Category: Science

Life together

Only living things can form a murmuration. Not only that, the individuals must all be alive with the same kind of life, don’t expect to see seagulls and starlings together in the same formation.

A murmuration of starlings

This morning, swilling out the cafetiere, watching the dark coffee grounds fan out and spiral down the drain, a word popped into my mind – ‘murmuration’. This word is used for a flock of birds flying together, swirling hither and thither, flying together as one yet moving independently and in smaller groups within that one flock. Starlings are particularly known for this behaviour as they go to roost in the evening light, and the dark specks of coffee reminded me of a murmuration of these birds.

Murmuration of starlings

But looking at those coffee grounds made it very clear to me that only living things can form a murmuration. Not only that, the individuals must all be alive with the same kind of life, don’t expect to see seagulls and starlings together in the same formation. The living entities must also be in a fluid environment (air or water, large shoals of fish can exhibit the same phenomenon). And they must be aware of one another and able to respond rapidly to one another’s movements.

Take a look at this video of a starling murmuration. It’s stunning!

So it should be with the church. A formation of individuals all alive with the same life, the life of Christ, all filled with his Spirit. Church should be a fluid environment, the individuals free to move in every dimension, yet always aware of one another and responding to one another.

When the church flows like a murmuration, individually alive with Christ, individually free to move yet mutually aware, responding to one another’s presence and movement, unconstrained except in obedience to Christ, then, my friends, we will see her transcendent glory revealed and the whole world will gasp. People will say, ‘Oh wow, how can this collection of individuals flow together with such transcendent beauty and grace?’

If not, we are little better than coffee grounds swirling into the drain. Not alive at all, merely acted on by random currents as gravity draws us ever downwards. Paul expressed this when he wrote to the church in Ephesus,

We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.

Part of the Grand Canyon is in Australia

Way back  a thousand million years ago when the super-continent Rodinia existed

Well, OK, it’s not that the canyon itself is partly in Australia, but the rock formations through which the canyon was formed are partly in Australia.

How do we know? Many of those rock layers with their very distinctive and unique sequences and chemical compositions have also now been found in Tasmania, the large island just south of the Australian state of New South Wales. It’s the oldest rocks of the Grand Canyon series that have been discovered in Tasmania. The rocks have always seemed unrelated to other rocks in the same part of the island, but they look like the oldest canyon rocks in many of their details and make-up.

Rodinia
Rodina, a super-continent with Australia adjoining Laurentia.

The solution to this puzzle can only be that part of Australia was once a single piece of continental crust with the rocks of the Grand Canyon. That would have been way back  a thousand million years ago when the super-continent Rodinia existed. Since then, the continents have broken apart, moved around, run into one another, and broken apart again. The breakup of Rodinia separated the early rock grouping into pieces that became part of modern North America and Australia.

This is not a new theme in the history of the continents. In a much more recent episode (the opening of the Atlantic Ocean) an ancient mountain chain was torn in two; the parts now form the Appalachians in North America and the Scottish Highlands on the edge of Europe.

But this new discovery helps scientists put more detail into the very early story of continental crustal movement and break up. Thanks to Jack Mulder and others for publishing the discovery and New Scientist for sharing the story more widely.

Early steps towards life

Imagine an RNA molecule that can replicate … this is already quite life-like.

A typical RNA molcule

I have a really exciting story for you today, especially if you are interested in the origin of life and evolution.

A typical RNA molecule

A recent article in the magazine Science reports that Thomas Carell, a chemist at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, has outlined a process that can generate all four of the building blocks of RNA from compounds and conditions present on the pre-biotic Earth.

Why is this significant?

To understand, we need to grasp the importance of RNA. Its cousin, DNA, is the molecule used by most living things on Earth to store the genetic information that controls their form and function. RNA is also capable of storing genetic information, and some viruses use it in exactly this way. RNA is also essential in all living forms because it acts as a go between in the production of proteins from the DNA genetic material. RNA is less stable than DNA and copying errors are more likely. For this reason, DNA is a better long-term genetic store than RNA, but RNA is more dynamic. Think in terms of DNA as a library of printed recipe books, while RNA is like hand-copied notes on scraps of paper that enable the recipes to be taken to the kitchen.

But RNA has additional tricks up its sleeve. Not only can this molecule store genetic information, it can also catalyse biochemical reactions, including the synthesis of simple proteins. RNA is a bit of an all-rounder, and it’s not so hard to imagine that quite soon after being randomly synthesised by Carell’s process, RNA molecules might be formed as the dissolved RNA bases came into contact with tiny rock templates that could act to stabilise the process.

RNA also has the potential to self-replicate. Imagine an RNA molecule that can replicate (albeit with occasional errors). This is already quite life-like. Now image the population growing in places where the Carell process was providing reliable supplies of the four bases. Some of those RNA molecules will have errors, sooner or later an error, or a combination of errors will provide a version that replicates more efficiently, or gets trapped inside a lipid membrane that protects it from breakdown, or catalyses the production of a protein that makes the RNA more efficient in some way. If all of those things happen you have something that might be regarded as an early living form – an enclosed lipid membrane with a self-replicating genetic system that can mutate and evolve. Nothing more than that would be needed to kick of an expanding array of related forms.

Voila!

The story as I describe it here is not complete and likely incorrect in many ways. I accept that. But though it’s a simplistic view, it’s also likely to be broadly correct as a bare outline. Over the next few years and decades I expect much more detail will become clear, especially detail about what is or is not possible. And I expect to see many of the steps to be experimentally demonstrated. Watch this space…