of any oil reservoir that we know of on Earth. And geochemistry shows that quite conclusively.

Suzan Mazur: So it’s not any kind of quick fix.

Roger Buick: It’s no kind of quick fix. But the fact that we can synthesize complex hydrocarbons out of simple molecules using geochemical processes suggests that you could in fact officially manufacture oil. But it would be at a very high cost. Whether it would be an economically viable substitute for biologically derived oil pumped out of the ground is another question.

Suzan Mazur: A final comment?

Roger Buick: Astrobiology’s great fun. It’s stretched me enormously. And I’ve loved it.

September 10, 2008
4:42 pm NZ

When I reached origins of life investigator David Deamer by phone at his lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he told me the NASA Astrobiology Program he’s part of encourages public outreach, since the program is publicly funded, and that he’d be happy to do an interview. But in the next breath Deamer revealed that the NASA Astrobiology program had no funds: “There’s no money available to send out any new grants at all.”

      There is also currently no overall manager for the Astrobiology program, with the recent departure of John Rummel, and appointing one may be on hold until a new White House administration takes over.

     It was David Deamer’s spelunking adventures growing up in Ohio that first sparked his curiosity about origins of life. By 1957, he was recognized in a Westinghouse Science Talent Search for his investigation of the self-organization of protozoa. He says “Ilya Prigogine’s pioneering of complexity was an inspiration – for us all.”

     A half century and many awards later, David Deamer is Professor of Biomolecular Engineering and Research Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Cruz where he directs a lab on self-assembly processes and the origin of cellular life. The lab has been supported for over 20 years by the NASA Exobiology program and for over 10 years by the National Institute of Health.

     He is also part of the Carnegie Astrobiology team affiliated with the Carnegie Institution in Washington, which has been investigating “Astrobiological Pathways: From Interstellar medium, through Planetary Systems, to the Emergence and Detection of Life”. And he is informally associated with NASA Ames Research Center.

     Deamer was a professor of zoology at University of California, Davis for more than 25 years before coming to UCSC. He has chaired many academic departments at UCSC and UC, Davis (Zoology, Biophysics, Biomolecular Engineering) as well as conferences – including a NATO Advanced Research Workshop in Hungary: “Polymers in Confined Spaces”.

     In 1988, along with musician Susan Alexjander, Deamer put DNA to music to make “microtones”.

     He has six patents and is the author of 126 peer-reviewed papers as well as 10 books, including Being Human: Principles of Human Physiology, The World of the Cell, Origins of Life: The Central Concepts – with another forthcoming (2010) from the University of California Press: Stars, Planets, Life.

     Last year David Deamer lectured at the “What is Life” Symposium in Kyoto, Japan and the year before that on “Self-assembly processes in the prebiotic environment” at the Royal Society in London. He will be a featured speaker again on self-assembly at the upcoming AAAS meeting in Chicago.

     Deamer’s Ph.D. is in physiological chemistry from Ohio State University School of Medicine and his B.S. in chemistry from Duke. His current research involves how DNA can make its way through nanoscopic pores in membranes.

     Honors includes Fellow, International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (2002), Distinguished Lecture series, Graduate Center, CCNY (2004), Distinguished Lecturer, Royal Society of New Zealand (1989), Guggenheim Fellow (1986) and the Westinghouse Science Talent Search (1957), among others.

     He lists a dozen public service roles on his C.V. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Bioenergetics and Biomembranes, Astrobiology and Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere. He has previously served on the NASA Space Science Advisory Committee, NASA Astrobiology Roadmap Panel, and chaired the NASA Panel on Exobiology (1991-1995).

     My phone conversation with David Deamer follows.

Suzan Mazur: The scientific establishment and the mainstream media are slow to accept that there are mechanisms involved in evolution beyond Darwinian natural selection. Part of the problem is that they are unclear what these other mechanisms are. Can you tell me, for example, what the process of self-assembly is and self-organization and how they differ from one another?

David Deamer: It would be good to have more precise definitions because I’ve tended to use the terms more or less as synonyms. Let’s start with self-assembly, which I define as a molecular process that produces ordered structures from disordered components, yet is energetically downhill, in the sense that an external energy input is not required to get it to happen.

In contrast, most life processes are energetically uphill. A source of external energy is required for polymerization of amino acids into proteins, which is the main growth process of life. Self-assembly is more like what happens to soap molecules in solution. Do you want me to go into technical detail?

Suzan Mazur: If you could describe these terms so a general audience can understand the science without being too technical, that would be great. The concepts now are ignored and dismissed as magic, “woo-woo,” because of the spontaneous way they happen.

David Deamer: Okay, let’s talk a little more about self-assembly. It is extraordinary what certain kinds of molecules can do in an aqueous environment. The example that I use is soap molecules in water. A soap molecule is just an oily hydrocarbon chain with a hydrophilic, or “water-loving” group at one end. When they are in a dilute solution soap molecules float around at random and pay no attention to each other.

But if the concentration is increased, the soap molecules begin to aggregate into little clumps called micelles which are composed of a few hundred soap molecules each.

What drives this is a law of physics that controls the way that water molecules interact with the hydrocarbon chains of the soap molecules [emphasis added].

Everyone has heard that “oil and water don’t mix.” At a certain concentration of soap there is no more room for the hydrocarbon chains to fit into the water structure, so they begin to stick together in micelles with all the oily chains pointing into the micelle, away from the water.

Now let's add more soap. When we get up to a concentration we call the CVC, or critical vesicle concentration, the micelles begin to aggregate into membranes and the membranes form beautiful little vesicles.

These are microscopic versions of the soap bubbles that everybody has seen at the macroscopic level. But if you look at soapy water under the microscope, what you see are microscopic vesicles that form compartments with an interior volume that is separated by a membrane from the external environment.

The point is that the membranes of cells are also produced by self-assembly. Nothing in the genes tells a membrane how to be a membrane. Instead the genetic information in the genes tells the cell how to make the fatty acids (the scientific word for soap) and how to assemble the fatty acids into more complex lipids. The lipids then assemble spontaneously into membranes, the boundary structures of all living cells.

Suzan Mazur: Would you describe self-organization? Self-organization is an open
system?

David Deamer: Yes. If self-assembly is a spontaneous, energetically downhill process, I would define self-organization as a step up from self-assembly in which more complex structures, including living organisms, use energy to organize themselves into functional aggregates.

Suzan Mazur: You say it’s a step up. So you see it as some sort of . . .

David Deamer: Increase in complexity.

Suzan Mazur: Are you saying there’s a connection between self-assembly and self-organization?

David Deamer: It’s analogous to the connection we might make between inorganic chemistry and organic chemistry. Organic chemicals can be much more complex than simple inorganic chemicals. Self-organized systems are more complex than self-assembled systems and can even include populations of organisms that organize themselves in the ecosystem.

Suzan Mazur: Cell biologist Stuart Newman told me in a recent interview that self-organization requires a “flux of matter or energy to keep the structure in place”.

David Deamer: I would agree with that In contrast, self-assembly is spontaneous, and depends only on the interactions between molecules and with the environment.

Suzan Mazur: Change of subject. Why does NASA promote natural selection as the only mechanism of evolution in its literature – for example, in Astrobiology Primer, whose editor is a priest, and on television in the program Origins of Life?

David Deamer: NASA is speaking to the general public. They’re just trying to keep it simple and explain evolution to people who may not know much about it.

Suzan Mazur: But there are other mechanisms contributing to evolution. The public is not being told about this. Not informing the public is not really serving the public.

David Deamer: The Astrobiology Primer and the Origins of Life program are intended for a lay audience [emphasis added]. Biologists agree that life started simple and became more complex through a natural process, and at the most general level we call that process evolution.

If I were teaching an advanced class in evolutionary biology to a college level audience, they would have enough preparation to deal with the other aspects that go into the evolutionary process beyond Darwin’s initial explanation. It takes a lot of background to understand the details that contribute to the evolutionary process.

For instance, the Altenberg 16 you have written about are professional biologists who are trying to go beyond the simplistic explanations that involve nothing more than natural selection. They are bringing to the table ideas that require considerable knowledge to understand their argument.

I certainly wouldn’t want to state that natural selection is the only process driving evolution, but if I am going to explain what that means, my audience needs to have enough information to understand the questions that are being raised.

Suzan Mazur: But as Stuart Newman, one of the Altenberg 16 scientists has pointed out, there would be more of an acceptance of evolution if the science was where it should be. He also says “old science” is being pushed in the mainstream media.

David Deamer: I get the point. Unfortunately, creationists have politicized the science so much that the very fact of evolution is being questioned.

Perhaps this is why scientists tend to fall back on the bedrock of Darwin’s basic concepts when they speak in a public forum. No one denies the factual basis of evolution, but we are still learning how evolution takes place, particularly in animal and plant populations in ecosystems.

I have debated creationists and intelligent design people in public forums, and my impression is that they are not looking for scientific truth. Instead they are working to advance their political aim, which is to get Christian fundamentalism taught in public schools as an alternative to evolution.

Suzan Mazur: Cytogeneticist Antonio Lima-de-Faria from the University of Lund refers to the “cycle-of-submission” within academia where scientists are unnecessarily conservative, stick together, protect their foundation grants instead of recognizing the validity of alternative mechanisms and advancing the science. This kind of fundamentalism feeds a creationist perspective.

David Deamer: No matter what we do, the creationists are going to focus on things we don’t know and forget about all the things we do know. I’m not sure there is any fundamental disagreement among scientists about the basic facts of evolution.

Suzan Mazur: There is clearly a horde mentality alive in the science blogosphere.
Should more scientific inquiry into the origins of life be encouraged by opening up the peer-review process? Often the papers of independent researchers are rejected because they’re outsiders and may take an unorthodox approach.

David Deamer: I would like to see the evidence you cite that independent researchers are rejected because they’re outsiders.

Suzan Mazur: They may take an unorthodox approach. In other words, they may not use all the science jargon that the scientific establishment is used to seeing in papers. So reviewers may reject a paper because it’s not written with a tight science jargon. Rejection, you don’t speak our language.

David Deamer: For every example you might give of a rejected unorthodox investigator, I could cite a counter-example. I’ll mention just one, Gunther Wachtershauser, a Swiss patent attorney. Wachtershauser came up with an idea all of his own. He was an absolute outsider.
His idea was published first in 1988 in Microbiology Reviews. Because of the strength and the novelty of his idea and the elaboration that he was able to give to that initial publication, it really caught people’s attention.

He followed this up with a Scientific American article and a series of other papers. I’ve been in meetings with Gunther. He’s not one of the gang by any means, and yet we are paying attention and are testing his ideas. Some of them stand up to critical tests, others don’t.

I would cite Wachtershauser as a clear example of an outsider breaking into the scientific process on the force of his ideas.

Then there are other independent researchers whose ideas just don’t stand up to critical evaluation. They complain that they can’t get their paper published, but the fact is that their ideas just don’t make sense.

Peer review is the only process we have for sorting out the good ideas and getting them out there for others to think about.

Suzan Mazur: What is the standard for acceptance of a paper?

David Deamer: The standard is based on judgment calls by knowledgeable referees and editors.

Suzan Mazur: Acceptance doesn’t require use of the same tight scientific jargon. It’s essentially about a concept and clear thinking.

David Deamer: It’s like being a good chess player. That’s not a bad metaphor. A good chess player wins whether or not he or she is a member of a club.

If they come in and begin to win games based on unorthodox strategies, they are going to gain automatic respect. It’s the same in science, which tends to attract people who think they have good and interesting ideas. I really doubt that there is a significant number of independent researchers who have really good ideas but are being rejected just because they are outsiders.

Suzan Mazur: Do you see any conflict of interest with many of the Astrobiology journal board members being NASA employees or NASA-affiliated?

David Deamer: It’s a bit of a problem, but we deal with it. It comes down to numbers. There are 10,000 researchers who call themselves neurobiologists, and perhaps 30,000 - 40,000 chemists. But there are probably fewer than a hundred researchers who call themselves astrobiologists. Because their research is usually funded by NASA, it can be hard to find knowledgeable people to serve on editorial boards who don’t have a perceived conflict with their NASA grants.

Suzan Mazur: But you’re looking to include outsiders on the board?

David Deamer: Most of the board members are not NASA employees. There are eight senior editors, two of whom are civil servants at NASA Ames. There are 75 members of the editorial board, but only five NASA employees. Over a third of the board members are from other countries, so I think we are well represented internationally.

We certainly want to get more people into the Astrobiology program, and it is growing. There are now 500 people who attend the annual Astrobiology meeting, both younger researchers and people like me who’ve been associated with astrobiology since it began in 1996.

Suzan Mazur: How many academics are now in the Astrobiology program?

David Deamer: It’s a few hundred if we include graduate students and post doctoral associates along with the principal investigators. Each member organization within the Astrobiology Institute has a principal investigator who assembles a small team of a few other faculty members that will get support from the program. And each faculty member might have one or two graduate students and a postdoc supported by the grant.

Suzan Mazur: And your affiliation with NASA at this point is…

David Deamer: I am associated with the Carnegie Astrobiology program that is funded through the Carnegie Institution of Washington. I’m also informally associated with the program at NASA Ames.

Suzan Mazur: You’re not a NASA employee.

David Deamer: No. The only funds I receive through NASA are in the form of grants that typically support one postdoc and a grad student.

Suzan Mazur: So academics are not being lured into the Astrobiology program because of the money.

David Deamer: Definitely not! The research funds available are much less than grants from the National Institute of Health. They being lured into it because of the interest and excitement generated by this new field.

Suzan Mazur: The NASA Astrobiology funds are not expanding?

David Deamer: No. In fact, last year the budget was so restricted that new proposals could not be funded and were put on hold.

Suzan Mazur: Do we know very much about astrobiology 10 years or so on in the investigation?

David Deamer: Yes, absolutely. Astrobiology has put life on the Earth into a larger context of our solar system and our galaxy. The origin of life on Earth is likely to be a universal process, and that’s why we are so excited by the discovery that Mars once had shallow seas. Perhaps in the next decade we will have clear evidence that life began there as well, by the same process of self-assembly that we discussed earlier.

It also has given us a vast amount of information about the history of life on the Earth. We now know that oceans were present well over four billion years ago, and there is evidence for life in the isotopic record that goes back about 3.8 billion years ago.

Suzan Mazur: Do you take a position as to whether life began outside Earth or on Earth?

David Deamer: I use plausibility arguments to answer questions like that. Plausibility is an individual judgment call based on knowledge. In my judgment it is implausible that life came to the Earth in the form of extraterrestrial spores or microrganisms. We can’t rule it out but I consider it to be a very low probability.

On the other hand, I consider it to be very plausible that the organic compounds required for life to begin on the Earth were delivered to the Earth by comets and meteorites during late accretion, and that synthetic reactions were producing complex organic molecules in the early Earth environment. I think life most likely began on the Earth by a self-assembly process in which moderately complex chemicals self-assembled into vast numbers of microscopic encapsulated systems. By a yet unknown process, a very few of these happened to be able to capture energy and nutrients from the environment and began to grow by polymerization reactions. There is much more to the story, but this is my guess about how life began.

Suzan Mazur: Can you tell me who is making the decisions following the departure of
John Rummel?

David Deamer: I know John has left and there is an acting director now, but not much more than that.

Suzan Mazur: What do you think the origin of the gene is?

David Deamer: I think genetic information more or less came out of nowhere by chance assemblages of short polymers. We don’t know that these polymers were exactly like RNA and DNA of contemporary life, but in the laboratory we use those polymers as experimental model systems.

Most people are open to the possibility that there are simpler molecules that we haven’t discovered yet that could contain what we now call genetic information. There may also have been specific sequences of monomers within a polymer that happened to allow it to fold into a catalytically active molecule. One idea is that RNA could have acted both as a catalyst and as a genetic molecule, so that at one stage in evolution life existed in an RNA world.

Suzan Mazur: So you see the line between life and non-life as being arbitrary?

David Deamer: Yes. There was probably an extensive mixing of genetic information at that time, as Carl Woese and others have suggested. This means that there was no tree of life at that time, instead just countless numbers of microscopic experiments occurring everywhere as the first catalysts and genes learned to work together in cellular compartments.

Suzan Mazur: Then does life have a beginning or is it just part of a process inherent to the
Universe?

David Deamer: It’s part of a process.

Suzan Mazur: Evolution starts when the Universe is born?

David Deamer: It depends on what you want to call evolution. The Universe is over 13 billion years old, but life originated on the Earth around 4 billion years ago. Biological evolution began with the transmission of genetic information between generations, and selective processes acting on variations within microbial populations.

Suzan Mazur: But can it be separated from the rest? Do you see biological life as relying on certain previous footprints?

David Deamer: Yes to both questions.

Suzan Mazur: Lima-de-Faria speaks of four levels of evolution – atomic, chemical, mineral and biological. He says there are coincidental patterns arising in organisms because they have the same atoms with the symmetries of the minerals transferred intact to the cell and organism level.

David Deamer: I agree to a certain extent, but there is still little evidence that minerals played an essential role in the process. Certainly astrobiology has given us a satisfying narrative of how life came to exist on the Earth, all the way from stellar nuclear synthesis to planet formation and habitability and then self-assembly of organics in aqueous environments. When energy sources impinge on these self-assembled structures they capture some of that energy and then interesting processes begin to emerge. So there’s a narrative describing a continuum from which life gradually emerges.

Suzan Mazur: Do we have enough data to construct a periodic table in biology like that in
chemistry?

David Deamer: I think we can construct a hierarchy of increasing complexity. It’s possible to think of the periodic table as a hierarchy of complexity in which hydrogen is the least complex atom. As the elements become progressively heavier with the addition of protons, neutrons and electrons, each level has a different set of chemical properties and therefore a different set of potential complexities as they interact with each other. In this sense I think we could describe a hierarchy of complexity levels in life, but I don’t think we would find much periodicity.

I’m writing a book about the origin of life for the University of California Press that is scheduled for publication in 2010. This is the approach that I’m taking in the book, that we can understand the origin of life in terms of the emergent properties of interacting systems of molecules.

Suzan Mazur: You’ve commented a little bit about the Altenberg group already – do you think that the “extended synthesis” is something the biology community will embrace at this point?

David Deamer: Epigenetic phenomena is one example of what can happen that is well beyond the usual idea that genes are all we need to understand evolution.

Suzan Mazur: Epigenetics has actually been tucked under the umbrella term plasticity in the extended synthesis. Do you think the extended synthesis was a good call, that the biology community will embrace this graft onto the modern synthesis?

David Deamer: This is how good science happens, when either an individual or a group of scientists think they might know something beyond the current consensus. They try to construct a new synthesis of ideas that has better explanatory power, and if they have a convincing argument, their peers will follow. Science should be open to these kinds of challenges.

This is what Steven J. Gould did with punctuated equilibrium, which caused so much controversy at first. Ed Wilson did this with sociobiology, and a consensus is slowly building that we can understand behavior in evolutionary terms.

Suzan Mazur: Along those lines, Stuart Newman predicts “a big turnaround in evolutionary theory”. He cites non-linear and saltational mechanisms of embryonic development contributing to evolution. Newman has told me: “It was Darwin who said that if any organ is shown to have formed not by small increments but by jumps, his theory would therefore be wrong.”

What are your thoughts about this?

David Deamer: I’d need to know more about this to have a knowledgeable comment. I don’t know what Darwin really meant by his statement, or how it could be tested now that we understand so much more about embryological development.

October 2, 2008
4:06 pm NZ

I have been having bits and pieces of communication with former NASA Astrobiology Institute chief Bruce Runnegar in recent weeks in between his field trips to Australia – sometimes via his wife Maria, a biochemist at the University of Southern California. Runnegar is investigating the oldest complex fossils – Ediacara fauna, in Australia as well as in Namibia, South Africa and Newfoundland. He speaks with a quiet ease and told me during my phone call to him last week at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is a professor of paleontology, that he’s “firmly disconnected from NASA for the last two years.” But I was interested in how NAI’s virtual organization works, so he agreed to explain. Runnegar is as comfortable discussing that as he is “the kerfluffle about the French Impressionists” on the Victorian scene, and defending natural selection in business (our chat was prior to the Dow falling 700 points).

      Although no longer NAI chief, Bruce Runnegar still considers himself an astrobiologist. His interest is in events that coincided with the Cambrian explosion of multicellular organisms a half billion years ago. And while he recognizes self-organization as a mechanism of evolution, he doesn’t buy the idea of plasticity in Cambrian multicellular organisms. Said Runnegar: “There was a common ancestor which didn’t resemble anything that we see in the Cambrian.”

     Runnegar also challenges fellow native Australian astrobiologist Roger Buick’s analysis that the 3.47 billion-year-old rock at Australia’s North Pole holds the oldest evidence for a specific metabolic process carried out by life – sulfur-eating bacteria. Runnegar’s got a year of sabbatical and plans to publish his results by December demonstrating that Buick’s findings are not correct, that the sulfate deposits Buick found were due to exposure to hydrothermal fluids, not bacteria.

     Bruce Runnegar served as the third director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, beginning his tenure at Ames Research Center in September 2003. He was director of UCLA’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics for five years prior to that.

     Dr. Runnegar has a D.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of Queensland, Australia.

Our interview follows.

Suzan Mazur: The NASA Astrobiology Institute established 10 years ago has been described by Astrobiology magazine – not the Astrobiology journal with links to NASA – as follows:

“a virtual organization composed of NASA field centers, universities and research organizations that collaborate to study the origin of evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe. Astronomers, biologists, chemists, geologists, paleontologists, physicists and planetary scientists are involved with teams chosen via peer-reviewed proposals.”

You were the director of the NAI a few years ago – roughly how many people are involved in NAI, and what would you say was your most important achievement as director?

Bruce Runnegar: Astrobiology is not a NASA journal or a NASA-influenced journal. It’s a journal like any other journal in the community. It’s run by an organization which is interested in making money.

The leader of that organization has chosen astrobiology as a developing field. Her business model is to find new fields of science and try to develop journals in those areas. There are a lot of NASA-connected connections with it, of course, because a lot of people working in astrobiology work with NASA or are funded by NASA. It’s certainly not a NASA mouthpiece.

Suzan Mazur: You were director of NAI a few years ago?

Bruce Runnegar: Yes.

Suzan Mazur: How many people are involved with NAI and what would you say was your most important achievement as director?

Bruce Runnegar: When you ask how many people are involved, you’ve got to ask how many people are loosely connected. I’m not trying to avoid the question, but one way of looking at it is how many people are paid on a full time basis. And that’s relatively few.

But many people are connected as academics, as advisors of postdocs and graduate students. People fully employed on NASA funding? There are a few hundred students and postdocs mainly. Academics get some salary assistance as is the tradition in American universities. NASA center members get more of their salaries from these sorts of sources. So a few hundred people are employed full time.

But there are probably, as you quoted in the article with Roger Buick, in the order of 1,000 people who are somehow connected with the NASA Astrobiology Institute. There are hundreds of institutions that are receiving some funding from the NAI.

There are 15 or 16 teams currently. They are also composed of consortia of other organizations, other universities, other research institutes. So if you total the number of organizations, it’s in the order of hundreds.

My greatest achievement? What I was trying to do was to overcome the inherent difficulty of this kind of organization in that fierce competition to obtain membership through peer-reviewed processes. And then as soon as one is funded – and not just one person but tens of persons per team – then the idea is that these teams must then instantly learn to reverse that thinking and become collaborative and start to share resources, work toward a common good.

So taking the process somewhere down that track is what I was aiming for and regard as the most important achievement. Summarizing that, it’s collaboration after competition.

Suzan Mazur: As former NAI director, can you tell me who makes policy at NAI and decides, for instance, that natural selection is the mechanism of evolution the public should know about?

Bruce Runnegar: No one decides that sort of thing in this organization. This is a scientific research organization. So what the public learns is what is believed to be the state of the art of science. The organization assists with that process trying to educate the public about new discoveries, but these discoveries like all science are subject to community acceptance and understanding.

Science, as you know, goes down the wrong track for many decades – as it did in the Earth Sciences when people didn’t believe in continental drift and plate tectonics. Then eventually it takes a U-turn.

Suzan Mazur: The NAI supported publication, Astrobiology Primer. Were you heading NAI at the time this was supported?

Bruce Runnegar: Yes.

Suzan Mazur: The explanation for natural selection being promoted as the sole mechanism of evolution in that publication – the decision about that would have been whose?

Bruce Runnegar: This is not a decision. The people who compiled that Primer are aiming to provide an educational service and so they write or wrote or acquired definitions of words. Basically trying to explain the jargon of astrobiology. Some of these explanations almost anybody could have different opinions about. [emphasis added]

There were reviews of the document by scientists connected with the institute [NAI], but I don’t think there’s any attempt to provide a stamp of approval for any particular definition.

Suzan Mazur: I spoke with Lucas Mix, the editor of the Primer, about this. Mix is now writing a book on astrobiology, forthcoming from Harvard University Press. He referred me to the minor mention of neutral selection in the Primer, but natural selection was really the only mechanism of evolution discussed.

Do you think the next edition of the Primer will be updated to include current scientific thinking?

Bruce Runnegar: Natural selection is not a mechanism, it’s the process by which the results of evolution are sorted.

Suzan Mazur: There are mechanisms which are being discussed in a major way, which were not covered in the Astrobiology Primer.

Bruce Runnegar: What do you mean by alternative mechanisms?

Suzan Mazur: Like self-organization for instance.

Bruce Runnegar: That’s what I’m saying. There are a lot of mechanisms we know about. Self-organization being one of those kinds of mechanisms. Neutral evolution of genes. In other words, substitution without any change in the expression of the genes as far as we can tell. Those are sorts of mechanisms. But all of these are going on all the time producing a set of organisms which then natural selection can act upon.

You have to have variability in populations or in the biosphere. And that variability is produced by those mechanisms including self-organization. But ultimately it is competition or selection among those members of the biosphere that is the evolutionary process. That was Darwin’s insight. Not the production of variation, but the ultimate effect of pruning by this natural selection process.

I think natural selection operates on all those mechanisms. That’s, I guess, the point.

Suzan Mazur: There is a growing understanding that the peer-review process is rigged to maintain science status quo – that it holds back scientific progress.

Swedish cytogeneticist Antonio Lima-de-Faria calls this the “cycle of submission”. He speaks of censorship in literature, like in the 2002 Encyclopedia of Evolution, which left out even A. Muntzing’s work with Galeopsis in the 1930s where Muntzing crossed two different species and by doubling their chromosome number got Galeopsis tetrahit which occurred spontaneously in nature. Lima-de-Faria says no successive random mutations were needed.

In the case of Astrobiology journal’s board there is a significant representation of NASA employees, which David Deamer recently acknowledged in an interview with me.

Do you see this as a problem, is there too much of a status quo operating in the peer-review process holding back discovery?

Bruce Runnegar: How is this any different from any other form of human activity? It happens in the arts. It happens in music. You remember the kerfluffle about the French Impressionists when they first came onto the Victorian scene. How dreadful their art was. It’s just human nature to want to maintain the status quo and to keep things on the path one is accustomed to. And it’s no different in science. People don’t like to be shaken up with new discoveries. And new ideas do shake people up. So there is naturally some resistance. And it inevitably shows up in peer-review processes. It’s just part of the way humans work.

Suzan Mazur: Are we any closer to answering the questions about the origin of life 10 years on?

Bruce Runnegar: I think we’re getting a lot of new information that certainly bears on that question both in terms of how life actually works and that comes from the understanding we’re getting from genomes. Not just the old idea that there is DNA that makes a gene and the gene makes proteins and the proteins all work together. And that all of the processes are much more complicated than people imagine. There are many more loops in the biochemistry of organisms. There are many cases where the RNA itself does the job and feeds back into the protein loop. So this whole system has become so much more complex. We understand the nature of life a lot more than we did 10 years ago. It’s not just astrobiology. This is the advance of science as a whole.

Suzan Mazur: What are your thoughts about the origin of the gene?

Bruce Runnegar: Nearly every gene we see in nearly every organism is a modified copy of another gene that existed previously. A gene can stay more or less intact or evolve to have a new function by changing constituents of the gene, or a piece of a gene can be spliced with a piece of another gene in an evolutionary context.

As to how genes got started in the first place – that’s a more complicated question. But we know from experiments in the last decade that you can actually make RNA that will evolve to do something in a lab in hours to days. So self-organizing of molecules that can do something worthwhile is certainly a very plausible hypothesis.

Suzan Mazur: Is the line between life and non-life arbitrary?

Bruce Runnegar: That’s a more difficult philosophical question. That’s something that we haven’t really got a good idea of yet because we have such a diverse difference with the possible caveat of some viral-like particles. There it becomes rather difficult to separate. But that’s all based on the same biochemical system. A bit like computer viruses are very separate from programs.

It’s kind of a question that doesn’t have any meaning if you don’t have computers and codes in the first place. So it’s all part of the living system and I don’t think the definition matters in that case. With regard to life elsewhere, it’s something we have no experience of, so it’s hard to know whether we’d be more blurred with the inorganic world or not.

Suzan Mazur: Do we arrive at biological life via atomic, chemical, mineral evolutionary footprints?

Bruce Runnegar: That’s what everybody thinks is the most reasonable.

Suzan Mazur: So everything is wired back to the atomic level?

Bruce Runnegar: First you have to build elements and you have to make them in stars. You know the story. Then you have to make compounds out of those elements. And if you go through and suggest what compounds are likely to be involved in life-like processes, you end up with a small short list. Carbon being one of those.

Then some of the fundamental things that we know about life – you don’t want too many strong bonds amongst all these atoms because otherwise you end up with a solid that’s like a piece of rock. You want some strong bonds and a lot of weak bonds.

There are obvious chemical reasons why life should prefer certain sorts of chemistry, etc. Yes, I think there is a hierarchy. Cells are part of that hierarchy, tissues, spatial organization, etc.

Suzan Mazur: Lima-de-Faria, who I mentioned earlier, says because life is ordered, wired back to the atomic level, that there’s no such thing as a mutation. What appears to be a mutation is not really a mutation. What are your thoughts?

Bruce Runnegar: Mutations to me means change in some component of the system. So if you had a house made of white bricks and had someone come along and hack one out and put a black brick in place – that would be a mutation. It doesn’t matter what the atoms are. It’s a black brick versus a white brick. It’s the brick that’s important not the material it’s made from.

Suzan Mazur: Your current research is biotic and environmental events that accompanied the Cambrian explosion of multicellular organisms 500 million years ago. You’re working with some of the oldest complex fossils in places like Namibia, Australia and elsewhere. Is it your view that it’s natural selection every step of the way?

You do accept that mechanisms like self-organization come into play.

Bruce Runnegar: I said that before. The production of change, novelty has probably got many separate ways of doing that. Big jumps in things like going from one cell to multicellular organization may require different mechanisms, from changing the color of the stripes on zebras or something like that. But ultimately the choice of what survives to the present is competition among components of the biosphere that coexist. That’s what we define by the words natural selection. It’s the process that’s operating on all these other mechanisms that makes natural selection kind of universal.

Suzan Mazur: Do you see any evidence of plasticity and a spontaneous emergence of body plans in development say 500 million to 600 million years ago?

Bruce Runnegar: Plasticity, again, I’m not sure what that means. Does that mean that one can transform into another as distinct from both diverging from a common kind?

Suzan Mazur: Ability to change form.

Bruce Runnegar: I think all that’s nonsense. I’m a cladist. I believe that any two things have a common ancestor which looks like neither of them. If you take birds and crocodiles as an example – the common ancestor of any bird and any crocodile didn’t look like either a bird or a crocodile. It looked like something else. Birds have evolved their characters from that common ancestor in one direction and crocodiles in the other direction.

So you can take the same logic back to that time. There was a common ancestor which didn’t resemble anything that we see in the Cambrian. And it provided on one line of one branch something we would see and something on the other side we would see, but the common ancestor of those two were – we can’t necessarily imagine what it looked like because we have no representative of it in the fossil record.

Suzan Mazur: How does the backbone form?

Bruce Runnegar: We know that flies that belong to a group of organisms known as arthropods have segments. The body is broken up into pieces that are all similar. Vertebrates have the same thing, better seen in a fish than a human perhaps. And we know from the genes that work those, that specify those segment patterns in vertebrates and the genes that specify those segment patterns in arthropods – that those genes predate the last common ancestor of those two groups.

If you go back from your average fruitfly and your average human and ask what did the common ancestor of these two animals look like – you have to say it didn’t look like either a fly or a human. And then it becomes difficult to know because we don’t have any clear representatives of that common ancestor. Probably because they were soft-bodied. Probably small. But we know that they were segmented.

Ultimately, the fact that bones are divided into vertebrae comes from that time when none of us had bones anyway. The bones came along later. But the patterning, the breaking of them up into pieces, comes from a genetic mechanism that existed long before bones.

So it’s not amazing that we have a vertebral column. All the extra bits that go with it – the spine, the attached muscles – all those things can be explained in functional terms. The fact that we’ve got discs between the hard bones is probably just a functional thing because otherwise they’d grind each other away. . . .

Suzan Mazur: You disagree with Roger Buick’s analysis that the 3.47 billion year old rock in Australia presents evidence of the oldest metabolic process carried out by life – sulfate reduction by bacteria. He’s been quoted in an NAI report as saying life from Mars probably colonized Earth.

You say the fractionated sulfur Buick found is due to exposure to hydrothermal vents and that the barite has always been barite.

Buick argues the fractionated sulfur he found has been through atmospheric processes. He told me in an interview that the debate has moved on substantially and that a French group published an important paper in Nature backing up his findings. He says your data has never been published outside conference abstracts.

Would you comment on why you think you’re right and what that means in terms of the origin of life?

Bruce Runnegar: If you’re talking about the original paper, forget about this business of going through the atmosphere because they only measured the ratio of two sulfur isotopes – the most common, which is sulfur 32. And the second most common, which is sulfur 34.

The convention is to take the ratio with the second most common 34, to 32 the most common. So you get a fraction, then you multiply by 1,000, because it’s a small fraction.

If you look at just that in the modern world, you find sulfur-reducing bacteria like sulfate from the ocean, which on the scale that we’re talking about, is about +20. And they reduce it to sulfide. That sulfide has a value which is negative. Let’s not even worry about it. It’s less than zero let’s say.

So they’ve shifted the ratio from +20 down to something below zero. And the reason they do this is, or the way they do this is, because they prefer to use the lightest sulfur isotope – sulfur 32, than the slightly heavier sulfur 34, because it works better in chemistry.

Chemistry likes to do the same thing. But the reactions that chemistry does slow down those temperatures. So ordinary chemistry would do the same thing. It would reduce seawater sulfates to sulfides. But at the temperature of the modern ocean that process hardly works because without the assistance of life, no chemical reaction takes place.

In principle, the two processes don’t have a different result. The only thing that makes it a signature for life is the temperature at which it happens. If it happens at ocean temperature, that’s one thing. If it happens at a hot temperature, that’s another thing. Then it could be either.

With the low temperature of the ocean, it’s just not going to happen without the assistance of life. So then it comes back to what is the environment of the rocks in the deep distant past? Because you have to know what the temperature of this – what was going on at the time. What processes were going on when the sulfides were formed in these ancient rocks

Roger started his career working in that part of the area. Did his Ph.D. on that sort of stuff. At that time they thought these sulfate minerals they found in the rocks had been produced by the evaporation of seawater. There was a sort of a marginal, at the edge of the sea lagoon where the water was evaporating. So it would have been seawater temperatures.

The arguments they used for saying these minerals were originally a different mineral are, I believe, not useful. If you accept the argument that they are now barium sulfate and they always were barium sulfate, then you have a different idea of what the original environment was like.

The most plausible thing is that they were made not at hydrothermal vents but at hydrothermal fluids. Because if you have hot rock under the ground, in this case a granite, then water coming from the surface goes down in cracks. It’s fairly cool. When it gets down to near the granite it gets hot and so it rises. And these develop circulation systems in the rocks.

Somewhere it’s going down and it’s cool. Somewhere else it’s hot. The vents occur where it comes up out of the surface. But I don’t think these things were out of the surface. They were in the sediments and in the rocks when they were forming. This water going down would dissolve barium from the rocks. That’s where the source of the barium is.

Suzan Mazur: When do you plan to publish?

Bruce Runnegar: I’ve got a year of sabbatical. So sometime this year. I’m hoping to get this into the press by the end of the year.

There are reasons why I don’t think Roger is correct.

Suzan Mazur: Please continue.

Bruce Runnegar: I think these fluids that were coming up were carrying the barium. They were fairly hot. The barium reacted with the sulfate in the ocean which means that the deposition took place near the surface. Barium sulfate is very insoluable and that’s how the sulfate deposits were formed.

Now the question of whether this sulfate was reduced by bacteria or not is another issue that’s more complicated still. But I don’t think the evidence is compelling. Let’s put it that way.

Suzan Mazur: And what does this mean in terms of the origin of life?

Bruce Runnegar: I’m an astrobiologist, so I think it’s important that we not raise false hopes. It doesn’t matter very much on Earth. These kinds of investigations and experiments are relatively inexpensive on Earth. You can do all this for a few tens of thousands of dollars. But it’s a highly different matter if you’re going to Mars and spending a billion or two billion dollars returning samples or doing experiments in situ.

I think it’s important that we be very confident about what we can say about data before we make these experiments elsewhere. That’s why I’m taking the very cautious approach of wanting to be 100% sure before saying yes. Whereas I think some other people maybe are more enthusiastic, which is good for astrobiology perhaps, but perhaps not ultimately what we need for these kinds of investigations.

Suzan Mazur: Do you lean one way or another as to where life originated? Do you think it happened on Earth or perhaps on Mars?

Bruce Runnegar: We know that there are natural ways of transporting material between Earth and Mars we didn’t know about 15 or so years ago. We also know from work done at CalTech that some of the rocks we’ve received from Mars, or at least one of the rocks that we’ve received from Mars, hasn’t been heated enough to destroy life by the process of shifting it from Mars to Earth. So it’s plausible that material containing microbes could have been transferred from Mars to Earth anytime in the last four billion years of Earth history.

So if life originated on Mars, it could conceivably have been transferred to Earth by this process. Perhaps less likely going the other way because Mars is a much smaller body and there’s much less likelihood I think – I don’t know this for sure – of getting materials going the other way. But that’s the end of the story.

Nobody knows whether life has ever existed on Mars, and if it did, what kind of life it is. Whether it’s the same as Earth life or not

Suzan Mazur: And how do you see life originating?

Bruce Runnegar: The origin of life one might expect would be a kind of set of experiments, but I think one of those experiments survived today. That’s what natural selection does. Natural selection ultimately removed all the other failed experiments.

Suzan Mazur: And does natural selection exist throughout the Universe?

Bruce Runnegar: I think it should. It’s a process that we see repeated in our own society. And that’s the way businesses survive or fail depending on whether customers want the products. Right? That’s natural selection in the case of business. It’s a process that one would think would be universal.

Suzan Mazur: Do you think the Darwinian model is the model we should use in our economics, survival of the fittest?

Bruce Runnegar: I’m not an economist. And that’s an expression which raises all sorts of emotional responses in the audience. But you may know that some of the most interesting models of evolution involve things like game theory. The famous game called the Prisoner’s Dilemma where altruism is actually one of the most important components of evolutionary systems. So natural selection doesn’t necessarily mean cutthroat competition, and that’s what businesses I think also realize – that it’s sometimes better to promote biodiversity of businesses rather than than try and grind the opposition to a close.

I’m no expert on this, but you only have to look at some of the ways businesses work collectively to realize that it’s not as black and white as much as this description you just said [survival of the fittest] might indicate. I’m all in favor of it in principle, but I’m not in favor of a caricature of the process.

Suzan Mazur: Do you recognize the new Extended Synthesis – the reformulation of the neo-Darwinian theory of natural selection that was kicked off at Altenberg in July?

Bruce Runnegar: I know nothing about it I’m afraid. I’ve been busy in the field.

Suzan Mazur: What is your connection currently to NASA?

Bruce Runnegar: I’m two years beyond some of the post-employment restrictions. I’m firmly disconnected from NASA for the last two years.

Suzan Mazur: Is there a final comment you’d like to make?

Bruce Runnegar: I’ve spoken at length because sometimes a brief comment leads to misunderstanding. I want it to be clear where I stand on these issues because they are contentious.

September 16, 2008
4:12 pm NZ

Over the phone I detect a touch of William Shatner’s Kirk in the voice of NASA astrobiologist Christopher P. McKay. McKay admits he was inspired by the television series Star Trek 30 years ago and the “great voyages of discovery”. But while most of his professional life has been at NASA Ames Research Center in the Space Science Division, beginning as a Planetary Biology Summer Intern in 1980, he objects to being typecast saying, “I’m a scientist and not a humanist? That’s idiotic.”

      McKay is now a planetary scientist at Ames researching the evolution of the solar system as well as the origin of life. He’s been involved in planning Mars missions including the 2009 Mars Science Lander. He’s an authority on Titan (Saturn’s moon) and was co-investigator on the Titan Huygen 2005 probe. McKay is also Program Scientist for NASA’s Robotic Lunar Exploration Program.

     He says he does his best thinking in extreme Mars-type environments – the Arctic, Antarctic, Siberia and Chilean desert. In 1994, The Planetary Society honored him with the Thomas O. Paine Memorial Award for the Advancement of Human Exploration of Mars.

     McKay now serves on the board of directors of The Planetary Society and on the editorial boards of Astrobiology journal as well as Planetary and Space Science journal. He studied physics and astrophysics as an undergraduate and has a Ph.D. in AstroGeophysics from the University of Colorado.

     Chris McKay is author/editor of several books, among these: Case for Mars II, Comets and the Origin and Evolution of Life, Earth’s Climate, From Antarctica to Outer Space: Life in Isolation and Confinement.

     My telephone interview with Chris McKay follows.

Suzan Mazur: You were co-investigator for NASA’s Phoenix Mars mission in May. We were told that perchlorate was found in the soil. And that clay and possibly methane exist on Mars as well. What do each of these signal?

Chris McKay: Let’s start with the methane. This was evidence from ground-based telescopic spectroscopy and the European Mars Express mission. There’s a lot of controversy about the methane and there’s still not yet a coherent story about the data and its interpretation. I actually belong to the camp that believes it’s not real, that the methane data is a mistake.

Suzan Mazur: What would the existence of methane signal?

Chris McKay: If the observations are valid and there is methane on Mars, it tells us that there is a very strong source of methane and that it varies on short time scales, much less than a year. Biology is one possible cause.

Suzan Mazur: What about the clay?

Chris McKay: Clay is much more clear. There’s evidence from orbital data for phylosilicates, which is a fancy word for clay. That’s pretty solid and not surprising. It’s consistent with what we understand about Mars. And the distribution of the clays is interesting.

Suzan Mazur: What is interesting about the distribution of clays?

Chris McKay: The clay is found mostly in the ancient regions of Mars, probably indicating that these are the locations which had water.

Suzan Mazur: This is clay that has fossilized?

Chris McKay: Not fossilized but old.

Suzan Mazur: And that means?

Chris McKay: It’s a relic from some time when Mars had a lot more water. This is the leftover mud from an early wet muddy period.

Suzan Mazur: What is the significance of finding perchlorate?

Chris McKay: The perchlorate recently detected by the Phoenix mission adds to the mystery of the Martian soil. Perchlorate is an oxidizing form of chlorine and we do find it in deserts on Earth, for example the Atacama desert in Chile. Perchlorates are not bad for life, but they are not good for life either. They certainly do not rule out biology.

Suzan Mazur: Aside from drilling down a kilometer or two into Martian soil to identify what is there, which some say could take anywhere from decades to centuries – you’re keen on the idea of terraforming. Nudging Mars back to its previous life, if Mars had one.

You refer to life on Mars as a possible “second genesis”. Life on Earth as the “first genesis”? Would you say a bit more about your vision?

Chris McKay: There are two thoughts here. One is the notion of a second genesis: Did Mars have life and was that life a second genesis. Was there a separate, independent origin of life on Mars? Did that occur?

That’s a question about the history of Mars that we seek to answer with robotic missions or with human missions. It’s a science question.

If we find there was life on Mars and that it represents an independent origin of life – what I call a second genesis of life – that’s wonderfully important scientifically as well as philosophically. Scientifically it gives us the opportunity for the first time to compare two types of life. All life on Earth is one type. If we find a second genesis on Mars, we will then have the opportunity to compare biochemistries for the first time.

It’s also wonderful philosophically because if right here on our own solar system life started twice, once on Earth and once on Mars, then it’s clear the Universe is full of life. That it starts on all Earth-like planets.

As long as we only have one example of life (Earth life), we never really know if it isn’t just a cosmic fluke. So to my mind the search for a second genesis is the most important science question about Mars. That is the science-driver in terms of understanding Mars’ past history and potential for life.

Now there’s another question about Mars’ future. The second genesis is the story about Mars’ past. The story about Mars’ future is: Could Mars have life in the future?

That would involve global change. We’d have to warm Mars up once again to make it a planet suitable for life.

Suzan Mazur: Critics of terraforming ask how we would do this on Mars when we have big environmental problems on our own planet. Then there’s the cost of terraforming Mars to consider as well as the dangers of messing around with the Martian environment without fully knowing what may be out there. Would you comment?

Chris McKay: There are two concerns. One is the cost. And I think the cost is probably small. We’re not talking about a massive engineering project. We’re actually talking about producing gases on Mars the way we produce them on Earth and letting nature take its course.

The normal scenario people have when they think about terraforming is some huge science fiction-like enterprise – massive fleets of spacecraft shining giant lasers down on Mars. That’s not what I think would make sense.

What would make sense would be producing gases at a low level on Mars – the same gases we’re producing on Earth – supergreenhouse gases, which are now warming up the Earth. Then once Mars warmed up, letting life follow its own evolutionary history. The actual effort involved would be quite modest.

But there’s an issue separate from the economic issue, which is: Is this something we want to do and how does it relate to Earth?

Sometimes people say we need to do this so that we have a lifeboat after we’ve messed up the Earth. So we’ll have somewhere to go. That is not a practical option and it’s ethically absurd.

Suzan Mazur: Anything more you’d like to say along those lines?

Chris McKay: Yes. If Mars had a separate origin of life, there’s a possibility life is still there on Mars, even if in a dormant state. In that case I have advocated bringing Mars to life, back to Martian life. “Mars-aforming” rather than terraforming.

Suzan Mazur: I visited Saudi Arabia a few times and have seen the Saudi successes at reclaiming the desert.

Chris McKay: We’re also reintroducing the wolf here in Yellowstone Park. Restoration ecology is a watchword for this millennium.

It used to be ecology meant doing nothing. Ceasing to do bad things represented ecological action. Now we realize doing positive things is important too. Civilization has become ecologically pro-active. Reintroducing the wolves in Yellowstone is an example.

We could bring a planet back to life. It would be the first really positive thing on our collective resume of space missions.

Suzan Mazur: What about space law? In 1967 we had the Outer Space Treaty, which said there would be no nukes or any other WMDs in orbit of Earth or installed on the Moon or any other celestrial body. Also setting out that space is res communis – no one country has jurisdiction to make laws in space. 98 countries signed and 27 ratified. Did the US and other major powers ratify this treaty?

Chris McKay: I think so, but I don’t really know that.

Suzan Mazur: Then in 1979 we had the Moon Treaty based on the UN Convention of the Laws of the Sea, which spelled out that the profits of space would be shared equally among nations. Leading the charge that resulted in the US not ratifying or even signing the Moon Treaty was the L5 Society who were promoting Gerard O’Neill’s ideas of space habitats (the L5 women said they would not become pregnant until they were in the space colony). L5 were also advocates of terraforming. 13 countries did ratify the Moon Treaty but no major powers.

Those ratifying included: Australia, Austria, Belgium, China, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines and Uruguay. France and India signed, but Russia, China and the US neither ratifed nor signed.

I was writing stories for Omni magazine at the time and asked Malcom Forbes what he thought of the Moon Treaty. He was not in favor of the Moon Treaty. Here’s some of what he told me, which he reprinted in Forbes:

“I think it’s a nice academic theory, but the point is, who’s going to spend all the money to dig out the ore if all of it has to be turned over to the commune of nations? You obviously can’t go out and stick a flag down, as in the old colonial days, and say the moon is yours. This is your Saturn. But you just can’t remove incentive and say everything belongs to everybody. That would mean nothing belongs to anybody, and nobody would then go get it. . . .

I think that if the French find a lot of ore on a particular asteroid, then France should be able to sell the ore in the world marketplace. Then somebody else will go after another asteroid for ore, as entrepreneurs have done on Earth for oil and for everything else. Competition makes people go seek it, and mankind profits universally. Though a drug company may own the rights to a certain medicine, mankind globally eradicates a certain disease.”

Does current space law address this issue about sharing the profits of space and what are your thoughts?

Chris McKay: I have thoughts on it but I’m not involved in space law at all. I think these points are irrelevant.

Suzan Mazur: Really?

Chris McKay: They are based on what I think is a false assumption, which is that there is money to be made in space. I think that’s smoke & mirrors. It’s the same smoke & mirrors that they applied to the space station and the production of wonder drugs in microgravity.

Suzan Mazur: So where are we now then in the discussion about the commercialization of space? In 1985 Aviation Week launched a magazine called Commercial Space: The First Business Magazine of the Space Age. The thinking was that space was “not just adventure, exploration and national prestige anymore” – in fact, 2,100 companies were supposedly supporting space activities at the time.

I noticed that Aviation Week has a web page article last year called “International Commercial Space Development for the Future 50 Years”, but the original AW magazine Commercial Space seems to be defunct.

I also remember having a lengthy conversation with someone at Shearson Lehman in the mid 80s about investments in space. You don’t think the thunder’s still there regarding business in space?

Chris McKay: I meant the way Forbes was describing it. Mining in space. There’s business in space, of course. The business in space is Earth observation and tourism, the only businesses in my view that make sense at all in space.

Suzan Mazur: Earth observation.

Chris McKay: In my view, satellites in orbit looking at Earth is not really space business. It technically is in industry parlance.

Suzan Mazur: So these 2,100 companies that were supporting space activities at the time?

Chris McKay: I bet 99.999% of them were supporting launch and Earth observation, Earth satellites, Earth communications.

Suzan Mazur: You don’t think the drug companies are sending up experiments.

Chris McKay: There have been no drugs developed in space. There have been no companies beating down the door. The only business in space has been the use of space as a platform to look at or talk to Earth. That’s a huge industry.

When I go out into the field, I have a little dish and I can get Internet through satellite. I love it! I get on Google Earth and I can look into my backyard and love it. That’s not space industry in my view, that’s Earth industry. That’s not what I mean by space industry.

What Forbes was implying was that there’s gold on an asteroid and someone’s going to go out and mine it and sell it on Earth. That’s what I say is bogus.

Suzan Mazur: That’s science fiction.

Chris McKay: It’s not just science fiction, its absurd. Science fiction when it’s done well is about things that we can’t do but we can think possible. Absurd are things that just make no sense at all.

Suzan Mazur: Have the number of space interest groups been expanding or has the pouf gone out of the souffle in recent years about interest in space?

Chris McKay: I think they’re high right now, partly because NASA is back on the track to go to the Moon and Mars. But there’s still – you go to NASA headquarters and there are still people talking about how we’re going to make money mining oxygen on the Moon and we’re going to have return on investment. We’re going to sell oxygen mined on the Moon. I think it’s so stupid that I’ve stopped even arguing about it.

I don’t think there is a mineral-based economic activity on the Moon or Mars or asteroid belt that’s going to pull private industry. But people still believe there is.

The L-5 Society/Forbes view that you just quoted – which is the view that there are mineral resources in space and we’re going to get rich by mining asteroids and the Moon, selling those minerals to passing spaceships or bringing it back to Earth – I just think that’s absurd.

Tourism is not absurd. Clearly there is a lot of interest and a lot of money to be made in tourism. Serious contenders are putting money forward in space tourism, like Virgin Galactic. Nobody is spending real money developing a mining operation on the Moon.

Suzan Mazur: Now I understand the Astrobiology Program funds are hurting. Is that right?

Chris McKay: That’s another matter. The science will continue at some small level. Science funds will go up and down as fashions dictate. Sometimes it’ll be geology and astrobiology. They’ll always be in there. But it’s always going to be a low level government-sponsored activity.

Suzan Mazur: What of the Astrobiology Program?

Chris McKay: Any science activity. Lunar geology, Martian astrobiology, the search for life, understanding volcanoes on the Moon and Mars – all of these are worthwhile science activities and they will all occur, but will be a low-level activity.

Suzan Mazur: Seems peculiar with people so interested in the origin of life – I would think there would be more resources put into this.

On the theory side of origin of life – are you involved in the review of papers and would you tell me what you look for in accepting or rejecting a paper? What reservations do you have in reviewing a paper coming from outside your peer circle?

Chris McKay: Mostly, is the paper presenting new ideas or new data. A lot of astrobiology papers written on the origin of life are just somebody’s afternoon speculation.

Suzan Mazur: You’re on the board of . .

Chris McKay: I’m on the editorial board of several journals.

Suzan Mazur: Which ones?

Chris McKay: Astrobiology, Planetary Space Science, probably some others I can’t keep track of. I get a lot of papers to review and I spend a lot of time reviewing papers. I think I’m the favorite reviewer for anything that’s astrobiologically speculative.

A lot of people lately – because astrobiology has become so fashionable – like to write what you could call Sunday afternoon theories. Well, maybe life could be based on boron, for example, and they write about it – all just speculation.

I insist that papers have new ideas, important new ideas or important new data. That they don’t just be somebody’s random ideas like wouldn’t it be interesting if there was life on a planet that was really hot and based on heavy metals and . . .

Suzan Mazur: So a paper needs math.

Chris McKay: Not necessarily math, it needs substance. It needs to have some meat to it. I’m using the word in the old English sense. A paper can have an important new idea or important new data and develop that idea or data. What I’m coming across is a lot of papers that are basically sophomore term papers on the origin of life. They review the field and then speculate about possibilities.

Even though the paper’s well written, I’ve read this 50 times before. If this were a sophomore term paper in an astrobiology class, maybe I’d give it an A. But it doesn’t need to be published in the literature because it doesn’t add anything to our collective understanding.

Suzan Mazur: What percentage of papers do you actually give a nod to?

Chris McKay: Oh I’m pretty generous – about 80% or 90%.

Suzan Mazur: Really.

Chris McKay: Yes. I’m known as the soft reviewer. That’s just the way I am. My view of reviewing is that it’s not the onus of the reviewers to be the gatekeepers. My name doesn’t get attached to the paper. It’s not a problem for me if a paper gets published that’s garbage. The author’s name is attached to it. The primary responsibility for quality and acceptability is the author’s.

I reject only in egregious cases, where I think it would be a real waste of the journal, in the sense that I’m a guardian of the ink space of the journal. We have finite pages we can publish each year and I don’t want to waste those pages.

Again, I don’t assume intellectual responsibility for the papers. The authors do that. I give authors broad benefit of the doubt.

Suzan Mazur: How many of these papers coming in for review would you say you’re reading on a weekly basis?

Chris McKay: I’d say it’s at least one a week. It comes in waves. Right now I have so many that I have to keep a separate folder on my computer called papers and proposals to review.

Suzan Mazur: Are you saying you’re overwhelmed with papers at this point?

Chris McKay: One a week is overwhelming. When astrobiology was less popular there’d be two or three a year. But one a week is overwhelming.

Suzan Mazur: It’s interesting that you give the nod to 80% or 90% of papers.

Chris McKay: Most scientists submit a paper that does have new ideas and new data. Scientists realize their name is on the paper. So the papers are generally not just random ruminations.

Suzan Mazur: These papers don’t require data, but it helps to have data. The important thing is to have a clear idea and develop it.

Chris McKay: If you’re publishing a paper without data, then you’ve got to have some pretty good new ideas. There are papers which present new ideas and explore the implications and present testable hypotheses derived from those ideas. That’s an interesting paper. Let’s publish that.

Suzan Mazur: What is your perspective on the line between life and non-life being arbitrary?

Chris McKay: I don’t think we understand that division. It’s useful to think of it in two ways. One is that the division is sharp. That it’s like a phase transition. Like the difference between water and ice. It’s rather sharp. And then it’s meaningful to talk about living systems as distinct from non-living systems or pre-biotic and biotic.

The other view is that it’s not sharp. That it’s gradual. That it’s a continuum of a state. And then it becomes hard to define when something is alive and when it is not.

Suzan Mazur: That’s when it’s arbitrary.

Chris McKay: We as scientists don’t know.

Suzan Mazur: But what is your best guess?

Chris McKay: My best guess is that it’s a sharp transition. I guess that based on the nature of life which is this feedback between information and matter. You have information stored in the genome and then you have material systems which are organic molecules which implement that. The feedback is self-amplified feedback. Typically self-amplied feedbacks have sharp ons and offs.

Suzan Mazur: Now you say in searching for life elsewhere in the Universe, the logical things to look for are energy, carbon, liquid water, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus. But you don’t say look for natural selection. Do you think Darwinian natural selection exists throughout the Universe?

Chris McKay: Yes. Natural selection, I think, is the essential aspect of life no matter where we find. It would be great to have some way to detect natural selection, but we’re unlikely to be able to. We have a hard time detecting it here on Earth and showing that it’s occurring.

But we see the products of it. In our biochemistry we see the results of billions of years of natural selection and optimization. So we detect natural selection indirectly.

If we were to go to Mars and find a dead rabbit on the surface of Mars, a Martian rabbit, that is neither alive nor is it undergoing reproduction and selection. But it would be proof of Darwinian selection on Mars because that rabbit or the Martian animal, the dead Martian animal would be proof of natural selection because only natural selection could produce that dead animal. And so we would have found evidence of life, evidence of natural selection – and if it was an alien biochemistry, evidence of a second origin of life, all from having found a single dead animal.

There’s an unfortunate problem in the English language where life refers to a process, refers to an individual, and it refers to a collective phenomenon that has a history. When people talk about defining life – they mix all those together in a messy way and it makes no sense. . . .

Suzan Mazur: What about other mechanisms of evolution, self-organization and self-assembly? They precede natural selection?

Chris McKay: Something had to precede Darwinian natural selection. The Darwinian paradigm breaks down in two obvious ways.

First, and most clear, Darwinian selection cannot be responsible for the origin of life. Secondly, there is some thought that Darwinian selection cannot fully explain the rise of complexity at the molecular level. [emphasis added]

Suzan Mazur: So you’re saying Darwinian natural selection sets in at what point?

Chris McKay: I think it must set in after life has started. After there’s a genome, genotype. That’s the one obvious place where Darwinian natural selection fails – is in the origin of life. It can’t be Darwinian all the way down.

Suzan Mazur: At what point did the gene set in?

Chris McKay: We don’t know. That’s the question. It’s got to do with whether the transition to life is abrupt or gradual.

Suzan Mazur: What is the gene?

Chris McKay: The gene in a general sense is anything that stores information in an algorithmic way. Stores instructions how to build something. It doesn’t have to be DNA, it could be RNA or it could be something else. But at some point life invented software.

I think the language of computers is very useful here. There’s a distinction between hardware and software. Darwinian selection only works when there’s software. And everything that’s prebiotic is hardware.

At some point life got onto software. And that’s when Darwinian selection could begin. Darwinian selection can’t work on hardware by definition because Darwinian selection involves inheritable traits. Only a system that has software has inheritable, mutable traits. It doesn’t have to be DNA, but it has to be software. And it has to record algorithmic information, instructions.

Suzan Mazur: You began your association with NASA in 1980 as a Planetary Biology Summer Intern at NASA Ames – which is where you are today.

Chris McKay: Yes. Still here. Same building.

Suzan Mazur: In a different capacity though. Those Star Trek episodes about a positive future really meant something.

Chris McKay: Yep.

Suzan Mazur: We’ve gone through a dark period in recent years – could more films about a positive future actually help bring one about do you think? How close is science fiction and science reality?

Chris McKay: Let me not just talk about films. Let me talk about literature and the humanities. The humanities is the study of human things in human terms. And they’re incredibly important to defining our human view. Science doesn’t tell us how to live our lives or how to strive for a better world. The humanities do that. And so there’s a terribly important role for literature, film, art.

Science gives us a lot of valuable information. But it’s the humanities that tells us about the human condition and what motivates us to make the world a better place – literature and art. It’s our understanding of our humanness in human terms. That’s what the humanities are.

I am a student of the humanities because I am a human being. I completely reject a distinction between science and the humanities. I’m a scientist and not a humanist? That’s idiotic.

Suzan Mazur: Science and art have a close connection historically. Thinkers like da Vinci, for instance, and so many other examples.

Chris McKay: Even in the non-genius end, as a human being and part of this culture I interact with this culture. I find motivation and inspiration and learn from being part of this culture. The human aspect of my environment is very important to me.

Literature, science fiction, are part of how we together create an image of the world as we would like it to be. So when we write stories about a positive future, we are in a very real way telling ourselves we shall make it so. We shall make a positive future. I’m a big supporter of that. It’s an important part of my own motivation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Suzan Mazur’s interest in evolution began with a flight from Nairobi into Olduvai Gorge to interview the late paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey. Because of ideological struggles, the Kenyan-Tanzanian border was closed, and Leakey was the only reason authorities in Dar es Salaam agreed to give landing clearance. The meeting followed discovery by Leakey and her team of the 3.6 million-year-old hominid footprints at Laetoli. Suzan Mazur’s reports have since appeared in the Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, Archaeology, Connoisseur, Omni and others, as well as on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox Television News programs.

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