The Chirality Problem: A Second Look

My most recent post summarized an interesting peculiarity of the chemistry of life — a property of certain objects in three-dimensional space called “chirality”. I hoped to expose this quirk of our universe to people who might not have the luxury of a technical education, and explain why it is worth considering. I imagine that a lot of people have never heard of chirality, let alone ever bothered to read about it in any depth. I am following up now with four thousand additional words to clarify some facts and logic, and to offer some additional thoughts.

I do this as an exercise in precision and humility, because I think both are important in discussions like this. These subjects are too often presented in a predominantly political style, where the focus is on rhetorical shapes that fit snugly around a set of favorable facts. The real world rarely fits so nicely within such arbitrary contours. Presenting only the smooth contours creates a cartoonish picture of reality, and I am guilty of this to some degree.

The original post has two parts, after the customary humorous anecdote from my clueless and arrogant youth. The first half of the post explains how and why chirality is so important to living systems. The second half gestated as a personal reflection about the implications of chirality relative to life’s origins, but emerged as a screed-like polemic on the misapplication of materialism by our scientific and cultural establishment.

I think both parts could use some refinement. So here goes…

On one hand, the first half of the post undersells the issue of chirality and the challenge it presents to explaining the existence of life. However, I think it also misrepresents the quality of certain recent research in origin of life (OOL). Just to be clear, I do not think that OOL research has made any significant progress toward its ultimate goal. But that does not mean that the research is poorly done or lacks value. Although some of the work is highly speculative and barely qualifies as research, certain notable studies are quality, hard science. And I want to give credit where it is due.

I will start by reiterating that chirality is a very big deal. Despite various sloppy claims from more militant OOL proponents, there is no evidence, and no reason to believe, that earth’s life would be possible without the pervasive chirality that governs its biochemistry. The more we learn, the more it seems that chirality is an intrinsic property — a non-negotiable.

There are many reasons to believe this. In the original post I focused on the critical geometry of life’s molecules, which depends heavily on chirality. If you remove the chirality of any of these major subsystems, it effectively requires a full redesign of the critical biochemistry that it provides. In the case of DNA, it would require radically different chemical toolsets for folding, unfolding and accessing the information, assuming that alternate geometries were even possible. Since all of these systems interact closely, such an exercise quickly balloons into a reinvention of the entire cell. If such a thing is possible, it is well beyond our ability to to imagine. Certainly, it has never been detected. As far as anyone knows, “non-chiral life” is a contradiction in terms.

But chirality’s centrality to life goes much deeper than geometry. I introduced a recently-discovered phenomenon called Chiral-Induced Spin Selectivity (or CISS for short). CISS is a quantum phenomenon that makes energy transfer in living cells shockingly efficient — and yet I still managed to undersell its significance. CISS is fundamental to the chemistry of life, and its discovery a quarter century ago will likely produce a Nobel prize soon enough. It is that important.

Improved energy transfer efficiency is not the only benefit that CISS provides, but I failed to fully capture even this issue. Without CISS, it is safe to say that living systems would incinerate themselves from the heat of normal metabolism. We can see this in a very crude way by comparing the human brain to an AI data center. The brain requires about twenty watts of power. Large data centers can require megawatts. Obviously, this is a silly comparison, but it helps to illustrate the point. Twenty watts is a tiny amount of power, given the data processing capacity of the brain, and the number of neurons in it. This is only possible because of CISS. Without CISS, your brain would literally fry itself.

But research is now demonstrating that CISS greases the wheels of many if not most cellular processes. For example, CISS improves recognition of compatible molecules, and the strength of their interaction. This might not sound like a big deal, but we are talking about the basis of every metabolic process in your cells — how critical molecules find and interact with each other. CISS appears to be deeply implicated in all of it. No chirality = no CISS = no life.

That last statement is sobering news to materialist faith in some sort of unguided origin of life on earth. It seems highly likely if not certain that any form of life, at least as we know it, requires chirality from its inception. Even if a non-chiral form of life could arrange itself, it seems that it would also soon incinerate itself. This means that the challenge is not only for chemicals to self-organize and gather to form a cell, complete with metabolic and reproductive capabilities, but all of those molecules must have the correct “handedness” as well, from the start.

This is a good time to correct some misleading information from my original post, which related to some excellent chirality research at Harvard’s Origins of Life Initiative. I apologize for the semi-technical description in what follows, but I want to be precise. I will comment in plainer language after describing the work (just to avoid any confusion, this is not the group that discovered CISS; this is later work that focuses on a specific application of it).

The Harvard researchers developed a method for separating enantiomers to near 100% purity from a racemic mixture of a particular chiral chemical called ribo-aminooxazoline, which is a precursor to RNA (yes, that’s a mouthful — sorry). Specifically, they found that magnetic surfaces (such as magnetite) can cause differential crystallization of certain chiral mixtures where CISS can activate. By running the process twice — first to obtain 60% separation, and then to 100% — they were able to demonstrate a fairly simple process by which a single enantiomer from a relevant molecule could be extracted via crystallization.

I know that is a lot of lingo, but, trust me, it is a big bleepin’ deal. It is not one of those contrived, multi-step experiments that one often sees in the OOL literature, with human interference continually injected along the way to keep things from running off the rails. This is a straightforward process, the main exception being that the process must be run twice to attain 100% purity. But that is reasonable, particularly in very basic research. The study shows that there is, at least in principle, a way of generating “single-handed” concentrations of chiral chemicals in nature. Of course, nobody has seen it happen outside of a lab, but that is not the point at this stage of OOL research.

It is very important to view this type of research for what it is, neither minimizing it nor extrapolating too much from it. It is an impressive and relevant piece of work, much moreso than I judged originally. Does it solve the origin of life problem? Not even close. Does it explain how all required chiral molecules could magically appear in pure form? Not even close. Does it explain how such chemicals could magically self-assemble into a functioning cell, even if they somehow appeared? Not even close. But those are not reasonable expectations. OOL research still hasn’t reached its infancy. And in that context, any study that clearly shows just about anything of potential relevance is good and useful work. Most current OOL research fails that test. But this one passes easily. We should acknowledge that.

It might help to put this kind of research into context. In Darwin’s time, it was reasonable to assume that cells were simple lumps of protoplasm, and that life somehow “emerged” when these lumps combined. In a universe like that, life might simply develop by pure chance, and the diversity of life on earth might emerge over the course of a couple hundred million years.

However, modern biochemistry put an end to such reasoning, as biochemical knowledge expanded through the mid twentieth century. We now know that life is staggeringly complex at the biochemical level, and the complexity deepens every year as science digs deeper. Nowadays, no rational person believes that life can spontaneously emerge by pure chance. Chance might be involved, but it will need some serious help from physics and chemistry. Natural selection is also a non-starter at this stage, as it requires entities that can reproduce.

This is why modern OOL research focuses on seeking regularities in non-living chemical systems that might pave the road to self-assembly. Personally, I think that it is still an impossible dream. In an earlier draft of this post, I discussed the formidable obstacles that basic probability theory imposes on this situation. I decided it was too technical to include in detail, but I think a quick summary will be useful.

Life depends on long chains of molecules that must be built component by component. The constraints on functional components are severe; these molecules must be nearly perfect to do what they do. The sequence matters; specific arrangements store huge amounts of precise information (as the letters in a paragraph do, but far less forgiving of typos). And there are additional chemical and physical constraints (e.g., chirality). The idea that even the simplest such molecule could form spontaneously, let alone millions of them in one place, is akin to believing in fairy tales. As I mentioned, I decided to spare the math here. But as a rough comparison… Imagine winning the Powerball lottery jackpot — ten times in a row. That would seem likely compared to the odds of life’s chemistry assembling on its own, even with assistance from physics and chemistry that might or might not exist. Those are the types of probabilities in play.

That said, we should not ignore or minimize good research. The Harvard study did what all good science does — leverage new and deeper understanding to make novel discoveries. It is a small start, but perhaps something to build on, unlike almost all of OOL research to date.

If you will forgive the brief self-indulgence, I will end this part of my discussion with some conjecture. If there is any glimmer of hope in discovering a path to self-assembly of life, I believe it will likely be discovered in deeper understanding of quantum effects in biochemistry. CISS is the first tangible example of this, and it turned out to be a massive revelation. But I suspect it is just the beginning.

Life has a “woo” factor that is impossible to capture through traditional chemical analysis. Science downplays this because science abhors woo. Physics accepted the woo in quantum mechanics kicking and screaming, but the experiments are what they are. If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that expecting life to form by itself, based solely on nineteenth century physics, is comically naive. In my opinion, this is why so much OOL research is comically bad — and why it is so painful for me to interact with friends who try to defend the indefensible in pursuit of an agenda. The Harvard study on chirality works because it explores issues at a deeper level, motivated by a newer quantum understanding of molecular behavior. It might turn out that this layer of understanding is equally crude. But it is better than what preceded it. And that is all we can really expect from scientific inquiry. Personally, I seek the actual meaning of life elsewhere, where there is at least some chance of finding it.

In the second part of the original post, I offer a personal reflection. I begin with a note about personal relationships. And, again, I think I need to refine the message.

I don’t think I over-generalize in claiming that curious, educated, secular people tend to be easily influenced by opinion leaders in scientific fields. They respect science as a kind of priesthood, although they would never characterize it as such. Nevertheless, they do view the opinions of prominent scientists as, say, practicing Roman Catholics view papal encyclicals. That is, they trust it implicitly. If a physicist writes a book claiming that string theory and cosmological inflation point to a multiverse, these folks begin to parrot the ideas like teenagers reciting lyrics of pop idols. Science is their bedrock, even though they generally do not dig into the math or fine print behind the claims (just as most self-identifying Christians don’t study the Bible).

Popular advice recommends that we avoid religion and politics in polite conversation. But science has become a kind of religion for many people, and one must tread carefully. Some folks now exploit claims from media-savvy scientists as Baptists exploit “proof texts”. They’ve never done any real science, or worked in a graduate lab, or written a peer-reviewed paper. But they believe in the transcendence of scientific inquiry over all other forms of human cognition and analysis, as a matter of faith. To claim otherwise is apostasy, or pre-Enlightenment voodoo. And they don’t want to entertain such babble from people that they claim to respect. So, you know, something’s gotta give. And, nowadays, it is often the relationship. Which is sad.

I do not seek to condemn people who now choose to move on from sullying interactions with me. Intellectually withering narrow-mindedness is their choice; I accept it. And them. My purpose here is simply to offer a more detailed explanation of the phenomenon. The issue is not that I don’t have my own blinders; we all do. The issue is the arrogance of people who refuse to see their own beliefs for what they are — a faith-based system. That said, my rhetoric in the original piece could have been toned down. I mean, nobody that I know thinks of their favorite science evangelists as “shamans”. I recognize that. I would propose a broader corrective, one that all who engage in these intellectual spaces would benefit from heeding.

Finally, in the last few paragraphs of the piece, I suggested that the necessary assumption of materialism within the modern scientific method can devolve into a kind of secular religious faith. This faith can then metastasize into prejudice against “non-believers” in the mystical power of materialism. This is certainly true; the following famous quote from famed zoologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins illustrates:

It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).

I think that qualifies as intellectual prejudice — although, to be fair, Dawkins has toned down his intolerant rhetoric in recent years. But many of his colleagues remain as edgy as ever (possibly more, as they lack Dawkins’ emerging, avuncular, English gentleman vibe). Expressing doubt about Darwinism, which is what Dawkins, et al mean by “evolution” in this context, can be a professional death sentence. Implicit fealty to the Darwinian model is assumed in these fields. It is the prevailing paradigm.

Nobody really argues with natural selection, per se. There is tons of hard evidence. To cite a random example, we now know that grizzly bears and polar bears likely share a common bear ancestor (note that assuming it and knowing it are not the same thing). The question is whether the process is as scalable as Darwinists claim — that is, how much change is supported by evidence vs. assumed through faith? My aim is not to open that specific discussion. The point is that professionals in good standing in most biological sciences do not have a choice. They must accept the full Darwinian explanation of life’s diversity, as a working thesis. In public discussion, this often sounds like a profession of faith to those not so convinced, since there are no complete descriptions of how any significant transitions might have occurred, let alone any credible theory for how life could have started by itself.

But that does not mean that they all believe it, or even care one way or another. The danger in my rhetoric is that it creates the impression that you cannot function in, say, molecular biology, unless you are a militant, card-carrying atheist with a side gig of slaying theists online. That is certainly not true. Most professionals in these fields just want to do interesting, valuable work that advances the knowledge in their field (like, say, studying hybridization between polar bears and grizzly bears, or analyzing the differences in some important molecule across species, or discovering a cool way to separate chiral mixtures). Undoubtedly, some buy into the broader Sagan / Cosmos metaphysics, but others see no need for that. Some are comfortable with Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of non-overlapping magisteria, or some less ivory towerish version of it. Others probably don’t give it a whole lot of thought — because you can do the work without imposing or professing unnecessary ideology.

Like every other branch of science, biological and earth sciences are mostly filled with smart people with keen interests in very narrow areas of inquiry, eager to further human knowledge just a little bit. Like many humans, some are prone to exaggerating findings and accomplishments, and explaining away inconvenient data, when money and prestige are on the line. But these sins primarily serve the tried and true human idols of ego and greed, not any ideological agenda.

The public-facing evangelists of materialism in science deserve criticism when they promote it as ideology (“the universe is all there is”) rather than necessary methodology (“we have to assume that there is no ghost in this machine”). But the broader profession should not be lumped in with the hyperactive zeal of prominent colleagues. I should be more discriminating in my indictments. I’d be a lousy lawyer. Mea culpa.

Epilogue

I seriously doubt that we will ever uncover an explanation for how life could invent itself without help. It certainly has not happened again in a couple billion years. And it is not happening today, even with a lot of help in laboratories. I see our deepening understanding of chirality — its tight connections both to necessary geometry in the classical world and to necessary energy considerations (among other things) in the quantum world — as yet another bold billboard that screams “Design!” But that’s me. I have philosophical priors that would lead me there, which I freely admit.

I should mention that physicists now have their own answer to these questions: the multiverse. This is now a serious, complex course of study, not just the stuff of lazy sci-fi writers needing unlimited plot fodder. For an entertaining and thorough review, I recommend Seasons 1 & 2 of the Physics To God podcast. But the basic argument is that our universe is only one of an infinite number of universes. And in such a situation, everything is guaranteed to happen somewhere. In fact, it is guaranteed to happen an infinite number of times. In a multiverse, planets teeming with life are not improbable, but inevitable. We just happen to inhabit one of those lucky universes. Voila! - problem solved.

For now, I will just say that there is no evidence for such a thing, and there likely could never be any evidence. Ultimately, the multiverse is esoteric math at best, and, at worst, anti-science ideology. Materialist acceptance of such an idea is one of the most egregious examples of intellectual hypocrisy and chauvinism that I could imagine. One might as well just say “anything but God”.

I have philosophical priors. It would be nice if others would admit to theirs — and recognize that enforcing them through the institutions of western civilization is as arrogant as it is a destructive abuse of power.

Thanks for reading.

Share

First published 6/24/26, with minor subsequent edits.

NOTE: I frequently edit my writing after publishing it here. I realize that this is a curious habit, but such is the life of self-publishing on a shoestring. Pushing pieces out the door is my way of imposing deadlines and avoiding the perfection trap. Which is all to say… if you are an E-Mail subscriber, you will frequently find a slightly improved version of a piece on the substack site a few days later. Going forward, I will add an end note when a piece has been edited since its first release.