Life is a unique phenomenon. Not always easy to recognize it at first sight, but when we see it in action, we know, it is alive. It look...
Life is a unique phenomenon. Not always easy to recognize it at first sight, but when we see it in action, we know, it is alive. It looks like the living matter has a life-force, a kind of urge to live. This is why it is so different from the lifeless matter. The living matter continuously doing something, eat, proliferate, want to stay alive. We can personally feel this. We have this urge from the moment of our birth to our last breath.
What is this vitality, what is the life force? When we personally feel it, it is like a basic instinct, deeply planted inside of us. Our life force creates will and goal. Our will and goal are functions connected to our brain, but the force of life is something different, something which exists much deeper inside us, and in every living creature. The simplest lifeforms have this vitality. The force of life must be rooted deeply in the living matter. What is it?
The force of life is deeply rooted, apparently to see but secretive and mysterious - it must have a supreme or transcendent origin. Many or most people believe that. The force of life is the breath of God - they think. God planted inside us and inside into every living creature. The vitality is so fundamental to life, even molecules must have this property. However, molecules can have this property only inside the living matter, regular molecules do not have this quality. Logical the metaphysical conclusion: life force is given by God. Or is it?
Is it possible to connect the life force to the exanimate matter? We must look for the answer on a deep level of the matter, but how deep we must go? Every living thing built by complex, carbon-based molecules, called organic molecules. If we would go even deeper and we try to find the vitality in any kind of molecules, we should find it in the inorganic world as well, but the inorganic world is absent of any vitality. Life exists only on organic molecules on Earth. However, organic molecules are not organic because they have this unique and strange property, the vitality. They haven't either. They are only structures of atoms, they are only the building blocks of the living matter.
What about the chemical reactions working on the molecules? They are not the source of the vitality either: chemical reactions are equilibrium based processes, they have directions until their equilibrium reached. No driving force after that, only to maintain the equilibrium. It is not the lifeforce that has a dedicated direction which what we are looking for.
The living cell is a chemical factory built on chemical reactions of the organic molecules. The living cell is a chaotic, liquid-colloid based environment. Why do the chemical reactions of the living matter not create an equilibrium? Why the life-building chemical reactions which are acting on the life-building organic molecules have dedicated directions? Not enough explanation that the living systems are open, so they are in a constant energy and matter exchange with the environment. It is necessary but not enough, non-living systems can have that. The essence of the living system is somewhere else. The real reason is that the organic molecules have a particular form, and the chemical factories of life can work with these molecules in a way that creates a direction for the reactions.
Organic molecules which are specific for life have a particular symmetry, called chirality. Practically all the organic molecules building the living matter have this property. Chirality means mirror symmetry. Chiral molecules are mirror-symmetric to each other. As our hands. Our left and right hands are similar to each other, almost the same. The only difference between them is that they can not be turned in three dimensions in any way to match each other perfectly.
The chirality originated from the carbon atom because it has four chemical connections and able to connect to four partners, and this way able to build mirror-symmetric molecules. Chiral molecules are almost the same, but in chemical reactions where the mirror symmetry of the reacting particles is a major factor, they behaving differently. And the chirality is an essential property in the chemical reactions of the life. It is so important that the life had to choose between the such called left or right kind of molecules at the dawn of life. The chemical reactions of the life can only use one type of chiral molecules. The other kind, the mirror-symmetric one is entirely dead for life. The life can't use both types of chiral molecules only the right one. This is the primary fact that every kind of life had a common ancestor. All living creatures must be relatives because of this specialty. However, chirality has another aspect concerning the life as well. It creates a life force.
Even the tiniest living cell is a vibrant environment. Molecules in the cells are vibrating, bouncing into each other from all directions. However, molecules of the living matter have chirality, and this creates a significant effect in the chaos. The chemical factories of the living matter use only one type of chiral molecules because the machinery of these factories is form-dependent. Like the ratchet tool and the always right-handed screws. The ratchet can tighten the screw in one direction but not in the other. It is built that way. Similarly, the biochemical factories using chiral molecules formed the way to move the molecules in one direction but locked in the other. The molecules are moving chaotically, in all directions, but one direction of the movement is preferred. The necessary one. And the bouncing from all sides creates this preferred, one-way direction. All of this because of the chirality of the molecules. The chirality in the chaotic environment inside the living cell creates a definite preference, a direction to the chemical reactions. Chirality creates the life force, the living matter.
It does not mean that the life is a second stage Perpetuum-mobile. Life can not extract useful energy from chaos, life needs additional energy to be able to create direction. More about how molecular machines work in books like Peter M. Hoffmann's: Life's Ratchet.
Ultimately all of our life instinct, our will to live originated in the mirror symmetry, the chirality of the carbon-based molecules which able to create a unique direction in an always teeming, chaotic environment, creates life. That is the breath of God.
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