an overview
of
Lyall Watson's
LIFETIDE
(Lifetide is 340 pages of heavily annotated and illuminating text. No 'summary' can substitute for the experience of actually reading the book. What follows are paraphrases and exact quotes. This sketch is intended to whet your appetite, and move you to seek out the real thing...)
page numbers from Bantam New Age Books edition April 1980
"The spiral soars into incomprehension however one looks at it, but the concept of an organic system, of a cosmos that lives and breathes, is I think a useful one. It helps us to think of life on earth as part of a larger pattern, instead of as something freakish and unique that could only happen here."pp. 12
"We have learned, for instance, that space is far from empty. The gaps between the stars are punctuated by clouds composed largely of gas and dust, which occur in the ratio of about a hundred to one...If the dust has the same composition as the interstellar gas - and there is no reason to assume otherwise - it is largely made of molecules of carbon (C), nitrogen (N), hydrogen (H), and oxygen (O). This provides an interesting, and perhaps meaningful coincidence. The grains in the interstellar medium are the same size and have the same composition as some of the most simple living things on earth, our terrestrial bacteria. Even the most complex living organisms, such as human beings, are not in essence very much different. The same four elements provide ninety-six percent of our body weight, much of it in solution. As J. B. S. Haldane observed, "Even the Archbishop of Canterbury is sixty-five percent water. pp. 13
"...at a gathering of astronomers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1973...several papers presented to what is now known as the Dusty Universe symposium pointed out that there seemed to be alot of atoms missing from interstellar space. Spectroscopic analyses kept coming up with results that showed less carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen than everyone expected to find there.
"...New models were put forward, and the most promising of these suggested that the missing atoms had gone undetected because there were bound up on the surface of interstellar dust grains in a sort of molecular mush which Mayo Greenberg called "dirty ice." At that time there was little experimental evidence for the existence of such accretions on cosmic grains, but since then radio astronomy - which receives and interprets microwaves rather than light waves, and can look right through interstellar clouds - has given us what we need. The very short radio waves provide a sort of electronic spectrum that includes fingerprints as distinctive as those that appear in the lines of an optical spectrum. And in the last few years, radio astronomers have detected an ever-increasing list of simple organic molecules in interstellar space." pp. 14
"...It has been suggested...that in addition to these mixed organic molecules, long chains of pure carbon are also accumulating to form what amounts to a coating of sticky tar on the surface of the cosmic dust." pp. 13
"The new planetary area remains rich in dust and complex organics, and as the central star warms the system, normal chemical reactions speed up and a steady stream of carbonaceous material showers down on any orbiting body." pp. 16
"...a favorable planet with a water-rich surface would have the potential for evolving life at a much earlier stage than we usually imagine. pp. 16
"Every day the earth collides with more than a hundred million meteors and something like a hundred tons of extraterrestrial material comes pouring into our atmosphere....a large part of the crust of the planet is nevertheless made of cosmic silt, about a ton each day settling slowly on the surface." pp. 16
"Most of the stony meteorites contain small glassy inclusions, and about two percent of these are called carbonaceous chondrites because they contain significant quantities of organic matter. The proportions, in fact, are extraordinarily high. About 0.1 percent of all material which has ever fallen on earth is organic. By comparison, if we measure the total weight of all organic matter on earth against the mass of of the planet itself, only 0.0000001 percent is of living origin. This means that meteors are coming from somewhere that is a million times more organic than earth itself - which is something one has to think about for a while." pp. 17
"Haldane saw the cradle of life as a primeval soup, a sort of hot dilute brew of simple molecules. So in 1953 at the University of Chicago, Stanley Miller took sterilized water, added an atmosphere of hydrogen, ammonia, and methane, and subjected the mixture to continuous electrical discharge for a week. The results are history. He got several simple amino acids, and by inference, if this was possible in one week in a single simple setup, then it was likely that in a billion years in the primordial ocean would be time enough to give rise to more complex nucleic acids, even those capable of continuous self-replication." pp. 19
He discusses comets, and other ways that organic building blocks are moved around space. Now, at the beginning of chapter two:
"The greatest barrier that life... has to overcome is the development of a replicating system. It is clear that simple organic compounds can and do originate spontaneously from basic elements available almost anywhere in the universe. And it seems certain that some of these do, by chance and under the influence of cosmic radiation, combine to form even fairly complex molecules such as amino acids. But it is an enormous jump from there to the existence of anything like a protein." pp. 31
Giving numerous examples, he talks about the "seed" around which crystals always form, and suggests that proto-proteins formed around a similar nucleus. He suggests that earth life's beginnings may have: "followed the same kind of sequence, beginning with the existence of a suitable crystal, probably a very small one, relatively insoluble in water. A colloidal mineral would be ideal, and none is in fact more common, or better suited to the needs of a primitive gene, or more appropriate in a biblical sense, than clay." pp. 36
He talks about how clay is an unusual and not totally understood substance, and that:
"Clays are extraordinary, layered, crystal structures which have, built into them, what amounts to an innate tendency to evolve...Clays have a dramatic ability not only to grow, but to absorb other molecules, and this capacity varies according to their structure." pp. 36"The memory of clay is manifest only in its ability to hold a pattern and to influence its environment when treated in a certain way."
"But this ability and the pattern are vital. The American chemist Armin Weiss has shown that some clays, in particular the mica types, can build up patterns of organic molecules between their silicate layers. He has identified more than eight thousand different derivatives in which the clays have acted as templates, inducing ammonium ions and alcohols to solidify into organic components." He quotes Cairns-Smith: "Reactions occurring in such an array containing suitable monomers could give rise to polymers with a genetically controlled configuration, out of which secondary control structures, membranes, and other cell structures could be formed." And then as more and more of the information in the silicates was transformed to the organic molecules, the clay would cease to control and take on a more passive role as a protective clamp. Cell walls could indeed evolve at a later stage from a vague tendency for the outer edge of a community to thicken like cold porridge, to the highly sophisticated ion and molecule filters that guard the borders of the modern cell." pp. 40
He describes natural selection:
"Each small mistake produces a variation in the end result, some tiny modification in the shape, size, or behavior of the living thing. Most of the changes tend to be detrimental and their owners disappear, but every now and then a change takes place which makes the organism better suited to some aspect of its changing environment. It survives at the expense of others less well adapted and becomes more numerous, until it in turn is replaced by a more beneficial change produced by yet another small mistake in replication." pp. 34These excerpts are taken from the first two chapters. Almost every sentence is peppered with footnotes and references; the book continues for 300 more pages, and has an extensive bibliography. He continues through the entire development of life on earth culminating in the latest development, humans. Again, please remember that these excerpts do not present Mr. Watson's whole thesis - they are presented here as a overview and appetizer.
So where/when "did it all begin"? Might as well try to find the beginning of a fractal. Another point can also be understood more easily using the fractal model, that is that any change, no matter how slight, effects the entire picture. Fractals also descibe the mystery that permeates the universe; the repeating cycles, the fact the no matter how deep you go, there is always more. Fractals describe deterministic chaos, that is, a seemingly chaotic system that begins to reveal patterns in itself over space/time. The universe is a perfect natural example of deterministic chaos...
The Structure of the UniverseDreams and the morphogenetic field
