Abiogenesis & JCVI-syn 3.0


JCVI-syn 3.0 is the latest edition of the first self-replicating synthetic cell.  Designed with the objective of discovering the smallest possible viable genome, it has 482 genes encoded in a sequence of 582,970 of the four nucleotides A, T, G and C.  From this basis the researchers postulate that as little as 256 genes may be sufficient for viability, which this author infers could perhaps be encoded in 309,627 nucleotides.  There are various ways in which this volume of data can be visualised.  The data could be encoded in nucleotidesx2 number of binary digits, or binary digits/3.32 decimal digits i.e. approx 186k decimal digits.  This volume of information could also be used to encode 77,406 ascii characters if expressed as bytes. Ascii is inefficient in its use of data volume, using 256 possible permutations to express 52 letters, 14 punctuation marks, ten digits and one space, its efficiency is only 30%.  Allowing for this inefficiency, a better estimate of the English character count represented by 256 genes may be 232,000, or 38,700 words - a little longer than George Orwell's Animal Farm.

Since the objective of the JCVI project is to define the minimum viable genome, by definition this is the amount of information that must be generated by random processes for abiogenesis to occur.  The difficulty that is posed by this requirement can be illustrated by investigating the frequency of meaningful strings in large random datasets.  Even if we use an efficient way of encoding alphabetic information (a=2, b=3, c=4, d=5, e=6, f=7, g=8, h=9, I=00, j=01, k=02, l=02, m=04, n=05, o=06, p=07, q=08, r=08, s=10, t=11, u=12, v=13, w=14, x=15, y=16, z=17 .=18, space=19), even relatively short strings cannot be found.  For example, the first 2 billion decimal places of pi contain darwin (5209140005) once, but dawkins (521402000510), not at all (http://www.subidiom.com/pi/pi.asp).  Granted, two billion places of pi cannot compare with the randomness of a universe, however the exercise above calls into question the “infinite monkeys + typewriters = shakespeare” postulation, especially since there are not infinite monkeys, or infinite anything else for that matter.  Consider the bar that must be cleared - Animal Farm from nothing!

The elephant in the room is that, even if the background noise of the universe could produce the entire text of Animal Farm, it would be meaningless without an appropriate operational paradigm - a printer to print it on and people to read it that are conversant with the intricacies of the English language.  In the case of abiogenesis, it is not just the dataset of the genome that must be generated by random processes, the paradigm in which the dataset has meaning must also arise by chance.  The fatal flaw in abiogenesis is that numbers are not stuff.  To produce JCVI it was necessary to sequence the novel genome, create it, and then insert it into a pre-existing cell for replication.  To say that the dataset and the cell are one and the same is wilfully perverse.  It is the equivalent to stating that possession of the blueprints for a nuclear device is the same as possessing said device.  It is possible to download the blueprints for the Space Shuttle from the internet, yet the dataset required to implement those blueprints and create the object itself is greater by many orders of magnitude - just ask any project manager at NASA.  It is true that the current universal paradigm includes cells that assemble themselves, yet before the moment of abiogenesis nothing was being assembled by anything.  To believe in abiogenesis is to believe that the $40m and the 200 man-years of directed effort that created JCVI-syn out of pre-existing biological material are analogous to the random actions of entropy on primordial matter.

JCVI-syn is an amazing achievement and reveals the absolute minimum complexity required for life.  Objections that the supposed primordial first cell was qualitatively different in structure are not relevant since the quantitative argument remains.  There is nothing special about the fact that Dawkins is not to be found in the first 2 billion places of pi, any 12 digit string is unlikely to be there.  If it is too much to allow the creation of JCVI-syn by chance, then the chance creation of any similarly complex system must also be discounted.

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