Abiogenesis

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That quote is a chapter name in Daniel Dennett's book Darwin's Dangerous Idea and his case is that an engineering perspective is a part of Darwin's theory because natural selection isn't based upon principles but rather whatever can be found to work. Dennett himself is clearly very much against ID or anything similar.

So basically you still believe in spontaneous generation? This would require very convincing evidence. Experience shows that life can only come from life, we have no empirical reason to think otherwise.
Is this a provable fact? Or is this just another unproven/untestable assumption?
Without extensive evidence this is nothing more then another creation myth. It has nothing to do with science.
Just assume that some (different) kind of intelligent life (in context of this universe) has always existed, might even have caused this universe to start. That would solve the the problem of existence, and this does not conflicting with any know physical laws.

Last edited by Meta on 09 Dec 2009, 3:43 pm, edited 4 times in total.

I know. He's wrong.

Molecules like ribonucleotides (the basic building blocks of RNA) could of formed via natural processes. This was demonstrated by Dr. Jack Szostak and others. You can argue that these ribonucleotides were "engineered" from the heating, cooling and re-heating of the solution but this could f happened naturally on the early Earth as the sun heated and re-heated the primordial soup. Additionally, Gerald Joyce and his graduate student Tracey Lincon synthesized RNA which they showed can self replicate and even mutate into more complex forms. This is all from articles that were posted near the beginning of this thread:



Also, for abiogenesis to work, the first proto-cells wouldn't of needed to be that complex. They would of just needed to be membranes enclosing a bit of self replicating RNA. The "mutations" described by Joyce and Lincon above, occurring behind the protective membrane as the cell divides and reproduces itself is then all thats required to produce the more complex molecules over time. Hence evolution gets started. This brings me to another point. That is a response to your reply to the original video:



As I said, all that's needed to get started is a self-replicating object, such as a self-replicating RNA molecule surrounded by a membrane. Whether or not you call that "life" is just semantics game. No one said that complex cells, with their more complex self-replicating machinery, have to appear all at once. The CMI is trying to get around this one simply by giving their own definition of what a cell is. Also, this may not give all the answers but saying "God did it" because we don't know all the answers is a typical "God of the gaps" argument.

No. Because that would be a "worm"; the biological analog of gray goo. It would just replicate itself until it runs out of resources. It would not become anything else.

And even then, self replication is only simple if it is meaningless. Don't expect non-trivial self-replicators to just accidentally emerge.


I think you are now playing a semantics game?

The problem does not become any easier if you chop it up in little steps, unless of cause you don't intend of ever actually go and prove the plausibility of every little step? Making the steps just small enough that it superficially appears to be "easy enough", without making sure that it is indeed so easy may give the appearance of science; Without actually being science.

True. however saying "all that's needed to get started is a self-replicating object" is just as wrong and unscientific.

Last edited by Meta on 10 Dec 2009, 1:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

Life should define itself. The idea of an unobservable protocell allows for skipping of empiricism though, and just defining things as one wants. Thus, they reject reality from the defining process and substitute their own opinions, particularly based on what is feasible for them to make so that a claim can be made.

Indeed. We have no empirical evidence to suggest that life as we know it was ever, could ever, be in anyway considered "simple". It's just not there.

The only reason one has is that it follows logically from the (among biologist) most popular philosophy or mythology.

Science should not be a slave to any philosophy, ideology, mythology; Science doesn't give a damn about your favorite philosophy or mythology. Science is in her core harshly pragmatic and strictly empirical. Science follows the evidence where ever it leads.

In essence reasoning from their philosophy in an attempt to use their pseudo-science to give creditability to their mythology. Without any regard for the proper checks and balances which real science would have.

Well, their philosophy overrides any scientific concerns, or even reality itself if it does not fit their favorite philosophy:

This is the way one describes a dogma.

If you accept the cosmological reality of the big bang, of which there is reasonable evidence, and you still assume life could come, only from life, then you must assume there was life at the point of the creation of the universe. That strikes me as extremely odd. All the elements necessary for life have been manufactured in the atomic processes that take place in stars and they simply did not exist in the early universe.

You can, of course then exhibit this as proof of an intelligent creator and since that, as far as I'm concerned, is pulled out of thin air because you cannot imagine anything else. I find that unacceptable and not worth considering.

Well.... yeah, actually science should pragmatically be subservient to philosophies, ideologies, and mythologies so much as they allow it to better examine the evidence.

Science cannot be "strictly empirical" as our scientific knowledge is full of hypotheses, and extrapolations.

As for pragmatic, of course it should be pragmatic. The issue is that it is beneficial to limit the kinds of entities that can be invoked to explain phenomena without additional evidence. So, I don't see how you have actually argued that your opponents actually stand against pragmatism.


Well, ok, but positing mysterious unseen designers is a better leap?? I mean, if anything it could be said "The idea of an unobservable intelligent designer allows for skipping of empiricism though, and just defining things as one wants.". I don't see how your attack makes sense given that the counter-claim can be made.


Ok? A quote. How wonderful. In any case, I am not sure that a quote really settles anything here. I mean, how does one really test for non-material/non-physical causation? How does one distinguish between intelligent designers and fairies?? I don't see a realistic way to do so. For that reason alone, I feel obligated to dismiss any theory that points to non-material/non-physical causation simply because a knowledge bearing theory does not seem as if it can be reasonably created from such a thing.

In any case, I don't see the point of this fanaticism about some bizarre abstract ideal of science that allows for fairy-ology to exist. That seems the least practical thing to pursue. Not only that, but a theory that boils down to Genesis 1 or "the UFOs did it" doesn't seem appealing. Now, I recognize that this is dismissing a lot of things off-hand, but for all of the efforts to decry dogma here, it really seems that what is being argued is actually a dogma. I mean, Meta, perhaps I am missing something, but you don't have evidence for alien biology labs or anything like that, but rather are just arguing from the gap found in a current theory. Do I consider that science? No. If there is alien intervention, then I expect something more tangible. I think Gromit has also been clear on his desire for a more fleshed out idea as well.

In any case, if you can somehow form a viable scientific community without reference to the mainstream, then go ahead. But I think the reason why the mainstream is rejecting the ideas is because they are bad or at least insufficiently good to warrant what they have to give up to accept such notions. Not because the mainstream is evil and kicks puppies.

Haven't got much time, so just a few things. More later.

I didn't understand before that you don't consider phylogeny relevant.


I am still not sure what you think is proof, but how about a mathematical theorem being proven in several different ways? Doing the same computations using different algorithms? Different people developing the same idea independently and from different inspirations? Different chemical reactions giving you the same product? If you want to get hands on, you can try building the same thing from Lego twice, starting from opposite ends of the structure.


I don't know what you are trying to say, but anyway, you lost track of the argument. Here is a summary:

Your latest answer about hmo goes off at a tangent. I dispute that "similar results imply similar process" is true and therefore I do not accept it as any evidence at all for intelligent design of organisms. Or did you mean to say that hmo alone is enough to prove your point? Then you'd have a circular argument.


I have been trying to work out how it could possibly be relevant to explaining the origin of species or of life. Instead I saw why it is not relevant. You challenge me to explain teleological evolution without an intelligently designed fitness function. I think that's where your expertise handicaps you, because if you have worked with evolutionary algorithms in programming, that has been teleological evolution. You had a goal in mind from the start. That can also happen in research. A biologist may want to know what selection pressure produced some result and then runs simulations or collects comparative data to work that out. Then, as in your challenge and as when programming, the problem is to find the suitable fitness function. But one of the first things you need to learn about the theory of biological evolution is that it says biological evolution is not goal directed. You do not start with a goal in mind and search for a suitable fitness function. The environment imposes a fitness function and you get the result from that. What is given and what you search for is different in the two cases. Every time you forget that you make the same mistake as Sarfati did in his video. And people seem generally biased to make that mistake: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16687-humans-may-be-primed-to-believe-in-creation.html

Perhaps you got that wrong when you claimed the references I gave you were all You haven't yet told me what your objections are. Bad science can slip through peer review, but when you claim that, you should support your claim with argument. If your objections are based on fitness functions being intelligently chosen, you have made a false analogy.


If you read what you quoted from my previous post, and other parts of my previous posts, you will find that I did mention this key word before. I even think I brought it into the discussion, and I haven't forgotten it, seeing that it is part of my objection to ID. The problem is that the intelligent reuse you postulate implies so much horizontal gene transfer that you couldn't reconstruct phylogenies at allns. The taxonomies you use yourself wouldn't exist, unless you introduce additional ad hoc assumptio.


True for bacteria, archaea and viruses. Mechanisms of horizontal gene transfer without the intervention of an intelligent designer have been identified. The same goes for multicellular life, only there you don't have enough horizontal gene transfer to support an interpretation of convergence as intelligent reuse.


That is the empirical finding I rely on. How do you account for it within ID? If you have an object library with nice, convenient modules, why would you rewrite the source code for the same job in a different way when the result is often worse than what you already have in your library? Copyright issues? Competing design teams? First year students at work? Can you show me how to predict what I marked in bold from the basic assumptions of ID, without ad hoc assumptions? I can do it for evolution. So can you if you know anything. Please do the same for ID. But remember that if you again try to argue that everything you find in biology is intelligent, you'll have to argue biology again, and I'll challenge you to demonstrate the intelligence of a few examples. If you go down that road again, you can start with the human lung, the most thoroughly researched lung on the planet.


Are you telling me that speed and cost of computation are not part of the phenotype? That reaction time makes no difference to natural selection? That the energetic needs of the organism, how much food it needs, make no difference? That is what you need to argue to claim that the usefulness of a solution makes no difference to natural selection, that only an intelligent agent can select on that basis. Make that one of two questions to answer even if you have to leave everything else.


And what is the genotype-phenotype coupling in the systems you are familiar with?


Which is my objection to ID, but why did you write this in the other thread?

I still say that if I take that at face value, you should believe that a theory that can be adjusted to be consistent with any evidence is a better theory than one that can only be consistent with a small sub set of all conceivable data. Is that what you believe? That is the other question I really would like to see answered. The answer determines whether we can have a discussion about scientific theories. Or should I not assume that you want to consider ID a scientific theory?

I disagree. The quote gave a fair summary of the argument that followed.


You misunderstand. That is what research on abiogenesis is looking for. It is not simple to find the right conditions and it is unclear for how long you would have to "just watch". But the whole purpose of the research is to find a set of conditions that could have occurred without, as you say, having to "constantly interfere to the point where you are basically engineering it."


If Sarfati wanted to argue that magnetic fields can only be intelligently designed, he could make an analogous argument. He point to all the trouble people have to go to if they want to generate magnetic fields at will, and how difficult it is to explain magnetism to pupils, how much more complicated the generation of Earth's magnetic field is than our coils, etc. If the Bible had claimed that God created the Earth's magnetic field to help his Chosen People navigate, I think Sarfati would be doing just that. He'd have to, and I am sure he could come up with an analogous argument. The only difference between the two cases lies in how difficult it is in finding the right conditions to create the two effects.

My other objection to Sarfati's argument is in my reply to Meta. Just search for the paragraph with the name Sarfati in, back up to Meta's challenge and then read my reply. I think it describes the basic error in Sarfati's argument.

@Gromit (I can't answer in full, I'm on my way to the hospital (nothing serious), more follows)

I've read your argument.

A short reply: The reason I proposed the question that I did was this: DNA is a symbolic encoding. [Which we haven't decoded yet in full] DNA has a meaning which is not a physical property of the material: There is no physical law from which to derive the sequence of nucleotides. There is a (algorithmic) message encoded in this sequence, the message has a coherent meaning which is informational, not physical and can't be derived from the physical.

It's a one-way interpretation which takes the genetic instructions encoded in DNA and then creates hardware from that. So every cell is/has a hardware compiler and meaningful instructions which can run on this hardware compiler. Is teleological in the sense that the message in a sense defines a goal, it is the symbolic representation of this goal.

Just as with the book question, here only some sequences are meaningful? It's also not the parts but the whole which is the problem. The sequences are dependent upon the interpretor, the rest of the message, and the rest of the cell. As soon as you have an interpretor/encoded message you have a symbolic relationship which goes beyond physics, which can not be derived from physics alone. This is not to say that its not consistent with physics, it is. But it's not something natural forces would generate with any reasonable plausibility; It can not be derived from physics alone.

Last edited by Meta on 11 Dec 2009, 9:22 am, edited 1 time in total.

Both chaotic dynamics and quantum physics suggest strongly that world states can arise acausally. What we call life, a persistent far from thermodynamic equilibrium state is consistent with physical laws. In the long run all life must perish as the universe becomes very cold and very dark, but as long as there is a sufficient energy source in a low state of entropy, life can exist.

In a sense, the source of life was the extremely high amount of Gibbs Free Energy that existed at the Beginning. The cosmos could have simply cooled off without producing persistent replication (another property of life) but it didn't. Somehow replicators emerged from non-replicators and can maintain an energy state far from equilbrium. Corpses cool to the ambient temperature even if they are surrounded by nourishment. Live beings don't cool down. As long as their is nourishment (which is to say energy in a low entropy state) they can persist.

Think of us as smoke-rings which take our time dissipating.

ruveyn

I don't, but let's see what is actually said,

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evuR14mWBRI[/youtube]

For the anecdote of contention, Dr Sarfati said,

"Now I want to say one thing: If scientists one day did create life in the test tube, guess what it would prove? It would prove that intelligence was necessary to create life. And yet some people will think that this proves that no intelligence was necessary to create life. So, the scientists aren't intelligent, then. But the point is, what was done in 1953 was a famous experiment by Stanley Miller..."

And then he goes on to explain the invalidity of Miller's experiment, such as there being too much interference and the production of both types of stereo isomers. The beginning anecdote was a general statement, of "even if they do someday pull this stunt it will require so much interference and intelligent input as to be meaningless to claim that such a process could occur in nature by itself, but since they will claim that their engineering feat requires no intelligence, they are therefore not intelligent." (My rendition may not be exactly the same, certainly not in terms of attempting to express some humor, but there is my version though I'm sure crap will be thrown at it also by some people), this anecdote, was not meant as a summary of the criticism of the Miller's experiment.




Okay, if it were possible to demonstrate a sequence of reactions to produce all the components necessary and have them combine into a functional unit performing the functions of life, and all this without massive quantities of interference, then it would show that abiogenesis could have occurred. However, as per the complexities of life and the massive difficulties imposed by chemistry, I do not see such a feat being accomplished without basically engineering the lifeform.




I don't think so. For one, the argument there is more related to the Anthropic Principle, such as the magnetic field being necessary to protect life on the Earth from solar wind. However, it does not take intelligence to create a magnetic field. Creatures with a nervous system do generate a very minute magnetic field, but that is beside the point. To the point though, no, Dr Sarfati would not argue in an analogous fashion that, basically, "intelligence is required to generate all naturally occurring phenomena". The problem is that many people would think that life is a naturally occurring phenomena, just the same as magnetic fields. And from there, the jokes ensue.

However, you do recognize that creating life from scratch is more difficult. For magnetic fields, at least using Faraday's law of induction, you would need to have an electrical current flow through a conductor. For creating life, from scratch, it is vastly more complicated to say the least. Step upon step, to put it minimalistically. For creating a magnetic field, it is an application of a physical law, one which is precisely quantifiable and deterministic in nature, within a single step, i.e. running electrical current through a wire. For abiogenesis, aside from the aspect of multiple steps requiring interference, it is not deterministic in nature, but rather nebulous.

Even so, assuming that it were remotely possible to create life without massive interference, so as to claim that it "can happen on its own", even assuming this is possible, then the leap must be made from "can" to "did". As there are many potential occurrences that do not take place, the possibility of the event is not equivalent to the necessity of the event. Even if something can be done, there is nothing requiring it do be done (in terms of physical law). And for events in the past which are unobservable in the present, even if it is demonstrated that an event is possible to occur it does not mean that they did.

However, I would presume that the leap from "can" to "did" has already occurred and will continue to occur, because it is more "scientificalistic"... heck, even without abiogenesis being shown as possible it is assumed to be true. That's not even a leap from "can" to "did", that is more of a leap from "might have" to "did". It would be on the basis of ideology, of course. And therefore such a leap of equivocation is acceptable as long as it is valid within ones own ideology, or better yet, within an ideology held by multiple people. Right or wrong?

I'll read it later. It's 3:45am here and I just figured I'd reply since I was finishing some homework for my finals anyhow.

I think you're argument is mistaken. If I understand you correctly you seem to be saying that because something can exist, this something can also be generated by unguided natural forces.

Experience shows that this is clearly wrong: Many things which exist, and therefor can exist, would however never even existed if humans had not made them. That a system is consistent with physics, in general, does not imply that unguided natural forced alone could generate this system.

Obvious example: A mechanical pocket clock is consistent with physics, still unguided natural forces alone will never generate such a thing.

In general: Maintenance is unlike generation.

Maintenance is easier because there is already an existing organization, all the organizational information is already present and tuned, so to maintain a system does does not require the generation new (meaningful) information; Just execution of the existing information and maybe copying it is sufficient. Generation of a new system does require new (meaningful) information which can not be derived from physics.

You seem repelled by the fact that humans were created by natural forces and thereby natural forces created pocket watches.