Group

Here are excerpts from recent (and an older) science news articles. My
comments are in square brackets.

Steve

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http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200505/s1366579.htm ABC May
12, 2005. 5... Reuters US scientists create self-replicating robot Self-
replicating robots are no longer the stuff of science fiction. Scientists at the
Cornell University in New York have created small robots that can build
copies of themselves. Each robot consists of several 10-centimetre cubes,
which have identical machinery, electromagnets to attach and detach to
each other and a computer program for replication. The robots can bend
and pick up and stack the cubes. "Although the machines we have created
are still simple compared with biological self-reproduction, they
demonstrate that mechanical self- reproduction is possible and not unique
to biology," Hod Lipson said in a report in the science journal Nature ....
He and his team believe the design principle could be used to make long
term, self- repairing robots that could mend themselves and be used in
hazardous situations and on space flights. The experimental robots, which
do not do anything else except make copies of themselves, are powered
through contacts on the surface of the table and transfer data through their
faces. They self- replicate by using additional modules placed in special
"feeding locations." The machines duplicate themselves by bending over
and putting their top cube on the table. Then they bend again, pick up
another cube, put it on top of the first and repeat the entire process. As the
new robot begins to take shape it helps to build itself. "The four-module
robot was able to construct a replica in 2.5 minutes by lifting and
assembling cubes from the feeding locations," said Mr Lipson. ....
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v435/n7039/abs/435163a.html
Nature 435, 163-164 (12 May 2005) ... Robotics: Self-reproducing
machines Victor Zykov, Efstathios Mytilinaios, Bryant Adams and Hod
Lipson ... Self-reproduction is central to biological life for long-term
sustainability and evolutionary adaptation. Although these traits would
also be desirable in many engineered systems, the principles of self-
reproduction have not been exploited in machine design. Here we create
simple machines that act as autonomous modular robots and are capable of
physical self-reproduction using a set of cubes. ...
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1365242.htm ABC Intelligent
robot copies itself Anna Salleh ... 12 May 2005 Engineers in the US have
created a machine out of intelligent cubes that can make copies of itself.
They say it is a small step towards developing robots that can repair and
replicate themselves in space or hazardous environments where it is
difficult for humans to venture. Assistant Professor Hod Lipson [said]
"Self-reproduction is central to biological life for long-term sustainability
and evolutionary adaptation," ... The machine Lipson's team developed is
made up of a set of modular cubes, called molecubes, which each contain
the machinery and a computer program necessary for self-replication. The
10-centimetre cubes use electromagnets on their faces to selectively
connect and disconnect from each other and they draw power through
contacts on the surface of the table they sit on. Each cube is divided in half
along its diagonal and this enables a robot made of a number of the cubes
to bend and move its own, and other, cubes around. ... The robot bends
around, moving its own cubes and new cubes 'fed' to it by the researchers.
Because it is not possible for the original robot to reach across another
robot of the same height, the new robot must assist in completing its own
construction. ... "The design concept could be useful for long-term, self-
sustaining robotic systems in emerging areas such as space exploration and
operation in hazardous environments, where conventional approaches to
maintenance are impractical."... Richard Willgoss ... says mechanical
replication provides building blocks towards doing a lot of other things
that biological systems do, albeit at a much larger scale. "If biology does it
so well, why can't we do it too." Willgoss, who is working on a modular
robotic arm, says intelligent modules can communicate with each other, as
cells in the immune system do. He says such developments could lead to
robotic systems that provide "tool kits" capable of, for example, making a
vehicle one day and a bridge the next. The idea is that if a module breaks
down the robot can repair it, or perhaps a whole entire new robot can be
built. "If we can make robots that have distributed intelligence, we can
perhaps give them a global request and they'll do the rest for us. It's very
fanciful but you have to start somewhere," says Willgoss. ...While these
self-replicating robots are 10 centimetres across, some scientists have
discussed the idea of self-replicating robots the size of molecules. This has
led to the nightmare scenario of self-replicating nano-robots, or nanobots,
reducing the Earth to a mass of seething "grey goo". So do the new
developments make this more likely? "The intelligence behind making that
assembly could easily be taken down to the nano scale but the practicality
of making the unit is a different matter," he says. "We've gone to the micro
scale where we're making tiny little cogs in wheels on a substrate with
integrated circuits but nanotech involves the atomic scale and that requires
very specialised equipment to do that." ...
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=637672
The Independent Stuff of sci-fi nightmares? An army of robots that
reproduce By Steve Connor ... 12 May 2005 It has been the dream - and
nightmare - of science fiction writers for decades. Now a team of
engineers has conjured up a robot that can reproduce itself. ..."Here we
create simple machines that act as autonomous modular robots and are
capable to physical self-reproduction using a set of cubes." Modular cubes
called "molecubes", each of which contains the machinery and computer
program necessary for replication, are at the heart of the robot's ability to
self-replicate. Electromagnets on each of the cubes' faces allow them to
attach and detach themselves to another cube according to the computer's
instructions. This allows a damaged robot to jettison defective cubes and
replace them by working ones or for it to construct a separate robot from
scratch by building a stack of individual cubes. When the newly-formed
robot reaches a certain height it helps to finish off its own replication by
adding the last molecubes to its own body. Professor Lipson said that
although the robot they have designed would only work in a laboratory, it
would - in theory - be possible to adapt the design to enable self-
replication to take place in space or other hazardous environments. "Self-
reproduction is an extreme case of self-repair from an engineering point of
view," Professor Lipson said. ... The researchers were able to demonstrate
a robot made from four modules that could build a replica of itself in two
and a half minutes by lifting and assembling the cubes from a "feeding
point" on the ground. ...
http://www.livescience.com/technology/050511_self_replicator.html
Livescience New Robots Clone Themselves By Michael Schirber ... 11
May 2005 ... Mimicking reproduction in living organisms, researchers
have built a simple self-replicating robot out of automated blocks.
Machines that can copy themselves have been built before, but the earlier
experiments were limited to two dimensions or confined to a track. Hod
Lipson and his collaborators ... have designed modular cubes, called
molecubes, that can assume a range of three-dimensional shapes. "People
think of robots as durable metallic machines, and the only way to make
them last longer is to make them more sturdy," Lipson said. Lipson and his
colleagues are exploring a different paradigm, in which robots become
more robust through self-repair. "Animals survive longer than robots
because they can repair themselves," Lipson explained ... The new robots
are simpler and less autonomous than biological organisms. But the
scientists argue that self-replication is not a yes-or-no proposition, but
rather a spectrum based on complexity and independence. ... The robots
are composed of four-inch-wide cubes that attach and release each other
with electromagnets. The cubes are cut in half along a diagonal plane,
allowing the robot to swivel 90 degrees. Each module carries a
microprocessor with the step-by-step instructions for replication. Sensors
tell the robot when a new cube has been attached at one end, and power is
supplied through floor plates. To help the robot make a copy of itself, the
scientists placed new cubes at "feeding" stations. One of the challenges
was designing modules that would not topple during motion. The initial
robot relies on help from its unfinished "clone" in the construction process.
In experiments, a four-cube-high robot copied itself in two and a half
minutes. More complex shapes are possible in principle, but Lipson said
that there are practical difficulties in making robots with more cubes.
Currently, the robots have no practical use, but the research team said that
it would be fairly easy to add other modules with grippers or a camera.
Self-replicating robots could be valuable for space exploration and in
hazardous environments, where they could take care of themselves without
human help. One robot could even build out of its own components a new
type of robot for a specific task, Lipson said.. ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4538547.stm BBC ... 11 May, 2005 ...
US robot builds copies of itself By Roland Pease ... US researchers have
devised a simple robot that can make copies of itself from spare parts.
Writing in Nature, the robot's creators say their experiment shows the
ability to reproduce is not unique to biology. Their long-term plan is to
design robots made from hundreds or thousands of identical basic
modules. These could repair themselves if parts fail, reconfigure
themselves to better perform the task they have been set, or even to make
extra helpers. So far, the robots, if they can be called that, consist of just
three or four mobile cubes. Each unit comes with a small computer code
carrying a blueprint for the layout of the robot, electrical contacts to let it
communicate with its neighbours, and magnets to let them stick together.
... That offspring version can then make further copies. It is only a toy
demonstration of the idea, but lead researcher Hod Lipson ... has bold
plans for these intelligent modular machines. ... [First, my apologies for
repetition in the above and thanks to Paul K for his comments on it. Clever
though this self-replicating robot is, it is a far cry from biological self-
replication by even the simplest single cell organism. Indeed it is not really
self-replicating because it does not replicate its offspring's "computer
program" but they are supplied with each "additional modules placed in
special `feeding locations', which would be analogous to eating our own
species and taking their DNA for our children-to-be! So this is nothing like
what even the simplest free-living bacterium does, i.e. build its offspring's
"computer" and "program" and everything else from raw materials, using
the parent cell's "computer" and "program" as a template. This robot would
therefore be limited by the number of such modules available, and unlike a
living organism cannot go elsewhere to find new "food". Also, a bacterium
generates its own energy from sunlight or chemicals, whereas presumably
this "self- replicating robot" is supplied it by external power. Note the
"practical difficulties" of adding more cubes. Finally, this "self-replicating
robot" is *designed* by highly intelligent human designers. Whereas life's
far superior original "self-replicating robot", from which all `self-
replicating robots' came (including this mechanical one) was supposed to
have been cobbled together by chance (see tagline). BTW, as for
"mechanical self-reproduction is not unique to biology", first it *is*
"unique to biology" and second, what is Lipson et al. if not "biology"? The
bottom line is that this just shows how absurd if the materialist-naturalist
`creation myth' that non-living matter could self- assemble a von Neumann
machine. I will add these quotes to PE 8.13. "Cell is a Von Neumann
machine"
<http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/pe08clml.html#clmlclrvnmnmchn>.
This may come in handy for the article I am writing for Reasons to Believe
(Australia) <http://www.ozreasons.org/> on "The Minimal Cell". .]

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/05/12/MNGGQCNTIJ1.DTL San
Francisco Chronicle Wrangle over 'Waggle dance' New study on insect
communication puts bee in scientist's bonnet David Perlman ... May 12,
2005 Consider the waggle dance of the honeybee, famed in science and
controversial for nearly 50 years. Most scientists firmly believe the dance
is a mysterious coded language that the bees use to direct their hive-mates
how to fly toward distant food sources of nectar and pollen. Its insight as
"language" won its German discoverer a Nobel Prize in 1973. Scores of
experiments over the decades have claimed to support his theory. But UC
Santa Barbara biologist Adrian Wenner, who has been a beekeeper in the
Sacramento Valley since childhood, insists that it is just the scent of food
that sends the honeybees flying in flocks -- and that scientists who believe
in the language of the honeybee dance are merely "suckers for the exotic"
whose experiments are designed to support the theory and not to challenge
it. Now, a group of researchers, led by a British physicist who tagged three
dozen bees with radar transponders to track their flight, claims their
experiments confirm that the dance is "the most sophisticated example of
non- primate communication that we know of." The latest effort to
decipher the honeybee's "waggle dance" is ... by Joseph R. Riley ...
together with Uwe Greggers ... It was in the 1960s that Karl von Frisch, a
German zoologist, first noticed the peculiar gyrations that certain
honeybees make in the darkness of their hives when they return after
discovering a new supply of food in flowers hundreds of yards away. He
watched the bees circling rapidly in figure-eight loops and noted how other
workers -- all honeybee workers are female -- clustered around the dancers
and then flew off in just the right direction and distance to the new food
source. At first, von Frisch thought the dancing bees merely brought the
odor of the food to the waiting bees. Finally, however, he decided that the
dance itself was a code -- a kind of complex language that was almost
incredible for an animal ruled by instinct and possessing such a tiny brain.
... Riley insisted that as a result of his experiments and many earlier ones
by other scientists, "no really sensible person can come to any other
conclusion" than that von Frisch was right. The bees in his team's
experiments, he said, "clearly could read the message encoded in the
waggle dance." ... Only two of the bees in the first experiment ever
actually found the food source, Riley conceded, but the radar tracked
almost all the others flying all around the site over and over again --
obviously, he said, searching for the unscented sucrose. It's a long-standing
principle of science that any hypothesis should be tested over and over
again in efforts to disprove it -- to "falsify" it, scientists say, before it
can
be accepted. Wenner ... insisted ... that every experiment so far had been
designed simply to confirm the original von Frisch hypothesis -- not really
to test it. The new research is more of the same, he said. ... "It's the odor,
not the dance, that explains everything," Wenner said ... "This research has
all sorts of problems with it because they're trying to prove something they
think is true -- but scientists are suckers for the exotic, and this controversy
will go on and on for decades." ... [Now I wonder what other theory that
reminds me of which "has all sorts of problems with it because they're
trying to prove something they think is true"? :-)]

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/05/12/MNGGQCNTIH1.DTL
San Francisco Chronicle Scientists find animal sold as food in Laos is new
rodent John Noble Wilford ... May 12, 2005 They live in the forests and
limestone outcrops of Laos. With long whiskers, stubby legs and a long,
furry tail, they are rodents but unlike any seen before by wildlife scientists.
They are definitely not rats or squirrels and are only vaguely like a guinea
pig or a chinchilla. They often show up in Laotian outdoor markets being
sold as food. It was in such markets that visiting scientists came upon the
animals, and after long study they determined that they represented a rare
find: an entire new family of wildlife. .... The new species in this
previously unknown family is called kha-nyou (pronounced ga-nyou) by
local people. Scientists found that differences in the skull and bone
structure and in the animal's DNA revealed it to be a member of a distinct
family that diverged from others of the rodent order millions of years ago.
"To find something so distinct in this day and age is just extraordinary, "
said Dr. Robert J. Timmins ... [Family is a fairly high taxonomic order
(e.g. Homo sapien's family is hominidae) so this is an amazing find in such
a well-studied class as mammalia.]

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/05/09/MNG5LCLEU41.DTL
San Francisco Chronicle Recent study forces scientists to rethink basic law
of physics 'Fine structure constant' is indeed a constant -- right? Keay
Davidson ... May 9, 2005 Legislators change laws from time to time, but
Mother Nature's laws are eternal -- or so it has seemed. Now, though,
scientists are debating clues that suggest the laws of physics change over
time. University of California scientists are among the major players on
both sides of the debate, which threatens to shake up our basic notions of
reality. At stake is one of the fundamental values in physics: the arcane-
sounding "fine structure constant," which measures how subatomic
particles interact with light and with each other. Some astrophysicists have
proposed that the value of the fine structure constant, a.k.a. "alpha," has
changed subtly over billions of years. They base this proposal on their
work -- using telescopes like the giant Keck telescope ... analyzing light
from interstellar gas and galaxy-gobbling super-furnaces called quasars on
the outskirts of the universe. If they're right, then our theories of the
cosmos might be due for an overhaul. One speculation is that alpha is
changing over time because of now- unknown alternate dimensions. As
these hidden dimensions change shape, they change the fine structure
constant. But skeptics, citing observations that contradict the claim that
alpha is changing, are plentiful -- and even the pro-change claimants are
being cautious, partly because there's so much at risk. ... "We are claiming
something extraordinary here," acknowledged astrophysicist Michael
Murphy ... one of the scientists who reported possible evidence of a
change in the fine structure constant at a scientific conference earlier this
year. "And the evidence, though strong, is not yet extraordinary enough."
At another science conference, a group of Berkeley scientists reported that
alpha is not changing, based on their independent analysis of light from
galaxies. ... Murphy defends his observational technique as more precise
than that of critics. As he reported recently, his latest observations have "a
precision of 1 in a million. So it's about a factor of 30 better" than the
technique deployed by critics ... The critics disagree. They say that their
observational technique is relatively simple and, thus, yields pretty
unambiguous results, whereas Murphy's technique is an especially
complex one that is vulnerable to all kinds of "systematic errors," in
scientific lingo. ... "These are very adventurous ideas -- and it's always
healthy to challenge the things that 'everybody knows,' " says one of the
nation's most distinguished astronomers, Robert Kirshner of Harvard. "I
would be very surprised if there are measurable changes in the fine
structure constant." ... Lee Smolin ... said .... "It is a very hard
measurement, and there are many possible sources of error." At the same
time, he wrote, "I would not be surprised if the measurement is right. ...
[This has been around for a while now, with no resolution. If alpha is
changing, it isn't by much. However if alpha can change without affecting
the other cosmological constants, then that would be evidence that they are
not part of a theory of everything but are independent initial conditions (set
by an Intelligent Designer?) which if they varied by even slightly, we
would not be here puzzling over them.]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=637563
The Independent Too hot to handle Our success in cutting air pollution
could be actually speeding up global warming. Steve Connor... 11 May
2005 The Earth is getting brighter. More sunlight is reaching the land
surface of the planet than at any time for the past 30 years, and scientists
are only now beginning to understand why. They are also learning about
how this relatively sudden and unexpected increase in sunshine could
make global warming more obvious - and potentially more dangerous.
Measurements of the sunlight reaching the Earth's surface show that
between about 1960 and 1990 the days were in fact getting dimmer.
Indeed, scientists estimated that during this period the Earth experienced a
decline of between 4 and 6 per cent in the amount of sunlight reaching the
ground. It became known as "global dimming", yet few people knew of its
existence let alone understood its cause. Then something happened at the
end of the Eighties. Another network of sunlight monitors around the
world detected an apparent reversal of the trend. Last week this was
confirmed in a study showing that global dimming has indeed come to an
end and that we have now entered a period of "global brightening". Over
the past decade the days have brightened by about 4 per cent. The most
obvious explanation is that the Sun is going through a cycle of higher
activity which is throwing more solar radiation our way. But the levels of
increased sunlight being measured on the ground are far higher than
anything that could result from increased solar activity. Others thought that
clouds could provide the answer, while some suggested an increase in
pollutant particles in the atmosphere could account for the dimming. But
to many experts, the ups and downs in the amount of sunlight reaching the
ground is a mystery. So what's going on? Is global brightening something
we should worry about, or should we just enjoy the extra rays? The answer
is, yes, we should be concerned because more sunlight means more heat
and that could make global warming worse. But on the other hand, the
brighter days could also be a sign that some of the anti-pollution measures
designed to clean up the air and rid it of smoke and sooty particles are
working. Global brightening could be an indication that the air is getting
cleaner in terms of visible pollutants, although not in terms of greenhouse
gas pollutants - the fossil-fuel emissions that exacerbate global warming.
... In effect, global dimming from 1960 to 1990 has counterbalanced the
tendency for global warming caused by a worsening of the greenhouse
effect. ... there is an unexpected irony in a cleaner world, which has shone
a spotlight on the more sinister, long-term problem of climate change.
Greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rise and global warming is
going to get worse. Global brightening has now begun to unmask a
problem that had been largely hidden from view - with the help of a murky
atmosphere. ... [More evidence that global warming is beyond human
control, and that we are now in the period between Luke 21:24b-28 (KJV):
"[24] ... and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the
times of the Gentiles be fulfilled. [25] And there shall be signs in the sun,
and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations,
with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; [26] Men's hearts failing
them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the
earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken. [27] And then shall they
see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory."? See
also next older article from my backlog.]

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1322661.htm ABC
Himalaya's glaciers are melting AFP 14 March 2005 Himalayan glaciers
feed seven of Asia's greatest rivers. But how will climate change affect
water levels? (Image: NASA) Climate change is causing Himalayan
glaciers to retreat rapidly, threatening water shortages for hundreds of
millions of people who rely on glacier-dependent rivers, conservationists
say. Global conservation group WWF warns of water shortages for people
in China, India and Nepal with the release of its new report today. The
report indicates glaciers in the region, which represent the greatest
concentration of ice on the planet after the poles, are now receding at an
average rate of 10 to 15 metres a year. "The rapid melting of Himalayan
glaciers will first increase the volume of water in rivers, causing
widespread flooding," says Jennifer Morgan, director of WWF's global
climate change program. "But in a few decades this situation will change
and the water level in rivers will decline, meaning massive economic and
environmental problems for people in western China, Nepal and northern
India." Himalayan glaciers feed into seven of Asia's greatest rivers: the
Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Salween, Mekong, Yangtze and Yellow
rivers. This ensures a year-round water supply to hundreds of millions of
people in the Indian subcontinent and China. ...
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1322661.htm ABC
Himalaya's glaciers are melting AFP 14 March 2005 Himalayan glaciers
feed seven of Asia's greatest rivers. But how will climate change affect
water levels? (Image: NASA) Climate change is causing Himalayan
glaciers to retreat rapidly, threatening water shortages for hundreds of
millions of people who rely on glacier-dependent rivers, conservationists
say. Global conservation group WWF warns of water shortages for people
in China, India and Nepal with the release of its new report today. The
report indicates glaciers in the region, which represent the greatest
concentration of ice on the planet after the poles, are now receding at an
average rate of 10 to 15 metres a year. "The rapid melting of Himalayan
glaciers will first increase the volume of water in rivers, causing
widespread flooding," says Jennifer Morgan, director of WWF's global
climate change program. ... [See above on Lk 21:24-28. The loss of water
for half the world's population is going to be the biggest humanitarian
disaster of all time. And those countries have all got the H-bomb!]
================================================

PS: Here are a number of tagline quotes by Dawkins on living organisms
being von Neumann machines, with my comments in square brackets.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Our next task is to join the two kinds of robot together. Imagine that the
walking, sucker-footed robot carries, on its back, something like the
industrial, hand-wielding robot that we saw earlier. The combined
machine is under the control of an on-board computer. The on-board
computer has a lot of routine software for controlling the legs and the
sucker feet, and for controlling the arm and hand assembly. But it is under
the overall control of a master Duplicate Me program which
fundamentally says: `Walk around the world gathering up the necessary
materials to make a duplicate copy of the entire robot. Make a new robot,
then feed the same TRIP [Total Replication of Instructions Program]
program into its on-board computer and turn it loose on the world to do
the same thing.' The hypothetical robot that we have now worked towards
can be called a TRIP robot. A TRIP robot such as we are now imagining is
a machine of great technical ingenuity and complexity. The principle was
discussed by the celebrated Hungarian-American mathematician John von
Neumann ... But no von Neumann machine, no self-duplicating TRIP
robot, has yet been built. Perhaps it never will be built. Perhaps it is
beyond the bounds of practical feasibility. But what am I talking about?
What nonsense to say that a self-duplicating robot has never been built.
What on earth do I think that I myself am? Or you? Or a bee or a flower or
a kangaroo? What are all of us if not TRIP robots? We are not man-made
for the purpose: we have been put together by the processes of embryonic
development, under the ultimate direction of naturally selected genes. But
what we actually do is exactly what the hypothetical TRIP robot is defined
as doing. We roam the world looking for the raw materials needed to
assemble the parts needed to maintain ourselves and eventually assemble
another robot capable of the same feats. (Dawkins R., "Climbing Mount
Improbable," Penguin: London, 1996, pp.256-258) [What Dawkins says
about "no self-duplicating TRIP [Total Replication of Instructions
Program] robot, has yet been built. Perhaps it never will be built" is still
true, because this Cornell University robot is not really a von Neumann
machine, i.e. a *self*-reproducing automata.]

"We are all TRIP robots, all von Neumann machines. But how did the
whole process start? To answer that, we have to go back a very long time,
more than 3,000 million years, probably as long as 4,000 million years. In
those days the world was very different. There was no life, no biology,
only physics and chemistry, and the details of the Earth's chemistry were
very different. Most, though not all, of the informed speculation begins in
what has been called the primeval soup, a weak broth of simple organic
chemicals in the sea. Nobody knows how it happened but, somehow,
without violating the laws of physics and chemistry, a molecule arose that
just happened to have the property of self-copying - a replicator. This may
seem like a big stroke of luck. I want to say a few things about this `luck'.
First, it had to happen only once. In this respect, it is rather like the luck
involved in colonizing an island. Most islands around the world, even
quite remote ones like Ascension Island, have animals. Some of these, for
example birds and bats, got there in a way that we can easily understand,
without postulating a great deal of luck. But other animals, like lizards,
can't fly. We scratch our heads and wonder how they got there. It may
seem unsatisfactory to postulate a freak of luck, like a lizard happening to
be clinging to a mangrove on the mainland which breaks off and drifts
across the sea. Freakish or not, this kind of luck does happen there are
lizards on oceanic islands. We usually don't know the details, because it is
not a thing that happens often enough for us to have any likelihood of
seeing it. The point is that it had to happen only once. And the same goes
for the origin of life on a planet. What is more, as far as we know, it may
have happened on only one planet out of a billion billion planets in the
universe. Of course many people think that it actually happened on lots
and lots of planets, but we only have *evidence* that it happened on one
planet, after a lapse of half a billion to a billion years. So the sort of lucky
event we are looking at *could* be so wildly improbable that the chances
of its happening, somewhere in the universe, could be as low as one in a
billion billion billion in any one year. If it *did* happen on only one
planet, anywhere in the universe, that planet has to be our planet - because
here we are talking about it." (Dawkins R., "Climbing Mount Improbable,"
Penguin: London, 1996, pp.258-260. Emphasis in original) [It's funny we
keep getting told that no one proposes chance anymore to get a self-
reproducing automaton started, but Dawkins proposed it in his 1986 "The
Blind Watchmaker" and now again here in his "Climbing Mount
Improbable" (1996). But it is significant that Dawkins does not work out
the odds, which would *vastly* exceed the probabilistic resources of the
entire Universe.]

"An origin of life, anywhere, consists of the chance arising of a
selfreplicating entity. Nowadays, the replicator that matters on Earth is the
DNA molecule, but the original replicator probably was not DNA. We
don't know what it was. Unlike DNA, the original replicating molecules
cannot have relied upon complicated machinery to duplicate them.
Although, in some sense, they must have been equivalent to `Duplicate me'
instructions, the `language' in which the instructions were written was not
a highly formalized language such that only a complicated machine could
obey them. The original replicator cannot have needed elaborate decoding,
as DNA instructions and computer viruses do today. Selfduplication was
an inherent property of the entity's structure just as, say, hardness is an
inherent property of a diamond, something that does not have to be
`decoded' and `obeyed'. We can be sure that the original replicators, unlike
their later successors the DNA molecules, did not have complicated
decoding and instruction-obeying machinery, because complicated
machinery is the kind of thing that arises in the world only after many
generations of evolution. And evolution does not get started until there are
replicators. In the teeth of the so-called 'Catch-22 of the origin of life' ...
the original self-duplicating entities must have been simple enough to arise
by the spontaneous accidents of chemistry. ... There are undoubted
difficulties in this story. Among them I have already alluded to the so-
called Catch-22 of the origin of life. The larger the number of components
in a replicator, the more likely it is that one of them will be miscopied,
leading to complete malfunctioning of the ensemble. This suggests that the
first, primordial replicators must have had very few components. But
molecules with fewer than a certain minimum number of components are
likely to be too simple to be capable of engineering their own duplication."
(Dawkins R., "Climbing Mount Improbable," Penguin: London, 1996,
pp.261-263) [One thing about Dawkins is that he is usually clear. I will use
this "Catch-22 of the origin of life" argument (although I had heard it
before in Denton) in my article for RTB and also in my book, "Problems
of Evolution" <http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/PoE/PoE00ToC.html>.]

"The original replication machines - the first robot repeaters - must have
been a lot simpler than bacteria, but bacteria are the simplest examples of
TRIP robots that we know today .... Bacteria make their livings in a great
variety of ways, from a chemical point of view a far wider range of ways
than the rest of the living kingdoms put together. There are bacteria that
are more closely related to us than they are to other, strange kinds of
bacteria. There are bacteria that obtain their sustenance from sulphur in hot
springs, for whom oxygen is a deadly poison, bacteria that ferment sugar
to alcohol in the absence of oxygen, bacteria that live on carbon dioxide
and hydrogen, giving out methane, bacteria that photosynthesize (use
sunlight to synthesize food) like plants, bacteria that photosynthesize in
ways that are very different from plants. Different groups of bacteria
encompass a range of radically different biochemistries compared with
which all the rest of us - animals, plants, fungi and some bacteria - are
monotonously uniform." (Dawkins R., "Climbing Mount Improbable,"
Penguin: London, 1996, p.263) [It is just an *assumption* (or rather a
*deduction* from Naturalism) that "The original replication machines ...
must have been a lot simpler than bacteria." If life *could* get simpler
there would be an advantage in it doing so in some environments. That we
don't find a living cell that is simpler than the mycoplasmas and they are
semi-parasitic, indicates that "The original replication machines" were not
"a lot simpler than bacteria" and indeed may have been more complex than
some bacteria today, i.e. the mycoplasma. The point is that, as Cairns-
Smith points out, even the *simplest* self-replicating system would "need
[to be] ... a fully working machine of incredible complexity: a machine
that has to be complex ... not just to work well but to work at all." (Cairns-
Smith A.G., "Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective
Story," [1985], Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1993,
reprint, p.37)]
Stephen E. Jones, BSc (Biol). http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones
Moderator: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CreationEvolutionDesign
& http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ProblemsOfEvolution/ Book: "Problems
of Evolution" http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/PoE/PoE00ToC.html
& http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/pe00cont.html
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