Scientists Find The First Animal That Doesn't Need Oxygen to Survive

Scientists Find The First Animal That

Doesn't Need Oxygen to Survive

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-find-the-first-animal-that-doesn-t-need-oxygen-to-survive

by Michelle Starr

May 10, 2020

Some truths about the Universe and our experience in it seem immutable. The sky is up. Gravity sucks. Nothing can travel faster than light. Multicellular life needs oxygen to live. Except we might need to rethink that last one.

Earlier this year, scientists discovered that a jellyfish-like parasite doesn't have a mitochondrial genome - the first multicellular organism known to have this absence. That means it doesn't breathe; in fact, it lives its life completely free of oxygen dependency.

This discovery isn't just changing our understanding of how life can work here on Earth - it could also have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life.

Life started to develop the ability to metabolise oxygen - that is, respirate - sometime over 1.45 billion years ago. A larger archaeon engulfed a smaller bacterium, and somehow the bacterium's new home was beneficial to both parties, and the two stayed together.

That symbiotic relationship resulted in the two organisms evolving together, and eventually those bacteria ensconced within became organelles called mitochondria. Every cell in your body except red blood cells has large numbers of mitochondria, and these are essential for the respiration process.

They break down oxygen to produce a molecule called adenosine triphosphate, which multicellular organisms use to power cellular processes.

We know there are adaptations that allow some organisms to thrive in low-oxygen, or hypoxic, conditions. Some single-celled organisms have evolved mitochondria-related organelles for anaerobic metabolism; but the possibility of exclusively anaerobic multicellular organisms has been the subject of some scientific debate.

That is, until a team of researchers led by Dayana Yahalomi of Tel Aviv University in Israel decided to take another look at a common salmon parasite called Henneguya salminicola.

(Stephen Douglas Atkinson)

It's a cnidarian, belonging to the same phylum as corals, jellyfish and anemones. Although the cysts it creates in the fish's flesh are unsightly, the parasites are not harmful, and will live with the salmon for its entire life cycle.

Tucked away inside its host, the tiny cnidarian can survive quite hypoxic conditions. But exactly how it does so is difficult to know without looking at the creature's DNA - so that's what the researchers did.

They used deep sequencing and fluorescence microscopy to conduct a close study of H. salminicola, and found that it has lost its mitochondrial genome. In addition, it's also lost the capacity for aerobic respiration, and almost all of the nuclear genes involved in transcribing and replicating mitochondria.

Like the single-celled organisms, it had evolved mitochondria-related organelles, but these are unusual too - they have folds in the inner membrane not usually seen.

The same sequencing and microscopic methods in a closely related cnidarian fish parasite, Myxobolus squamalis, was used as a control, and clearly showed a mitochondrial genome.

These results show that here, at last, is a multicellular organism that doesn't need oxygen to survive.

Exactly how it survives is still something of a mystery. It could be leeching adenosine triphosphate from its host, but that's yet to be determined.

But the loss is pretty consistent with an overall trend in these creatures - one of genetic simplification. Over many, many years, they have basically devolved from a free-living jellyfish ancestor into the much more simple parasite we see today.

(Stephen Douglas Atkinson)

They've lost most of the original jellyfish genome, but retaining - oddly - a complex structure resembling jellyfish stinging cells. They don't use these to sting, but to cling to their hosts: an evolutionary adaptation from the free-living jellyfish's needs to the parasite's. You can see them in the image above - they're the things that look like eyes.

The discovery could help fisheries adapt their strategies for dealing with the parasite; although it's harmless to humans, no one wants to buy salmon riddled with tiny weird jellyfish.

But it's also a heck of a discovery for helping us to understand how life works.

"Our discovery confirms that adaptation to an anaerobic environment is not unique to single-celled eukaryotes, but has also evolved in a multicellular, parasitic animal," the researchers wrote in their paper, published in February 2020.

"Hence, H. salminicola provides an opportunity for understanding the evolutionary transition from an aerobic to an exclusive anaerobic metabolism."

* The research has been published in PNAS.

**A version of this article was first published in February 2020.

* * * * * * * * *

RELATED

The Amazing Story of Oxygen

Methane-filled Atmosphere of Early Earth

Helped ‘Clear the Air’ for Oxygen

The Story of Oxygen in Early Earth

Oxygen was a toxic gas in primordial earth's early history until it was not. How and why did this happen? It begins with the story of methane gas. Further, it seems to explain quite sufficiently the explosion of life in the Cambrian Period which everyone seems to make a fuss over (Why All the Fuss over Earth's Remarkable Cambrian Explosion?). The article that follows explains this....

R.E. Slater

August 15, 2018

Towards a Process Philosophy of Ecological Neuroscience

Neuron Activity inside the brain

Towards an Ecological Neuroscience:

Aspects of the Nature of Things

According to Process Philosophy

http://home.earthlink.net/~icedneuron/ProcessPhilosophy.htm

by S. David Stoney

Ph.D.Dept of Physiology

December 17, 2001

"There are deep similarities between Whitehead's idea of the process by which nature unfolds and the ideas of quantum theory. Whitehead says that the world is made of actual 'occasions', each of which arises from potentialities created by prior actual occasions. These actual occasions are 'happenings' modeled on experiential events, each of which comes into being and then perishes, only to be replaced by a successor. It is these experience-like 'happenings' that are the basic realities of nature, according to Whitehead, not the persisting physical particles that Newtonian physics took [to] be the basic entities.

Similarly, Heisenberg says that what is really happening in a quantum process is the emergence of an 'actual' from potentialities created by prior actualities. In the orthodox Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory the actual things to which the theory refer[s] are increments in 'our knowledge'. These increments are experiential events. The particles of classical physics lose their fundamental status: they dissolve into diffuse clouds of possibilities. At each stage of the unfolding of nature the complete cloud of possibilities acts like the potentiality for the occurrence of a next increment in knowledge..." Henry P. Stapp, author of Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics, in an invited paper at the Silver Anniversary International Whitehead Conference, Claremont, CA, August 4-9, 1998. See http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/wh2.txt

I. Introduction.

The problem, of course, with the materialistic approach is that it doesn't validate that which is the only thing we are really sure of, our own experience. This is dangerous for ourselves as persons of value and for science. Whitehead's bold step was to presume the reality of experience and process all the way up, from the most "elementary" of particles to the mind of God, so to speak. The biologist, Conrad H. Waddington, described Whitehead's idea as follows:

"Whitehead was bold enough to take on, face to face, the most difficult of intellectual problems - the fact that each one of us has a conscious experience, whereas in science we try to account for the behavior or things by means of concepts or entities - atoms, waves, fundamental particles, and so on - whose definition does not contain any reference to consciousness. Whitehead argued that this is not good enough: you have either got to have consciousness, or at least something of that general kind, everywhere, or nowhere; and since it is obviously in us, and cannot be nowhere, it must therefore be everywhere, presumably mostly in very rudimentary form." Conrad A. Waddington, cited in John A. Jungerman, World in Process: Creativity and Interconnection in the New Physics, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pgs. 86 & 87, 2000.

David Ray Griffin had this to say about the universality of experience:

"Panexperientialism [another name for process philosophy] is based upon the... assumption that we can, and should, think about the units comprising the physical world by analogy with our own experience, which we know from within. The supposition, in other words, is that the apparent difference in kind between our experience, or our "mind," and [other] entities... is an illusion, resulting from the fact that we know them in two different ways: we know our minds from within, by identity, whereas in sensory perception... we know [other entities] from without. Once we realize this, there is no reason to assume them really to be different in kind." David Ray Griffin, Religion and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pg. 2000.

So, process thought views experiential events, understood as actual occasions, not substances, as fundamental. Although brief, actual occasions bring forth, over and over again, the objective world and our awareness of it. The following description, which relies heavily on the mercifully short introductory chapter in Jungerman's (see above) book, will present, in a somewhat didactic form, a brief description of the basic features of the process approach. This chapter from Jungerman's book is on reserve at the MCG library. The other books and copies on reserve at the MCG Library have more thorough descriptions.

II. Some important process ideas.

(See Figure below from Jungerman, pg. 11, see )

• Actual occasions, understood as experiential events, are primary, not substances ("mere matter").

• Each event feels the feelings of - is connected to (i.e., prehends) - earlier events as well as the dominant occasion of experience of the universe. Actual occasions are "drops of experience."

• Although strongly influenced by the past, events have aims (goals), namely to maximize creativity and intensity of feeling, that arise due to their participation with more dominant occasions of experience.

• Thus, events have some capacity, however slight, to select among alternatives. This allows for novelty.

• Immediately upon grasping or incorporating the feelings of past events and potential goals, the actual occasion "perishes" into objectivity, becoming data (potentiality) for the next actual occasion, which immediately succeeds it.

• This process makes concrete a novel, present unity with duration, in which the prehensions and the subjective goals are integrated. Whitehead calls this process of self-determination a "concrescence."

• An event that has completed it's concrescence has achieved satisfaction and becomes "objectively immortal" as a datum to be prehended by future experiential events.

• Thus existence is a series of coming into beings (concrescences), each occasion of which brings the world with it as data (See and reference 8, especially Kevin O'Regan's notion of "the world as an outside memory," in the Introduction).

• Subjects and objects are different in time, not in kind.

• Compound individuals (societies of prehensions with dominant occasions of experience; such as living creatures) must be distinguished from mere aggregates (societies of actual occasions without dominant members; such as rocks).

• Any creature is a highy integrated, dynamic pattern of interdependent events. Its parts contribute to, and are modified by, the unified activity of the whole, i.e., by the dominant occasion of experience.

• The dominant occasion of experience integrates the lower level actual occasions into a unity of purpose. For human beings, the dominant occasion of experience constitutes the mind (or psyche, or soul) and the integration of the experience of all subordinate actual occasions provides for conscious awareness from an embodied perspective.

• Existence is becoming: The many become one and are increased by one

• Most experience is nonconscious (nonsensory) experience. All actual occasions share in having nonconscious experience; conscious experience arises in only a few compound individuals.

• The universe appears interconnected by a web of prehensions and probably has its own dominant occasion of experience.

• For any actual occasion, the future is open, i.e., unpredictable because of the alternatives (potentialities) available to it. This is the basis for the appearance of novelty.

• Conscious awareness is not an unbroken stream of experience, but rather is a series of experiential events, each of which has spatial as well as temporal extension.

• Memory and perception are alike in that they each are an intuition of previous actualities

Jungerman describes this figure as follows:

"The event begins with a prehension, a grasping of previous events, including the prior events of the enduring society to which it belongs, by the physical pole. The physical pole is the part of the event that interacts with the external world. This information passes into the mental pole. The mental pole is internal to the the event. It synthesizes the data coming to the physical pole with the goals of this becoming event. This process is termed a concrescence. When the synthesis is accomplished, all the data are simplified in a satisfaction... The mental pole's creative simplification by selection among alternatives may lead to increased intensity of experience and to novelty. It may lead to a new whole (synthesis) through emergence with other events. On the other hand, a single electron's experience may be viewed as being so dominated by its physical pole that upon concrescence its characteristics are repeated over and over. It becomes an enduring individual that retains the same character over a long period of time. After its satisfaction, an event is said to be objectively immortal, as it becomes a datum to be prehended by future events. Note that the event takes place in a finite time, which flows from the past to the future..." (pg. 11 & 12)

Nicholas Rescher, in Process Metaphysics (see), notes that this approach is a point of view that accepts that processes and activities are more important than things and substances. He listed the following differences:

III. Prehensions

The importance of this concept cannot be overstated. Each actual occasion prehends - i.e., grasps or incorporates - data from the past, as well as subjective aim from dominant occasions of experience. Thus, an actual occasion is an action.

In addition to such positive prehensions, negative prehensions, which can exclude the sharing of feelings can also occur. Jungerman describes prehension as follows:

"Prehension describes the connection between past and present events, no matter how elementary. The present event, which is partially self-determining, makes a creative selection among data from all past events and from alternative future possibilities, goals, or aims. Such aims are only potentialities until the selection actualizes them... At some level we are aware of the mysterious 'otherness' of our fellows creatures and take them into ourselves, informing our own actuality - not just in appreciation, but rather in recognizing that the 'other' is [sic] in some sense constitutes ourselves. We are all inextricably linked in the matrix of creation " (pg. 7 & 8)

At a more concrete level of description, consider Charles Hartshorne's words (which describe, I believe, the doorway to understanding of placebo effects):

"Cells can influence our human experiences because they have feelings that we can feel. To deal with the influences of human experiences on cells, one turns this around. We have feelings that cells can feel." (pg. 12)

IV. Dominant occasions of experience

No doubt there is a dominant occasion of experience for the event known as a hydrogen atom, just as there are dominant occasions of experience for the events known as you and I. The prehension of the proton by its electron (and vice versa) no doubt gave rise to an experience that is, from our perspective, indescribable, except to say that there presumably is more enjoyment associated with that concrescence than, for example, with the concrescence of the quarks and gluons that make up the proton. The idea that societies of actual occasions, especially those associated with compound individuals, are capable of more enjoyment and more complex experiences than simple assemblies of events is fundamental to process thought. Failure to take note of this feature is one of the most common, erroneous reasons for dismissing panexperientialism: "Oh, those folks are crazy, they believe that electrons (or rocks) are conscious."

Process thought explicitly recognizes that creation of order, increasing complexity, and emergence of novelty are historical facts. Such an outcome is, according to process thought, the natural outcome of a society of occasions of experience maximizing its satisfaction or enjoyment. Jungerman quotes Waddington in this regard:

"Whitehead insisted that an event is not merely an assemblage of numerous relations between many different things thrown together in a disorderly heap. On the contrary the various 'feelings' of one for another are organized into something with a specific and individual character... Organization occurs when the relations are of such a kind that they tend to stabilize the general pattern against influences which might disturb it. That is to say, organization confers on the entity an enduring individuality which a mere assemblage lacks." (pg. 118)

In this regard, I believe that it is noteworthy that Whitehead's metaphysics leads naturally to an introduction of the divine. I simplistically [can now] view the divine "as a field of pure positive affect that pervades the entire universe and which participates with the dominant occasion of experience of that universe." The accord between modern science and process theology means that the estrangement between religion and science may dissipate in a reconstructive postmodern era. Given the threat to societal stability posed by abrupt global climate change, it is comforting that we may be able to use all the tools at our disposal to meet that enormous challenge to human progress.

V. Why bother?

Isn't the present primarily physicalist approach close enough for government work? Well, yes, provided that the goal is to maintain the status quo and continue the current modern trajectory toward a deconstructive postmodern ("posthuman") future where we can all take great delight in being naught but souless "bags of genes and chemicals" bumping about in a blighted environment. If perchance that does not seem desirable, then perhaps it is time to admit that 100% allegiance to the present approach may be suicidal. Isn't neuralism, especially in conjunction with a "revolt of the elite" - for whom the accumulation of more and more 'stuff,' without relation to actual need, has become the highest good - quite nihilistic toward human value, not to mention survival of the world as a viable ecosystem?

I suggest taking a bold step. Integrate information about abrupt global climate change into our base of conscious knowledge so that it can act as a "cognitive capstone," deflecting the trajectory of embodied human consciousness away from its highly alienated, 'posthuman' target and towards a more humane, postcritical mindscape. According to this scheme, the competitive, tribal mentalities that have dominated the first part of this interglacial phase must give ground to more cooperative, postcritical, participatory mentalities not dominated by unconscious fear. A postcritical worldview will consciously recognize abrupt global climate change and the critical need to break free of the conditioned thinking of the past where 'our knowledge' of abrupt global climate change has been almost entirely in the form of unconscious fear. The figure below illustrates some alternative trajectories for embodied human consciousness.

As alluded to above, the data about cyclic climate change - at least for the last three million years or so of earth's geologic history - where long, cold, arid glacial phases have been interrupted by short, warm, wet interglacial phases, is startling and very worrisome. The last three million years was, by the way, the period when the hominid line diverged from its primate forebears, leading, according to the fossil record, to the appearance of modern Homo sapiens with brains such as ours in size, around 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. This data is, at least in broad outline, firm and widely accepted.

"Cyclic climate pattern of alternating cold, dry glacial periods and warm, wet interglacial periods. This pattern has prevailed during the current ice age, which has lasted for three million years. Transitions between glacial and interglacial phases may occur within as short a period of time as a decade. Marked variations in sea level occurred near the end of the last two interglacial periods. Upward slope of interglacial phase temperatures reflect the progressive decrease in earth's albedo as the polar ice caps shrink. Insert shows rapid fluctuations in temperature that occurred during the last glacial phase."

So, our best guesses are that the three million year old climate cycle continues and the currently warming interglacial phase will come to an end, perhaps abruptly, perhaps soon. What we don't know is exactly when and how the next glacial phase will begin. However, to wait until we do know "for sure" will almost certainly be too late. Even though we have developed practically all the tools (except perhaps the political will and spiritual fortitude) we need to deal with this problem during the first part of this interglacial phase, we should not underestimate the resistance that will arise to changing the ways we do business.

If we have 100 years to get used to the fact that those of us who live in northern latitudes are merely 'renters,' well, then we could probably do a little. If we have 500 years we could do a great deal. To put it into stark terms, consider that contemporary thought forms appear to be able to do relatively little towards stemming population growth. This makes it probable that interglacial phase population growth will approximate the curve shown in part A of the figure below: population increases as long as food supply allows.

The problem for the postcritical mind: Learning to learn to live in an ecologically sustainable way during interglacial phases.

Now, in the event of a rapid cooling (or worse, a "1-2 punch" of rapid warming and sea level rise followed by rapid cooling) the population downsizing will almost certainly be extremely catastrophic. Is that how this phase of civilization is going to end? Let's at least try opening ourselves to a new infusion of creativity and novelty for the last part of this interglacial period.

Surely we should work towards having a population that will be closer to a level sustainable through the transition to the next glacial phase. Surely we should work for the maintenance of civilization, freedom, and the individualized modes of consciousness that civilization supports. Who knows what can be accomplished in our society if we Homo sapiens sapiens are willing to work together, if we are willing to strive to be an example for the rest of the world.

If not, if we bow our heads and slink into the posthuman future of denial, alienation, and despair, then the question must arise as to whether or not human beings are truly conscious. What use is freedom without consciousness?

VI. References and Notes

1. The disutility of conceiving of human beings in strictly physicalist terms was addressed with vigor by philosopher/scientist Michael Polanyi:

"The ideal of strictly objective knowledge, paradigmatically formulated by Laplace, continues to sustain a universal tendency to enhance the observational accuracy and systematic precision of science, at the expense of its bearing on its subject matter...[Science may be characterized as harboring] a misguided intellectual passion - a passion for achieving absolutely impersonal knowledge which, being unable to recognize any persons, presents us with a picture of the universe in which we ourselves are absent. In such a universe there is no one capable of creating and upholding scientific values; hence there is no science."

The story of the Laplacean fallacy suggests a criterion of consistency. It shows that our conceptions of man and human society must be such as to account for man's faculty in forming these conceptions and to authorize the cultivation of this faculty within society. Only by accrediting the exercise of our intellectual passions in the act of observing man, can we form conceptions of man and society which both endorse this accrediting and uphold the freedom of culture in society. Such self-accrediting, or self-confirmatory, progression will prove an effective guide to all knowledge of living beings." (Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, 1958. Emphasis added)

2. John A. Jungerman, World in Process: Creativity and Interconnection in the New Physics, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pgs. 86 & 87, 2000.

3. Henri Bergson, in Introduction to Metaphysics (NY: G. P. Putnam's Sons, pg. 12, 1912), expressed it this way:

"...to live is to grow old. But it may just as well be compared to a continual rolling up, like that of a thread on a ball, for our past follows us, it swells incessantly with the present that it picks up on its way; and consciousness means memory."

4. Nicholas Rescher, Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pg. 35, 1996.

The Sovereignty of God Displayed in Evolution's Entropic Value

Picturing the Ancient Devonian Age of the Earth

While visiting the northwest coast of Lake Michigan above the city of Petoskey I saw some petoskey stones lying on a shelf and made a guess as to their history. When later checking I found I wasn't far off from a very important period of the ancient earth. That these fossilized coral pieces were part of an ancient sea bed formed between 358 to 415 million years ago known as the Devonian period. If you've ever wondered where plants and marine life was birthed this was the era spanning 60 million years way, way, way before the dinosaur era.

Geography of the Continents during the Devonian Geologic Age

Moreover, thinking about terrestrial biologic life I remember reading an article not too long ago about how the process of evolution can be described in terms of energy gain or loss. That is, "the first significant adaptive radiation of life on dry land occurred during the Devonian [period]," according to the Wikipedia article I had turned to next. But what does this mean?

The Devonian period spawned Sea & Terrestrial Life

As you may, or may not, know all of life is a response to energy's entropic value of emitting heat until a symmetry of balance can be found (that is, a state of equilibrium). The second law of thermodynamics says that everything moves in such a way as to always balance itself back to its initial energy state with no loss and no gain. In other words, for every dissipative event there is an equally reconstituting event.

For example, if a star explodes than it's emitted energy is recovered in it's hot gases. Similarly, evolution follows this same equation. If the surface of the earth heats up than the grasses on the surface of the earth are a response to cooling it off by absorbing that energy and redistributing it in a process of photosynthesis and cellular product.

Travellers of Faith walking in Light

As such, everything revolves around radiated heat, light, and energy. Thought in these terms, the equation of evolution balances off (or dissipates) the collective build up of heat in the earth. Thus, the ever evolving complex of evolutionary eras ceding energy back and forth with itself via entropic events. It is how earth became earth by moving from a chaotic, violent planet to its many strange forms of life throughout the eons. But when you add it all up the initial energy it started with (in a closed system) always equals the energy remaining. Of course our solar system lives in an open system but I think you get the point that there are energy tradeoffs within a large scale system and between other large scale systems.

So when is the last time somebody described evolution in terms of its entropic values? Or its meaning relative to the indigenous life we observe here on planet Earth? And, if you believe in a sovereign God, than what an amazingly complex God we have who designed such a system as this to reflect His creative power, wisdom, and glory! Like gravity, small and inconsequential in its affects upon other objects when measured against other mightier forces of nature such as the weak or strong nuclear forces or the electromagnetic force (see here for further reading) yet, when viewed as a large scale gravitational force it is the mightiest of all in sheer strength and distances encompassed! So, I think is God's sovereign power, which operates weakly amongst His free-willed or indeterminative/chaotic creation but bursts forth in grandeur across the full scales of time and matter as all things are knit together back to Himself and His redemptive purposes.

Peace,

R.E. Slater

April 28, 2018

"Create in me a new heart, O Lord, a new vision of Thyself and the World"

Reference Material

Wikipedia - Petoskey stone - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petoskey_stone?wprov=sfla1

Wikipedia - Devonian period - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devonian?wprov=sfla1

Wikipedia - Second Law of Thermodynamics - 2nd Law of Thermodynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics

* * * * * * * * *

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old physicist at MIT, thinks he has found
the underlying physics driving the origin and evolution of life.

A New Physics Theory of Life

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/

An MIT physicist has proposed the provocative idea that life exists because the

law of increasing entropy drives matter to acquire lifelike physical properties.

by Katherine Taylor for Quanta Magazine

January 22, 2014

Why does life exist?

Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

Cells from the moss Plagiomnium affine with visible chloroplasts,
organelles that conduct photosynthesis by capturing sunlight.
Kristian Peters

“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.

England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”

His idea, detailed in a recent paper and further elaborated in a talk he is delivering at universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both.

England has taken “a very brave and very important step,” said Alexander Grosberg, a professor of physics at New York University who has followed England’s work since its early stages. The “big hope” is that he has identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life, Grosberg said.

“Jeremy is just about the brightest young scientist I ever came across,” said Attila Szabo, a biophysicist in the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institutes of Health who corresponded with England about his theory after meeting him at a conference. “I was struck by the originality of the ideas.”

Others, such as Eugene Shakhnovich, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology and biophysics at Harvard University, are not convinced. “Jeremy’s ideas are interesting and potentially promising, but at this point are extremely speculative, especially as applied to life phenomena,” Shakhnovich said.

England’s theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation — that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life — that remains unproven. But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab.

“He’s trying something radically different,” said Mara Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard who is contemplating such an experiment after learning about England’s work. “As an organizing lens, I think he has a fabulous idea. Right or wrong, it’s going to be very much worth the investigation.”

A computer simulation by Jeremy England and colleagues shows

a system of particles confined inside a viscous fluid in which the turquoise

particles are driven by an oscillating force. Over time (from top to bottom),

the force triggers the formation of more bonds among the particles.

Courtesy of Jeremy England 

At the heart of England’s idea is the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of increasing entropy or the “arrow of time.” Hot things cool down, gas diffuses through air, eggs scramble but never spontaneously unscramble; in short, energy tends to disperse or spread out as time progresses. Entropy is a measure of this tendency, quantifying how dispersed the energy is among the particles in a system, and how diffuse those particles are throughout space. It increases as a simple matter of probability: There are more ways for energy to be spread out than for it to be concentrated. Thus, as particles in a system move around and interact, they will, through sheer chance, tend to adopt configurations in which the energy is spread out. Eventually, the system arrives at a state of maximum entropy called “thermodynamic equilibrium,” in which energy is uniformly distributed. A cup of coffee and the room it sits in become the same temperature, for example. As long as the cup and the room are left alone, this process is irreversible. The coffee never spontaneously heats up again because the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against so much of the room’s energy randomly concentrating in its atoms.

Although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or “closed” system, an “open” system can keep its entropy low — that is, divide energy unevenly among its atoms — by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings. In his influential 1944 monograph “What Is Life?” the eminent quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that this is what living things must do. A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.

Life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but until recently, physicists were unable to use thermodynamics to explain why it should arise in the first place. In Schrödinger’s day, they could solve the equations of thermodynamics only for closed systems in equilibrium. In the 1960s, the Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine made progress on predicting the behavior of open systems weakly driven by external energy sources (for which he won the 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry). But the behavior of systems that are far from equilibrium, which are connected to the outside environment and strongly driven by external sources of energy, could not be predicted.

This situation changed in the late 1990s, due primarily to the work of Chris Jarzynski, now at the University of Maryland, and Gavin Crooks, now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Jarzynski and Crooks showed that the entropy produced by a thermodynamic process, such as the cooling of a cup of coffee, corresponds to a simple ratio: the probability that the atoms will undergo that process divided by their probability of undergoing the reverse process (that is, spontaneously interacting in such a way that the coffee warms up). As entropy production increases, so does this ratio: A system’s behavior becomes more and more “irreversible.” The simple yet rigorous formula could in principle be applied to any thermodynamic process, no matter how fast or far from equilibrium. “Our understanding of far-from-equilibrium statistical mechanics greatly improved,” Grosberg said. England, who is trained in both biochemistry and physics, started his own lab at MIT two years ago and decided to apply the new knowledge of statistical physics to biology.

David Kaplan explains how the law of increasing entropy could drive

random bits of matter into the stable, orderly structures of life.

Filming by Tom Hurwitz and Richard Fleming. Editing and motion

graphics by Tom McNamara. Music by Podington Bear. 

Using Jarzynski and Crooks’ formulation, he derived a generalization of the second law of thermodynamics that holds for systems of particles with certain characteristics: The systems are strongly driven by an external energy source such as an electromagnetic wave, and they can dump heat into a surrounding bath. This class of systems includes all living things. England then determined how such systems tend to evolve over time as they increase their irreversibility. “We can show very simply from the formula that the more likely evolutionary outcomes are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment’s external drives on the way to getting there,” he said. The finding makes intuitive sense: Particles tend to dissipate more energy when they resonate with a driving force, or move in the direction it is pushing them, and they are more likely to move in that direction than any other at any given moment.

“This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environments,” England explained.

Self-Replicating Sphere Clusters: According to new research at Harvard,

coating the surfaces of microspheres can cause them to spontaneously

assemble into a chosen structure, such as a polytetrahedron (red), which

then triggers nearby spheres into forming an identical structure.

Courtesy of Michael Brenner/Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 

Self-replication (or reproduction, in biological terms), the process that drives the evolution of life on Earth, is one such mechanism by which a system might dissipate an increasing amount of energy over time. As England put it, “A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.” In a September paperin the Journal of Chemical Physics, he reported the theoretical minimum amount of dissipation that can occur during the self-replication of RNA molecules and bacterial cells, and showed that it is very close to the actual amounts these systems dissipate when replicating. He also showed that RNA, the nucleic acid that many scientists believe served as the precursor to DNA-based life, is a particularly cheap building material. Once RNA arose, he argues, its “Darwinian takeover” was perhaps not surprising.

The chemistry of the primordial soup, random mutations, geography, catastrophic events and countless other factors have contributed to the fine details of Earth’s diverse flora and fauna. But according to England’s theory, the underlying principle driving the whole process is dissipation-driven adaptation of matter.

This principle would apply to inanimate matter as well. “It is very tempting to speculate about what phenomena in nature we can now fit under this big tent of dissipation-driven adaptive organization,” England said. “Many examples could just be right under our nose, but because we haven’t been looking for them we haven’t noticed them.”

Scientists have already observed self-replication in nonliving systems. According to new research led by Philip Marcus of the University of California, Berkeley, and reported in Physical Review Letters in August, vortices in turbulent fluids spontaneously replicate themselves by drawing energy from shear in the surrounding fluid. And in a paper appearing online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Michael Brenner, a professor of applied mathematics and physics at Harvard, and his collaborators present theoretical models and simulations of microstructures that self-replicate. These clusters of specially coated microspheres dissipate energy by roping nearby spheres into forming identical clusters. “This connects very much to what Jeremy is saying,” Brenner said.

Besides self-replication, greater structural organization is another means by which strongly driven systems ramp up their ability to dissipate energy. A plant, for example, is much better at capturing and routing solar energy through itself than an unstructured heap of carbon atoms. Thus, England argues that under certain conditions, matter will spontaneously self-organize. This tendency could account for the internal order of living things and of many inanimate structures as well. “Snowflakes, sand dunes and turbulent vortices all have in common that they are strikingly patterned structures that emerge in many-particle systems driven by some dissipative process,” he said. Condensation, wind and viscous drag are the relevant processes in these particular cases.

“He is making me think that the distinction between living and nonliving matter is not sharp,” said Carl Franck, a biological physicist at Cornell University, in an email. “I’m particularly impressed by this notion when one considers systems as small as chemical circuits involving a few biomolecules.”

If a new theory is correct, the same physics it identifies as responsible

for the origin of living things could explain the formation of many

other patterned structures in nature. Snowflakes, sand dunes and

self-replicating vortices in the protoplanetary disk may all be

examples of dissipation-driven adaptation. | Wilson Bentley

England’s bold idea will likely face close scrutiny in the coming years. He is currently running computer simulations to test his theory that systems of particles adapt their structures to become better at dissipating energy. The next step will be to run experiments on living systems.

Prentiss, who runs an experimental biophysics lab at Harvard, says England’s theory could be tested by comparing cells with different mutations and looking for a correlation between the amount of energy the cells dissipate and their replication rates. “One has to be careful because any mutation might do many things,” she said. “But if one kept doing many of these experiments on different systems and if [dissipation and replication success] are indeed correlated, that would suggest this is the correct organizing principle.”

Brenner said he hopes to connect England’s theory to his own microsphere constructions and determine whether the theory correctly predicts which self-replication and self-assembly processes can occur — “a fundamental question in science,” he said.

Having an overarching principle of life and evolution would give researchers a broader perspective on the emergence of structure and function in living things, many of the researchers said. “Natural selection doesn’t explain certain characteristics,” said Ard Louis, a biophysicist at Oxford University, in an email. These characteristics include a heritable change to gene expression called methylation, increases in complexity in the absence of natural selection, and certain molecular changes Louis has recently studied.

If England’s approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that “the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve,” Louis said.

“People often get stuck in thinking about individual problems,” Prentiss said. Whether or not England’s ideas turn out to be exactly right, she said, “thinking more broadly is where many scientific breakthroughs are made.”

**Emily Singer contributed reporting. This article was reprinted on ScientificAmerican.com and BusinessInsider.com.

**Correction: This article was revised on January 22, 2014, to reflect that Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, not physics. 

Snippets of Thoughts - Evolution

EVOLUTION

For those still struggling with the topic of creational evolution below will be found some current conversations and reflections on evolution and the bible from many of the authors we have quoted or have read here at Relevancy22 through a recently published book.

For myself, it's a no-brainer. I've already crossed over to the dark side. There are no doubts, no regrets, no losses. Curiously, the only major thing that did happen - besides horrifying my friends and family to the point that they believe me to have lost my faith... ("I did not") was that I discovered a much larger God. A God whom I couldn't define, systematize, place in a theological box, or presume to know the indefatigable One of deep mystery, love, and redemption.

As a result, along the right side of my blog site here are topical listings of subjects. Scrolling down to the "Science section" will discover several hundreds of articles on biblical evolution. There is also an excellent series conducted by Peter Enns who interviewed many of his friends and acquaintances on when the "faith of their youth grew up" when they could no longer look at the bible as they once did through fundamental or evangelical interpretations. The link to these interviews can be found here (21 in all if I remember right) - "Faith Transitions - aha Moments" in Scholars lives.

The latest book below does something similar along the lines of exploring evolution over against a depiction of the bible as teaching "instantaneous creation" [known by several names such as Intelligent Design, Young Earth Creation (YEC), or Old Earth Creation]. For many Christians they receive their direction of Scripture from the pulpits of the church, but for those who really yearn to make creationism even more real through denial of evolution and misinterpretation of the mythology of creation (Gen 1-11, which includes the Great Flood) than creational apologeticist Ken Ham has several biblical theme parks to be explored to resettle any uncertainty. One is built upon the Intelligent Design Concept and the other - not too far away - can be found in a Noah's Ark theme park (currently being built as of this date) to shore up the lagging faith of the literal bible (flat-earth) reading crowd.

Of course, there are also the big budget movies one might consume in living technicolor depicting what the created world, or Egypt, or Jesus, might have looked liked or gone through in their day. Or, like me, you could wander into the Royale Tyrrell Dinosaur Museum in Alberta, Canada, and walk through the massive exhibits amazed at the many real (not casted) acres of dinosaur skeletons while listening to a pre-Cambrian show of how all this came together.

Now, not that I would turn down a good ice cream cone or a gooey coney dog at a biblical theme park. Nor enjoy any less the fellowship of my blessed, more-fundamentally-minded, brethren seeking solace and encouragement through Ken Ham's 3D theme park efforts. But, the reality is, there is no contest or question about cosmological, geological, or biological evolution. It just is. You may pay your money to the theme parks, buy the books against evolution, and go see exhibits, and discussions with your bible study group, but no amount of posturing can deny the scientific veracity of evolution. And it is ridiculous to try despite the efforts of many.

Why? Because once you cross this "artificial" chasm between the bible and God your faith becomes larger than one can ever imagine. Rather than losing your faith to Darwin, you may join with Darwin and many other Christian scientists working alongside scientists of every persuasion. The bible comes more alive, the standard pat answers of our previous theology blows up and must be reworked, and a wonderful element of faith comes into our lives helping us to see people all around us again (the church's mission field of ministry to all). People needing our loving care, service, and help, rather than being bludgeoned with (correct) knowledge first and (church-sanctioned) works later.

As of today, can we say that evolution has ended? Nope. It always is. And it is continuing apace as our species works very hard at bringing about another major extinction event in an era begun to be described as the Anthropocene Age. An age caused by the industrial use of fossil fuels along with their harmful affects on the earth. How do these fossil fuels harm the earth? They create an overproduction of CO2 gas which has warmed up the planet 10X beyond the last extinction event, thus changing the currents in the air, the oceans, the salinity of the salt water, the melting of all earth's glaciers, the loss of animal species, the loss of rangeland for those species to thrive, and overall affected climate change itself.

However, when we're all dead and gone guess what? Somehow life will live on. The atmosphere may be toxic but no matter. Evolutionary theory says "life will somehow survive." As example, the early earth was covered in noxious methane gases. Bacterias of every form thrived in this gaseous environment, both on land and in the primordial oceans. And then something strange happened. The earth changed the way it behaved and over hundreds of millions of years a lethal gas known as oxygen became the dominant gas of life which drove the Cambrian Explosion. (I've got several articles on these subjects too if you google relevancy22 + "Cambrian explosion" or "primordial oxygen").

In conclusion, below is a new book recently released by Biologos, a Christian evolutionary website, which provides the stories of people searching for answers when confronted by science and wishing to take the bible and their faith seriously. It would be well worth the read for many churches. Peace.

R.E. Slater
March 24, 2016

http://www.ivpress.com/cgi-ivpress/book.pl/code=5290

How I Changed My Mind About Evolution

Evangelicals Reflect on Faith and Science

BioLogos Books on Science and Christianity

Edited by Kathryn Applegate and J.B. Stump

Perhaps no topic appears as potentially threatening to evangelicals as evolution. The very idea seems to exclude God from the creation the book of Genesis celebrates.

Yet many evangelicals have come to accept the conclusions of science while still holding to a vigorous belief in God and the Bible. How did they make this journey? How did they come to embrace both evolution and faith?

Here are stories from a community of people who love Jesus and honor the authority of the Bible, but who also agree with what science says about the cosmos, our planet and the life that so abundantly fills it.

Among the contributors are

Scientists such as

• Francis Collins
• Deborah Haarsma
• Denis Lamoureux

Pastors such as

• John Ortberg
• Ken Fong
• Laura Truax

Biblical scholars such as

• N. T. Wright
• Scot McKnight
• Tremper Longman III

Theologians and philosophers such as

• James K. A. Smith
• Amos Yong
• Oliver Crisp