Kevin Dorner

Does anyone have any good links to writeups of the clay-crystal abiogenesis idea? I keep hearing about it, but haven't read anything on it yet.

Quetzal

Well, if we're talking favorite abiogenesis arguments, I like this one best: <a href="http://www.gla.ac.uk/projects/originoflife/html/2001/menu.htm" target="_blank">Submarine alkaline seep hypothesis</a>. It seems to answer a lot of the old creationist "it can't happen because..." arguments. The interesting thing is it doesn't even need any particular kind of atmosphere, really, reduced solar radiation, or any of the other quibbles creationists keep babbling about.

As to probabilities: I'd have to say that given known sample size n=1 of the total number of planets that might support life, the probability of life occurring by natural processes on Earth (all that have been observed) is p=1.00. Put that in your creationist probability pipe and smoke it...

Quetzal

The best one, of course, is Cairns-Smith's own book, "Seven Clues to the Origin of Life". Dawkins also talks about it extensively in "Blind Watchmaker". I wrote up a summary once (somewhere buried on II - might have been S&S). If you'd like, I can repost it or you might be able to dig it out somewhere.

jdawg2

heh.

Funny how some think it's "unlikely" for a certain chemical reaction to have occured at some point in history...(we have evidence of chemistry, people!)

but a disembodied invisible mind "breathing" things into existence willy-nilly is just so much more probable

lpetrich

Given the content of VZ's questions, I wonder if he believes in vitalism, the theory that living things have some extra life-stuff or "vital force" in them.

I wonder that because he links the question to the origin of mind, and he seems to believe that there is some special sort of mind-stuff.

Vitalism is an old view; over 2000 years ago, Aristotle had proposed a form of vitalism in which there are three kinds of soul, the vegetable soul, associated with nutrition and growth, the animal soul, associated with motion, and the rational soul, associated with mental activity.

However, vitalism has become totally discredited over the past few centuries, No special life-stuff has ever been detected, and the successful paradigms for explaining the workings of living things feature no life-stuff whatsoever. I ought to track down the history of the fall of vitalism some time -- it could be interesting.

Dr. Isaac Asimov once pointed out about vitalism that if it was correct, then that would greatly simplify the life-detection problem: one would simply look for life-stuff. Thus, if one wanted to find out if some meat was contaminated, one would do a life-stuff assay. The meat, being dead, would contain no life stuff, but contaminating bacteria and fungi would.

But in the real world, the one that all of us wake up in, there is not a trace of life-stuff, making that job more difficult.

Creation's Terrier

Why? If we can find answers to it without supernatural involvement, then the super-natural becomes super-fluous. Especially given the rather scant evidence for it otherwise.

Science offers answers to this. They are at the moment tentative, but then all scientific answers are provisional (this doesn’t mean vague or uncertain, just never absolutely certain beyond all possibility of being wrong. But unlike supernatural answers, they are open to testing. If you want a certain answer, then sure, religion’s yer man. As the quote goes, science offers evidence without certainty; religion offers certainty without evidence.

So point 1 is wrong, there are answers to this. Here’s some:

<a href="http://www.postmodern.com/~jka/rnaworld/rna/base.html" target="_blank">www.postmodern.com/~jka/rnaworld/rna/base.html</a>

<a href="http://www.accessexcellence.org/WN/SUA03/RNA_origins_life.html" target="_blank">www.accessexcellence.org/WN/SUA03/RNA_origins_life.html</a>

<a href="http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/2948/orgel.html" target="_blank">www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/2948/orgel.html</a>

<a href="http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/A/AbioticSynthesis.html" target="_blank">http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/A/AbioticSynthesis.html</a>

<a href="http://www.resa.net/nasa/origins_life.htm" target="_blank">www.resa.net/nasa/origins_life.htm</a>

There are answers, and they have evidence behind them. Could you offer some evidence for your version please?

How is that nearly equivalent to the first? But anyway, there’s non-supernatural answers to that too. Do a Google for things like ‘mental algorithms’. It’d be good if you could define ‘mind’ though!

You might start also with this book:
<a href="http://www.oup-usa.org/docs/0195110536.html" target="_blank">www.oup-usa.org/docs/0195110536.html</a>

Again, sure they’re tentative. But they are answers, and they’re better ones than supernatural ones, since they can be tested to see if they’re right.

No offence, but why do you pick on things which science is still in early stages of getting to grips with? Even if there were no answer at all, it wouldn’t make yours right, because we cannot test it to see if it is!

That’d be a Google for something like ‘quantum vacuum fluctuations’. Other comments as above. Three out of three, there are answers. If you want certainty, go on your way and be happy in your God. But if you care whether you are right or not, you’ve got to be able to check. We can’t know everything, so we can’t be totally sure. But at least with science we can be as sure as possible, because of corroboration from evidence.

Would be a novelty? Sorry, couldn’t resist

How might we find out if it’s right? By what standard do we measure its accuracy? Do we simply take someone’s word for it?

What answers? Do you mean Genesis? Genesis has been demonstrated to be incorrect, insofar as taking it literally at least. Could you tell us why it must be literal please?

As for answers, where does Genesis, for ex, explain why mitochondria have so similar a genome to the epidemic typhus bug?

Best wishes, AW

Vanderzyden

Camaban,

Thanks for your clarification. Yes, I think I understand what you mean:

How can we measure the probability of an event if we cannot define its terms? Well, perhaps we can.

What is the probability that your computer monitor will levitate during the entire time you have it in possession?

No doubt, you will say the probability of such an event is effectively zero, since you have sufficient experience with the workings of our world and you know that things don't "just happen". As such, if anyone makes an assertion to the contrary, you would rightly say they are talking nonsense.

Nonsense.

Consider that word for a moment. It is a very suitable response from the creationist to the materialist who asserts any of the following:

1. Life can originate from non-life.
2. Mind can originate from non-mind.
3. Something can originate from nothing.

One equivalence in these statements is that they are nonsensical. They do not make sense, either in general or when we consider particulars like the natural world, necessary causal relationships, information, and agency.

Come back to the levitating monitor example. We don't know how it could be done, but we are certain of the very low probability that it would happen at all. The same may be said concerning life. We don't know how, but we know that life is not non-life. To say that one comes from the other by accident is nonsense.


Vanderzyden

Jamie_L

It seems to me that we have evidence that at one time there was no life on earth. Now, there is life on earth. Therefore, we KNOW that abiogenisis occurred. That is, life came from non-life. Whether or not a designer-God was involved is not relevant to this point. There is no probability involved. It happened.

The question is not, "did it occur?", but "how did it occur?" Now, a God-hypothesis is a potential answer to "how did it occur". However, at this point, such a hypothesis does not include any claims that science can test. So, science tests those hypotheses that it can test.

Lastly, there's no logical incompatibility of a designer-God and scientifically proveable abiogenisis. Process X happened. God willed it to happen. See. Process X can be abiogenisis. What's the big deal?

I find this all amusing. Science does not come out and say "we found this. See, there is no God." Science just says what they find. It's the creationists that feel so threatened that they have to point out why these scientific facts threaten their beliefs.

Of course, there is no God.

Jamie

Vanderzyden

Jamie,

You make a good point of clarifying that we are dealing here with a question of HOW. But, I must ask, what is your justification for asserting that life originated with non-life?

The point is that we DON'T KNOW HOW life arose. With the scarcity of plausible arguments or evidence, why not entertain the possibility of non-natural agency? We must admit that this is at least a possibility.

You also emphasize that a process is necessary for life to arise. However, you'll notice that a process requires a processor. So, I have another question:

What is the cause of the process, and cause the necessary environment in which life may thrive?


Vanderzyden

[ September 24, 2002: Message edited by: Vanderzyden ]</p>

Camaban

Almost zero, but I base that calculation on that no-one elses monitor has ever levitated, and why should mine be the first?

As for abiogenesis, I see evidence that it happened all around me, right down to being evidence myself.

I haven't seen any evidence that any monitor has levitated itself.

So kinda different arguments.

We don't know HOW it happened. Argument from ignorance.

One interpretation (How did brains first start evolving in the first place?) is an argument from ignorance (Don't know how it happened therefore goddidit) the second, you see every day around you, each of us started off without a mind. (You'll also have an incredibly hard time convincing me that, say, dogs don't have a mind, I've seen as much evidence for that as I have for any person I've ever met having one)

As for the third, simplest answer (as far as I've seen) is we don't know.

Yeah, but here's the difference

I don't know of any levitating monitors

I do know of many living things.

And as long as we don't know how life could have come from non-life, saying it's absurd has absolutely no even semi-solid backing.

Because a non-natural agency, while once thought to be nessecary for damn-near everything, has been shown to have been nessecary for so painfully little, it's foolish to go to it as a default answer instead of saying "We don't know"

a process doesn't nessecarily need an intelligent processor. (if that's what you were implying)

[ September 24, 2002: Message edited by: Camaban ]</p>