A Brief History of Creation Read online

  For our mothers.

  Not everything mentioned in the Torah concerning the Account of the Beginning is as the vulgar imagine, for if the matter were such . . . the sages would not have expatiated on its being kept secret. The correct thing to do is to refrain, if one lacks all knowledge of the sciences, from considering those texts merely with the imagination.

  —MAIMONIDES, The Guide for the Perplexed, c. 1190

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  1. BY THE ACTION OF YOUR SUN

  Ancients ask where life comes from * Anaximander explains the natural world * Aristotle writes of “spontaneous generation”

  2. PROVANDO E RIPROVANDO

  Francesco Redi and the scientific method * Van Helmont’s recipe for mice * “All life comes from an egg”

  3. THE EYE OF A GNAT

  The Enlightenment transforms science * Hooke pens Micrographia * Antonie van Leeuwenhoek discovers the microscopic world

  4. THE LABORATORY OF THE ATHEISTS

  Voltaire subscribes to intelligent design * Atheists seize upon the origin of life * Buffon observes “reproduction”

  5. A VITAL FORCE

  Andrew Crosse’s “extraordinary experiment” * Vitalism and “imponderable fluids” * Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation captivates Britain

  6. BREATHED BY THE CREATOR INTO A FEW FORMS OR ONE

  The Beagle sets sail for the Galápagos * The Origin of Species wins converts * Charles Darwin imagines a “warm little pond”

  7. PLEASANT, THOUGH THEY BE DECEITFUL DREAMS

  Pasteur dispels the notion of a “useless God” * Thomas Huxley grooms a new generation * The germ theory of disease versus spontaneous generation

  8. NO VESTIGE OF A BEGINNING

  The Earth grows ever older * J. B. S. Haldane imagines a “half-living” thing * Alexander Oparin reimagines an ancient planet

  9. A LABORATORY EARTH

  Stanley Miller creates the precursors for life * Scientists flock to exobiology * NASA enters the origin-of-life game

  10. THE NUCLEIC ACID MONOPOLY

  Apollo 11 looks for clues on the moon * Sidney Fox and his proteinoid microspheres * Crick and Watson discover “the secret of life”

  11. LIFE EVERYWHERE

  An enigmatic Martian rock * Panspermia revisited * Life in meteorites?

  12. ONE PRIMORDIAL FORM

  The last universal common ancestor * The Woesian revolution * Scientists look to undersea vents

  13. A CELL IS BORN

  The birth of the RNA world * Genetic engineering opens doors * A new genesis?

  EPILOGUE

  APPENDIX: RECIPES FOR LIFE

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  INDEX

  PREFACE

  It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.

  —MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein, 1818

  THE SEAFLOOR WAS DARK GREEN, sloped like the outer edges of a huge jade dome, and cut by deep chasms and steep ravines. There were few signs of life. Hardly anything could be seen living that deep in the ocean, only a few slumbering giant clams and the occasional tube worm, some as large as 8 feet long. Every so often, one of the enormous worms would puff out a blood-red plume that would linger in the water like octopus ink, drifting past enormous white pinnacles that dotted the landscape. The largest towered sixteen stories above the ocean floor. Their surfaces were rough like bark, giving them the organic appearance of trees in some alien forest, spreading their branches toward the sun.

  But no sunlight could penetrate that deep. A full half mile below the surface of the ocean, the ghostly pinnacles had never seen any kind of light at all until they were illuminated by the first dim flickers of a strobe light fastened to a lumbering metal craft that crept slowly above the ocean floor.

  The Argo was about the size of a long canoe, enclosed by a large metal cage resting on sled-like rails. It didn’t look like much, but the little unmanned craft already had a long and storied history. The Argo had taken part in some of the most important deep-sea explorations ever conducted and had found the wrecks of both the Titanic and the Bismarck. It carried some of the most sophisticated oceanographic sensors and cameras in the world, which transmitted their signals via 6 miles of cables connecting it to the surface and the research ship Atlantis, where geologists Barbara John and Gretchen Früh-Green steered it by means of a tiny joystick.

  The scientists knew the Atlantis would soon have to return to port. It was early in December of 2000, and the ship had already been at sea for more than a month. The weather was turning rough—the first signs of a big squall coming in from the northeast. The Atlantis was a large ship—274 feet long with a crew of twenty-three and space for several times that number. It could handle a storm, but the delicate work of exploring the ocean floor required gentle seas.

  The choppy water was already making it difficult to operate the Argo. Every swell of the ocean and sway of the ship tugged at the little craft down below. The Argo was tricky enough to maneuver under normal conditions, but even trickier as the scientists tried to navigate it through an undersea equivalent of the Alps, filled with unusually steep pinnacles and sharp cliff faces.

  The Argo was exploring a deep-sea mountain called the Atlantis Massif, about halfway between Europe and North America, near the largest underwater range in the world, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The scientists steering from above had reason to suspect there was something special about the Atlantis Massif. The first clue was its size. It was enormous: 10 miles wide and 14,000 feet tall, about as big as Mount Rainier. The second was its composition. While much of the bottom of the ocean is covered by a mixture of minerals, the Atlantis Massif is made up almost entirely of a dense, green rock called peridotite, usually only found at least 20 miles beneath the Earth’s crust. Still, John and Früh-Green didn’t expect to find what no human being had ever seen, something that would become, for some, a crucial clue in the quest to answer one of the greatest enigmas in science.

  As they cautiously steered the Argo along the rim of the mountain, the two scientists saw the first of the treelike pinnacles. More and more became visible as the craft drew closer. The first thing that struck John and Früh-Green was their height. One that would later be named Poseidon was 180 feet tall. As they steered the Argo toward the giant pinnacles, they noticed something else. The water was getting warmer. It dawned on them that the treelike rocks were actually what are known as submarine hydrothermal vents, a network of underwater chimneys caused by volcanic activity below the ocean floor. But these were far larger than any a human being had ever laid eyes on. When they finally spotted the first milky-white plumes of warm water coming from the tops, they realized they were looking at a new kind of chimney altogether, something few had ever guessed existed. They named the field the Lost City.

  IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for news of the discovery to reach the desk of British geologist Mike Russell. Russell wasn’t the only scientist in the world to suspect the existence of chimneys like those found at the Lost City. He was, however, one of the only scientists to have said with great conviction that they did exist, or at least that they had existed sometime around four billion years ago. The way Russell saw it, if those chimneys didn’t exist, then we wouldn’t exist, nor would any other living thing on Earth.

  As a young geologist, Russell had spent several years doing fieldwork at the Silvermine Mountains in central Ireland. There he came
across unique, tubelike formations of minerals that, for him, had only one possible explanation: long ago, when the whole of Ireland lay under the Atlantic Ocean, hydrothermal chimneys had percolated up through the seafloor that once existed on the dig site. What made Russell’s claim so contentious was that he was talking about a kind of chimney that was different from the only ones then known to exist: the viciously hot “black smokers” that get their name from the toxic discharge of metals and sulfur that lends them the appearance of nineteenth-century industrial smokestacks. The vent that Russell imagined was merely warm, and it was rich in minerals. It was not all that hostile to living things.

  Subsequent trips to the Dalmatian Alps and various mineral fields in Canada further convinced Russell that such chimneys had to exist. More important, he believed that they represented a significant clue to answering a question that had become one of the greatest challenges science had ever faced: the enigma of how life itself came to exist. Such chimneys, thought Russell, would be the perfect birthplace for life. If scientists could say conclusively where life arose, determining how it arose would be that much easier.

  A century and a half before, another scientist had tried to conceive of the environment where life might have first emerged. Charles Darwin had suggested a “warm little pond.” Ever since, most scientists had taken it for granted that the presence of water was necessary. They also supposed that the ancient oceans were not good candidates for the birthplace of life.

  According to Russell, when the first living things appeared some four billion years ago, the oceans were about as inhospitable an environment as one could imagine. They were filled with carbon dioxide leached from the Earth’s early atmosphere, leaving them too acidic to give birth to even the most primitive forms of life we know of today. They contained few of the organic chemicals that most scientists assumed were necessary for life to arise. And those chemicals would have been too dilute to easily come together to form living things.

  Not so the water in Russell’s chimney. The water in his “hydrothermal garden” would never get too hot or too cold. It would have been rich in a diverse variety of minerals. Also it would have been shielded from constant bombardment by meteorites and solar ultraviolet radiation on the surface world above. Despite serious opposition from veteran scientists in the field, Russell started promoting his theory with a kind of evangelical fervor. How life began was a question that had become the holy grail of the life scientists, and Russell believed he had found the key to answering it. His conviction rubbed more than a few of his peers the wrong way. To them, Russell’s theory was, for the most part, mere conjecture, an interesting idea and nothing more. Supporters of hydrothermal-vent models were sometimes mockingly derided as “ventists.”

  The Lost City.

  There remained one gaping hole in Russell’s theory. Nothing like the environment he was suggesting had ever been found. But all that changed with the discovery of the Lost City.

  IN 2009, the prestigious British science journal Nature ran a profile of Mike Russell. It was accompanied by a mock painting of him dressed in the dark robes and black beret of a Renaissance scientist. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the faux painting was Russell’s smile. It had a certain Mona Lisa–like quality to it, serene and all-knowing, as if he alone held the answer to some great secret.

  In less than a decade, the discovery of the Lost City had transformed a man who once sat on the peripheries of origin-of-life research into someone who could be depicted as a modern-day Copernicus in the pages of one of the world’s most prestigious science journals. The interesting thing about Russell’s newfound celebrity was that so many others had donned the same mantle in the past. The long saga of humanity’s quest to solve the riddle of the origin of life is filled with scientists who thought they were on the brink of solving the great mystery, only to see their discoveries and contributions washed away by the acid test of scientific scrutiny. At one time or another, any one of them could easily have taken Russell’s place in the Nature portrait.

  There is something about the question of how life began that sets it apart from just about every other question science has ever tried to answer. It is not like asking how mountains form or what causes water to turn into steam. The question strikes at something deep in the very heart of human existence and at the meaning that may or may not lie behind that existence. It springs from that same intangible yearning that leads human beings to conceive of an all-powerful creator, touching upon not only how we came to be, but why we came to be. It is, in a sense, the ultimate question.

  It takes a certain kind of iconoclast to grapple with such a question—an individual possessed of a boldness that sometimes borders on hubris. The ranks of these individuals are filled with the some of the most brilliant minds in the long history of science. Their lives have been filled with great moments of triumph and tragedy.

  Their stories also teach us something about science itself. No other scientific question has ever provoked such controversy, nor has any so often stripped science of its veneer of objectivity. As much as we may wish and believe science to be the pure pursuit of truth unencumbered by human prejudice, it exists and has always existed in a world of human beings, with all of their failings and self-deceptions.

  This is the story of the appearance of life on Earth. But just as important, it is the story of the evolution of how we see the appearance of life on Earth. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it is tempting to see it as a story with a clear trajectory. First there is darkness and ignorance. Gradually, this gives way to illumination and knowledge, marching onward in a straight line through Darwin’s revelations of the workings of evolution, through the deciphering of the genetic code, and all the way to the unraveling of the cell’s inner workings. Yet along that path, there were countless twists and turns. Ideas long discredited have found redemption; science thought incontrovertible has been disproved. More such twists will no doubt occur, for the mystery has not yet been solved. We still don’t know how life began. No one was there to witness the event, and almost all of the geological record of that period has long since been erased by billions of years of constant geological change.

  What we do know is that by at least three and a half billion years ago, a single-celled living organism appeared on a sterile Earth. We don’t know for sure how it got there, but we can infer that it emerged from nonliving matter. An educated human being in the eighteenth century might have laughed at such a notion. Yet a person living in ancient Rome or ancient China or nearly anywhere else in the ancient world would have held beliefs not so strikingly different, at their core, from what we basically believe today. A scientist in the twenty-first century would call the emergence of life from nonlife abiogenesis. A literate Greek around the time of Christ would have called it spontaneous generation. But both understandings are, at root, quite similar. As much as it might surprise us today, throughout most of human history people didn’t think that the sudden appearance of life from nonlife was all that miraculous.

  A BRIEF

  HISTORY OF

  CREATION

  BY THE ACTION OF YOUR SUN

  I am above the forest region, amongst grand rocks & such a torrent as you see in Salvator Rosa’s paintings vegetation all a scrub of rhodos. with Pines below me as thick & bad to get through as our Fuegian Fagi on the hill tops, & except the towering peaks of P. S. [perpetual snow] that, here shoot up on all hands there is little difference in the mt scenery—here however the blaze of Rhod. flowers and various colored jungle proclaims a differently constituted region in a naturalist’s eye & twenty species here, to one there, always are asking me the vexed question, where do we come from?

  —JOSEPH HOOKER, Letter to Charles Darwin, June 24, 1849

  NO ONE KNEW where the river began. Its source was thought to be somewhere far to the south, beyond the distant land the ancient Egyptians called Nubia. By the time it reached Egypt, the river grew at points to more than 4 miles wide, cutting thr
ough the rocky lands that bordered the southern edge of the kingdom and forming a deep canyon some 650 miles long. Then the river hit the great Sahara desert, winding through it like a life-giving road that split the endless sands in two before settling, finally, in the Mediterranean Sea.

  The Egyptians didn’t have a name for the Nile. There was no need. The river was life, and all life centered on the river. They called it, simply, iteru, “the great river.” Their country they called Kemet, “dark land.” It was the same word they used for the abundant black soil that collected on the river’s banks, deposited there by a massive annual flood. Every year around July, iteru would rise, flooding the plains. Two weeks later, it would recede, leaving behind the nutrient-rich kemet. The size of the flood would foretell a year of abundance or famine, life or death.

  And every year, as if by clockwork with the rising of the Nile, the frogs would come—thousands upon thousands of them. They were the same frogs that would inspire the story of the ten plagues of Exodus. Just as the Egyptians wondered about the source of the great river, they wondered about the frogs. As far as they could tell, the frogs didn’t come from eggs as did the ibises so commonly seen nesting in the tall reeds along the river. Nor did they emerge from the womb of a mother like the water buffalo that grazed on the river’s edge. In the eyes of the Egyptians, the frogs simply arose from the waters, a gift of the frog-headed fertility goddess Heket, who was said to swim the Nile during its rising.

  There was nothing particularly unusual about the way the ancient Egyptians viewed the frogs of the Nile. Some creatures sprang from a mother’s womb. Some hatched from eggs. Some living things just appeared, naturally, from things that were not alive. As far as human beings could tell, those creatures simply emerged from wood or from old grain, from water or from dust. They could see this phenomenon happening all around them. Insects appeared to spring from fallen trees. Mice appeared in grain. Frogs simply emerged from freshwater.