After graduating from college, I worked as a park naturalist and an outdoor education instructor for several years. In both of these positions, I presented programs about plants. Once, on something of a whim, I brought to my program a glass of water, a filled balloon, and a small amount of dirt on a plate. I set these items out in the sun by a large flowering plant.
After the participants had gathered, I discussed how a plant, with the aid of sunlight, was composed entirely out of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and a small amount of other minerals. I added that the carbon was obtained from the air, and the hydrogen, oxygen and minerals from the soil. Then I asked a question: “What is the difference between this living plant, and these elements, examples of which are found in this balloon, glass of water, bag of soil, and the sunlight that is shining on them?”
I didn’t expect an answer. I simply asked it to get them thinking, and because the question intrigued me. I knew some of the answers to the question, but I doubt anyone could give a complete answer.
Humans have gained considerable knowledge about the mechanisms plants use to pull carbon from the atmosphere and combine it with hydrogen and oxygen to synthesize simple sugars like glucose (chemically: C6 H12 06). This is done through photosynthesis.
They also have gained detailed knowledge about the anabolic processes by which plants convert these simple sugars into more complex molecules, (which often include small amounts of the various minerals obtained from the soil, particularly nitrogen and phosphate). Included in the multitude of more complex molecules are a number of amino acids, which are further synthesized into proteins, and nucleic acids, which are synthesized into RNA and DNA.
Simple explanations of photosynthesis read something like: “during photosynthesis light energy is captured and used to convert water, carbon dioxide, and minerals into oxygen and energy-rich organic compounds.” In fact, the process of synthesizing glucose and converting it into more complex compounds is much more complicated. It comprises three distinct processes, each requiring its own complex set of structures and enzymes. (I won’t go into the details here; for a more detailed account, the Wikipedia article on “Photosynthesis” is reliable.) These processes have significant similarity, but in reverse, to the metabolic processes by which our body converts digested food into glucose and then harvests its energy.
In the end, though, all of our knowledge about the complex mechanisms of photosynthesis fail to answer the basic question I posed. Photosynthesis, even in single cell organisms, requires complex structures and processes. To understand how these arose, requires us to venture into the long history of photosynthesis and the somewhat shorter history of plant evolution.
But even our knowledge of evolution doesn’t completely answer the question. For life and evolution to really begin, nature had to discover a molecule that could encode and preserve information (perhaps one could say information has to emerge out of chemistry). This information bearing molecule had to be integrated in a complex way with a variety of other chemicals, such that the information molecule directed the structuring of these molecules into organisms.
Well, that’s not a very elegant description of the problem, but I have yet to encounter an elegant description at that level. Just how a molecule could gain and preserve information, and then use that information in highly complex and innovative ways is a really big question. Yet, it seems to me that once nature had solved that rather amazing feat, it was well on the way to the development of a fully functioning cell. Once a fully functioning eukaryotic cell had evolved, the rest of evolution may have been inevitable.
To summarize, the simplest answer that I would give to the question I had posed at the beginning is: the difference between the living, growing plant and those simple chemical elements is in the information stored in the plants chromosomes. Information gathered over the vast ages of the evolution of life.
When a plant dies and dries up, we can easily burn it. As the plant burns, it returns its carbon and oxygen to the atmosphere, and leaves behind ashes that contain the other minerals of which it is part. In a laboratory, one could collect all of these elements and save them. But in that process, you would not collect an iota of the information that gave the plant its structure and function. Although we always find information associated with some material base or other, information in itself is not material, not tangible. Its existence leaves no trace. It’s rather magical stuff.
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There is another question that I would pose here that has an answer along the same lines as the one above. The question is: What is the difference between a person whom you knew well in life and their ashes after cremation (plus, the water and gasses that evaporated during cremation).
The answer is somewhat the same as that for a plant, but our concept of information becomes much more complex. We have the genetic information that gave structure and form to our friend’s body. Then we have the combination of genetic and learned information that made up our friend’s basic temperament. Then the cultural information that gave our friend his or her language and foundation of basic beliefs and gestures. Finally, there was the cerebral information, gained through the unique experiences of our friend’s life as he or she journeyed from childhood through maturity.
I’ve heard intelligent people say that we humans are nothing but a bunch of chemicals. What I have written here would explain why I think that is a bit insipid. Instead, I would say that we are primarily composed of information, that “thing” that is completely lost to the cremation urn. Is there not more of our friend to be found in a single letter, poem or story that he or she composed, than in the ashes we might ceremonially toss to the wind?
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You are on it, Thomas. This is precisely why people link meaning to poems, letters, objects, heirlooms, and to the person or pet’s ashes, whether in the urn or on the wind: because of the information (it is love, actually–now in the form of memories), which those things convey about the loved one.
I wonder if a linguistic analogy works too? Those nouns (heirlooms) are where we locate the verbs (functions) of information through which our relationship to that friend enriched our lives. They give us tangible things to see, taste, touch, smell, and hear that remind us of the intangible information where the real value lies. Thanks for writing this.