Not to put to harsh a slant on it, it must be acknowledged that life shows highly ordered, anti-entropic structure, while matter that is not involved with life, shows a fondness for entropic decomposition. I fully appreciate the temptation to view this as an indication that there is an additional life-force element (call it God, call it elan vital, call it phlogiston) but this is a temptation, not a theory.

There is a lot of literature in the last few years on the subject of self-organizing systems and how new orders of complex order can emerge from a group of elements who are operating only on a small set of rules and a very large number of transactions. THere are also some interesting studies on the emergence of amino acids from combinations of pre-biotic life.

So even though the idea seems very counter-intuitive to me, I am interested in seeing how the physical science boyos do at filling in the bits of this puzzle. They are not there yet, and bear in mind they are only explaining the most primitive stages, hoping the Grand Complexity of Evolution will take care of all subsequent stages.

Life forms from clay and gas seems a bit of a stretch, but then I think about some of the people I have met, and it doesn't seem all that far-fetched... ;>)


A