Genetics of Original Sin Read Online Free Page B

investigators have collected and used in their efforts to understand nature. Such an image of the Deity as a willful mystifier is hardly one a sincere believer is likely to defend.
    * See J. Sechbach and R. Gordon, eds., Divine Action and Natural Selection: Science, Faith and Evolution (Singapore, 2009).

2
The Origin of Life
    T he beginnings of life on Earth are shrouded in the darkness of a very distant past, going back at least 3.55 billion years—more than three and a half million millennia!—according to microscopic traces believed to be of fossilized bacteria, detected in rocks of that age. It is interesting to place this event within the framework of the history of our planet and of the history of the universe.
Life appeared on Earth shortly after the young planet had become physically able to harbor it
    The Big Bang, the primeval explosion taken by most cosmologists to have sparked our universe into being, took place 13.7 billion years ago according to the most recent estimate. The solar system was born some 4.55 billion years ago—when the universe was already more than 9 billion years old—from a swirling cloud of gas and dust that gradually condensed into the central Sun and surrounding planets, including the Earth. This birth was a violent affair, which subsided only about 4billion years ago, when the Earth became covered with bodies of liquid water and became, for the first time, physically capable of harboring life. Less than half a billion years later, maybe much earlier but leaving no record so far discovered, life was there. It is not impossible that life appeared as soon as the Earth was physically ready to receive it, or almost.
The origin of life is not known, but the only scientifically acceptable hypothesis is that it arose naturally
    How life started is the object of much research and even more speculation. Instant divine creation is one possibility, not only advocated by creationists but also implicitly accepted by a large number of laypeople, perhaps a majority, who see life as due to some kind of “vital spirit” that was initially “blown” into matter and still goes on “animating” it in every living being. Everyday language is permeated with this belief.
    Unlike strict creationism, this view, known as “vitalism,” is not incompatible with evolution; it dominated biology for a long time, especially in France, where it was defended by many famous scientists, including Lamarck, one of the fathers of evolutionism, the celebrated Louis Pasteur, and, more recently, many other biologists, influenced by the philosopher Henri Bergson, winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize for literature, whose major opus,
L’Évolution créatrice,
recognized evolution, as the title says, but saw it as the product of an “élan vital,” a vital surge. Remarkably, the one-hundredth anniversary of the publication of this book was celebrated in France with some prominence in 2007, in spite of its outdated character. Today, vitalism is rejected by most scientists, with the exception of the advocates of intelligent design, who espouse the relatedtheory of finalism (see chapter 8 ). Thanks to the revolutionary advances of the last fifty years, we now understand and explain life entirely in natural terms.
    The same can’t be said of the origin of life, which is unknown so far. It thus remains permissible, while rejecting vitalism, to imagine, as some do, that life was flipped into being by a Creator, who subsequently left it to function and evolve under its own power, although such a conception of the deity does not fit with the more usual one of an omnipotent God who, notably, can be asked to change the course of things. As long as the origin of life can’t be explained in natural terms, the hypothesis of an instant divine creation of life cannot objectively be ruled out. But this hypothesis is sterile, stifling any attempt to investigate the origin of life on