Scientific Illiteracy
The Physics and Chemistry of Life. (Bell, 13s. 6d.) AT the turn of the century a Member. of
Parliament making a speech had only to leave a classical quotation hanging in the air for all the rest of the 670 Members to complete it for him.
The fact that few of our present MPs could achieve this feat is not a sign of intellectual deterioration. It merely implies that the content
of our national education has changed. It can
be argued, however, that the fact that the excel- lently printed, profusely illustrated and beautifully written Scientific American might not be under- stood in this country means that our education has not changed far enough, and that in conse- quence we are missing some of the important intellectual achievements of our generation.
The Physics and Chemistry of Life is a com- pilation of eighteen essays from the Scientific
American. Many pf the ideas described are new and of basic philosophical importance to all educated people who want to know what is hap- pening in the intellectual climate of the world in which they live. For instance, most of the cultures of the world, our own included, hold mythical be- .- fiefs in a supernatural creation of life. Rational ...- scientists, however, from Aristotle to Descartes, accepted the evidence of their senses that life " could arise from non-living materials—worms . from mud, maggots from decayed meat, mice from rubbish and so on. Then in 1857 Pasteur, in ' a series of rigorous experiments which it was impossible for logical people to overlook, demolished this theory of spontaneous genera- tion. It is a symptom of the philosophical poverty of our time that most modern biologists, having accepted with satisfaction the downfall of the hypothesis of spontaneous generation, and yet un- willing to accept the alternative belief in a special supernatural creation, are content with nothing.
But now we have the experiments of S. L. - Miller, carried out two years ago in 1955 in the United States and since confirmed in Russia, showing that electrical discharges similar to those occurring in the upper atmosphere cause the formation of amino acids from simple gases— water vapour, methane, ammonia and hydrogen —which there is good evidence to believe existed in the early atmosphere of the earth. In one stroke this remarkable result suggests that proteins, of which amino acids are components, and hence the class of proteins specified as enzymes, and hence the simplest form of living organism, and from them the whole sequence of biological life, pro- liferating according to the rules of evolution, were first created in this way. And so created only once. Amino acids produced by modern lightning today would be destroyed by existing life.
Our grandparents accepted Darwin or resisted him. We ignore the implications of S. L. Miller's results because our scientific illiteracy is such that we don't know what amino acids are.
MAGNUS PYKE
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