24 May 2010
Last month, scientists at the laboratories of genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter announced the creation of a “synthetic” bacteria. Venter became renowned earlier this decade as the first man to completely map the human genome. His research work lately has been attempting to decode the genomes of bacteria, and to synthesize them from base chemicals using the elaborate machinery and methods he developed in deciphering the entire human genome.
The scientific news service SiliconRepublic.com report was typical, “beginning with information on a computer, four bottles of chemicals on a chemical synthesizer were used to construct the bacteria’s genes, Venter said, and the research has been deemed a landmark by many independent scientists and philosophers.”
“The synthetic bacteria, which behaved like natural bacteria, have 14 ‘watermarks sequences’ attached to their genome – inert stretches of DNA added to distinguish them from their natural counterparts.”
“We have passed through a critical psychological barrier,” Venter was quoted by the Financial Times, “It has changed my own thinking, both scientifically and philosophically, about life and how it works.”
What the Ventor lab did was to decode the genome of a naturally occurring bacterium, replicate the genome synthetically in the laboratory from base chemicals, add several inert sequences to the manufactured DNA as markers, and then insert the manufactured genome into a living cell whose naturally occurring genome had been removed. When the modified bacterium reproduced naturally, the reproductions contained the inert stretches of DNA that had originated in the laboratory. Venter called the reproductions a “synthetic bacteria.”
Venter did not go so far as to claim that he had created “synthetic life,” which would be untrue. Although Venter said he created a “synthetic” cell, the word “hybrid” would be more accurate. The claim of “synthetic” was bound to create the sensation it did, given the contention in biology today between Darwinism and the Intelligent Design schools of thought.
“Synthetic life” is the holy grail of Darwinism and modern biology. To manufacture life in the laboratory would establish philosophical materialism as the basis of biology, the same philosophical basis of modern physics. Synthetically created life would establish that life could arise spontaneously from dead matter, and would lend credence to the belief of the Darwinist theory of the origin of life on earth. That belief is that DNA, by sheer random chance, was produced in the primordial soup which was once the earth’s oceans, and began to reproduce.
Previous to Sir Isaac Newton, the founder of modern physics, science was Aristotelian in outlook. Before Newton Newton Newton
Implicitly, Newton
If whatever power the material possesses lies within the material itself, then life, in the materialist view, is nothing more than dead matter organized in such a way that the organization as a whole is capable of exhibiting such characteristics as growth, development, response to stimuli, and, under certain circumstances, reproduction.
The father of biology was the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who was not a materialist. His views on biological life are set out in his works De Anima (On the Soul) and The Metaphysics. Aristotle conceived that a living thing constituted “substance,” which comprised matter and form. The power of the substance lay within the form, while the matter was simply the thing in which the form manifested itself. Substance required both matter and form to exist.
Of the analytically separable components of the form, there was one element that Aristotle called the soul. The presence of soul was what distinguished a living organism from that same organism, lifeless. Aristotle believed that a living thing was not merely an assemblage of subcomponents; there existed a unity and function in the organism separate and apart from the assembly of components. He called this the essence of the thing, and soul was the essence of the living thing. Soul was incorporeal and existed everywhere within the body of the living thing, and its presence was essential to the life of the thing, whatever it was. Soul was the efficient cause of life. The immortality of the soul in the species was what drove the individual organism to reproduce; immortality was the final cause of soul and was the reason the organism attempted to reproduce.
Soul was not something that could exist separate and apart from the body it gave life to. There was a mutual dependency between body and soul; one could not exist without the other, and together they comprised the living thing. When a thing died, its soul left it.
Materialism has no answer to the question of what is the difference between a living thing, and that same thing, lifeless. By rights, since the power of life existed in the matter, if the matter is in the proper configuration then the organization ought to exhibit the signs of life. Frankenstein ought to be “alive” since his components are arranged properly. If Frankenstein is too complex an organism, then certainly the DNA in the cells of the subcomponents of the lifeless thing ought to be able to function even if the total assemblage, the once living thing, is no longer able to continue as a living unity. Yet, they do not. Once dead, a ‘unity’ of the organism is gone, and body of the thing decays into other substances.
Materialism also has no explanation as to why a living thing would want to reproduce. Being concerned with efficient causes, materialism can explain the mechanism of reproduction; but having no view on final causes it has no explanation as to why the process of reproduction in a living thing ought to occur in the first place.
Venter’s lab was careful to place the manufactured DNA into a living cell, one which had come into existence in the natural way. The lab did not place the synthetic DNA into a primordial soup and watch the DNA reproduce itself, or generate a whole new cell around itself. The lab did not kill the cell and then insert the manufactured DNA, expecting the DNA to bring the cell back to life. Venter did not put his faith in materialism to that test. If Venter’s DNA did those things, spontaneously reproduced in a primordial soup or bring a dead cell back to life, it would mean that DNA was life. A strand of DNA in itself being life would raise all sorts of questions, inconvenient questions to the materialist view of life; that is, Darwinism.
If DNA were in itself life, then DNA must itself be alive. If DNA is alive, why would DNA synthesize a cell structure in which to encase itself? If DNA came together in the primordial soup quite by accident, why did that molecule simply not begin to replicate itself out of the components naturally occurring in the soup? Why was a cell structure necessary for replication; and how could a molecule with the capacity for self-replication conceive that a cell structure would be necessary for this process and include replication of the cell structure also in the business? If DNA is alive, then the cell structure is to the DNA as the pond is to the frog.
If a cell structure is necessary to the survival of the DNA with its property of self-replication, did an entire cell have to come into existence also by accident in order to generate a thing capable of self-reproduction? If both DNA and a cell structure are necessary for a self-reproducing thing, then DNA by itself is not “life” and it is not the DNA by itself which is “alive,” but the unity of the cell structure and the DNA which is alive.
While most biologists are prepared to accept that under the right conditions DNA could have come into existence by accident, they are not prepared to accept that an entire cell structure complete with DNA came into existence by the action of random chance. That is too far-fetched.
For the Venter lab to produce truly synthetic life, it would have to synthesize not merely DNA, but an entire cell structure also; and this assembly would then have to spontaneously reproduce on its own. Ventor’s lab did not do this, and that is why Ventor’s technical achievement did not amount to the creation of synthetic life. What the lab created was a hybrid cell, and this technical achievement, as well as its limitations, on further review raise more challenges to philosophical materialism and Darwinism, rather than less.
Such are the philosophical problems encountered when biology is placed entirely on the same philosophical footing as physics.
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