Chapter 35 — Information Does Not Arise from Chemistry

The deepest problem in abiogenesis is not chemical. It is logical. DNA carries information. Information is not a physical substance. The information in a book is not in the paper and ink—it is in the sequence of letters that encodes meaning. The information in DNA is not in the chemical composition of the bases—it is in their sequence, a sequence that is not determined by the chemistry.

This is a critical point. The chemical properties of the four DNA bases do not constrain their sequence. Adenine will pair with thymine in double-stranded DNA, but in the single-stranded sequence being transcribed, adenine does not chemically prefer to follow any particular base rather than any other. The sequence is chemically unconstrained. This is precisely what makes it capable of carrying information. And it is precisely why chemistry cannot explain why a particular sequence exists.

Hubert Yockey stated: "The origin of the genetic code is the most baffling aspect of the problem of the origins of life and of life itself." Specified functional information consistently has only one known cause in human experience: a mind. We have never observed specified functional information arising spontaneously from non-information, at any timescale, under any conditions. The question is not whether chemistry can produce nucleotides. The question is where the code came from.

Yockey, H.P. Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life. Cambridge University Press, 2005. p. 182. Meyer, S.C. Signature in the Cell. HarperOne, 2009. Chapter 6.

Chapter 36 — The Minimal Cell Problem

The origin-of-life field is not searching for the origin of complex multicellular life. It is searching for the origin of the simplest possible self-replicating cell. In 2016 the J. Craig Venter Institute published the most minimal genome ever assembled for a free-living organism: JCVI-syn3.0, containing 473 genes. This is not a natural organism stripped to its essentials. It is a designed minimal cell, built by one of the most advanced synthetic biology teams in the world, using known genes from an already-living organism.

Even at 473 genes, the cell requires all core systems to be simultaneously present and functional: information processing (transcription and translation), energy production, membrane maintenance, and replication. Remove any one of these systems and the cell cannot survive. The gap this opens is precise: the Venter team did not create life from chemistry. They reduced an already-living organism to its minimum. Approximately 149 of the 473 genes perform functions that the team could not identify. The most thoroughly characterized biological system ever deliberately minimized still contains functions unknown to the scientists who built it.

The minimal cell defines the floor of life. The floor is 473 genes, hundreds of precisely coordinated proteins, all core systems simultaneously functional, and a membrane to contain it. Below that floor is chemistry. The question of how the first version of even this minimal system assembled from non-living chemistry—without a design team, without foreknowledge of which genes were required, without an existing organism to start from, and without the machinery that reads genetic instructions already in place to read those instructions—has no proposed mechanism. The chemistry below the floor is not life.

Hutchison, C.A. et al. "Design and synthesis of a minimal bacterial genome." Science 351, no. 6280 (2016): aad6253. Glass, J.I. et al. "Essential genes of a minimal bacterium." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103, no. 2 (2006): 425–430.