If most origin scientists would agree with Hazen that the beginning of life is probably both theoretically and experimentally discoverable, there isn't much agreement on anything else about it. Contemporary debunkers of science -- who include not just fundamentalist preachers but also Fox News commentators and much of the Republican Party's leadership -- like to depict scientists as a monolithic cabal of like-minded thinkers. As Hazen's book makes clear, this is about the most singularly wrong-headed observation one could possibly make; origins research (like most scientific fields) is full of clashing egos, angry turf wars and full-throttle ideological collisions.

To simplify a complicated field slightly, Hazen frames origins research as consisting of three separate but interlinked scientific questions, each characterized by significant controversy. First comes the issue of where and how the first "biologically significant" organic molecules -- the most basic building blocks of life -- were formed. Next comes the murkier matter of how these basic sugars, amino acids and other primitive molecules were assembled into specialized "macromolecules," which might be regarded as the missing link between non-life and life. Lastly, almost magically, these macromolecules organized themselves into ever more complex structures, capable of replicating themselves and passing genetic information along to their offspring. Somewhere along this continuum of intensifying complexity, life was born.

Even before addressing these questions individually, Hazen tackles one of the most exciting issues in contemporary cutting-edge science, which he argues provides an essential framework for thinking about the origin of life: the "missing law" of emergence. You may remember the second law of thermodynamics, from high-school physics or various "Star Trek" episodes: Energy has a ubiquitous tendency to dissipate from hot regions into cold ones; all natural systems decay from order into entropy. Hazen observes that this law is "more than a little depressing," but goes on to the important -- and, until recently, heretical -- idea that "disorder is not the only end point in the universe."

Much of what we find beautiful and valuable in the universe around us results from what scientists now call "complex emergent systems," impressive ordered structures that arise, Hazen explains, when "energy flows through a collection of many interacting particles." Such emergent phenomena occur all over the place in nature and in human society, on a vast intergalactic scale and a microscopic, molecular one.

"Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins"

By Robert M. Hazen

Joseph Henry Press

339 pages

Nonfiction

Buy this book

What's more, they cannot simply be understood as the sum of their individual parts. If scientists have not yet codified the law of emergence (and some might still dispute that it exists), Hazen sees it everywhere: "The arms of spiral galaxies, the rings of Saturn, hurricanes, rainbows, sand dunes, life, consciousness, cities and symphonies," he argues, all reflect the tendency of such interactive systems to process energy into astonishing levels of complexity and order.

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"Genesis" is a book about science, not about philosophy or religion, but Hazen is precisely the sort of scientific Renaissance man who knows that the theoretical course he has set possesses teleological ramifications. If he weren't such a clear and charming writer, it would be easy to find Hazen an irritating overachiever: He is not just an important researcher and a leading science educator, but also a professional trumpeter with the National Philharmonic and the Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra.

Some philosophers and theologians have seized on the proposed law of emergence to suggest, in opposition to the perceived nihilism of the natural sciences, that the purpose of our planet is in some sense the production of life, and the purpose of life the production of human consciousness (itself the most complex and elegant of emergent forms). Hazen avoids such metaphysical speculation, but unlike many scientists he is not hostile to those who would see God's hand behind the entire process. In an aside about the "intelligent design" movement, he rejects its ticky-tacky technical arguments as inadequate not just scientifically but also theologically; he prefers a "God of natural laws" who "set the entire magnificent fabric of the universe into motion." On several occasions he makes clear that he thinks that the basic requirements for life are "hard-wired into the fabric of the universe." While such an argument certainly does not demand a deity, it's also compatible with any non-fundamentalist variety of belief.

To turn from cosmology to specifics, the genesis of organic molecules on the primordial Earth is the best-understood of Hazen's three questions -- but what you may think you know about it is probably wrong. In 1953, a University of Chicago grad student named Stanley Miller scored a legendary experimental triumph by concocting a bench-top mixture of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water -- the presumed chemistry of the early oceans and atmosphere -- and zapping it with electrodes to simulate lightning. In just a week of experiments, he produced an entire suite of amino acids and other organic molecules. The New York Times published a Page One story headlined "Life and a Glass Earth," countless editorial cartoons depicted slimy critters crawling out of test tubes for their white-coated creators, and the myth of the primordial soup was born.

But Miller hadn't created life, or anything close to it. As Hazen puts it, synthesizing a bunch of amino acids and then saying that you understand the beginning of life is like buying a pile of bricks and lumber at a supply yard and announcing that you've built a house. While the "Miller-Urey hypothesis," arguing that life began in a rich stew of organics on the surface of the primordial ocean, has become a form of orthodoxy, it has all sorts of problems. Miller's calculations about the composition of the Earth's atmosphere were probably wrong. The harsh ultraviolet radiation at the surface of the ancient ocean makes it a most unlikely environment for those amino acids to join up and form proteins and other macromolecules. And finally, it has subsequently become clear that producing organic molecules is no big deal -- the early Earth was probably covered with all kinds of organics, from many different sources.

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