Abiogenesis

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Quantum effects like virtual particles require space/time to happen. Space/time is something, not nothing. Empty space is empty, not nothing. If it was nothing it would not be empty.

Where does space/time come from? The mainstream theory is that space/time did not always exist, that time started and space was created during and after the big bang (and this continues).

Is the universe a closed system? Or is it open in some way? Which way?

Then we have the problem of organisation: Macro-states resulting from random micro-events will behave according to the Law of large numbers: The more random events you have the closer the macro-state will move towards some likely average.

When the micro-events which are required for some macro-state are very unlikely then, while this macro-state will be possible, its occurrence is not plausible unless some external agent causes it to happen. Notice that the fact that something is possible does not make it happen: While it is possible for all the air in a room to be collected into a bottle, the chance of this occurring at random is zero. But we are able to do it if we want.

The is no evidence that an informationally closed system can develop new levels of organisation. You just can't get from here to there. (more)

There is no evidence of self-organization, only of self-ordering, regrettable many people assume that self-ordering and self-organization are identical.

Then from where does even that come?

Again, I really do not care what we might ultimately learn to be the truth about one or more origins or not and/or driving forces or whatever. I only keep asking questions because I have them, and because of this:

"A truth should be held up in all lights and at all angles ... until even the dullest of minds can understand it" (Byron J. Rees, 1899).

So until we all do, I just keep trying to be at least a little like a scientist and keep looking from every possible angle ... and I am still listening as to your 0=1-1 thing even though it makes no logical sense to me.

Bankers make use of the principle all the time. They will lend you a dollar that they don't have and borrow a dollar from someone else to cover their debt. Their cunning plan is to get you to return $1.20 to them and for them to give $1.10 to who they borrowed the dollar off. However, they started with nothing and made a lucrative living off it until people finally realised that nobody was actually holding any real money and things hit the fan. (Don't read anything into this silly reply, it is just a bit of fun).

This is certainly true of the closed system example you gave regarding the bottle in the room due to the laws of thermodynamics and direction of entropy. However, I don't see how it is relevant to the none-closed system of biological development. The laws of thermodynamics and entropy are obeyed due to the fact that sunlight devolves into heat via many mechanisms including via plants to sugars and subsequent metabolisation by animals and finally into background heat again. Thermodynamics has no problems with pools of organisation within the overall scheme of a system provided the overall result tallies to an increase in entropy - which is the case.

You also seem to be mixing up totally random phenomena with those that are able to incorporate positive and negative feedback into their behaviour and modify their subsequent behaviour such as DNA. Random changes to DNA that produce a positive feedback in terms of creating more organisms with that modified DNA lead to yet more organisms adapted in that way. Organisation naturally occurring out of random phenomena due to the retention of changes acquired via positive feedback principles.

It's also true in any system that is in some way open.

Room 1 is closed in every way.
Room 2 is open to sunlight, for anything else it's just as closed as room 1.

What difference would this make to what is possible? Adding energy only changes the amount of energy available, it can not change anything else: Room 2 will become warmer, the kinetic energy of the air will increase.

Any macro-state that is improbable in room 1 will also be improbable in room 2. Only a macro-state for which the only limiting factor in room 1 was the amount of energy available might become some what more likely in room 2, but only if the added energy to room 2 is just right.
I don't see how this argument is relevant. Yes, life is possible. Which is equivalent to saying that all the air in a room can be compressed into a bottle. That a macro-state is possible however does not imply that it will just occur by it self. It might occur if a very unlikely specific sequence of micro-events are forced to occur, eg. by an intelligent agent.

If I get a box of bicycle parts and lay them out in the sun they will not become a bicycle just because the sun is shining on them. More is required. I can put the parts together according to the plan and build myself a bicycle, an activity which is consistent with the laws of thermodynamics and entropy. However, to reach this macro-state requires both a suitable kind of energy and a suitable intelligent actor. If either one is missing the macro-state, while possible, will remain unrealized because it's realization is implausible because it requires very specific, and naturally very unlikely, micro-events.

Energy does not equal, nor cause, organization. An intelligence can use energy to cause organization. So energy is required but not sufficient.

In amongst all your other false assumptions and deductions, I have to strongly object to this one:

It certainly is NOT zero. It is just a rather small probability... that all molecules of the air in a room just happen to find their trajectories just right for (briefly) ending up inside a bottle placed in the room... with no intervention at all, human or otherwise, in its "collection".

I couldn't follow any of your room 1 / room 2 non-argument: "Adding energy only changes the amount of energy available, it can not change anything else". So far as I know, changing the energy available is identical to changing the mass available - and is mappable into any other change you might want to have. I.e. it changes everything - maybe. Put a nuclear bomb in each room, with a trigger sensitive to light.... and the change in the lit room, versus the unlit one, will be a little spectacular.

Great way to start. So this is the best you could do? Brilliant!

Please read but theres still a chance right?
You think the difference really makes any difference?
Tha probability is so close to zero that one can consider it to be zero? e.g.. The difference that makes no difference is no difference?

Notice that you describe a macro-event, for which the probability is equal to the product of (all ready very small) probabilities of the many, many micro-events? For any large enough room (with a large enough number of particles) this will quickly be come a number vastly smaller then 1/10^80. Note that the universe approximately only has about 10^80 particles? Meaning that the probability will quickly be come closer to zero then measurable even when taking the whole universe in to consideration.

Also note that you are arguing against the second law of thermodynamics?
So you believe in magic? Anything is probable enough to occur?

Those bicycle parts I lay out in the sun can indeed arrange to become a bicycle by themselves? O, no... I don't even need to have bicycle parts... light is equal to mass you claim so that bicycle will just pop in to existence with a plausible probability?
Indeed. "Just add whatever can't happen by itself..." So basically you now arguing in favour of intelligent design, by accident no doubt.

Or do you think that a nuclear bomb with a light sensitive trigger will also pop just in to existence (based on your "theory" that light = mass => anything can happen) with a plausible probability?

OK. If all your arguments are based on this, or maybe a belief that something will prevent things from happening, when they do not fit your scheme, there's no need for me to point out the errors any more.

Then again, maybe you could posit that time is granular - which would give you a leg to stand on.

PS. I didn't know that your room 1 / room 2 example was requiring the rooms to be somehow "empty", in some fashion that you would define later on - and that you don't believe in the interchangeability of describing anything as energy or mass.

It is very honest of you to admit that. Prepare for complaints about the result to arrive in your inbox once word gets around.


From Stenger's book God: The Failed Hypothesis:




On the contrary, it is known that something can come from nothing. Tallyman mentioned Hawking radiation. Stenger discussed the subject as well:

Tallyman's 0 = 1 - 1 is a better analogy than is immediately apparent.


The first is covered by the total energy summing up to zero, the second by the expanding universe.


Now that is not a law of nature. There is nothing that says the universe must be comprehensible to some intellect within that universe. You could even say that because no intellect within a universe can be as complex as the whole universe, it can never represent all the universe, and that puts a limit on the level of comprehension that is possible.

Anyway, why should the universe be comprehensible to our intellects, even collectively? Why not to the intellect of a parakeet, or the intellect of the average cyborg of 10000 years in the future? What is so special about our intellects now that we should be able to comprehend the universe?


Trying to explain complexity by saying it was designed is not an explanation because it then doesn't explain the complexity of the designer. That is the core failure of the intelligent design hypothesis.

If, for the purposes of your probability calculation, you can treat the micro-events as independent. That is emphatically not true when the prerequisites for evolution are met. One is heritable variation, meaning what happens in one generation depends very much on the previous generation. That means your random events are no longer independent.

Tallyman replied to you with:

OK, let us go through a specific example. We have a room measuring 5m x 10m x 2m, completely isolated from the rest of the universe. The average temperature of the air in the room is 20 degrees C. What is the probability that the air in one half of the room is on average of 2 degrees or more warmer than the air in the other half?

The volumes of the two halves are 50 cubic metres each. At atmospheric pressure, that means 22.4 mol/litre, and 6.023 x 10^23 particles per mol. That will be about 6.7 x 10^29 gas molecules in each half of the room. What is the probability that the distribution of kinetic energies is such that the temperature in one half of the room is 2 degrees or more above that in the other half of the room? Lau, can you do the rest of the calculation? I don't know what distributions to use and how to compare them. I think it's safe to say that the probability of an uneven distribution of kinetic energies will be quite low.

Did I mention that my sealed room has one half painted black and one half painted white? Doesn't matter to the closed room anyway. But now we put a 2m x 10m window in one side and let the sun shine onto the white and black halves of the room. What do you think is the probability of a temperature difference of 2 degrees or more? With enough energy from the sun, the probability can be as close to 1 as the probability for the closed room is 0. Whether the system is open or closed makes rather a lot of difference.


I gave you an example of a macro state that is probable in room 2 but improbable in room 1. If you think I am wrong, please show me what my mistake is.


Here you argue there is absence of evidence.


Here you claim evidence of absence. The two are not the same.

You linked to http://www.panspermia.org/eprize.htm. They also don't claim evidence of absence, they don't claim self-organization is impossible. Neither does the abstract you quoted. The authors of that paper only claim absence of evidence and lack of a good theory.

Sure, that would be an intellectual copout, and dismissing the possibility altogether before actual evidence clearly proves otherwise would not be good science.

I'm not sure.... are you sticking with the idea that it's "turtles all the way down"?

Well, maybe you could then explain why you think that adding light will make things possible, no probable, which where totally improbable without light? How does energy convert to organisation?
The point was that leaving everything else the same, adding light will have very little effect on the likely hood of most macro-states. In general, there is adding energy does not solve the organisational problem.

Only some micro-events, e.g. those for which available light/energy was a limiting factor will become more likely, and some other events which required the absence of light/less energy will become less likely. But for most improbable events for which light was not a limiting factor will remain just as unlikely. There is no know unintelligent process which can use energy to organise matter; There is no evidence for so called "self-organization" (See one of my previous posts).

I do not know what that means (and I will go take a look), but no, I am only saying it is arrogant and/or foolish and/or far from scientific to think our finite minds can ever comprehend the infinite.

Well, yes. We where at the time talking about the air in a room ending up in a bottle. The probability of this macro-state is not depending upon the amount of light/energy added to the system, its as unlikely in the dark room as in the light room.

I would like to restrict this discussion to abiogenesis? Afterward we could come back to evolution.

8) Which I think proves that adding energy alone does not do much unless one also adds a mechanism (something as simple as a paint job) to control the way in which this energy is put to work.

The mechanism however is specific: It will not be warmer on the white side of the room then on the black side. It will also not make it any more likely that all the air will end up in a bottle.

But limited to exactly this effect for which the room was designed. So unless you can think of a way in which the sunlight would cause the walls to become white on the one side and black on the other side?

No your right, but not in the way you think you are.

If I do it's only in the same way as that there is no evidence for magic, unicorns, fairies, etc. Indeed I can't say that these things do not exist; I have no evidence for that. But at the same time I have no evidence to think they might exist, and so no reason to consider these options, it would not make a good base for any hypotheses/theory.
Indeed, they do. Note that in principle this problem also applies to some aspects what is the modern interpretation of evolution, e.g. the origin of higher levels of organisation, Problems which I might add are confirmed by computer simulations of the mutation-selection process.

Last edited by Meta on 29 Nov 2009, 11:51 am, edited 1 time in total.

Always something topic

I am of the opinion that there has always been something, however infinitesimally small. The questions that I am thinking: why were the raw materials of the universe so small, and then why did it expand into view?