Bernie Madoff and the Origins of Life
Bernie Madoff and the Origins of Life
Three years into his 150 year sentence, Madoff has time to ponder his inadvertent contribution to thinking about the origins of life.
I remember clearly the moment at which ‘a billion’ made sense to me not as a fuzzy concept, but a concrete amount. I was reading a New York Times article about New York pyramid scheme fraudster Bernard Madoff. He personally bilked investors out of about 18 billion dollars.
Reading about Madoff’s kleptomaniacal rip-off I was struck by the fact that it was possible to actually individually steal and spend billions of dollars. Prior to this moment, I’d thought of billions with regard to the unimaginably large, remote and invisible, as in billions of stars or countless bacteria. I can accept both of these as true – and am indeed grateful to the billions of bacteria with whom I share myself. This said, these billions felt more fantasy than fact.
For some reason, though, I could relate to Madoff’s billions, and this made all the difference. A billion became a number I could work with.
This came to mind recently when a scientist I was interviewing dropped the number 10 to the 40th, or as it’s written 1040, one followed by forty zeros. Ten to the 40th laughs at a billion, which is a puny 109th. Even Madoff, I believe, would throw-up his hands in disbelief at1040. It’s not a googol, one with a hundred zeros, but lets be straightforward here: once you’ve got one with 40 zeros, who’s really counting anymore?
Well, origins of life researchers, that’s who. Because when it comes to the origin of life on Earth, it turns out that some see 1040 as the problem, while others see it as the answer.
Here’s the problem part: if you think of the cosmos as a chaotic place, the chance of life getting itself organized amidst this vast atomic jumble seems impossible. (Just as I imagine those who lost their life savings to Madoff felt the day before the news hit – unimaginable). The prophet of this view of what’s termed irreducible complexity is Sir Fred Hoyle, one of the fathers of the Stardust Revolution.
In the decades following his brilliant work figuring out how stars are the philosopher’s stone – transforming simple hydrogen and helium into all the other elements of the Periodic Table – Hoyle turned to thinking about the next steps in cosmic complexification, from cosmic dust to the molecules of life.
When it comes to complex organic molecules, such as proteins, Hoyle argued that their complexity pointed to a deity, or intelligent designer. His reasoning was in large part based on 1040 . Proteins are made LEGO-like from amino acids. Life on Earth involves 20 different amino acids, from alanine to tryptophan. Based solely on chance, there are 1020 possible pair combinations of amino acids for any ten amino acid-long protein. Imagine a pair of interacting ten-amino acid proteins and you have a probability of 1040 . You can continue this exercise to produce an effectively endless string of zeros.
Most proteins are built from hundreds of amino acids. To Hoyle, the enormity of this numerical complexity defies a natural origin of life’s chemical complexity. A master of metaphor and analogy, Hoyle suggested a comparison that’s become part of the creed of the intelligent design movement: “The situation would be akin to a tornado sweeping through a junk yard which just happened to fling together a strand of bits of metal in such a way as to form a brand new Boeing 747.”
However, the astrophysicist’s reasoning misses a key factor at work in the cosmic process of complexification: selection. Where Hoyle pointed to the impossibly long odds of random chance, others such as Carnegie Institute origins of life researcher Robert (Bob) Hazen see the numbers at the core of an evolutionary process.
Dr. Hazen believes that the handedness - the left and right 'hands' or faces - of minerals such as the calcite he's holding, could explain the handedness of the amino acid molecules that form all proteins on Earth.
On the nascent Earth there were billions of square kilometres of reactive mineral surfaces on which chemical reactions were taking place. Each reaction was a natural experiment – and some were more successful than others. Some reaction products survived to change their environment and thus catalyze other reactions.
“Even if a particular juxtaposition of molecules is incredibly unlikely, over a hundred million years, over a billion years…these reactions are happening in seconds, you can have literally ten to the 50th or ten to the 60th different experiments going on over the course of an Earth-like planet,” says Hazen. “So things that are very improbable, but not impossible, become deterministic.”
Just as the Madoff scheme’s forty year run and $18 billion fraud was improbable, it clearly wasn’t impossible. Given the right conditions, the improbable became the possible. As with all great financial events, what we learn from the Madoff affair is about more than money. Yes, it provides fascinating grist for reflection on greed and self-delusion, but also on the nature of a billion, and even the numbers behind the origin of life.
See Jacob Berkowitz in New Brunswick in May
Jacob’s touring New Brunswick, Canada in May 2011 as part of the Hackamatack awards.