Origin Stories

In my previous post, I briefly mused about ‘origin’ stories being more interesting when driving a narrative. There’s room for tension and creativity as the young protagonist makes a journey of self-discovery and finds strength in challenging situations. Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins, Eragon and Katniss Everdeen might be familiar examples from popular books also made into movies. Re-watching older movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (in preparation for Avengers: Infinity War), I’m reminded of how good some of the ‘origin’ movies were as characters were first introduced. We care about their story and humble or sometimes not-so-humble (in the case of Tony Stark and Thor) beginnings.

Sequels are correspondingly more difficult. In the Marvel movie sequels, spectacle seems to take precedence. The story is some variant of an old foe who has emerged to challenge the new superhero, but it’s now about a clash of power and ability. The situation must be more perilous to up the ante. More action. More explosions. More of a mess. Further down the road, there needs to be a bigger baddie to further up the ante. This requires an ensemble of superheroes. The increased complexity does not necessarily lead to better story-telling. Bigger action. Bigger explosions. Connections and interactions between different characters are explored, but sometimes they feel contrived and superficial; it feels like the narrator/director is trying to get you to care about the characters, but narrative development fights to share space with increasingly elaborate fight sequences.

The origin stories of many ancient cultures involve battle among powerful entities: gods, monsters, beasts, and supermen of old. For example, in the Babylonian creation story (Enuma Elish), the mighty sea goddess Tiamat is slain by one of her own descendants, the storm god Marduk. He divides her broken body and thereby creates the heavens and the earth. Warring gods and powerful beings, with humankind caught in the middle? Sounds like the makings of a movie. Wait a minute. This decade alone we’ve had Clash of the Titans, Immortals and Gods of Egypt. What a mess! (I admit I watched all three, but on DVDs borrowed from the library, since I wasn’t going to pay money to watch them.)

This is one reason the Bible’s creation story stands out. No warring gods. Instead you get orderly creation. However, we age-of-science modern readers inadvertently misread the story – thinking it’s about the physics, chemistry, geology and biology. John Walton however convincingly argues that ancient Near East stories should be read as pertaining to functional origins rather than material origins. I’ve briefly explored the philosophical argument about ontology in a previous post, but since I re-read Walton’s book recently while preparing for a science-and-religion talk, I was reminded of his analogy of the origin story of a college. His main point is that the college is more than a campus location and its physical buildings and landscaping. Walton writes:

What would a college be without students? Without administration and faculty? Without courses? We could talk about the origins of the college when it first opened its doors, enrolled students for the first time, hired faculty, designed courses and offered them and so on. In another sense this process is reenacted year by year as students return, faculty again inhabit their offices, courses are offered…  The course schedule brings order to time. Time had been there all along, but the schedule gives time a meaning to the college and the students. Even the course schedule had been there a long time (designed months earlier with students registering), but is has no existence until the semester begins. Dorms had existed filled with furniture. But now students inhabit the dorms and the furniture begins to function.

This passage particularly resonated with me as mid-April for me involves the craziness of course registration. As the number of students interested in taking chemistry courses has increased year-by-year, there is more stress for everyone involved. Some of my time is spent calming panicky students, afraid they can’t get into the classes they want and need. The students are not worried about the physical buildings, chairs, desks, or whiteboards. They’re there to support learning, but they are secondary to the function of the college, or its origin story. It’s not that the physical trappings are unimportant. It’s just that they are not of primary importance in the college’s story.

Here’s my tongue-in-cheek imagined conversation. Here’s a response to the request: “Tell me the origin story of your college.”

“The first solid brick was fired from clay and sand in an approximate 1:2 ratio by mass, and to this mixture was added small quantities of lime and iron oxide. It was placed twenty feet south of the great oak tree. Smeared over this first brick was a paste of lime and sand in a 2:1 ratio with small amounts of alumina, magnesia and iron oxide. This paste was named Portland cement. A solid brick of similar dimensions to the first was laid adjoining the first brick end-to-end. After also covering it with smear, the next brick was placed atop the previous two but only covering exactly half of each…”

This story is going to get very boring very quickly. “Stop! Stop! That’s not what I was asking…”

This made me think about origin-of-life research and how it has evolved since the famous experiments by Stanley Miller back in 1953. In the early days, chemists cared about which molecules relevant to life they could synthesize in a lab. Now we realize that the identity of a molecule isn’t as important as the functional relationships in a system of interacting molecules. A recent paper in Astrobiology by Westall and co-workers (“Hydrothermal-Sedimentary Context for the Origin of Life”, 2018, DOI: 10.1089/ast2017.1680) summarizes the situation:

Clearly, we still do not understand the fundamental mechanisms by which the first forms of biological life emerged. However, it is recognized that such emergence resulted from energy being transduced from one form to another and for some of that energy to have been used to drive spontaneous self-organization or complexity. In this context, ‘complexity’ refers to the mutual and integrated communication between chemical species rather than the variety of chemical species present per se. It is only through this connectivity that self-organization is revealed.

This makes the problem exponentially more difficult, because the tangled web of relationships between objects increases exponentially with the number of objects. This is even more pronounced when you have different types of objects. Perhaps we scientists should take a page out of the book of the story-tellers of old. Chemists have a long-standing assumption that structure tells us all we need to know about function. Perhaps for a single molecule or a pair of interacting molecules. Beyond that, things get more complicated. There has to be a better way to elucidate the threads of this complex tangled web of the story of the origin-of-life. We should also think about what the sequel might be.