Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Function Symmetry and Form

Function, Symmetry and Form

The world is indebted to Watson and Crick for their marvelous discovery of the Double Helix (DH), which appears to be the signature structure of life. Chromosomes intertwined about one another take on a similar appearance. No surprise there.

At the time (1953) it was quickly acknowledged that the two researchers had hit upon something big. Their structure, answered all that was known, building up to the discovery, and fit neatly, like a missing part of the puzzle as to what the basic building block of life should look like. That part of the discovery, of itself, would have been pretty awesome, but there were two aspects of the DH that didn’t get all the press that were every bit as wonderful. These were the shape and the ability of the construct to replicate.

Getting back to chaos and the primordial pool idea, one might willingly suspend disbelief and entertain the notion that life was born of a random combination of chemicals that at a point in space and time hit the cosmic lotto. Now if you count up all the variables contained in the structure you will have to conclude that such a possibility is remote indeed. However, for the sake of argument lets assume it happened. Now it turned out that the DH also showed how a life form could replicate. This taken with the basic DH structure is astonishing to the point of being mind-boggling and every bit as complex. It takes coincidence over the cliff of believability.

Think about it. Science and technology today have done some remarkable things in robotics. Say the Mars Rover chanced upon a robot somewhere on the outback of the red planet. That would be an exciting discovery but it would raise more questions than it answered. First we would want to take the robot apart and see how it worked. When that was complete there would be some Nobel prizes for the scientists who figured it out first…. Now take it a step further, assume it had a capacity for reproduction discovered under an access panel. Now that would take the excitement to a whole new level. I don't suppose anyone would have the cheek to suggest spontaneous generation or a tidal plane with just the right combinations of the iron ore, copper and silver molecule were responsible. To suggest chaos theory might somehow be responsible, combined with randomness and the long passage of time would be seen as absurd. Somebody would note that the robot was built along a vertical axis with sensors and appendages redundantly arranged in harmony with one another. This, taken with all the rest, does not happen in a pool filled with any imaginable combination of the Periodic Table lying randomly scattered about.

So why is it that the DH discovery was not heralded as a proof of creation? For function, form and reproduction to have happened randomly, all in the same instant is a bit hard to fathom.