( Please Note Below New Time And Lunch to be Served)
Thinkers’ Forum USA Affiliates!
You are cordially invited to the next monthly Lecture of TF USA.
Speaker: Babar Mustafa
Topic: “Animation Of Matter”
Moderator: Dr. Fayyaz Sheikh
When:
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Duration:
Start Time: 11;00 AM
End Time: 1;00 PM
Lunch Served After Lecture
Location:
Dr. Shoeb Amin’s office
48 New Main Street
Haverstraw NY 10927
Synopsis
Animation of Matter
How life originated? This question has two different answers. First one which is more popular is that God created it and that is the end of discussion for the “how” part for most people. Second one is that it evolved from one first life. The evolution part from first life onwards is well established since Darwin in mid19th century presented the theory of natural selection. I personally am convinced one hundred percent that life did evolve from rudimentary and very basic, to the present level of complexity. It is all quite understandable and not really hard to get the idea of evolution except the emergence of the very first life on its own.
It is also speculated that this very first life might have originated elsewhere and travelled through space embedded in meteorites and hit earth and with favorable conditions here thrived and evolved. If we look at certain facts about our empirical self, about the stuff that we, humans and all other life including animals and plants, it becomes quite clear that no, there is no reason to think that life originated elsewhere because the six basic elements that life is composed of existed here before life originated and these elements are all around us. These six elements are common denominator of all life, accounting for 99%of the dry weight of every living thing. Life is known to be carbon based. Carbon formed in the core of the stars, when those stars exploded it spread all over. Other five major elements are – hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, phosphorous and Sulfur.
Life as we know now seems too complex and I agree it is hard to imagine it having emerged on its own but what about the life at the earliest stages, some three thousand five hundred million years ago i.e. 3.5 billion years ago? Was it the same as it is now? The fossil records do not confirm it and the environmental conditions that science figures out existed at the time earth was formed do not allow this life to have existed. Early atmosphere of earth didn’t have oxygen enough to sustain this life for example. So if we consider life having evolved from humble beginnings it all makes sense.
It has been scientifically determined that all this diverse life began to spread about 600 million years ago in the Cambrian era (known as the Cambrian Explosion) when single cell life became highly complex and Eukaryotic cells evolved and oxygen levels increased sufficiently. Eukaryotic cells are what animals (including humans) and plants are made of. It took two and a half billion years for this complex cell to evolve from basic Prokaryotic cells (of what bacteria are made of). And it took about one billion years for the Prokaryotic cell to emerge first. It is no easy task to figure out things that happened billions of years ago but thanks to science we have pretty good methods to figure out the past to a great degree of accuracy and hopefully will be able to understand more in the future. The evolution of life from Prokaryotic cell life onwards is understood quite well but the question of that very first life is still not known with complete understanding yet. I came across some information regarding this in a book “Microcosmos” where Carl Sagan’s son Dorion Sagan writes (co-authored with Lynn Margulis, his mother – both highly educated), how life could have originated from the basic elements that I mentioned earlier, considering the properties of those elements. I have picked out some parts of their book and tried to keep it to layman’s level for the purpose of simplicity:
Carbon atoms, being very light and with four valence electrons (i.e. electron in outer most shell available to pair with another available electron) and due to this property virtually all the molecules that we are composed of are carbon based. Carbon atoms in their highly agitated states during the hot wet and molten Archean conditions, combined rapidly with hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and sulfur to generate a vast diversity of substances.
A hydrocarbon chain linked to a group of phosphorous and oxygen atoms manifest an electrical charge on the end bearing the phosphate group and no charge on the other end. The chemical as whole attracts water on its charged end and repels it on the non-charged end. Such chemicals, called phospholipids, tend to lineup side by side with each other, the non-charged ends pointing away from the water while the charged ends point down into it. (This is essentially what happens when a drop of oil enters water, instantly forming a film.) These and other types of lipids tend spontaneously to fold into drops, secluding materials on the inside from those on the outside. They have also been shown to form double layers when waves bring two water surfaces, filmed with lipids, together. When this happens, the charged ends of the sheet of lipid molecules point towards each other sandwiched between the non-charged ends. In this way the first membranes were formed – the first semipermeable boundaries between “inside” and “outside, the first distinction between self and non-self.
The membrane makes possible that discrete unit of the microcosm, the bacterial cell. Most scientists feel that lipids combined with proteins to make translucent packages of lifelike matter before the beginning of life itself. No life without a membrane of some kind is known.
Probably not once, but several times, amino acids, nucleotides, simple sugars, phosphates and their derivatives, formed and complexified, with energy from the sun within the protection of a lipid bubble, absorbing ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) and other carbon nitrogen compounds from the outside as “food”. Fairly complex structures have formed spontaneously from lipid mixtures in the laboratory.
Bubbles of lipids split in two at first simply from the strain of surface tension, each half carrying on its internal activity. The protocells simply broke down and disappeared, while others formed in some other tidal pool, each with a slightly different “modus operandi”. Once able to stay itself, a structure on its way to becoming living must reproduce itself. Before cells, life and non-life may have been indistinguishable. The first cell like systems were what the Belgian Nobel Prize- winning physicist Ilya Prigogine has termed “dissipative structures” – objects or processes that organize themselves and spontaneously change their form. With the influx of energy, dissipative structures may become more instead of less ordered. The sort of information theory that has been so useful in communication technology applies solely to information which consists almost entirely of confirmation. In dissipative structures, information begins to organize itself; pockets of elaboration arise.
It seems silly to postulate a single dramatic moment of magical lightning when DNA and RNA spontaneously formed a cell and life began. Many dissipative structures, long chains of different chemical reactions, must have evolved, reacted and broken down before the elegant double helix of our ultimate ancestor formed and replicated with high fidelity. Indeed, living forms based on totally different types of replicating molecules may have arisen and developed for a while before disappearing altogether. But because they are the common denominator of all life today, it is clear that at some point lipid membranes containing RNA and DNA began to flourish. The numbers of these tiny bacterial spheres increased and diminished in a process of ebb and flow. At some point some time before 3,500 million years ago, the evolutionary tide reached the level of life as we know it: that of the membrane-bounded, 5000-protein, RNA-messaged, DNA-governed cell. The Earth’s microcosm, the age of bacteria, had begun. The time it took because of nature’s hit and trial or natural selection of first one billion years for Prokaryotic cell to emerge and then two and a half billion years for the Eukaryotic cells justifies the inner complexity of these cells.
Most of the mechanism at microscopic level is a function of positive and negative charge of the matter. An atom or a molecule with unequal number of electrons and protons becomes ions – more electrons make it negatively charged and more protons make it positively charged. The layers of lipids that make membrane of a cell separate these charge differences across the membrane and embedded ion channels and sodium pumps in the membrane open or close when charge gradient increases. The solutions inside our cells, and those of all other organisms on earth, are high in potassium ions (+ve) and low in sodium ions (-ve). These ionic differences are exploited to generate the electrical pulses in our nerve and muscle cells for, like water trapped behind a hydroelectric dam; they are an effective way of storing potential energy. Open the gates and these ions try to redistribute themselves to try and establish equal concentrations on either side of the membrane.
The origin of rapid motion in bacteria seems to be connected to a rotary device that is unknown in cells with nuclei. A flagellum, or whip like strand, is attached to the disk-shaped base of the bacterium. The round base known as the “proton motor’, actually spins around, also propelled by changes of electric charge.
This gives me an idea how cell membranes could have formed, began splitting and replicating or reproducing and moving and it is all of atomic nature, flow of currents and now we know quite precisely how nerves and muscles operate, how neuron circuits in our brain work digitally etc. There is a clear pattern of increasing complexity from simplicity.
It will be a fair question to ask that if we know how matter became alive, how come we cannot produce a living cell in a laboratory now. A few hundred million years of molecular activity is a long, long time. Scientists have been working only a few decades to provide conditions conducive to the origin of laboratory life and have come very far. It is not inconceivable that one day a living cell will be spontaneously generated in the laboratory. We should remember that it wasn’t more than 500 years ago when Copernicus settled the matter that sun didn’t revolve around earth but it was vice versa. We are here, having started from humble beginnings, a collection of atoms and molecules and bacteria and we are conscious, have emotions and our brains capable of figuring this all out. Whatever life is, it is amazing and very precious.