In the next few days, I will post some papers that I have recently skimmed through that relate to the issue of origins. Thanks to the bio grad student who brought some of these papers to my attention.

"Chance and necessity do not explain the origin of life" (Nov 2004), by J.T. Trevors and D.L. Abel, is a paper that points out the current shortcomings of the idea of abiogenesis. I found this to be an interesting read since a comparsion is made between life (DNA/RNA) and some computer concepts, like operating systems and instruction sets. The paper asks a lot of tough questions:

How did inanimate nature write

(1) the conceptual instructions needed to organize metabolism?

(2) a language/operating system needed to symbolically represent, record and replicate those instructions?

(3) a bijective coding scheme (a one-to-one correspondence of symbol meaning) with planned redundancy so as to reduce noise pollution between triplet codon‘‘block code’’ symbols (‘‘bytes’’) and amino acid symbols?

We could even add a fourth question. How did inanimate nature design and engineer

(4) a cell [Turing machine? (Turing, 1936)] capable of implementing those coded instructions?

The tone of the paper seems to be authoritative rather than cautious. Consider the conclusion:

New approaches to investigating the origin of the genetic code are required. The constraints of historical science are such that the origin of life may never be understood. Selection pressure cannot select nucleotides at the digital programming level where primary structures form. Genomes predetermine the phenotypes which natural selection only secondarily favors. Contentions that offer nothing more than long periods of time offer no mechanism of explanation for the derivation of genetic programming. No new information is provided by such tautologies. The argument simply says it happened. As such, it is nothing more than blind belief. Science must provide rational theoretical mechanism, empirical support, prediction fulfillment, or some combination of these three. If none of these three are available, science should reconsider that molecular evolution of genetic cybernetics is a proven fact and press forward with new research approaches which are not obvious at this time.

If you are a UCI student, you can access the rest of this paper at a UCI computer. Go to the UCI library site, do a search on Cell Biology International, and then go to the November 2004 issue (Volume 28, issue 11). You can also view this from home by establishing a "UCIFull" VPN and then following the same instructions.