“And the end is implicit in the beginning?” said I.
“Yes; but the intermediate stages are not inevitable in detail, only overwhelmingly probable in the gross. There, Perry, if you like, you can reconcile Foreknowledge with Freewill.”
“Life, then, I suppose, is but one more element of randomness,” said I, “in the randomness of things.”
“Presumably,” said Hoskyns.
There was a pause.
“What is Life?” I asked, suddenly.
“Well, Pontius,” said Waters, “if we could answer that question we should probably not need to ask the others. At present—chemically speaking—the nearest definition I can produce is that it is a kind of bias—a lopsidedness, so to speak. Possibly that accounts for its oddness.”
“I’ve said that kind of thing myself,” I said, rather astonished, “just as a sort of feeble witticism. Have I hit on something true by accident?”
“More or less. That is to say, it is true that, up to the present, it is only living substance that has found the trick of transforming a symmetric, optically inactive compound into a single, asymmetric, optically active compound. At the moment that Life appeared on this planet, something happened to the molecular structure of things. They got a twist, which nobody has ever succeeded in reproducing mechanically—at least, not without an exercise of deliberate selective intelligence, which is also, as I suppose you’ll allow, a manifestation of Life.”
“Thank you,” said Perry. “Do you mind saying the first part over again, in words that a child could understand?”