Scientists at the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences recently announced that 80 strange objects were discovered in the Universe - they were called ROCOS - that look like stars, but are not. An employee of the institute Grigory Beskin suggested that "these are some beacons set by powerful civilizations for some of their own purposes" …
The scientist was supplemented by his colleague Sergei Yazev: “A couple of decades ago,“blame”on extraterrestrial civilizations for interference in the structure of the solar system could only be a scientist who did not care about his reputation. But you can't argue with facts. Suppose we are studying the solar system "from the outside", from one of the star systems. And what is left to think, seeing we have a lot of "strange patterns"?"
Astronomers have noticed all these oddities for a long time. It turned out that the parameters of that part of the solar system where our planet is located are suspiciously precisely "adjusted" to create conditions suitable for life. This is the speed of rotation of the Earth, and the angle of its inclination, and the distance from the Sun, and the presence and mass of the Moon, and the huge Jupiter nearby, which, due to its mass, intercepts a huge number of comets and asteroids flying by …
One in a billion
But it turned out that there are no fewer miracles on earth. The application of the methods of exact sciences (in particular, physics, probability theory, computer science …) to the study of biological objects gave stunning results. Having calculated the probability, scientists came to the conclusion that there was not even one chance in billions for the accidental occurrence of life on our planet.
Probably, the first cold shower for atheists was the data presented at the 1st International Conference on Communication with Extraterrestrial Civilizations in 1978, at which cosmologists actively discussed the problem of the origin of life in the Universe. A simple protein can consist of 100 components called amino acids, of which 20 are essential for life.
Therefore, the probability of their randomly combining in the appropriate order to form a protein molecule that consists of 100 amino acids is 20 to the minus 100th power, or approximately 10 to the minus 130th. Scientists have calculated that all elementary particles in the Universe, interacting billions of times per second throughout its entire existence, may, however, not form this protein.
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An even more astonishing number is the required number of combinations for the random formation of enzymes, which equals 10 to minus 40,000 … Quite a well-known cosmologist, professor of applied mathematics and astronomy at Cardiff University (Wales) N. C. it is like this:
"It is more likely that a hurricane sweeping through the graveyard of old planes will collect a new superliner from pieces of scrap than life will arise from its components as a result of random processes."
But to explain how scientists came to this stunning conclusion, it is necessary to make a small excursion into the history of the issue.
The dead do not give birth
For a long time, the most popular were three theories of the origin of life on Earth. Biblical, asserting that God created the world and living beings in it in 6 days. The panspermia hypothesis, put forward in the 19th century. G. Richter - life is brought to our planet from space. A. Oparin's theory, according to which life on Earth spontaneously originated in the primary ocean millions and millions of years ago.
It was Oparin's work The Origin of Life (1924) that for a long time was presented by atheists as a knockout inflicted by the materialism of theology and idealist philosophy, who argued that the emergence of life is the result of a creative act of God or the Supreme Reason.
The joy of atheists was natural. Their struggle with theologians began with the naive assumptions of medieval scientists that life spontaneously arises in our geological era (for example, the Belgian alchemist J. Helmont believed that mice could arise from a mixture of wheat flour, dust and old rags in the attics of houses). After that, the materialists have come a long way, have achieved something, especially in terms of individual experiments, but they have not created a coherent all-embracing theory.
In a sense, their salvation was the panspermia hypothesis, according to which the "embryos of life" (the simplest microorganisms) were brought to the Earth by meteorites or the solar wind. It is curious that materialism at first accepted panspermia with hostility, although it brought him out of the impasse in which he fell, arguing that life on Earth arose by itself. Then he realized this and repeatedly returned to the theory of panspermia, when he entered another blind corner in his attempts to substantiate how life itself appeared on our planet in all its diversity.
Therefore, at first glance, a fairly consistent theory of Oparin seemed like a welcome answer to this old question. Briefly, its essence is as follows. In the hot primary ocean that covered the Earth, there were many carbonaceous compounds, from which organic polymers were formed, collecting the so-called coacervate drops. These droplets, absorbing energy-rich substances from the surrounding solution, increased in volume and mass. Gradually evolving over millions of years, they turned first into protobionts (a system of organic substances isolated from the solution), and then into the simplest cells - protocells that already possessed the properties of living things.
At first, experiments seemed to confirm the concept. Oparin and his co-workers managed to achieve the formation of coacervate drops in the organic broth. Not only did they increase in size, absorbing various substances, the set of these substances and the rate of their absorption were determined by the composition and spatial structure of the drops themselves. Well, just like biological systems that do not absorb everything from the environment, but each has its own set of substances!
But the coincidences ended there. Many scientists in many countries for decades cooked "Oparinsky" broth in various modes with various additives, irradiated it with different types of radiation … The result was invariably the same - coacervate drops formed, increased, but … flatly refused to multiply! In other words, they did not form their own kind, which are able to function according to a certain algorithm under certain conditions, and pass this property on to the next generation.
Oparin took wishful thinking. Perhaps he should have called his work not "The Origin of Life", but "The Origin of Conditions Suitable for Life." Because he could not explain how the physicochemical stage of the evolution of nature turned into a biological one. And how did one of the main fundamental differences between the inanimate and the living come about - the difference is in how they interact with information.
Its essence can be demonstrated by the following example. For example, if in a certain region of the planet the temperature gradually drops, then the water in the lakes also becomes cold and may eventually turn into ice. Those. as a result of the receipt of information in the form of a decrease in temperature, the water passes into a different state of aggregation. The living creatures that live here react differently - either migrate to warmer regions, or, if climate changes occur gradually, adapt to them - for example, become covered with wool or become overgrown with fat. And, what is important, these qualities are passed on to descendants. But if from today to tomorrow the temperature rises above zero, the water will again become liquid, but the animals will not overnight lose fat or wool received from their ancestors as protection from the cold.
This comparison, perhaps, suffers from a too simplified presentation of the issue, but still, in general terms, it gives an idea of the qualitative gap in the interaction with information between the inanimate and the living, which matter had to overcome in the course of evolution. In terms of consequences, this is a leap, the results of which are recorded in a phenomenon inherent only in living things - heredity. But how exactly this leap took place - the materialists have no intelligible answer.
Darwin lacked information
Another amazing property of living nature on our planet is associated with heredity - its diversity. Materialists, polemicizing with idealists and theologians, always refer to the theory of natural selection by Charles Darwin, the discoveries of the founder of genetics, G. Mendel, and their followers.
All living things are capable of producing more offspring than nature is able to feed. Moreover, some of these offspring have deviations from the standard set of hereditary traits - mutations. Those individuals whose mutations coincide with changes in the environment receive benefits in terms of survival. The rest die. In other words, those less adapted to the conditions of existence are rejected in the course of natural selection.
Later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the hypothesis became very popular that the emergence of life on Earth was the result of the accidental formation of a single "living molecule", in the structure of which the entire plan for the further development of life was supposedly laid. In 1953, J. Watson and F. Crick discovered the role of ribonucleic acids in the realization of the mechanism of heredity. The hypothesis that all living things evolved from one simple cell into which a "living molecule" was transformed, it seemed now that it could be substantiated at the molecular level.
The spiral-like molecules of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) store biological information. When a living cell multiplies by division, replication occurs - the doubling of DNA helices, and each of the two newly formed cells inherits a full set of hereditary information. Mutations occur as a consequence of replication errors. Those. during the doubling of DNA helices during cell division, a partial rearrangement of the constituent parts of deoxyribonucleic acid molecules occurs.
When it comes to the evolutionary improvement of already existing species of living beings, all of the above sounds convincing. When it comes to the species diversity of life in general, the likelihood that it arose in this particular way raises great doubts. To quote Wickramasinghe's article again:
“It is absurd to believe that the information carried by one simple bacterium can be developed through replication so that a person and all other living beings that inhabit our planet appear. This so-called "common sense" is tantamount to the assumption that if the first page of the Book of Genesis is rewritten billions of billions of times, it will lead to the accumulation of enough replication errors and, therefore, enough variety for the appearance of not only the entire Bible, but all volumes. stored in the largest libraries in the world.
These two statements are equally absurd. The processes of mutation and natural selection can have only a minor effect on life, acting as a kind of "fine-tuning" of the entire evolution. For life, first of all, a constant flow of information is necessary, which in time covers all geological eras."
Information systems - and all forms of life are such - cannot progress without the receipt of new information. If living organisms on Earth only accumulated errors due to replication, this would lead to degradation of information in them. In other words, the assertion that all species existing on Earth, including humans, have evolved over billions of years from a single primitive life form in the manner described above is untenable from the point of view of information theory …
Why do orangutans need a piano?
The human mind is another phenomenon that materialism has failed to provide a clear explanation. The assertion of materialistic scientists that a person's thinking is the result of biochemical reactions in his brain, by and large, explains nothing. Biochemical reactions also take place in monkey brains. But why is the result of these reactions so striking, given that, for example, the hereditary information of chimpanzees and humans does not coincide by only 3 percent?
A textbook description of how monkeys are caught in India: they put an orange in a box, in one of the walls of which a hole is made of such a size that the monkey can hardly stick its paw. Grabbing an orange, she cannot take her paw out of the narrow hole. No matter how many painful attempts he makes, the orange does not release. Those. the level of thinking of a primate is such that he is not able to draw the simplest (and, moreover, vital) inference from the obvious. Why, then, is the closest "relative" of monkeys - man - capable of making inferences that contradict the obvious, but correspond to reality? For example, even before Magellan's circumnavigation of the world, it was concluded that the Earth was spherical, and before flights into space - that it revolves around the Sun, and not vice versa.
Or how the human genes necessary for the development of mathematical theorems, the creation of musical and literary works could be accidentally formed from the genes of monkeys, if in the course of natural selection only what is necessary at the moment for survival was selected ?! When and in what jungle was it necessary for chimpanzees or orangutans to survive in order to pass on to their descendants hereditary traits that would allow, in principle, to play the piano ?!
Numerous unsuccessful attempts to create artificial intelligence are also indicative in this regard. In a sense, the task at the time of its setting is absurd: the human mind is trying to model itself even before it could define what it is. And it is still a question whether he will ever be able to independently give such a definition if he is not a consequence of natural development, but the result of an act of creation.
Biochemist M. Behe in his book "Darwin's Black Box" drew attention to the fact that biological objects function so clearly as information systems that it seems that someone has programmed them mathematically. And he put forward the concept of conscious design, the idea of which was the maxim "There can be no program without a programmer." Guided by it, the mathematician W. Dembowski developed a method with which it is possible to identify artificially constructed objects. The person "tested" by Dembowski fell into the category of artificially created …
Science becomes a pillar of faith
Physics, mathematics and biological sciences have developed in parallel for a long time, almost without overlapping. Their rapprochement yielded amazing results, which were discussed above. And this radically influenced the world outlook of the scientists themselves.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, atheism held such a strong position in the scientific community that belief in God was considered almost bad form. On the threshold of the 21st century, the situation has changed dramatically. Judging by the numerous statements of the scientists themselves, as they understand the world, materialism among them is becoming less and less popular, yielding to the assumption of the existence of a Reasonable beginning, at a lower educational and intellectual level, simply called God.
By the way, at the end of his life even A. Einstein believed in him, who remarked about the sophistication of the world order: "God is sophisticated, but not malicious." Well, the already quoted Wickramasinghe wrote:
“The concept of a Creator placed outside the Universe raises certain logical difficulties, and I can hardly agree with him. I give my own philosophical preferences to the eternal and boundless Universe, in which the creator of life, the mind, significantly surpassing ours, arose in some natural way."
But this is a statement by a scientist of the late twentieth century. And there is also just a brilliant remark of the medieval monarch - King of Castile Alfonso X, nicknamed the Wise (XIII century): “If the Lord God had honored me by asking my opinion at the creation of the world, so I would have advised him to create it better, and most importantly - easier.
Valentin Pustovoit