Free Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos by Peter M. Hoffmann

modern science is mostly an outgrowth of European philosophical history, starting with the ancient Greeks.
    * Other examples are explanations based on steam engines (thermodynamics) and chemistry or computers (the brain as computer). All of these explanations capture some aspects of life at least metaphorically, but ultimately they fail and should be used only with a giant grain of salt. The heart is not a clock, and the brain is not a computer.
    * The term teleomechanism was introduced in Timothy Lenoir, “ The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1989; 1982).

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Chance and Necessity
     

Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.
    —D EMOCRITUS
We believe that God created the world according to his wisdom. It is not the product of any necessity whatever, nor of blind fate or chance. We believe that it proceeds from God’s free will.
    — C ATECHISM OF THE C ATHOLIC C HURCH , A RTICLE 295

    F AINT WISPS OF HYDROGEN AND HELIUM ARE SWIRLING through the immensity of space. The cosmos is vast and empty. Suddenly, the visitors glimpse a tiny illuminated island: a galaxy in a sea of nothingness. Looking closer, they notice that the island is made of smaller points of light: little nuclear fireplaces called stars, sprinkled into the cold darkness of space. Around many of the stars, small sand grains and blobs of gas leisurely circle their star’s illumination. On one of the sand-grain planets, heated by its star to a comfortable 293 degrees Kelvin, white water vapor clouds beautifully set off the deep blue of saltwater oceans and the yellow-brown of continents. The tiny two-legged creatures inhabiting this little world, having just begun to glimpse a few feeble answers to the endless mysteries surrounding them, believe themselves to be the center of the universe. Chuckling, the visitors keep their giant spaceship cloaked, and move on.
    Meanwhile on Earth, completely ignorant of being observed by powerful beings from outer space, humans seem incapable of shaking their illusions of superiority. As far as they know, this is the only planet with life, and they are the only intelligent life among millions of species. Only a few humans sense that this doesn’t seem right. One of them writes a comic strip Calvin and Hobbes , in which a little boy called Calvin observes: “The best proof that there is intelligent life in the universe is that they have not contacted us.” Maybe it’s because they would die laughing.
    In our belief that we are the center of the universe, we have assumed much, just to be proven wrong time and again: No, the solar system does not revolve around Earth. No, the universe does not end beyond Pluto, or even beyond our Milky Way galaxy, but it is much bigger than we ever thought, full of stars in some places, but for the most part filled with staggering emptiness. No, there is no special life force—our bodies are part of nature, run by molecules. And no, we are not a separate creation from all the other animals, but are their close cousins—all, including ourselves, historical accidents of evolution. In short, we are lucky to be here.
    This last insult to our pride, that we may be here—at least partly—by accident, by chance, may be the toughest nut of all. But what is so bad about chance?
Randomness
     
    You know the story. Traveling to some faraway destination, say, Turkey or Singapore, you run into the neighbor of your cousin, who happens to know about the perfect job opening for you. Fate, right? Many see hidden meanings when the unexpected strikes. Some become superstitious, some believe in karma, others in the will of God. Few people would admit it happened by chance, that it was simply a coincidence. Why do so many people reject the influence of randomness on their lives? Why are we bothered by randomness? Randomness invokes chaos, lack of control. If randomness rules, all bets are off.