Is "The DNA Code" a Constant of the Universe?

A recent mathematical analysis says that life as we know it is written into the laws of reality.  DNA is built from a set of twenty amino acids - the first ten of those can create simple prebiotic life, and now it seems that those ten are thermodynamically destined to occur wherever they can.

For those unfamiliar with thermodynamics, it's the Big Brother of all energy equations and science itself.  You can apply quantum mechanics at certain scales, and Newtonian mechanics work at the right speeds, but if Thermodynamics says something then everyone listens.  An energy analysis by Professors Pudritz and Higgs of McMaster University shows that the first ten amino acids are likely to form at relatively low temperatures and pressures, and the calculated odds of formation match the concentrations of these life-chemicals found in meteorite samples.

They also match those in simulations of early Earth, and most critically, those simulations were performed by other people.  The implications are staggering: good news for anyone worried about how we're alone, and bad news for anyone who demands some kind of "Designer" to put life together - it seems that physics can assemble the organic jigsaw all by itself, thank you very much, and has probably done so throughout space since the beginning of everything.

The study indicates that you don't need a miracle to arrive at the chemical cocktail for early life, just a decently large asteroid with the right components.  That's all.  The entire universe could be stuffed with life, from the earliest prebiotic protein-a-likes to fully DNAed descendants.  The path from one to the other is long, but we've had thirteen and a half billion years so far and it's happened at least once.

The other ten amino acids aren't as easy to form, but they'll still turn up - and the process of "stepwise evolution" means that once the simpler systems work, they can grab the rarer "epic drops" of more sophisticated chemicals as they occur - kind of a World of Lifecraft except you literally get a life when you play.  And once even the most sophisticated structure is part of a replicating organism, there's plenty to go round.

It's no accident that we see stars in the sky, says famed Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins: they are a vital part of any universe capable of generating us. But, as Dawkins emphasizes, that does not mean that stars exists in order to make us."It is just that without stars there would be no atoms heavier than lithium in the periodic table," Dawkins writes in The Ancestors Tale -A Pilgramage to the Dawn of Evolution, "and a chemistry of only three elements is too impoverished to support life. Seeing is the kind of activity that can go on only in the kind of universe where what you see is stars."

A fascinating corollary according to both Dawkins (see video below) and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, is whether DNA is inevitable as the foundation for the coding of life, or has life started with DNA in only one place in the solar system and then spread among the livable habitats through panspermia. Microbial life can land on and seed another planet, thereby not requiring that you have to create life from scratch multiple times and in multiple places.

Another totally intriguing possibility, one of many that deGrasse Tyson Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History and host PBS's NOVA scienceNOW., describes in Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution, is that there is life that has encoding that has nothing to do with DNA.

It is the relentless shifting and mutating of DNA, says Dennis Overbye in a brilliant essay in The New York Times, that generates the raw material for evolution to act on and ensures the success of life on Earth (and perhaps beyond). Dr.Paul Davies co-director of the Arizona State University Cosmology Initiative said that he had been encouraged by the discovery a few years ago "that some sections of junk DNA seem to be markedly resistant to change, and have remained identical in humans, rats, mice, chickens and dogs for at least 300 million years."

But Dr. Gill Bejerano, Assistant Professor of Developmental Biology and of Computer
Science at Stanford, one of the discoverers of these “ultraconserved” strings of the genome, said that many of them had turned out to be playing important command and control functions.

“Why they need to be so conserved remains a mystery,” Berjerano said, noting that even regular genes with known functions undergo more change over time. Most junk bits of DNA that neither help nor annoy an organism mutate even more rapidly, Overbye points out.

What your quess: Is the DNA the cosmic code for life in the universe, or is it possible that there's are alien, unknown foundations? At the Galaxy, we place our chips on DNA.

Don't miss the Dawkins video below...get past the first 5 minutes and you'll witness a brilliant discussion of his views on DNA as the universal foundation for life in the universe.

Posted by Luke McKinney with Casey Kazan.

Humans and Aliens might share DNA roots

Comments

[Ramkumar]

'A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution',.... dont know from where
Dawkins get such beautiful and apt titles 'The greatest show on earth', Unweaving the rain bow ','the selfish gene'.... Thanks to Permalink for the video ...

[India Holidays]

Its still a mystery sir.

[jghughes]

I feel compelled to comment: DNA is NOT made of amino acids, rather proteins are. That doesn't change the impact of this discovery, but it is certainly an important distinction

[bumpy]

Dawkins is saying DNA is not necessarily universal, but something with some of the same properties must be.

I think many other systems must have cropped up on the very early Earth, and DNA won out through natural selection because it is somehow better than the others.

The victory may have been decisive, or it may have been a near thing. So maybe there is only one dominant system everywhere, or maybe there will be two or three found nearly everywhere. It is unlikely that there will be a great diversity of genetic systems.

[dawkins]

could our universe be one giant Womb amongst many (the multiverse idea) and meteors be Life giving spert containing DNA.

And our earth was the lucky egg to be fert1lised by one such 'one in a billion' meteor? hows that for a theory?

[dawkins]

>>

could our universe be one giant Womb amongst many (the multiverse idea) and meteors be Life giving sperm containing DNA.

And our earth was the lucky egg to be fert1lised by one such 'one in a billion' meteor? hows that for a theory? silly or probable?

[DMartin]

Who writes this stuff? Could you do a little bit of fact checking before you write? Like, maybe, just look up Wikipedia.

DNA is not "built of a set of 20 amino acids". That would be proteins.

[Tiffany jewellery]

Who writes this stuff? Could you do a little bit of fact checking before you write? Like, maybe, just look up Wikipedia.

[EvilCosmicMonkeyfrom Knoxville]

dawkins -

Your idea sounds very intriguing. The universe / multiverse as a giant womb..... It sounds almost like an idea from one of our ancient mythology systems. Hindu cosmology says the universe was formed from a primal egg. Egyptian cosmology had Khnum fashioning the world & life from a primordial sea from a mound of his own sperm.
So that concept doesn't sound so far out.

As to the prevalence of DNA in the universe. what if life elsewhere uses something besides DNA ?
We're still thinking in terms of carbon - as - basis for life.

[Ramkumar]

It is not a must than Alien life has to be carbon based ..
it can be ammonia or silicon .. He clearly says that humanoid based thinking may not be correct in the case of life on other planets .. We assume that alien life,like life on earth, will need liquid water and there fore that it must evolve on a planet that lies with in the habitable zone around the star ..we found ionized water molecules in Enceladus days back(cassini )..

[me]

i dont understand how this is bad news for there being a creator. if anything it is good news.

[EvilCosmicMonkeyfrom Knoxville]

This is about the process of Creation. The spark of life may not reside in just Terrestrial DNA. DNA may have analogues elsewhere in the universe that don't use Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine & Thymine. Maybe there are completely different elements.
The Creator can make DNA or its anologues out of whatever " He / She " wants to.

[dirk alan]

everything is alive or on its way to being alive.

[bathroom vanities]

If so, it's very amazing. I accepted knowledge about DNA in school. I hear about it rarely. Now reading this article, I can't help thinking about it and wondering about it. Looking forward to read more about this aspect.

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[Dr. Paul Anderson]

I suspect Prof. Dawkins efforts to explain evolution etc. has far more to do with eliminating God, than it does proving evolution. In a statment, Marx declared that his intensions were to rid this world of God.

Speaking of Evolution, after comparing Darwins 1858 writings with that of others since, they have been altered to support their particular views. Works that have been translated by others of an original, aren't worth the paper they are written on.

As a retired Aero-Space Engineer: The complexity of the human genome, and the accuracy of replication of the human DNA is such that, the thought of it existing on it's own is shear madness.

[Paul Barnett]

So... If you can't provide an exact set of events, equations, and chemical reactions in order to prove life spontaneously began in a primordial puddle... simply introduce another theory that explains how life REALLY began on another planet (though you don't have an explanation for that either) and claim it came to Earth on an asteroid a billion years ago... kinda like Superman... !!!:) Mere science fiction... :)

[Kenn Pappas]

What's unfortunate about those that calculate mathematical odds related to science is that they always leave out one factor: Comparatives to actual evidence confirming the math. The fallacy in attempting to calculate the odds of proteins combining in order to form DNA is that there are no true odds to calculate. You would need existing conditions and a sequence of conditions on another planet to confirm the possibility that DNA can result from proteins, or ... how shall I say it ... "proof in the petri dish". Intelligent design people are notorious for calculating the possibilities that hemoglobin, the eye, and other biological structures, could have formulated on their own without the assistance of a divine being, always with the conclusion that the math doesn't add up. However, the fallacy in this type of calculation is that there is no comparative, no way to assume that the possibility of the eye formulating on its own without the aid of a divine being, is not possible, primarily because there is no way to calculate the mathematical possibilities by including all possible variables. In this case, the attempt to calculate the possiblility of DNA formulating from proteins on another planet in purely mathematical terms violates this same reasoning ... there just isn't any way to control all the variables. This is, unfortunately, one of the fallacies that many scientists are trapped by ... too much math, not enough experiment to confirm what is merely a hypothesis or a loose theory based on the math. We need experiment to find more variables, and until we find some DNA on a fly-by asteroid or another planet, we really can't control any more variables than we already have available. Sorry, boys, the math falls short no matter how much you crunch it.