Who Built the Moon? (17 page)

We had already noted that the second of time appeared to be real in some way, rather than just an abstract convention. On Earth a pendulum that swings at a rate of once a second will have a length of a metre, with tiny variations dependent on the user’s precise distance from the planet’s core.

Perhaps the values programmed into the Earth by the UCA were so fundamental that any intelligent life form evolving on the Earth would respond to them. The relatively recent discovery that pendulums appear to go haywire during a total eclipse could point to brief interruptions of this Earthly harmony. We were aware that we were putting speculation upon speculation but it made sense. And we have to remember that we are not trying to displace any well-reasoned theory already in existence, so these possibilities have the benefit of being alone in fitting all of the known facts.

The bottom line to all this is that some unknown creative agency made the Moon out of parts of the Earth so that it would act as an incubator for life. The next question to confront was this: What was put into the incubator so that it would eventually grow into an intelligent life form? Setting up the hardware was impressive enough but what software was used?

‘A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature.’

Professor Anthony Flew, December 2004

Not very long ago, religion was the only guide to the way the world was perceived. For right or for wrong the various scriptures of theological tradition provided a way of making sense of everything from the miracle of birth to the movement of the stars in the sky. But today we have rational thinking – we have science.

The word ‘science’ is from the Latin
scire
, meaning ‘to know’ and it is concerned with the organization of objectively verifiable sense experience. In other words, it makes sense of the way we see the world in a testable and verifiable way. It seems that there is nothing that science cannot explain given enough time and study. From Anthropology to Zoology, the people of the twenty-first century have experts who can explain where almost everything came from and how it works.

But science does have its limits. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, for example, means that we cannot exactly know the position and the momentum of a particle simultaneously. We can choose one or the other – but we cannot have both. And there is at least one subject that science appears to be unable to explain. The origin of life.

In his book,
How to Think Straight,
Professor Anthony Flew has pointed out that practical reasoning and clear thinking are essential for everyone who wants to make proper sense of the information we receive each day. He stresses the importance of being able to quickly know the difference between valid and invalid arguments, the contradictory versus the contrary, vagueness and ambiguity, contradiction and self-contradiction, the truthful and the fallacious. These, he says, are the qualities that separate clear thinkers from the crowd.
²⁷
After sixty-six years as a leading champion of atheism and logical thinking, Professor Anthony Flew has made sense of new information which has led him to state that science appears to have proven the existence of God. Flew’s reason for this monumental about turn is the discovery of evidence that shows that some sort of intelligence must have created the world we inhabit. He has particularly pointed to the investigation of DNA by biologists, which has shown that an unbelievable complexity of the arrangements are needed to produce life; leading to the conclusion that intelligence must have been involved.

We have bemoaned the lack of objectivity that often pervades the academic community but we must applaud a man who is prepared, at the age of eighty-one, to throw away the cornerstone of his life’s work. That takes guts!

The first the world knew of Flew’s change of heart was his letter to the August–September 2004 issue of the
Philosophy Now
journal where he stated: ‘It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism.’

Flew is a man of principle and when he was asked if his startlingly new ideas would upset some people, he responded by saying, ‘That’s too bad… my whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads.’

How refreshing. That is exactly what we are trying to do with the information we have gathered about the Moon and the origins of life on our apparently designed incubator.

We have arrived at a point where we need to try and understand the emergence of life. And we find, at this precise moment, that the old assumptions about how life originated have been thrown out of the window.

The first question we asked ourselves is: What do we mean by ‘life’?

We use the term to cover all kinds of organisms from cyanobacteria to plants and animals. The essence of life is reproduction, the formation of identical or near identical copies of a complex structure from simple starting materials. The increase of complexity involved in the formation of living organisms from their precursors distinguishes the processes of biological growth and reproduction from physical processes such as crystallization. This local increase of complexity can also be described as a decrease of entropy, which we have already speculated might be the motivation of the unknown creative agency that seeded and promoted life on Earth.

But where is the boundary of what is and what is not a life form. Is, for example, a virus a living entity? The standard answer is ‘no it is not’, but that is now seen as a very debatable point. Viruses cannot replicate on their own but can do so when they occupy a host. In the late nineteenth century, researchers realized that some diseases were caused by biological objects that were then thought to be the simplest and smallest of all living, gene-bearing life-forms. Throughout most of the twentieth century, though, viruses have been designated as non-living material.

All living organisms possess a genome, which is the set of instructions for making the body, and this is always composed of nucleic acid. It is usually DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) or in the case of some viruses, RNA (ribonucleic acid). The genome consists of a number of genes, each of which is a segment of nucleic acid coding for a particular type of protein molecule. In October 2004, French researchers announced findings that blurred the boundary once again. Didier Raoult and his colleagues at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille announced that they had sequenced the genome of the largest known virus, Mimivirus, which had been discovered in 1992. This virus, about the size of a small bacterium, contained numerous genes previously thought to only exist in cellular organisms. The virus is therefore a very smart bit of ‘dead’ matter or it is part of a unique club of entities only known to exist upon Earth.

The remarkable nature of living matter caused astrobiologist Paul Davies to observe in December 2004:

‘Most people take the existence of life for granted, but to a physicist like me it seems astounding. How do stupid atoms do such clever things? Physicists normally think of matter in terms of inert, clod-like particles jostling each other, so the elaborate organization of the living cell appears little short of miraculous. Evidently, living organisms represent a state of matter in a class apart from the rest.’

Back in 1953, when Watson and Crick discovered the helical structure of the DNA molecule and the general way that it coded the formation and replication of proteins in cells, it seemed that a plausible scientific explanation for the origin of life was about to be assembled. The laboratory synthesis of amino acids from basic chemicals further heightened the expectations that humankind was on the verge of creating a living cell.

It was suggested that the early Earth, through a mixture of volcanic activity and landmass weathering, had acquired oceans rich in nutrients and chemicals – known as ‘the primeval soup’. It was in the constant mixing and intermixing of chemicals, and probably with the aid of lightning strikes, that the first primitive life had come into existence – or so the evolutionists suggested. Experts remained confident that the primeval soup theory was the most likely explanation and were convinced that, given time, someone would manage to create life in a laboratory.

Soon after Watson and Crick’s discovery, Stanley Miller, a graduate student from Chicago University, co-operated with Harold Urey, a Nobel Prize winner, to recreate the exact circumstances that are believed to have existed in the primeval soup of the infant Earth. Their soup contained water vapour, hydrogen, methane and ammonia. It was estimated that lightning had played a part in the emergence of life, so Miller and Urey provided an electrical spark to their chemical soup and eventually succeeded in creating simple amino acids. ‘Hooray!’, they and everyone else concerned said, because amino acids are a major component of organic life. Unfortunately, more than half a century later, no one has come any closer to actually creating life than this.

It has also been pointed out that the amino acids created by Miller, Urey and others are but a tiny few of the constituents required for life. In any case, the experiment was very selective in its methods. Amino acids are referred to as being left- and right-handed, both of which were present in Miller and Urey’s soup, whereas life uses only left-handed amino acids. What is more, the very electrical spark that created the amino acids would also have destroyed them, so they had to be artificially isolated in the experiment.

It might be thought reasonable that if life once formed in the oceans, it would continue to do so today. In reality this can’t happen because the mixture of temperatures, chemicals and gases present is wrong. It was generally accepted that life could not spontaneously appear in an oxygen rich atmosphere and so the evolutionists had to suggest a very different sort of atmosphere on the infant Earth. (Oxygen, whilst preserving life, destroys organic molecules that are not alive.)

Generating life in the laboratory proved to be utterly impossible and researchers began to realize that new natural laws would need to be discovered to explain how the high degree of order and specificity of even a single cell could be generated by random, natural processes.

The DNA molecule is in the form of a double helix – rather like a ladder twisted into a spiral. The bases of the DNA are found in pairs and these make up the rungs of the ladder that carry the information to replicate the entity. When DNA copies itself, the ladder breaks down the middle of the rungs. New bases are matched to the bases of each upright and so the original DNA molecule then becomes two new identical molecules of DNA. Information necessary to build new proteins, and to perform other necessary chemical changes, is taken to various parts of a cell by another molecule, this one being ribonucleic acid (RNA). RNA is similar to DNA but is only a single helix. RNA is therefore the ‘messenger’ that allows the information held within DNA to be distributed and acted upon.

An important question remains, and it is one that science still cannot answer. How did DNA come about in the first place, because as things stand now, only DNA can create DNA.

Some chromosomes contain extremely long strings of DNA of more than a metre in length, which is colossal considering the microscopic nature of the DNA molecule itself. However, the question that has puzzled everyone concerned is the origin of this process, because all enzymes are proteins and protein synthesis must be directed by DNA. Yet, DNA replication cannot take place without these proteins. So, what came first – the protein or the DNA?

The problem goes right back to the origin of all life. But it is a problem that appears to have no answer. What is certain is that amino acids, nucleotides, lipids and other multi-atom molecules can be manufactured at random by heat, for example from lightning strikes. They can also come about from sunlight and other sources of energy that don’t themselves have life. Many ideas have been put forward to explain the occurrence of DNA but none of them can be more than educated guesses.

But as we were researching this book a new theory appeared, and it is one that has gained favour with many experts. This theory suggests that DNA exists thanks to the presence of Earth’s Moon!

Four billion years ago, the orbit of the Moon was much closer to the Earth than it is today. At this time, the Earth was spinning much faster on its axis and phenomenal tides were being raised on the Earth, by the constant passing of the Moon. With the Moon so much closer to Earth the height of the tides would have been colossal (see chapter 5).

Richard Lathe, a molecular biologist at Pieta Research in Edinburgh, has suggested that within the primordial oceans, constantly dragged back and forth by the passing of the Moon, DNA could have been rapidly multiplied.
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One of the most commonly held theories regarding the origin of DNA is that it emerged when smaller, precursor molecules in the waters of the early oceans – ‘primeval soup’ – came together or were ‘polymerized’ into long strands. These long strands, it is suggested, became the templates for more molecules to attach themselves along the templates, which eventually resulted in double-stranded molecules like DNA.

Richard Lathe suggests that the problem lies in the need for some mechanism that would constantly break apart the double strands, in order to keep the process going. He maintains it would have taken some external force to dissociate the two strands.

It is at around 50°C that single DNA strands act as templates for synthesizing complementary strands, whereas at the higher temperature of about 100°C, these double strands break apart and this doubles the number of molecules. When the temperature falls, the process begins again. The number of replications grows exponentially with just forty cycles producing a trillion identical copies.

A billion years after the Moon came to orbit the Earth, it was extremely close to its host planet and the Earth was spinning much faster than it is now. The tides, as Lathe suggests, must have extended several hundred kilometres inland, which meant that coastal areas were subjected to rapid changes in salinity and this would have led to repeated and very frequent association and dissociation of double-stranded molecules similar to those of DNA.