Nature lost patience

We know that living systems took about three to four billion years to form. At first glance, this is – measured by human scales – a very long time. Still, when we realize what all had to be done for life to appear on Earth finally, and especially when we take into account the fact that developments that are not controlled “from above” is random and therefore very slow, we conclude that this time is short for nature to perform this exceptional performance. The literature does not lack an attempt to roughly estimate the time required to give birth to the simplest living creature (virus) based on the number of probabilities.

We start from the well-known fact that knowledge of a virus requires about 1,000 bits of information. (Recall that 1 bit of information represents the knowledge of one of two possibilities.) Based on the relationship between the number of information in bits and the probability of occurrence of a certain phenomenon (H ≈ ln p), it can be calculated that the probability of the virus occurring by random grouping is approximately p ≈ 2‒ 1000 ≈ 10‒300. If we really assume that the time required to “trigger” the necessary chemistry is approximately 1 hour, then the number of all viruses generated in one hour (assuming this process took place in the oceans) would be obtained by multiplying the probability by the factor Voceán / Vvírus ≈ 1033, where the letter V denotes volume. The number of all viruses produced by the Big Bang would be obtained by multiplying the number of hours elapsed since that time (1013). Thus, we conclude that the random grouping had a chance to generate only about 10‒300 x 1033 x 1013 ≈ 10‒254 viruses. It follows that for at least one whole virus to be produced from the Big Bang so far, it would have to take 10254 times more hours than has been the case. In practice, this means that such a mechanism could never happen. And yet nature has done it in less than four billion years!

This estimate can be commented on in two ways: First, to state that external (for example, extraterrestrial) intervention was necessary in this case, or – secondly – to look for mechanisms by which nature was able to accelerate the development process radically. One biologist humorously commented the second option: “Nature’s past is straightforward to explain – it has simply lost patience.” proved to be viable. We have already mentioned both in the previous text. One of these mechanisms is selection, which takes place (thanks to autocatalysis) already at the molecular level and accelerates evolution already in the prebiotic era.

The second very effective process in this respect is phase transitions, i.e., qualitative changes. There is always a radical reduction of the so-called degrees of freedom. We can illustrate this problem.

Imagine a string on a violin. With the help of a string, we get it into states “far from equilibrium,” in which it has already lost stability. At that moment, a huge amount of commotion begins to be generated in her, which forces her to a certain time-varying rhythm. These disturbances propagate at high speed along the string to the attachment points, from where they bounce back and interfere with the original disturbances. If they have unsuitable wavelengths, they are eliminated by mutual interference after several reflections. The “winner” of this competitive struggle, which is technically often called the “principle of enslavement,” is the commotion that has the optimal wavelength in the given conditions. It is such a wavelength that it fits exactly an integer multiple of halves on the whole string.

The whole “enslavement” process43) takes less than about 0.1 s, so that the human ear does not register it at all and perceives only the resulting “mod,” such as the tone “a.” One does not realize at all that nature has carried out – thanks to the validity of the laws of dynamics – an amazingly efficient selection process, in which an extremely numerous ballast was spontaneously eliminated and only one (or several) viable configurations remained.

The same is true of other sudden qualitative changes, and something similar may have happened in connection with the emergence of genes. Thus, nature was not forced to try all possible and conceivable variants. Still, through effective selection in the middle of great ballast, it could move incredibly quickly to new, more viable qualities. On its way to life, nature used – figuratively speaking – not ordinary, but “seven-mile” boots.

Despite these compelling “physical” arguments, some biologists remain skeptical about whether life could actually be born on Earth by spontaneous evolution because of the time it would take for nature to seem very short. This is one reason why they are counting on the possibility that life may have been brought to Earth from other cosmic regions, which could eventually shed light on a mystery in the “six-day” scenario of the world’s creation, which we have already pointed out.

We know that living systems took about three to four billion years to form. At first glance, this is – measured by human scales – a very long time. Still, when we realize what all had to be done for life to appear on Earth finally, and especially when we take into account the fact that developments that are not controlled “from above” is random and therefore very slow, we conclude that this time is short for nature to perform this exceptional performance. The literature does not lack an attempt to roughly estimate the time required to give birth to the simplest living creature (virus) based on the number of probabilities.