Primordial Soup

I have always been fascinated by science - I suspect that is one of the main reasons why I became interested in medicine at an early age.  I was the child who had the chemistry set, but didn't follow the directions (I made up my own experiments).  I remember stabbing one of my fingers with a needle to look at a drop of my own blood beneath the microscope.  I inherited a set of dissecting tools from one of my parents (I think it was my mother's) and remember going to the Kay-Bee Toy and Hobby Shop (which apparently is coming back) at our local mall to buy the latest specimen in a jar of formaldehyde to dissect and examine.  I remember dissecting a worm, a grasshopper, a perch, and a frog, at least.  One of the earliest and perhaps most vivid school memories was the time I opened up our science textbook and saw the picture of a contraption built to replicate Earth's early atmosphere to create the so-called primordial soup.  I am sure you have seen it before too - basically, a group of scientists combined all of the physical and chemical conditions of the Earth's atmosphere, some time around the beginning of time (methane, water, ammonia, and hydrogen combined with the right amount of heat, pressure, and electricity to mimic lightning).  After several days, the scientists found that these conditions created a number of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins.  I was incredibly impressed - this was it!  The origins of life on Earth.

I've been reading a book the past few days called "The Immense Journey" by the American anthropologist, philosopher, and naturalist Loren Eiseley.  The book is basically a more scientific version of Henry David Thoreau's classic book, Walden.  There is a chapter in the book where Eiseley talks about one of the early theories on the origin of life.  As it turns out, when the first trans-oceanic cables were being laid, sludge from the bottom of the sea was dredged up.  Analysis of the sludge revealed a number of organic compounds, leading more than a few scientists to hypothesize that life may have began at the bottom of the sea (note that this particular theory follows the sequence of the theory of evolution, in that life started out in the water and eventually crawled out of the ocean and on to land).  As early as 1868, the British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley studied samples taken from the bottom of the Atlantic and called this substance, Bathybius haeckelii, in honor of the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, who was one of the first to suggest the concept of a "primordial soup" (he called it Urschleim).  The bottom of the ocean was covered with this primordial slime, and all of life on Earth originated from Huxley's Bathybius haeckelii, or so he believed (he was not alone).  After the oceanographic Challenger expedition of 1872-1876 failed to find any evidence of Bathybius haeckelii, Huxley's theories rapidly fell out of favor.  Surprisingly, Huxley's theories were much closer to the present day thinking than he could have ever imagined, as recent theories suggest that life began near deep-sea hydrothermic vents. 

What's the point of all of this, you ask?  My point is this - the increase in our knowledge starts with observations and experiments that lead to a theory, which in many cases is not correct.  In fact, in some cases, the theory can be dead wrong!  However, the important thing is that if we learn what is wrong, we will eventually learn what is right.  The opposite of counterfactual is factual.  Even when we are way off the mark, we are just that much closer to being on the mark.  As the saying goes, you will never learn if you never make a mistake.  The only way to advance knowledge is to learn by making mistakes.  Huxley was certainly not correct, but by putting his theory out there, we moved one step closer to the truth.  We learned through his mistakes, as well as the mistakes of others.  Perhaps the true "primordial soup" of knowledge rests in our ability to take risks, learn from our mistakes, and move forward as we learn about life.