“Cooperation more so than competition has supported the evolution of life”
For years scientists have been searching for the origin of life. They do so in mainly two ways: the first route compares plants and animals with fossils from a distant past. The second approach explores in the laboratory, how primitive organisms can grow out of simple chemical reactions.
The first method is based on a strong relationship between all forms of life on earth. Humans, animals, plants and bacteria all have exactly the same molecular structure and it makes perfect sense to assume that they all come from one and the same predecessor. One has successfully traced the evolution of life back to very old microbes, that lived long ago (and still today) at the oceanfloor close to vulcanic vents! These microbes do not live from sunlight, but from chemical reactions far beneath the earth’s surface. Much later some of these microbes have learned to live in sunlight in the presence of oxygen and have ultimately evolved into plants and animals. Altogether impressive and surprising discoveries! But still an enormous gap exists between the non-living world of chemical substances and the living world of these oldest microbes.
The second route has also yielded significant results. Proteins and DNA can be prepared in the laboratory. These materials are the building blocks of life, as it were the hardware (proteins) and software (DNA) of life. But where does the genetic code come from? How does DNA know it has a genetic code, that should direct the growth of an organism? After a century of searching this still remains a mystery.
Life has a very special feature, totally different from non living nature. Normally everything that is left to itself is falling into decay. Iron rusts. An empty building turns into a ruin. Mountain tops erode, etc. But life has this remarkable tendency to resist the stream of decay. To create order instead of chaos. In some way comparable to the force of gravity, that also creates a kind of order out of the chaos in the universe. Where do these unexpected forms of order come from? Is science missing something fundamental and are we therefore unable to explain the course of life and time?
I can not prove it, but I do think so. Probably a scientific revolution is yet to come, with more impact than the discoveries of Copernicus (‘the earth turns around the sun’) and of Darwin (‘humans descend from apes’) together. Then life will not be a coincidence, as many seem to think today, but inherently present as a germ in matter. If so, life will probably exist not just on earth, but on many other planets in the distant universe.