The Blah Blah Tech blog often gets me thinking. Recently, tech author Wayne Smallman posted an item about how DNA is hardwired into the universe. It’s an interesting read, but there were a couple of points of fact that I wanted to pick up on and a critique of the conclusions I wanted to make.

First, Wayne quotes from another article about DNA, life, the universe, and everything, that makes a factual error:

“A recent mathematical analysis says that life as we know it is written into the laws of reality. DNA is built from a set of twenty amino acids — the first ten of those can create simple prebiotic life, and now it seems that those ten are … destined to occur wherever they can.”

DNA, of course, is not built from 20 amino acids at all. Proteins are built from amino acids. DNA is built from bases and there are four of those. They are usually labelled G,T,C, and A (hence the 1997 movie title Gattaca about a genetically “different” man).

In the subsequent paragraph, Wayne then states that DNA is the building block of life. Again, that would be proteins. DNA is the template against which protein chains of amino acids are constructed and then “fold” into their active forms, which are then considered the building blocks of life.

But, the main thrust of the article is that somehow the structure of DNA is somehow woven into the fabric of reality. Well, it is for terrestrial life, but I think it’s wishful thinking if we are to suggest that should there happen to be life elsewhere in the universe that it too would utilise the same four simple chemicals – G,T,C,A, to construct self-replicating molecules that then build other molecules to produce their life stuff.

We can say nothing yet about life elsewhere and whether amino acids and so proteins are essential to life, they may not be. The actual notion that life is somehow intrinsically fundamental because of patterns is quite a fanciful idea. There are patterns and fundamental ones at that seen in life on earth. But, we have absolutely no evidence that these “patterns” have emerged anywhere else in the universe, life here really could be a total and utter fluke.

There may be some peculiar self-replicating crystalline system based on high-pressure inorganic chemistry that exists under the extreme conditions of a whirling gas giant planet orbiting a distant brown dwarf, or some vapour-like entity hovering low on a distant moon, who knows? Certainly, the writers of science fiction and fanciful research papers don’t.

Meanwhile, those alien crystals or extraterrestrial vapours may, right now, be puzzling over the mathematics of symmetry and Boltzmann’s constant and anticipating the discovery of other crystalline or gaseous lifeforms elsewhere in the universe. Forgetting that while chemistry is universal, it is not all organic.