Partly as a distraction from the hideous state of affairs politically, I've begun reading a difficult monograph on a subject that interests me inordinately, namely the origin of life on Earth and its universal implications. The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth / The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere by Eric Smith and Harold Morowitz, both of whom are esteemed elders associated with both George Mason Univ. and the Santa Fe Institute. Their overall thesis appears to be 1) "Metabolism first" (this is perhaps by a slight margin now the predominant view, as espoused especially by Nick Lame). In other words, the chemistry of life emerged in the pre-biotic world first, then became encapsulated in physical forms that enabled the chemistry to function in a wider range of environments, and it was off to the races. 2) The fundamental level of entity that enabled life to cross the threshold from nonliving organic chemistry to biochemistry is the ecosystem, not the organism, and that while phylogeny is the key to the understanding of the "big picture" of life's diversity, to understand its universality and the importance of convergence and function to its long term stability and survival the ecosystem remains the key and most fundamental entity (given that it remains likely true that unlike the physics and chemistry laws that fully specify the origin and continued existence of the other three geospheres (atmosphere, lithosphere, and hydrosphere, each subdivided into subrealms), the biosphere is to a considerable extent characterized by contingency and history, which gives it a unique stamp likely not closely matched anywhere in the observable universe). 3) Notwithstanding the uniqueness of life on Earth, some form of life, and uniquely characterized biosphere, is likely to form wherever conditions permit elsewhere in the universe, because the physical/chemical function of life, as the path of least resistance for energy transport to most efficiently increase universal entropy, will always occur, just as water always "tries" to find a path to a lower energy state, usually in the sea. OK, there's more to it than that, but this is the general point of view.
My problem with the book is that it is written in the most opaque imaginable Academese. I am a fairly literate person and retain most of my marbles, but I have to read most of the sentences at least twice to even get the gist of what they're trying to say. Perhaps one example will suffice to make my point.
The phase transition to autocatalytic self-maintenance was the first selector of metabolic pathways. These probably have a minimal component of accident. The small molecule world has little capacity for long-term memory: Whatever is most facile and robust becomes most likely, moment by moment, independently and everywhere. The boundary conditions provide similar energy supplies.
I asked ChatGPT to try to turn these sentences into something more easily digested and it actually did a pretty decent job:
The shift to systems that could sustain and maintain themselves marked the first stage in the evolution of metabolism. From that point on, chemical pathways were selected based on their ability to maintain such self-sustaining cycles. Chance probably played only a small part. In the world of simple molecules, there's almost no "memory" of past events — what works best at any given moment tends to prevail everywhere it can. Because the surrounding conditions and energy sources were similar in many places, the same kinds of reactions kept being favored again and again.
More words but easier to grasp. Efficiency in writing is more than just conciseness: comprehensibility is even more important. Bottom line: reading this 650 page book is going to be a real chore, but a little bit more sympathetic effort on the part of the authors to make their ideas more comprehensible would've been well worth it.
I could imagine some folks accusing me of calling the kettle black here, since I myself have a tendency to write long, complex sentences that are hard to follow and sometimes even get lost in their unnecessarily elaborate structures. But this is just laziness on my part, and at least I admit it. When you're writing a major work (Cambridge University Press), you really owe it to your readers to write in as comprehensible a style and format as you possibly can.
..............................................................................................
Silence is complicity. Americans who believe in democracy MUST RESIST.
--George Washington, 1783
No comments:
Post a Comment
Gyromantic Informicon. Comments are not moderated. If you encounter a problem, please go to home page and follow directions to send me an e-mail.