11 - Randomness, complexity, the unknowable, and the impossible

Summary

“It's no use trying,” said Alice. “One can't believe impossible things.” “I dare say you haven't had enough experience,” said the White Queen. “When I was your age, I did it for an hour a day. Why sometimes, I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), aka Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson

Orderliness, randomness, and self-organization

There has long been considerable opinion in the literature that life must be nonrandom and appears because of self-organization (Eigen, 1971). Many authors appeal to pattern formations that abound in Nature, such as crystal structure, stripes on a zebra, snowflakes, oil drops in water, hurricanes, and ripples on a river bed. It is often said that the crucial event in the origin of life is the saltation from a disordered state to an ordered state (Chaisson, 2001; Dyson, 1982; Schrödinger, 1987, 1992).

What has really happened, if we compare the two selected species after the restoration of the steady states, is a change in “valued information” which is reflected in an increased order.

(Eigen, 1971)

Thus, combinatorial explosion is a universal threat to biopolymer sequences and structures as well as reaction and controlling networks. Examples are known from biology, in particular metabolic, genetic, developmental, signaling, and neural networks. If this is true, how then, can organized objects originate? Must not all processes that are not regulated externally end up in a highly diverse mess of molecular species, each one at best realized in a few molecules? […]