GEORGE DYSON, a science historian, is the author of Project Orion and Darwin Among the Machines.
I predict that we will reach a complete understanding of molecular biology and molecular evolution without ever discovering the origins of life.
This suggests either a mystery that science cannot explain, or confirmation that life is merely the collective result of a long series of incremental steps, making it impossible to draw a precise distinction between living and nonliving things.
“The only thing of which I am sure,” argued Samuel Butler in 1880, “is that the distinction between the organic and inorganic is arbitrary; that it is more coherent with our other ideas, and therefore more acceptable, to start with every molecule as a living thing, and then deduce death as the breaking up of an association or corporation, than to start with inanimate molecules and smuggle life into them.”
Every molecule a living thing? That sounds dangerous to me! But where else can you draw the line?