There isn’t such evidence so the claim is not justified. And no, YouTube propaganda videos aren’t evidence.
Sorry, but I can’t help but see that as nothing more than an ad hominem attack. There is no justifiable reason I can see to dismiss a world renowned synthetic chemist presenting direct empirical evidence without even addressing the issues he raises.
If you’re really serious about truth, I would expect you to at least provide evidence that what he’s saying is incorrect. Since you won’t even engage with his evidence, I can only conclude that most likely you aren’t able to refute his claims. Regardless, I don’t see how such an approach can be taken seriously. Thanks for the conversation. 
I see you have no clue what the term ad hominem means.
He didn’t present any evidence. He made a bunch of hand-waving empty assertions in a YouTube video. But thanks for the usual ID-Creationist syncophantic drivel. 
actually the first direct evidence of the first living thing belong to a multicellular organism:
its not always true:
“Therefore, early and late amino acids do not correspond to a strict chronological order of introduction into the code”
I find the whole characterization of “arguments from ignorace” or “incredulity” entirely unhelpful.
They contain unexamined value judgements.
Instead, the controversies swirl around arguments from very different, sometimes dogmatic, premises.
These we recognize right away and it is often our first impulse to merely disregard or dismiss the arguer (“they’re just ignorant”).
At this forum, there is sometimes more productive discussions of the back and forth interchange between folks with very different, perhaps dogmatic, starting premises, about things neither side can be actually completely certain about.
When advocacy overly dominates, rational and civil discussion suffers.
My two cents.
@Rumraket I’m not sure you’ve fully understood what the argument I made, or the evidence it is based on, even is . First of all there are multiple corroborating lines of evidence that show which amino acids would be most likely to be produced by nonbiological chemical processes. One of those is the Miller-Urey type(spark-discharge) experiments, another is observations of the contents of carbonaceous chondrites, another is physical calculations based on chemical thermodynamics, another still is in silico simulations, another is laboratory experiments mimicking hydrothermal systems of various kinds. These different lines of evidence converge on a so-called “consensus” set of amino acids one would expect to be produced.
Then there is the evidence from comparative genetics about what the amino acid composition of the oldest proteins were like, and scientists can show that as we go further and further back in time on the tree of life, the proteins increasingly are made of the “consensus” amino acids expected to be produced by abiotic chemistry, and decreasingly with age contains the “modern” set of amino acids we see in life today. So basically when looking at the constituents of proteins, the further we go back in time, the more it looks like they were made by abiotic chemistry, rather than being biosynthesized by cellular anabolism…
Ask yourself, why should this trend be observed in amino acid gain and loss? Why would the frequency of nonbiologically produced amino acids increase the further we go back in time? If life originated by some sort of intelligent design, the designer could have made the first life to exist with basically any distribution of amino acids that the designer wanted.
Hi @swamidass, @colewd, @jety, @T.j_Runyon, @Timothy_Horton, @T_aquaticus,
I have to say I think @Rumraket is right. The same kind of logic that supports evolutionary family trees for living organisms (converging lines of evidence, which the hypothesis of common ancestry can easily account for, but the hypothesis of separate creation can only account for by resorting to highly ad hoc explanations), also supports a common, abiotic ancestor for modern proteins. If you’re going to accept evolution, then by the same token, you should accept abiogenesis, despite the formidable obstacles (and they are formidable) which it currently faces.
I should also add that no-one has yet produced a valid argument showing why the origin of life from non-living matter would be an event so improbable that we would not expect it to occur even once during the history of the observable universe. Until such an argument is forthcoming, I think it would be prudent to conclude, in the light of the evidence marshaled by @Rumraket, that life arose from non-living matter. My two cents.
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Why would you assume this? Where is the evidence for this path?
This is materialist philosophy. To conclude a natural origin of life you need to show it is probable. BTW I have seen you argue the other side of this one effectively Where is the evidence that it is even remotely probable?
I used to be much impressed with Dr. Douglas Axe’s infamous “10^77” argument. If one accepted that figure, as well as the propositions that the first organism must have been a cell, and that a minimal cell requires 250 different proteins, then it’s easy to show that life is vanishingly improbable. However, I now regard all of the above as gratuitous assertions at best, and I have been persuaded that the 1 in 10^77 figure is bad science. Hence I would now say that the boot is on the other foot: it’s incumbent on design proponents to show that abiogenesis is astronomically unlikely.
Let me reiterate that my change of opinion has nothing to do with theology. For me, it’s the math that counts. Cheers.
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I disagree that Dougs numbers are bad math as it depends on the application but for arguments sake let’s use the more conservative numbers of Szostak of 1/10^11.
Now build me a living cell from random chance. The first issue is minimum capability for sustaining life and self replication so you need several say 400 well functioning genes for this.
Now take Szostak’s numbers and go from this to a Eukaryotic cell. This is maybe an even more difficult problem for random mutation and natural selection.
The problem here is to get successful self replication the chickens and eggs all need to be available at once. Can you sustain life without rapid amino acid and ATP production? Can you sustain life without DNA repair?
This is a monster challenge so I think the default position is it is highly improbable for a random mechanism to have accomplished this.
I agree with you that this is not a theological issue but it is a very large problem for science.
Perhaps that’s true but the math is sufficiently ambiguous here. If we allow for Gods action (which science does not) I think the most rational conclusion is rational and rigorous agnosticism.
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That’s the wrong way of looking at it.
We know that there is randomness involved in snowflake formation. We can see that from the large variety of snowflake shapes. Yet nobody would describe that as “building a snowflake from random chance.”
Hi @colewd,
Here’s the problem if you accept Szostak’s 1 in 10^11 figure, and your estimate of 400 genes for a minimal cell. At first blush, you might think: 1 in (10^11)^400 is 1 in 10^4,400, which is well below Dembski’s Universal Probability Bound. But during the history of the primordial Earth, it is estimated that there may have been up to 10^43 amino acid sequences explored (to the nearest order of magnitude), according to Dryden, Thomson and White (2008). If 1 in 10^11 yields something functional, then we have 10^32 functional molecules floating around on the primordial Earth. Getting 400 of these to hook up in a way that supports life and self-replication doesn’t sound so impossible now, does it?
As a Christian, you are familiar with the idea of God’s providence. How does God achieve it? He definitely does not always do it ‘supernaturally’, overriding natural law that he has established. Scripture is replete with examples, as is recorded history in the lives of multiple hundreds of Christians since, and in mine. I am reminded of one involving George Müeller, founder of many orphanages in England, when they sat down at breakfast to empty plates, not knowing where the food was going to come from, and gave thanks anyway. God provided by design. So probabilities are irrelevant, but you can still believe in design, as do I.
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Hi Bill,
A couple of notes to help you better understand the criticisms that bounce around here and elsewhere.
First, it is not necessarily Axe’s math that is bad (although his approach to analyzing his data is bereft of what most would consider to be a suitable statistical component), but that his experiment in and of itself does not allow for the conclusions (and the numbers) Axe reaches.
Second, as far as Szostak’s value of 1/10^11, remember that this is the ratio of functional to all sequences. It is not a probability. To get a probability, one needs to consider the number of sequences in a population (pool, setting whatever). For example, in a liter of prebiotic solution that has a molar concentration of peptides of 5 picomoles (that is 5x10^-12 moles, by most peoples’ estimations a pretty low concentration) per liter, the probability of finding a functional sequence would be essentially 1. Which would also be the probability of finding 400 different functional sequences, given Szostak’s ratio.
Let us know if this is not clear.
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The forum software told me that there were 6 unread posts in this thread.
So I clicked on it, to read those posts. And 5 of the 6 posts were hidden (flagged by the community).
Note that I’m not objecting to this. I was able to read those 5 flagged posts. And, in all honesty, they did not add anything useful to the discussion.
Perhaps we can do better than this.
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How do you get them to hook up if there’s no enzymes or DNA synthesizers to hook them up with?
…by design, naturally, not breaking any natural laws, but with supernatural timing and placing. That cannot be proven by science, but events and circumstances are infused with meaning, again, by design, and that could certainly be true in the biological realm, as well. “There is a difference between a set of circumstances that is improbable, and a set of circumstances that is improbable and also performs a function.” @terrellclemmons
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Try getting two of them to hook up. Let’s say that the chance is 1 in 10 per 1 second per 1cm^3, and this chance scales linearly with the number of molecules that need to work together. And furthermore it all works without any enzymes. Let’s be generous.
Then the volume of Earths oceans are 1.332 billion cubic kilometers which is 1.332e+24 cm^3
The chance of 400 of them hooking up is 1 in 1e+400
Divide the two and you get a chance of 1 in 1e+376
Divide with the number of seconds in a year 3.154e+7
And you get a chance of 1 in 3,17e+365 that’s 365 zeroes
Divide that with the number of planets in the observable universe 10^24 (give or take)
And you would need to wait around 3,17e+341 years to see the process you imagined would come to fruition and produce life. To put it in context that’s 2.3e+331 times the current age of the universe.
If abiogenesis is possible, it HAD to be more efficient than that.
Sounds like an argument from pure ignorance.
Or he got tried of dinosaurs.