| PLANETARY DREAMS: The Quest to Discover Life Beyond Earth Robert Shapiro New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN 0-471-17936-1 | 306pp. | HC/FCI | $27.95 | |
Biochemist Robert Shapiro is concerned with the origin of life. He wants to find out how it happened — by learning the secret from nature, rather than by proclaiming what the truth must be. This makes him, alas, a controversial figure, even something of a heretic.
In the long history of investigations of this profound mystery, proclamation has been the rule rather than the exception. Perhaps the prime example comes from the debates over the reality of spontaneous generation — a concept endorsed by such noted thinkers as Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Galileo, Copernicus, and Goethe. Dr. Shapiro presents the words of the seventeenth-century Flemish biologist Jan Baptiste van Helmont:
If you press a piece of underwear soiled with sweat together with some wheat in an open mouth jar, after about twenty-one days the odor changes and the ferment, coming out of the underwear and penetrating through the husks of the wheat, changes the wheat into mice. But what is more remarkable is that mice of both sexes emerge [from the wheat] and these mice successfully reproduce with mice born naturally from parents... But what is even more remarkable is that the mice which came out of the wheat and underwear were not small mice, not even miniature adults or aborted mice, but adult mice emerge!" – page 82 |
On the following page, Dr. Shapiro observes, "More remarkable yet is the absence of skepticism in the account." However, skepticism was operating in some quarters, notably in the contest between Henry Bastain and Louis Pasteur. Bastain held that he could produce microbes from a preparation of boiled urine; Pasteur disputed this. The matter was to be settled before a commission appointed by the French Academy of Science. But, in the event, some of the commissioners failed to show at the appointed time (although Bastain and Pasteur were present), and the commission then declared itself dissolved. It may have been just as well; for Bastain might have succeeded in his demonstration by producing, not new life, but the growth of heat-resistant spores which had endured the prescribed period of boiling.
And the actions of the commission may have demonstrated wisdom, for the question had profound philosophical and theological implications. As Pasteur himself expressed it in a lecture at the Sorbonne [page 85]:
Scientific controversies are much more lively and passionate now because they have their counterparts in public opinion, divided always between two great currents of ideas, as old as the world, which in our time are called materialism and spiritualism. What a victory for materialism if it should be affirmed that it rests on the established fact that matter organizes itself, takes on life itself, matter which has in it already all known forces! ... Of what good would it be then to have recourse to the idea of a primordial creation, before which mystery it is necessary to bow? To what good then would be the idea of a creator God?" – page 85 |
In the present, we have learned much more about life than Pasteur ever dreamed of. Nevertheless, the controversy he described still persists. We know that life cannot be coaxed out of dirty underwear or boiled urine unless it was there already. Yet all our science tells us that spontaneous generation must have happened somehow, long ages ago.
No resolution of the dispute is expected any time soon. Dr. Shapiro wrote this book to advocate an approach to a solution. That approach depends on a certain world-view, which in turn rests on what is at bottom a very personal decision.
In Dr. Shapiro's formulation, there are three sides to the dispute. The first can be broadly termed religious fundamentalism. This encompasses both the Christian fundamentalists (e.g. the Christian Science Research Center, which Dr. Shapiro describes in detail) and Anthropic Cosmology, which holds that the universe was made for Humanity alone, and is empty of life except for Earth.
The second side is what he terms "The Sour Lemon School." In this view, life is but a fluke of the universe1, an improbable exception to the rule of chaotic barrenness and meaninglessness that will soon be snuffed out as accidentally as it chanced to begin.
The key thing both the preceding views have in common is that there is no compelling reason to plan for a long-term future.
Dr. Shapiro belongs to the third school, which adheres to a concept he calls Cosmic Evolution. In his view (and in mine), the cosmos is teeming with life, though intelligence may be rare. Something he labels the Life Principle "stacks the deck", so to speak, so that certain conditions favor the emergence of life. If this is so — science has no evidence yet to support it — then the presence of liquid water and gases like methane, hydrogen, carbon dioxide on the surface of a planet circling a star as stable as our own should, over millions of years, lead to a natural progression from simple amino acids through polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons to RNA and DNA, and ultimately to living organisms.
The goal of Dr. Shapiro's present book, then, is to argue for continued investigation into this question of how life originated. He advocates a multi-pronged approach: Experiments with pre-biotic conditions that may demonstrate the existence of a life principle; more vigorous exploration of the planets of our solar system (especially Mars, Europa and Titan) in hopes of finding micro-organisms; a complementary hunt throughout the solar system for alien artifacts such as derelict probes (or active ones) that may have been left here by long-departed survey teams; and of course expanded SETI.
As the book reveals, this quest has been pursued since the time of the classical Greeks. Many are the dreams it has spawned (and some of the many are zany indeed). A few are described, and one is illustrated in the book's selection of color plates — though most of those hew close to reality. Dr. Shapiro also provides an extensive chapter-by-chapter list of endnotes, and a very comprehensive index.
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