Hi Nick, Russ, and all, Far too much here to be able to answer, but I feel this is one I should pick up a little. I am relieved that your question is quite specific:
> I am curious to know if others have read this book, and what you might think > of it. I haven't read this book. Maybe someday will have time. I should end the email there. But I do know Nick Lane somewhat, and I know this story rather well from the technical literature. So, a too-brief answer. 1. Good to be aware that this is Nick's adoption and somewhat-personally-developed interpretation of ideas Mike Russell has been arguing for something like 30 or 40 years. Nick gives credit, and is a fair colleague as well as a good expositor, so no worry there. The particular angle he emphasizes is part of his larger interest in energetic constraints on life. His interest in their relation to the formation of Eukaryotic cells is developed in his earlier book Power, Sex, Suicide. The flavor it gives of the author's interests may help put the Vital Question treatment into a richer context for readers. 2. These arguments have strengths and weaknesses per my tastes, largely divided according to the styles of the argument put forth. The strengths tend to be on rather general points, many of which I agree with. The reason for focus on the deep ocean is that much of the chemical disequilibrium between an Earth-interior which has a lot of iron in a relatively reducing ( = electron-donating) state, and oceans and atmosphere that are driven to be more oxidizing ( = electron-accepting) due to asymmetric escape of hydrogen from the upper atmosphere, is concentrated on a tectonic Earth at spreading centers. Because of the way crust forms, most of these are under the oceans on a wet planet like ours. A thing to appreciate about Mike's arguments -- and the reason for the obsessive focus on white smokers -- is that it has so far been difficult to do chemistry that looks like biochemistry purely from the electron-donating potential of the small molecules that are concentrated in the chemical focusing regions at or near mid-ocean spreading centers. Therefore Mike wants to also harness the pH difference between the primary alteration fluids from the subsurface rock-water interaction zone, and the surrounding oceans. He wants to add the energy from the pH difference to the energy from the electron-transfer chemistry, in the hope that this will make it easier to produce something that looks biochemical. There is a more general way to say this: In modern cells, the organic chemistry that builds biomass, and certain pH differences that carry biological energy, are interdependent and closely coupled in their architecture. Mike started arguing (I think in the 1970s) that this coupling of pH energetics and biochemistry should be viewed as continuous all the way back to pre-cellular geochemistry. That is, don't try to explain the biochemistry and the bioenergetics separately and figure out how to link them later; rather, view them as having been interdependent all along. That general line of argument was picked up first (in a big way) by Bill Martin at Dusseldorf, and then later added Nick Lane, and then several others in more limited roles. Sometimes these authors have been collaborators and said they agree; other times they have had variant interpretations and been in various conflicts. Sometimes figuring out what they are arguing about can be difficult and even mystifying. 3. The place where all these arguments get poor in my view is that they go from these general insights (which may be right or wrong, but are reasonable to pursue), to trying to unpack them into very detailed stories about the trajectory of life from the very beginning to very advanced. They harp on white smokers (a quite particular kind of rock-water alteration environment) because they can tell a visual story about how the geometry and pH gradients in the rock/water system could be imagined to continue directly to the geometry of cells. This is one of those things that -- on a wild hair -- could turn out to have some relation to what really happened, but is built on a kind of visual metaphorizing like "Oh look! That cloud looks like a puppy's face!", which is neither a very conceptual nor a very robust style of argument. There is a vast number of problems that have to be solved to understand the various emergences of complexity between early chemistry and cells, and for most of these it is difficult to argue that anyone in the world has contributed really compelling ideas. The imagination that Russell, Martin, Lane, or whomever, will plot a detailed story line through this 10,000-dimensional space of ignorances, and get anywhere very close to correct, seems to me fanciful. As a matter of personal preference for style, I would prefer if they separated their general arguments about energy flow -- which I think are sensible and insightful and the strong part of their work -- from the problems of growing complexity, where they have little more to offer than any scientific layman. That would make it easier to judge the strengths and weaknesses, and would save time. They tend to mix the strong and the weak parts, and have equal vigor and enthusiasm for both, which I think muddies the waters. The thing that such scenarioistic reasoning hides is that there is a wide variety of rock/water alteration environments even on the present Earth, and the ones on the very earliest Earth were likely to be somewhat different. Where it is best to look in this large parameter space is actually very wide open. These authors (I think) are aware of this complexity, but it doesn't seem to affect their style of argument much. It is a challenge, admittedly, to know what to do that is better than scenarioizing in this domain. This is where I think "theory" should really have something to add. What one would like is to learn about particular mechanisms, to figure out conceptually why they matter, and then to try to turn that into a more systematic way to scan a large parameter space, and to reason from experiments about where to search for locations or mechanisms that may be different from the ones where you discovered a phenomenon, but which fit more correctly into the bigger picture. This is a lesson that, it seems, both physics and biology should have taught us many times over. If you look at the function a thing has in the present, and ask what function its predecessor had that enabled its current form, often there will be a deep conceptual continuity, but only rarely is that reflected in a superficial visual continuity parsed according to our own habits of dividing the world into objects. I like the way some physicists like Elbert Branscomb (also part of the Russell collaborative circle) try to take problems apart in this way, and there are some good chemists in Origin of Life who seem to operate at this level (sometimes Nick Hud of Georgia Tech, George Cody at Carnegie Institution, a good guy names Joseph Moran at Uni Strasbourg who mostly works in synthetic chemistry, and probably others I could think of). The slow and tentative style of that reasoning doesn't translate well into a satisfying public narrative, so it is harder to see the things many of these guys have done. In the end, probably all the approaches will be helpful, so I should close by saying I am glad all of it is there. My small quibbles about style shouldn't detract from that. Hope this is helpful or useful, Eric > > Nicholas S. Thompson > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology > Clark University > http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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