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Perfectible Harmony - home |
Individual life forms are absolutely built from the ground up, but life itself is
as much about breaking down as it is about building up. The Miller-Urey experiment
will grind to a halt when either the atmospheric gases become depleted or the resevoir
of water is exhausted or there's not enough electrical energy to spark further reactions.
Amino acids are crucial for lifeforms as we know them, but is it in and through them that
find life? Does life just suddenly emerge at a certain level of complexity?
Or is it far more elemental and much, much simpler?
Life on this planet has existed in one form or another for nearly 4 billion years.
But did life pre-exist form? What if the Miller-Urey experiment were extended so that
the amino acids that were created were subject to a decompositional process which
returned water to the resevoir and gases to the atmosphere? If we could also
recoup the energy released from breaking the chemical bonds it could be stored
and converted to the electrial energy needed to re-create new amino acids.
I can't imagine how the new extended experiment could work, but it's still a good
thought experiment ... and maybe sonething that could be simulating on a computer.
The questions I find myself asking are:
1) Is a self-sustaining and self-regulating process a living system?
2) Is life to be found in the any of the simple elements or complex molecules of matter itself?
3) Or is life the harmony of the myriad ongoing and interrelated processes?
4) Is it fair to say then that life itself is above physical nature
and neither derived from nor produced by
physical matter; nor is life an emergent phenomenon arising from the complexity of physical interactions.