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The Cosmic Serpent

This document summarizes Francis Crick's hypothesis of "directed panspermia", which proposes that life on Earth originated from microorganisms transported to our planet via comets or meteorites from another planet. It discusses Crick's criticism of the theory that the first cell emerged randomly through molecular collisions. Crick calculated that the probability of even a single protein forming by chance is inconceivably small, making it unlikely that life arose spontaneously on the early Earth. The document concludes by noting that Crick proposed a yet unknown mechanism must have directed the origin and early development of life.

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Jonathan Robert Kraus (OutofMudProductions)
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315 views3 pages

The Cosmic Serpent

This document summarizes Francis Crick's hypothesis of "directed panspermia", which proposes that life on Earth originated from microorganisms transported to our planet via comets or meteorites from another planet. It discusses Crick's criticism of the theory that the first cell emerged randomly through molecular collisions. Crick calculated that the probability of even a single protein forming by chance is inconceivably small, making it unlikely that life arose spontaneously on the early Earth. The document concludes by noting that Crick proposed a yet unknown mechanism must have directed the origin and early development of life.

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Jonathan Robert Kraus (OutofMudProductions)
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
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Coaerof Crick (48t), reproduceduith permission from Little, Brou;n LsCo.

peoples claimed that the vital principle was a selpent from the cosmos. I had never heard of Crick's hypothesis, called ..directed panspermia," but I knew that I had just found a new conespon_ dence between science and the complex formed by shamanism and mythologr. I sat down in the armchair and plunged into Llfu itself: lts origin and,nature. cnIcr, writing in the early rg80s, criticizes the usual scientific theory on the origin of life, according to which a cell first ap_ peared in the primitive soup through the random collisionsof disorganized molecules. For Crick, this theory presents a major drawback: It is based on ideas conceived in the nineteenth century long before molecular biologr revealed that the basic mech74 . T h e Co sm ic Se r p e n r

anismsof life are identicalfor all speciesand are extremely complex-and when one calculates the probability of chance producing such complexity, one ends up with inconceivably small numbers. The DNA molecule, which excelsat stochng and duplicating information, is incapable of building itself on its own. proteins do this, but they are incapable of reproducing themselveswithout the information contained in the DNA. Life, therefore. is a seemingly inescapablesynthesisof these two molecular systems.Moving beyond the famous question of the chicken and the egg, Crick calculatesthe probability of the chance emergence of one single protein (which could then go on to build the first DNA molecule). In all living species,proteins are made up of exactly the same20 amino acids,which are small molecules.The averageprotein is a long chain made up of approximately 200 amino acids, chosen from those 20, and strung together in the right order. According to the laws of combinatorials,there is I chancein 20 multiplied by itself 200 times for a single specificprotein to emerge fortuitousry. This figure, which can be written 20200, and which is roughly equivalent to 10260, enormausly greater than the number of is atoms in the obsensable unioerse (estimated at 1080). These numbers are inconceivable for a human mind. It is not possible to imagine all the atoms of the observableuniverse and even lessa figure that is billions of billions of billions of billions of billions (etc.) times greater. However, since the beginning of life on earth, the number of amino acid chains that could have beer, synthesizedby chance can only represent a minute fraction of all the possibilities. According to Crick: "The great majority of sequences can never have been slmthesized at all, at any time. These calculationstake account only of the amino acid sequence. They do not allow for the fact that many sequenceswould probaS e ein g Co r r e sp o n d e n ce s . /$

bly not fold up satisfactorily into a stable, compact shape.What fraction of all possible sequenceswould do this is not known, though it is surmised to be fairly small." Crick concludesthat the organized complexity found at the cellular level "cannot have arisen by pure chance." The earth has existed for approximately 4.5 billion years. In the beginning it was merely a radioactive aggregate with a surface temperature reaching the melting point of metal. Not really a hospitable place for life. Yet there are fossilsof single-celled beings that are approximately 3.5 billion years old. The existenceof a single cell necessarilyimplies the presence of DNA, with its 4letter "alphabet" (A, G, C, T), and of proteins, with their 2OJetter "alphabet" (the 20 amino acids), as well as a "translation mechanism" between the twe*given that the instructions for the construction of proteins are coded in the language of DNA. Crick writes: "It is quite remarkable that such a mechanism existsat all and even more remarkable that every living cell, whether animal, plant or microbial, contains a version of it."le Crick compq"r protein to a paragraph made up of 200 let" ters lined up in the correct order. If the chancesare infinitesimal for one paragraph to emerge in a billion years from a terrestrial soup, the probability of the fortuitous appearance, during the same period, of two alphabets and one translation mechanismis even smaller. Wsnu I loorro up from Cricks book. it was dark outside. I was feeling both astonishedand elated. Like a myopic detective bent over a magnifying glasswhile following a trail, I had fallen into a bottomless hole. For months I had been tDnng to untangle the enigma of the hallucinatoryknowledge of Western Amazonia'sindigenous people, stubbornly searching for the hidden passage in
.

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