Whenever the conversation turns to the origin of life, natural selection is summoned as the explanation for nearly everything. I want to make one point about it, and I want to make it carefully, because once you see it you cannot unsee it. Natural selection has to have something to select. That one fact is the whole problem.
Three Things Selection Needs First
Strip the mechanism down to its parts and you find that it requires three things already in place before it can do anything at all.
- Reproduction. There must be organisms making copies of themselves.
- Heredity. The copies must carry traits forward from the parent.
- Variation. The copies must differ from one another in ways that matter.
Take away any one of these and the mechanism does nothing. Without reproduction there is nothing to select among. Without heredity a favored trait dies with the individual that had it. Without variation there is nothing to favor. Selection is not a creative force standing outside the system. It is a description of what happens once a living, reproducing, varying population already exists.
A Logical Objection, Not a Religious One
Here is the consequence. Selection cannot be the explanation for the origin of reproduction, because it presupposes reproduction. You cannot use a process to explain the arrival of the very conditions that process requires in order to run. The engine cannot build the engine.
I want to be clear about what kind of objection this is. It is not a verse from Genesis dressed up as science. It is a point of logic, the sort of thing I would flag in any argument on any subject. And it is not a point that only believers make. Researchers who work on the origin of life state it themselves. Whatever got the first self-replicating system running, it was not natural selection, because natural selection had nothing to work with until that system existed.
What Follows
This does not settle every question about origins. It settles one, and it is a large one. The mechanism most often credited with explaining life cannot explain the beginning of life. For that, you need something that can account for reproduction, heredity, and variation arriving together, functioning together, before any selection could begin.
I know where I think that account is found. But you do not have to agree with me about the answer to see that the question is real, and that the usual answer does not reach it. Start there. Follow the logic wherever it leads.
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