First give you a clearly defined and falsifiable hypothesis to work with instead of your usual copy/pasta walls-of-text. Until then there isn’t much to discuss.
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Evolution.
No one has ever observed a supernatural deity creating life. The correct answer to how life came about is “We don’t know”. Period. We don’t default to the supernatural when we don’t have answers.
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The possible mechanisms to explain the origin of life
Either life just coalesced from atomic building blocks through a random fluke collision of disorderly pieces, emerging by “dumb, blind” mechanical processes, a fortuitous accident, spontaneously through self-organization by unguided, non-designed, unintended stochastic coincidence, natural events that turned into self-organization in an orderly manner without external direction, chemical non-biological, purely physico-dynamic kinetic processes and reactions influenced by environmental parameters, or through the direct intervention, creative force, and design activity of an intelligent cognitive agency, a powerful conscious creator with intentions, will, goals and foresight.
There’s nothing about inert chemicals and physical forces that say we want to get life at the end of the abiogenesis process. Molecules do not have the “drive”, they do not “want” to find ways to harness energy and to become more efficient
One cannot explain the origin of evolution, through evolution. It is widespread and very common to see the attempt to smuggle the Darwinian dynamic of replication with a heritable variation into the origin of life. Biological evolution by natural selection does and cannot explain the origin of life. Natural selection only acts on the random variation of alleles based on DNA replication, but the origin of genes, and replication is among the origin of the entire self-replicating cell, what origin of life research has to explain.
ADDY PROSS: What is Life? How Chemistry becomes Biology
Darwinian theory is a biological theory and therefore deals with biological systems, whereas the origin of life problem is a chemical problem, and chemical problems are best solved with chemical (and physical) theories. Attempting to explain chemical phenomena with biological concepts is methodologically problematic.
What is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology 2012
Paul Davies: Why Darwinian evolution does NOT explain the origin of life Sep 2, 2021
I think in all honesty a lot of people even confuse it the people who aren’t familiar with the area that oh I presume Darwinian evolution sort of accounts for the origin of life but of course, you don’t get an evolutionary process until you’ve got a self-replicating molecule. ( Darwin ) gave us a theory of evolution about how life has evolved but he uh didn’t want to tangle with how you go from non-life to life and for me, that’s a much bigger step.
Koonin, The logic of chance 2012
The emergence of the first replicator system, which represented the “Darwinian breakthrough,” was inevitably preceded by a succession of complex, difficult steps for which biological evolutionary mechanisms were not accessible
Wilhelm T. S. Huck Robustness, Entrainment, and Hybridization in Dissipative Molecular Networks, and the Origin of Life May 30, 2019
Life emerged spontaneously from the selfassembly, or spontaneous organization, of the organic products of reactions, occurring in complex mixtures of molecules formed abiotically from simple precursors and sequences of reactions.
https://robobees.seas.harvard.edu/files/gmwgroup/files/1320.pdf
Darwin persuades us that the seemingly purposeful construction of living things can very often, and perhaps always, be attributed to the operation of natural selection. Natural selection requires three processes: reproduction, variation, and inheritance.
If you have things that are reproducing their kind;
if there are sometimes random variations, nevertheless, in the offspring;
if such variations can be inherited;
if some such variations can sometimes confer an advantage on their owners;
if there is competition between the reproducing entities -
if there is an overproduction so that not all will be able to survive to produce offspring themselves -
then these entities will get better at reproducing their kind. What is needed for natural selection are things that conform to those ‘ifs’. Self-replicating cells are prerequisites for evolution. None of this was available prebiotically to explain the origin of the first life form.
And yet you try to explain the origin of intelligent design through intelligent design. Go figure.
Oh look, another wall-of-text that does address the criticism. Classic Otangello.
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On second thought, I am moving this back to moderated comments, so walls-of-text an pruned.
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No, God is eternal, uncreated.
Falsifiable hypothesis: Getting the following by non-guided, non-intelligent means.
- Getting homochiral building blocks of life, precisely as needed.
- Getting pure materials: avoiding impure contamination in the pool of chemicals was the state of affairs.
- Getting free Gibbs energy: recruiting Gibbs free energy from its environment so as to reduce its own entropy.
- Activation and repetitive processes: Monomers need to be activated in order for polymerization and catenation to make amino acid strands, and genes, to be possible.
- Information: getting specified complex information, digital data, stored in genes through the language of the genetic code, which dictates and directs the making of irreducibly complex molecular machines.
- Getting the genetic code
- Polymerization: getting prebiotic polycondensation of amino acids and nucleotides in heterogeneous aqueous solutions or in interfaces with water-based media occuring without the aid of biological catalysts
- The right sequence of reactions: In metabolic pathways in the cell, enzymes must be lined up in the right sequence. Getting spontaneous events to organize such a state of affairs.
- Getting an organized system out of chaos: Getting an organized system capable of emergent processes such as growth, self-propagation, information processing, and adaptive evolution
- Getting all the parts, despite the fact that the individual parts by themselves bear no function unless integrated into a higher-order system.
- Homeostasis: It had to create a homeostatic environment, in one of many other cases, diminishing the calcium concentration in the cell 10000 times below the external environment, to permit signaling. It requires osmoregulation to maintain the fluid balance and the concentration of electrolytes, preventing the cytosol to be too diluted or concentrated.
- Getting the transition from prebiotic recruitment of the basic building blocks, to metabolism ( at least 400 reactions performed by hundreds of enzymes and proteins, the molecular robots, producing all relevant molecules. in a minimal LUCA).
- Getting a minimal genome ( In P.Ubique, the smallest free-living cell, 1,3 Mio nucleotides)
- Getting the epigenome, the glycome, the lipidome, the mobilome, the transcriptome, the metabolome, the proteome, the interactome, the signalosome, and the metallome of our minimal cell.
- Salvage and recycling pathways ( That includes uptake and processing of the big, major, and trace elements [ nitrogen and carbon fixation].
- Getting sophisticated, complex, and advanced immune and defense systems to protect itself from invaders, viruses, plasmids, and phages.
- Connecting the genome, that directs the making of hundreds of proteins ( the proteome) - complex molecular machines made through transcription ( the transcriptome) and translation, the proteins interconnection ( the interactome), using the genetic code, the machinery of DNA replication, error-check and repair mechanisms starting with DNA, all the way through to the ribosome ( 13 check and repair mechanisms alone).
- Getting an epigenome, that controls DNA–protein interactions ( DNA methylation that performs transcriptional activation and repressions, and the formation of phenotypic variants) timing of DNA replication, partitioning of nascent chromosomes to daughter cells, repair of DNA, and timing of transposition and conjugal transfer of plasmids. The chromosome segregation machinery ( topoisomerase II).
- Getting the ribosome which is especially noteworthy. The Universal Gene Set of Life (UGSL) is dominated by translation-related genes. These ribosomal RNAs (rRNAs), transfer RNAs (tRNAs and the machinery to synthesize and modify tRNAs, a full set of aminoacyl tRNA synthetases) small RNAs, and ribosomal proteins make up the most abundant macromolecular species in all living organisms ( Bernstein 2019). Ribosome biogenesis: It would require all proteins that assemble ribosomes, including proteins, that make proteins, that make the subunits of the ribosome, and the entire error check and repair, and recycle machinery. It would require chaperones, proteins that help proteins that come out from the ribosome, and are being misfolded, to get their right fold. That includes chaperones, that help chaperones to be folded properly. ( In other words, machines, that help machines, that help other machines)
- Getting the membrane which includes millions of complex membrane-embedded protein channels, ion pumps, ion exchangers, transporters, importers, translocons, translocases, symporters, and antiporters that control what is imported, what leaves the cell, and the intracellular levels of all life-essential elements.
- Getting the enzymes that are involved in cell division, and its regulation.
- A way to get a Wood Ljundahl or rTCA cycle to fix carbon to produce carbohydrates, that is digested through catabolism to feed ATP synthase, electron transport, and a proton gradient to generate ATP, the energy currency in the cell. It would also require at least 8 co-factors, and vitamins.
- Thioesters were almost certainly involved in the prebiotic formation of many molecules that are important in contemporary biology. Their formation depends on Coenzyme A (CoA). Coenzyme A synthesis depends on five enzymes used in the five-step universal pathway of coenzyme A (CoA) biosynthesis.
- Getting numerous machines for the uptake of iron ( Non-ribosomal peptide synthetase to make siderophores) and chelate it ( making it available in soluble form for uptake), sulfur, and the machinery to create Iron-sulfur (Fe/S) clusters, essential in many vital proteins in their reaction centers. Life essential proteins, replete with FeS clusters and radical reaction mechanisms, depend upon transition metals, flavins, S-adenosyl methionine, ferredoxin, molybdopterin, corrins, and selenium.
- Mechanisms of adaptation to the variegated environmental conditions, able to get and interpret signals from the environment the outside and react accordingly ( like thermal conditions).
Where is the experiment demonstrating that claim?
THe question is not falsifying naturalistic hypotheses, we know how to do that. The question is how to falsify hypotheses of guided Design by “intelligent” means. To be falsifiable it should be possible to obtain evidence, at least in theory, which would falsify design.
Evidence FOR a naturalistic hypothesis does NOT falsify a Design hypothesis.
Scientism, verificationism, and the quest for a sound epistemological approach to finding truth in regard to origins
’I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives us a lot of factual information, puts all of our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.’
Erwin Schroedinger’
The problem of many atheists is that they have not developed an epistemological framework that is consistent. Very frequently, they ask God to prove himself to them, in order to believe. Or they claim that science provides all relevant answers. Can science measure thoughts? Logic? Truth? Empiricism is a failure as a worldview. The assertion that only things we can measure, touch, taste, hear, or smell are reality, is absurd and demonstrably false. The key component of the supernatural is that it occurs at the will of an undetectable persona. Will and intention cannot be measured or predicted.
We need to endorse a worldview that makes sense, and is a consequence of a carefully chosen and elaborated methodology of an epistemological framework, and applied to do a consistent, correct to the case research, and coming to meaningful, and the most accurate possible conclusions in regards of origins and reality. There are several ways, like rationalism, empiricism, pragmatism, authority, and revelation. Empiricism is a cornerstone of the scientific
method. Empiricism, in philosophy, is the view that all concepts originate in experience, that all concepts are about or applicable to things that can be experienced, or that all rationally acceptable beliefs or propositions are justifiable or knowable only through experience. Can or should we use the scientific method and empiricism alone where the scientific method is the primary epistemology for truth claims? This approach is based on observations
of the world, but philosophy and theology are a priori rejected outhand. That is one of the wrong approaches that many unbelievers in God adopt.
In the very first post, you are the one who established empirical verification as the basis for acceptance. You are the one who said abiogenesis should be rejected because it has not been empirically observed.
It falsifies the need to invoke design as the direct cause of the observation. The theory of gravity falsifies design as the direct cause of the motion of the planets. The origin of gravity is still unknown and design could be responsible.
What we don’t have is a direct empirically tested cause of life’s origin(s). As in the origin of gravity design could be responsible.
While design does not have a detailed explanation it is a useful null hypothesis as simply using no cause or random can lead to faulty conclusions.
Sorry Bill, you don’t get to redefine falsification. ID needs to be falsifiable or it is not science,
Useful HOW?
Inventions? No,
Patents? No.
Medical treatments? No.
New areas of research? No.
Name one thing (how/why/where/what/when/who?) we have learned from ID.
Null hypotheses are made to be disproven. Since most scientific models are wrong at least in part, and design is unfalsifiable, then in all likelihood ID is forever stuck with a null hypothesis which can only lead to faulty conclusions.
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The need to invoke design has not been demonstrated. No use trying to falsify what is not in evidence in the first place.
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Design can be falsifiable as a direct cause as I showed you. The null hypothesis used against common descent (separate origin by random cause) is not strong enough to test the hypothesis and has become a science stopper as no one outside creation groups is exploring the possibilities multiple origins yet we are getting lots of new genetic information every day at this point.
By creating a more stringent comparison to theories like origin of life(s) or origin of matter then the claim of a random accident.
The title of this thread’s a bit bizarre. I don’t think I have ever heard of anyone who contends that “naturalism” explains the origin of life. The origin might be explained naturalistically, but naturalism itself explains nothing.
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It suffices to give good reasons why design is a more case-adequate explanation compared to non-designed. Specified complexity observed in genes dictates and directs the making of irreducible complex molecular machines, robotic molecular production lines, and higher order assembly into integrated, interdependent chemical cell factories. If this is not evidence of design, what is it?
It’s not, so I guess that question goes to you.
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Just noticed the subtitle given to Otangelo. Well played, Mr. Peaceful Science Subtitle Giver!
Also, a reminder that Mr. Grasso is among the contributors to Evolution News, which of course only hires the best:
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