Views of Life

When scientists talk about life, whose culmination, so far, is man, they generally stick to material aspects that they know well how to handle. Those scientists who believe that man also has a unique rational element, a soul--and some of them do --do not generally consider it a proper subject for scientific inquiry, although for many of them the basic subject of study is man. Result is that though they are deeply imbued with the ultimate mystery of the universe, they often talk as if man were no more than an animal crowded and shaped by deterministic forces.

No Darling. At last week's Chicago meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Harvard's George Gaylord Simpson, vertebrate paleontologist, seized upon the centenary of Darwin's publication of the Origin of Spe cies to summarize today's consensus of scientific thinking on the nature and origin of man. The ancestry of man is still not fully known, he conceded, but he denounced "pussyfooting" about apes in man's family tree.

"Apologists emphasize that man cannot be a descendant of any living ape, and go on to state that man is not really descended from an ape or monkey at all but from an earlier common ancestor. In fact that common ancestor would certainly be called an ape or monkey in popular speech by anyone who saw it. Since the terms 'ape' and 'monkey' are defined by popular usage, man's ancestors were apes or mon keys (or successively both) . . . Man is in the fullest sense a part of nature and not apart from it. He is not figuratively but literally akin to every living thing, be it an amoeba, a tapeworm, a flea, a seaweed, an oak tree or a monkey." In a word, man lives in a world "in which he is not the darling of the gods." In other species, Simpson points out, uncontrolled evolution often leads to degeneration and usually to extinction. "But man is not just another animal. He is unique in peculiar and extraordinarily significant ways. He is the only organism with true language. This makes him the only animal who can store knowledge and pass it on beyond individual memory." He has a moral sense, including a sense of responsibility. ("The evolutionary process is not moral -- the word is simply irrelevant in that connection -- but it has finally produced a moral animal.") To whom is man responsible? "The post-Darwinian answer seems fairly clear: man is respon sible to himself and for himself." Since he is not the darling of the gods, Simpson warns, man can save himself from evolutionary degeneration only if he himself "takes a hand in determining his own future evolution."

Revolt of the Machines. Greatest challenge to man's ascendancy is not other living creatures but mechanical monsters of his own creation, argued Mathematician Norbert Wiener of M.I.T. Dr. Wiener, inventor of the word "cybernetics" (science of control mechanisms), and No. i cybernetic philosopher, solemnly warned that computers and other educated machines may yet outgrow man's control. He rejected the common and cheerful opinion that machines can never have any degree of originality. "It is my thesis," said Wiener, "that machines can and do transcend some of the limitations of their designers."

Even rather simple computing machines, Wiener pointed out, act much faster than humans and with much more precision. "This means that although they are theoretically subject to human criticism, such criticism may be ineffective until a time long after it is relevant. By the very slowness of our human activities, our effective control of our machines may be nullified."

Machines have already been built that can learn by experience. Taught to play checkers, some modern computers have learned, after only 20 hours of play, to beat the man who programed them. When the machines get a little brighter, they may learn economic games, such as figuring out the production schedule of an industry or manipulating the stock market. Once their human masters have set them to work, it is quite possible that an overeducated machine may sweep its masters to disaster before they realize clearly what it is up to.

Wiener foresees a time when modern pushbutton war will become so swift and complex that only computers can think fast enough to make its strategic decisions. They will train themselves by playing war games, as human generals do now, and will figure out more quickly than humans when it seems necessary to push the fatal buttons. But Wiener does not trust the motives of even the brightest war-making machine. "If the rules for victory in a war game," he says, "do not correspond to what we actually wish for our country, it .is more likely that such a machine may produce a policy which will win a nominal victory on points, at the cost of every interest we have at heart, even that of national survival."

Toward Synthetic Cells. Biochemist Sidney W. Fox of Florida State University reported progress toward creating life in the laboratory. Experimenters have long known that when a mixture of methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide and water vapor (all probable constituents of the earth's primitive atmosphere) is bombarded with electric sparks or high-energy radiation, amino acids are produced. Amino acids are the building blocks that form the multitudinous proteins in living organisms, and Dr. Fox carried the process a step farther. When he heated a mixture of amino acids with polyphosphoric acid as a catalyst, he got big molecules with many of the properties of proteins, i.e., they have similar chemical characteristics, are digested by natural enzymes and are eaten greedily by bacteria.

When Dr. Fox dissolved his semi-proteins in hot water and let the solution cool, billions of microscopic spheres separated out of each gram. The spheres were about the same size as cocci (primitive bacteria), and they seemed to be sheathed with thin membranes much as bacterial cells are. Dr. Fox does not claim that his spheres are "alive," but he thinks his experiment demonstrates one possible means by which nonliving chemicals in the earth's primitive ocean may have been gathered together into cell-like units of life.

On Alien Planets. If a life-forming process happened on earth, said Nobel Prizewinning Geneticist Hermann J. Muller of Indiana University, something similar probably happened on millions of other planets in the universe, and may have produced highly intelligent creatures.

But it is highly unlikely that such alien life will duplicate exactly the chemistry of earthside life. So when earthmen land on a foreign planet, they had better not eat the indigenous plants or animals; if they do, they will be poisoned, or at least will not be nourished. On the other hand, the indigenes would find the earthmen equally indigestible.

There may be some similarities between alien and earthside creatures. If the ani mals have eyes, they will probably resemble some type of earthside eye, since only a few kinds of eyes are possible.

There may be other similarities, e.g., legs for walking, teeth for chewing, but Muller discourages romantics who hope that space explorers will find planets stocked with creatures that resemble humans. "To suppose that humans have evolved there," says Muller, "is about as ridiculous as to imagine that they speak English."

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