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When You Wish Upon a Star

Dr. Gerald Joyce is lonely. A researcher at Scripps Research Institute and long-time proponent of the "RNA World" hypothesis, Dr. Joyce confesses to his feelings of gloomy isolation in an article in PLoS Biology. Titled "Bit by Bit: The Darwinian Basis of Life," the paper is an odd mix of Disney-like fantasy and intelligent-design realism. PhysOrg provides a summary in which Joyce audaciously speaks for all of mankind:

Even as he wishes upon a star, with a hit tip to Jiminy Cricket, Dr. Joyce knows that as a scientist he must keep his feet on the ground. Astronomers are rapidly approaching the discovery of the 1,000th extrasolar planet, yet no claims of alien life have ever panned out. Joyce continues:
Didn't President Clinton announce in 1996 that a Martian meteorite recovered in Antarctica "speaks of the possibility of life" on Mars? (No, it turned out to be mineralic artifacts.) Wasn't some "alien" arsenic-based life discovered recently in Mono Lake, California? (No, it's a familiar proteobacterium struggling to survive in a toxic environment.) Didn't Craig Venter and his colleagues recently create a synthetic bacterial cell, "the first self-replicating species we've had on the planet whose parent is a computer"? (No, its parent is Mycoplasma mycoides and its genome was dutifully reconstructed through DNA synthesis and PCR amplification.)

Why are we so confused (or so lonely) that we have such trouble distinguishing life from non-life and distinguishing our biology from another? A key limitation is that we know of only one life form, causing us to regard life from that singular perspective.... We see life as cellular, with a nucleic acid genome that is translated to a protein machinery.

In her summary of the paper, Stephanie Pappas at LiveScience agrees that the hype about habitable zones and Earth-like planets is just that: hype. She reports that Joyce feels such breathless over-reporting can backfire:
"I just worry that we cry wolf too many times, and people are going to start tuning it out," Joyce told LiveScience. "Let's just cool it on these false alarms," he added.
Science can't make an inference from a sample size of one, and Joyce knows it. In a subsection called "Rolling the Dice," he asks:
Reverse-Engineering Darwin

Conveniently defining life in Darwinian terms, Joyce continues:

Yet, incongruously, Joyce speaks primarily of the minimum amount of information needed to comprise life. What if a system had some of the above functions, but could not evolve new functions? Would it be alive? He frames the question, again, in terms of information:
By doing some bitwork accounting and asking information-based questions, Joyce came up with a formula for the information content required for a system to be considered alive: it has to encode "more heritable bits than the number of bits required to initiate its operation." Self-replication is insufficient, he notes. A living system must have the ability to derive new information intrinsically:
Life derived from a pre-existing life form would have a "privileged beginning," he says, whereas life on Earth (which he believes evolved from a primordial soup) started with zero information. He gives some examples of derivative life, but it's clear he is more interested in how to get information from the ground up.

How many bits are necessary? Joyce imagines RNA chains with 80 bits of information; that, unfortunately, would require that warm little soup to have 27 kilograms of RNA to get all the possible combinations. Things are a lot simpler, he argues, if 40 bits is considered sufficient as a starting point. Then, "a lucky milligram might contain the seed of life."

But other problems quickly mount. There's no natural selection without self-replication, and copies must be accurate enough to avoid error catastrophe. In addition, harmful cross-reactions tend to gunk up the works. (These problems were all described 28 years ago in the early ID book by Thaxton, Bradley and Olsen, The Mystery of Life's Origin.) Joyce writes:

Show Your ID, Please

The situation seems hopeless. Dr. Joyce injects some hope by describing his own work on self-replicating RNA molecules that appear to evolve in a Darwinian fashion. But he deflates his own story by admitting he snuck information into the system:

At the end of the paper, under the heading "Prospects," he discusses how his loneliness might be cured. Astronomers might find alien life around another star. Evolutionists might find a new life form that derived from pre-existing life. Or, they might find life derived from bit-free chemistry. Most likely, though, he thinks, intelligent designers will reverse-engineer Charles Darwin:
Meanwhile, scientists persist in wishing upon stars. "We can take pure chemicals in a test tube and stack the deck like crazy to try to get something replicating and evolving, and that hasn't happened yet," Joyce says. "Right now the jury's out on whether it's hard or easy." Until and unless that happens, he feels "researchers should 'hunker down' and avoid the temptation to overhype the possibility of new life forms."

And why are they tempted to overhype? "To me, it's something kind of fundamental about human loneliness," he said, speaking for all humanity again. "We just wish it to be, so that we're not alone."

As benevolent psychiatrists, let's diagnose Dr. Joyce's condition and see if we can help.

Etiology: Loneliness caused by wishing upon a star and knowing it's all hype. Symptoms aggravated by thoughts that life in the real world is information-based and runs on machinery. Condition becomes acute when pondering that Geppetto and Craig Venter are intelligent designers.

Prescription: Daily meditation on Dembski's No Free Lunch and Meyer's Signature in the Cell.

Of course, to benefit from treatment, the patient first has to realize he has a problem.