Abiogenesis and Arguments From Ignorance

Peter, are you aware of the important fact that catalysis only speeds up (technically, reduces the activation of) reactions that “work” without catalysis?

I would agree that science, metaphysics, and even other fields of knowledge can and should be done together as a conversation. My point is that when science has reach a limit after considerable research that cannot account for something by natural causes, at that point it seems justified to shift the main focus to the field of metaphysics to look for explanations. And at that point, if there is a warranted metaphysical explanation, it should be recognized by all fields of study. And only if at some point new evidence should arise that would allow for a natural cause should the question shift back into the realm of science.

Isn’t it also true, that in an environment, where a given molecule could partake in 20 different reactions, the presense of an enzyme could mean the difference between the end result being “gunk” and a useful reaction product. Anyway, do you think it’s important in the context of this calculation?

Hi Art

I see your argument but I don’t see how it explains OOL. Functional peptides is a pretty vague claim.

How do you model this in order to end up with a living organism of 400 genes. Living organisms need to be able to produce molecules in high volume production.I listed the some of the assumptions required to VJ.

This problem ranks with trying to figure out the origin of matter.

Depends.

No, because there’s this process called selection.

I’m replying to the metaphysical part of this conversation. I feel like this should be split into a new thread, but I don’t know if I have the necessary privileges.

An example on an NDE

Perhaps you should write an essay explaining why hundreds of thousands of biochemistry (and other) papers that measure protein function in vitro are delusions.

Good grief! We discovered the structure of DNA a little over 65 years ago, we still don’t know what quantum mechanics means after 90 years, OOL research has only barely begun and already made some good strides from what I’ve seen. I’m actually surprised how fast it’s gone given the magnitude of the problem and distance from the actual events.

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Where did these proteins come from?

If you quote the related comment and hit the arrow in the upper left hand corner of the editor, it will give you 3 option, one of which is to start a new topic.

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What specific progress do you think we have made on this problem?

From what I understand OoL has been going for at least 60 years and hasn’t made much progress. Guess it’s a matter of opinion when something has had sufficient research to warrant a move to the metaphysical. :slight_smile:

There is this beautiful theory called Chemoton theory with the three interconnected reation circles

but I heard that it couldn’t get anywhere because instead of the reactions going in circles like they are meant to be, basically without enzymes everything tended to react with everything. Theoretically, even when counting the enzymes, a chemoton would only need about fifty molecules to get going, so that’s already a way better proposition, than the 400 quoted earlier.

Pretty sure I did it the wrong way. I think you need to be an administrator (which I do not aspire to be) to be able to split several comments at the same time into a new thread.

From the website on chemotons
"In biology, a big confusion exists until now about the question, what and when can be considered something living, non-living or dead. Gánti, by setting up a phenomenological system of life criteria has not only clarified the borderline, but has also shown that some of the old criteria are not criteria of individual life, but those of a potential to develop the living world (absolute and potential life criteria). "

That’s gotta be useful, right?

The problem is that what happens in reactions like this depend very much on the kinds of conditions under which they are tested. What minerals, elements, metals, salts are present, in what concentrations are they each? Do they persist or fluctuate? Do they cycle up and down? In what structure are they, tiny powdered grains, large uniform solids, what is the total surface area, the topology? What are the temperatures like, for how long do they persist? Is there convection, thermophoresis, evaporation? Is there UV light, which wavelengths, what intensity? Are conditions neutral, acidic, alkaline? Reductive, oxidative? There is so incredibly much we still don’t know, and the interactions of very complex, multicomponent systems are almost impossible to predict from first principles.

The number of possible options here is difficult to overstate, and so few have been experimentally tested. This is why claims that “experiment X didn’t produce hypothesized result Y - therefore we know it can’t or won’t” are so silly. I repeat my earlier analogy, you can’t conclude that a particular small rock doesn’t exist on the african continent if you’ve only searched a square meter of it.

This is one of many issues with James Tour’s claim that chemistry has shown there’s some problem with the origin of life. He just can’t conclude that from so limited data. Of course it gets even worse when we consider that Tour treats the origin of life as the origin of something like a modern bacterium.

But we don’t know what the simplest or most likely form of life is, so going back to the analogy, we’re now looking for a rock we don’t know what looks like on the african continent, we’re far from sure just how small it is, and we’ve only looked on one square meter of it.

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Thanks, did not know. I could have used that tidbit a couple of times. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Um, it isn’t intended, on its own, to explain the OOL. It is meant to show how the sorts of “probability” arguments you and other ID proponents cling to actually do not rule out chemical mechanisms for the OOL.

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Haven’t tried that, but I would assume you select the first portion of text from a comment and select the quote button when it appears. Then scroll to the next comment and select the portion of text from there that you want and hit the quote button when it appears. Then when you have the appropriate quotes in the editor hit the upper left arrow and choose the option to move it to a new topic. Next time if I need to I’ll try it and let you know how it works.

Freudian slip? :slight_smile:

@jety @Jim I don’t believe you can split threads. I think that we mods have to do so. You can create new ones, though.

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