I.3. The enlightenment of the birth of life

In the process of thinking, it is customary to bring in a subject, and about creation is no exception. For all man-made creations, it is obvious that man is the subject of creation, and this is the main motivation for attributing it to man himself in most cases when we discuss creation. For the non-human, a large number of unexplainable creations, it is often disheartening to attribute them simply to mysterious natural forces, and this constitutes the basic origin of creationism, because the need for human beings to give an account of themselves and where the life that combines the spirituality of heaven and earth actually came from is something that has troubled every human being at one time or another.

In thinking about how human beings came into being, if we base ourselves on the conscious creation of a subject, we will inevitably fall into a dead end, namely, who created the subject of human beings, be it God or other higher beings. This paradox would lead to a stagnation of thinking, and the usual solution is to attribute the creation of this subject to an earlier creation without a subject, as a perfunctory matter, as is the case with mythology. Interestingly, although troubling, this perfunctory approach has not necessarily affected human research in most fields of science and technology, and even the imagination derived from it has inspired a great deal of creativity in literature and art. However, researchers in the fields of biology and medicine have had to face this challenge head-on and think deeply about the truth behind the perfunctory nature.

Since the publication of the Darwin-Wallace paper on natural selection in 1858, evolutionary biology has come a long way, and the genomes of humans and chimpanzees have been shown to be very similar in many ways through genetic sequencing, but this is no longer surprising compared to the equally high genetic similarity between humans and C. elegans, because all existing All life uses the same set of genetic codes. Evidence for evolution comes from all fields of biology and geology, including morphology, development, life history, and comparative studies in molecular biology, genomics, paleontology, and biogeography. In the face of overwhelming evidence, there is a consensus in the scientific community that humans share a common ancestor with chimpanzees, fish, insects, plants, and indeed all living things on Earth. The intensive study of the evolutionary history of organisms has also led to the fact that hardly any biologist in the world has become a fan of creationism, a much higher percentage than in other fields, even though it has become customary to stop considering its purpose in scientific explanations.

This book’s discussion of creation is based on the mainstream view of current research. When referring to the creation of human beings, it does not imply the conscious creation of human beings by a subject, but mainly refers to the natural evolutionary process by which human beings arose, which, for the sake of people’s habits of thought, can be simplified to mean that human beings arose naturally, or expressed as if nature created them, thus making a strict distinction from all creationist views.

Although we do not have more material than this, it is difficult to find better material than this. After all, human creativity is unparalleled among all creatures, and it is logical for us, as humans, to start from ourselves. Since modern humans are the pinnacle of creativity, it is natural to look back to Homo sapiens, hominids, and primates, and then forward to mammals, amniotes, vertebrates, and post-oral animals, to multicellular organisms and eukaryotes, and finally to the origin of life.

The problem that cannot be ignored is that, despite the great creativity of modern humans, this creativity is not recent, and the existence of organisms that can be called human in taxonomy is less than three million years old, which is a moment compared to the 3.5 billion years of life on Earth. If we compress the time between the birth of the Earth and the present to within one year, the existence of human beings is only a very short half an hour, and the history of civilization, of which we are most proud, is only 2 seconds, nearly 3000 years. Therefore, it is clear that merely studying the evolutionary history of humans since the Cenozoic Quaternary is not enough to uncover the true source of creation. Since living things may have a common ancestor, the origin of creation must have preceded it. In this sense, the study of the origin of life is the necessary way to study the origin of creation, and the birth of the universe and the earth has to precede that. Therefore, we might as well start at the beginning.

Many scientists agree that the current universe originated from a big bang 13.8 billion years ago, a theory that explains many of the observed facts, and that about 4.5 billion years ago, the Earth and other planets in our solar system began to form. As the Earth cooled, oceans gradually formed on the surface. The first glimmer of life was shown by the appearance of prokaryotes, including bacteria and archaea, about 3.5 billion years ago in the terrestrial period.

While the process of obtaining simple organic matter through inorganic substances can be easily replicated in the laboratory and under natural conditions, it remains unclear exactly what process was involved in obtaining the complex organic molecules that form the basis of life through simple organic molecules. in 1953, Stanley Miller and Harold Urie simulated the primitive Earth’s atmosphere by performing a spark discharge (simulated lightning) in a mixture of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, carbon monoxide and water Performing a spark discharge, hydrogen cyanide and formaldehyde were produced, as well as amino acids, sugars and lipids. This experiment was an attempt to demonstrate that organic matter could be produced completely spontaneously in the primitive Earth environment. But later studies have shown that the early Earth’s atmospheric composition may not have been the same as the initial conditions of the Miller-Urie experiment.

In 2015, Nick Lane described in his book a way of life birth with a higher probability, involving the relationship between life and the energy flow of the surrounding environment. At alkaline hydrothermal vents present in the oceans, a continuous gradient of natural proton concentration is formed, and carbon dioxide, hydrogen and water are used to synthesize the basic substances that make up life, such as proteins, fatty acids and carbohydrates, using the constant flow of energy generated by the proton gradient in the presence of an iron sulfide catalyst, and the adenosine triphosphate (ATP) molecule, which is required for all metabolism, is likely to be produced simultaneously. The earliest ATP molecules were charged by the difference in proton concentration between the alkaline hydrothermal vents and the surrounding seawater. Some fatty acids spontaneously aggregated together to form cell membranes, replacing the isolation provided by rock crevices as a demarcation between the cellular microenvironment and the larger marine environment, while the proton gradient continued to provide a voltage difference between the two sides of the cell membrane. Subsequently, certain microenvironments that evolved proton pumps gradually broke free from their restraints and were released into the ocean, forming the prototype of primitive cells. These primitive cells could absorb organic matter from the environment as fuel to build a proton concentration gradient for themselves and continue charging ATP. This series of processes gave birth to the first primitive cell, “Luca”.

Whether or not life on Earth actually arose in this way, the above hypothesis provides important insights into the fact that life did not appear in isolation or suddenly, but rather because it played a role in the environment and met the conditions for the initiation of reaction kinetics. There is no doubt that the world we live in is governed by various laws of nature and laws that guide the birth of all the basic elements of the world and inanimate matter, which precede life and by which life is naturally regulated. Thus, even if the substances that form the basis of life are created by being struck by lightning or other chance phenomena, these substances are not sufficient to obtain the energy for continued evolution unless life initially originated with some role in the environment and in the process gained the impetus for evolution.

If one is familiar with physical chemistry, it is easy to make an association between the evolutionary process of life and the second law of thermodynamics. According to the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy of an isolated system never decreases automatically; it remains constant in reversible processes and increases in irreversible ones. That is why the law is also known as the law of entropy increase, which is one of the highest principles of the existing universe. The entropy value describes the degree of disorder in a system, and the law of entropy increase characterizes the tendency to maximize the degree of disorder that exists in a closed system. In simple terms, this reflects the inherent need for repressed energy to be released, just as the sun does not weaken until it has radiated enough light and heat, and the surface of the earth does not begin to cool until the magma at its core stops spewing frequently. For life, which derives its energy mainly from the Earth and the Sun, it simply needs to choose the right time to come on the scene and play a compliant role, and then it can dance to its heart’s content.

In Schrödinger’s view, the most essential characteristic of life is that it absorbs “negative entropy” from the external world, which is used to counteract the trend of entropy increase, and passes on this skill, which makes life itself orderly. From the perspective of the whole environment, life activities undoubtedly promote the outward expansion and dissipation of energy, assisting in the enhancement of environmental chaos, and in this process, through the continuous flow of energy through itself, promoting its own evolutionary response and the continuous growth of its scale. At the same time, the more prosperous life in turn drives more strongly the process of environmental entropy increase. What a perfect match. Although life is so small in the face of the environment, like ants huddled and busy carrying food scraps around the walls at the foot of the table, nature’s great creation of life is the result.

【Chinese original】

一、3、生命诞生的启迪

在思考过程中，人们习惯于带入一个主体，关于创造也不例外。对于所有人为的创造，显而易见的以人类为创造主体，这也是大多数情况下我们在讨论创造时，将其归功于人类本身的主要动机。而对于非人为的，大量难以解释的创造，将其简单归于神秘的自然力量往往使人心有不甘，这也构成了神创论的基本起源，因为人类需要给自己一个交代，集天地灵性于一身的生命到底从何而来，是每一个人都曾有过的困扰。

在思考人类如何产生时，如果立足于某一主体有意识的创造，将会无可避免的落入一个死循环，即创造人类的主体，无论是神还是其他高等生命，又是由谁创造的呢。这一悖论将导致思考陷入停滞，而人们通常的解决办法是将这一主体的产生归于一种更早的无主体的创造，以此来敷衍了事，神话故事大抵如此。有趣的是，虽然有所困扰，但这种敷衍并不必然影响人类在大多数科技领域的研究，甚至其衍生的想象力还激发了大量文学、艺术领域的创作。不过，对于生物、医学领域的研究者，却不得不直面这一挑战，对敷衍背后的真相进行深入思索。

自1858年达尔文-华莱士关于自然选择的论文发表以来，进化生物学取得了长足的发展，人们已经通过基因测序获知人类和黑猩猩的基因组在很多方面具有极高的相似性，但这相对于人类和秀丽隐杆线虫（C.elegans）同样具有很高的基因相似性已经不足以令人惊异，这是因为现存所有生命都使用同一套遗传密码。演化的证据来自生物学和地质学的所有领域，包括形态学、发育、生活史，以及分子生物学、基因组学、古生物学和生物地理学等方面的比较研究。在大量证据面前，人类与黑猩猩、鱼类、昆虫、植物，乃至地球上的所有生物，具有一个共同的祖先在科学界已形成了一种共识。对生物进化历程的深入研究也导致了世界上几乎没有任何生物学家成为神创论的拥趸，这个比例远高于其他领域，即便在科学的解释中人们已习惯于不再考虑其目的。

本书对创造的探讨基于目前研究的主流观点，当提及人类的被创造时，并不意味着某一主体对人类的有意识创造，而主要指人类产生的自然演化过程，出于人们思维习惯的考虑，可以将其简化理解为人类是自然而然产生的，或表述为自然创造了人类，从而与所有神创论观点进行严格区分。

研究创造的起源，人类无疑是一个很好的起点，虽然除此之外我们并没有更多素材，但也很难找到比这更好的素材，毕竟人类的创造力在所有生物中无可匹敌，而身为人类的我们，从自身开始探寻也当然是顺理成章的不错选择。既然现代人类体现了创造力的顶峰，那么我们一路回望，自然需要追溯到智人、类人猿、灵长类，再向前到达哺乳类、羊膜动物、脊椎动物、后口动物，直至多细胞生物、真核生物，最终到达生命的起源。

无法忽视的问题在于，尽管现代人类具有很强的创造力，但这种创造性并非近期所产生，而生物分类学中可称为人的生物其存在的历史还不到三百万年，与整个地球生命所走过的35亿年之久的历程相比恍如一瞬。如果把地球诞生到现在的时间压缩到1年之内，则人类存在的时间只有极短的半个小时，而最令我们自豪的近3000年的文明史，不过2秒而已。因此，仅仅研究新生代第四纪以来人类的进化历史，显然不足以挖掘创造的真正源头。既然生物可能具有一个共同的祖先，那么，创造的起源必然在此之前。从这个意义上讲，研究生命的起源是研究创造起源的必经之路，而宇宙和地球的诞生还要在那之前。因此，我们不妨从头说起。

很多科学家赞同目前的宇宙源于138亿年前的一次大爆炸，这一理论可以解释很多观测事实，大约45亿年前，地球和太阳系内的其他行星开始形成。随着地球的冷却，逐渐在地表形成了海洋。在距今约35亿年前的太古代，原核生物，包括细菌和古细菌的出现，展现出了生命的第一缕曙光。

虽然通过无机物获得简单有机物的过程可以容易地在实验室和自然条件下进行重复，但通过简单有机分子获得构成生命基础的复杂有机分子到底经历了何种过程仍然并不清晰。1953年，斯坦利·米勒与哈罗德·尤里通过模拟原始地球大气环境，在甲烷，氨，氢气、一氧化碳和水的混合气体中进行火花放电（模拟闪电），生成了氰化氢和甲醛，以及氨基酸、糖和脂类。这项实验试图证明有机物完全可以在原始地球环境中自发产生。但是后来的研究表明，地球早期的大气成分和米勒-尤里实验的初始条件可能并不相同。

2015年，尼克·莱恩在其著作中描述了一种具有更高可能性的，涉及生命和周围环境能量流转关系的生命诞生方式。在大洋中存在的碱性热液喷口处，形成了一个连绵不断的天然质子浓度梯度，二氧化碳、氢气和水在硫化铁催化剂的作用下，利用质子梯度产生的源源不断的能量，合成出了蛋白质、脂肪酸和碳水化合物等组成生命的基本物质，所有新陈代谢都需要的三磷酸腺苷（ATP）分子很可能同时产生，而最早的ATP分子的充电方式就是碱性热液喷口和周围海水之间的质子浓度差。一些脂肪酸自发聚集在一起，形成了细胞膜，代替了岩石缝隙所起到的隔离作用，成为细胞微环境和海洋大环境之间的分界，质子梯度则继续为细胞膜两侧提供电压差。之后，某些进化出质子泵的微环境逐渐脱离束缚，释放到海洋中，形成了原始细胞的雏形。这些原始细胞可以从环境中吸收有机物作为燃料，为自己构建质子浓度梯度，继续为ATP充电。这一系列过程诞生了第一个原始细胞“卢卡”。

无论地球生命是否真的经由这种方式产生，上述假说都为我们提供了重要启迪，即生命不是孤立或突然出现的，而是因为在环境中恰好发挥了某种作用，满足了反应动力学的启动条件。毫无疑问，我们所处的世界受到各种自然定律和法则的约束，而这些规律引导了世界所有基本元素和无生命物质的诞生，它们先于生命而存在，生命自然也要受到它们的规制。因此，即便因被闪电击中或其他偶然现象而产生了构成生命基础的物质，这些物质也不足以获得持续进化的能量，除非生命最初起源时在环境中扮演了某种角色，并在此过程中获得了进化的动力。

如果熟悉物理化学，很容易对生命演化过程与热力学第二定律之间的关系产生联想。根据热力学第二定律，一个孤立系统的熵永不自动减少，熵在可逆过程中不变，在不可逆过程中增加。所以该定律又名熵增定律，这是现存宇宙的最高原则之一。熵值描述了系统的混乱程度，熵增定律表征了封闭系统中存在的无序程度最大化的趋势。简单来说，这体现了被压抑着的能量有被不断释放的内在需求，如同太阳只有辐射了足够的光和热才会趋于衰弱，地心的岩浆不再频繁喷涌后地表才开始冷却。对于能源主要来自于地球和太阳的生命来说，只需要选择一个合适的时机登场并扮演一个顺应潮流的角色，便可尽情舞蹈。

在薛定谔看来，生命最本质的特征就是它会从外部世界吸收“负熵”，用来对抗熵增的趋势，并把这个本领传递下去，这成就了生命自身的有序性。而从整个环境角度考虑，生命活动无疑促进了能量的向外扩张和消散，协助了环境混乱程度的提升，并在这一过程中通过流经自体的源源不断的能量，推动了自身进化反应的持续进行和规模的不断壮大。与此同时，愈加繁盛的生命也反过来更加强烈地推动着环境熵增的过程。多么完美的配合，虽然在环境面前生命如此渺小，如同蜷缩和忙碌在桌脚墙边搬运食物残渣的蚂蚁，但自然对生命的伟大创造却由此而产生。

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