PRIMORDIAL SOUP IS OUT

Yesterday the NPR news program briefly described a new take on the beginnings of life. They had a lot of fun with the theory of “primordial soup” as it used to be portrayed in Life magazine with a suspicious brew in a fish tank being zapped with electricity by someone who might have been Dr. Frankenstein’s nephew. The idea was that the early air was methane and ammonia which can form “organic” molecules when shocked. Then after the discovery of the entwined helixes of DNA, the thought turned to mud that might, when drying, push molecules into a twist. Now the attention goes to sea vents, not the big smoking sulphur vents, but small alkaline streams of warmed water that form “cells” or bubbles with a persisting membrane that causes a gradient -- a difference in concentration -- between the inside versus the outside.

The idea is that no matter how interesting and likely a form might be -- molecule or mud structure -- it doesn’t matter any more than an image of the Virgin Mary on a flapjack, unless it has a source of energy to fuel process. Life is process. An unmoving image is not life.

So can death be process. If you put salt on a slug, the water in its body will emerge through its permeable skin, making it shrivel and writhe. (Plasmolyzing it.) Likewise, if cholera gets into your guts, it will draw out all the water in your system through your permeable intestinal walls and throw it out of your body. The effect is deadly. Life needs water.

Cells are fueled by the gradient between the solutions inside and outside the cell wall, which is controlled by a tiny “pump” or gate in the cell wall. It works like water running through a mill race or dam. (That’s a metaphor, not literal.) Malfunctions in those teeny pumps are probably at the bottom of many bodily discomforts. I first started reading about the little pumps when I tried to grasp the literature of fat, how fat forms, what a fat cell does, how to make it stop doing bad things. (Maybe sugar plasmolizes cells?)

As an abstract concept, gradients are more primal than structure because structure is only form but gradients push movement. When we read the news and hear about a wheat glut in one country, starvation in the next or drought in one place but floods in another, my joke has been that we don’t have a shortage/excess problem -- what we have is a distribution problem. Some places get too much, other places don’t get enough. Socially we also have a distribution problem: some people know too much or are too wealthy, other people don’t know enough or are poor.

In fact, when I started really thinking about Native American artifacts, it became clear that there was a value gradient: in the SW there are so many artifacts and they are so inexpensive (“found” is a very good price) while in, say, the NE there are so few early artifacts and they are valued so highly (because that part of the country is obsessed with knowing things and valuing objects) that all one has to do is provide transportation and contacts to make a LOT of money.

Shamefully and tragically, this is also true of pets and children. There is always an excess that people don’t value and there are always people eager to buy them and devote themselves to them, sometimes in a good way and sometimes in a bad way. To successfully address the problem one would have to tackle both sides of the gradient: birth control for animals and people (which probably comes down to forcible sterilization in the end, the same as China, though they say education is also effective) on the one hand and on the other hand somehow diminishing the obsessive craving for puppies and babies, their intense mythic meaning in our lives. Not much chance of that. Drugs come to mind.

The alternative would be rational or at least compassionate management of the “gate” between the two -- excess and desire -- to control black markets (fat chance) and price gouging. Even using such terms to discuss such an emotional and sacred subject will draw volatile responses.

So let’s back off to carbon. We’re actually working on that gradient to try to balance and manage the economic gradient between those who make a lot of it and those who can still wean themselves. Part of the problem is that the planet itself is creating gradients all the time: too much snow for Washington, D.C. politicians, not enough for the polar bears. Instead of salt pumps in the cell wall membranes, we’re dealing with the huge ocean gyres and solar winds moving water and temperatures, but also unseen depths of magma. I keep wondering whether the alternation between la Nina and el Nino in the Pacific ocean isn’t driven by undersea volcanism, the stove top beneath the rising water temperatures. (Where’s that frog? We begin to suspect we are the frog?)

Meanwhile our political salt pumps, the energy-making gates back and forth between the two political environments, have gone awry. The two sides are too much alike maybe, for anything to move. But social pressures never rest and if the pressure rises and rises, the membrane will be ruptured. Hopefully not all the “water” will be purged from the system in a major revolution.

Wallace Stegner wrote a paragraph I’ve often quoted. It’s about the “peneplain” which is the flat and even surface that the prairie is always eroding towards, the movement of the wind and water trying to redistribute the elevations of rock by wearing them down and raise the coulees by filling them up, erosion balancing sedimentation, to make the planet into a bowling ball. But volcanism and plate tectonics -- maybe a few meteor strikes -- ruck up mountains and craters all over again.

I suppose it’s selfish to take this grand can-opening idea of gradient to my own life, but it does seem to me that the gradient between too much work and not enough work can be either productive or overwhelming. What is the membrane that manages the flow? Isn’t it rational planning? But one would not want to eliminate chance and joy, those great disrupters.