Nor will anybody ever know. Science cannot explain a miracle.
Will scientists ever produce a living organism from inanimate matter? Of course not! Only the seriously delusional would think they can.
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Almost certainly not. But the reason is not that they couldnāt, its that it would be a wasted effort. If someone wants nucleotides for assembling a desired RNA or DNA sequence, they wouldnāt synthesise them from graphite, water and nitrogen, theyād get them from organic sources.
Not sure thatās quite right. Commercial dNTPs are synthesized from inorganic sources as far as I know, though perhaps not from graphite. At any rate, one should agree that dNTPs count as inanimate matter.
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Thatās an excellent question. The answer seems to be that they are synthesized both chemically and enzymatically (ref).
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I actually disagree, I think that it is very useful to know what is impossible, and more importantly why it is impossible. Most OOL research currently is based on the assumption that the spontaneous generation of life from non life, actually happened as was imagined by some ancient cultures many, but that the process simply was much more complex than was imagined centuries ago.
Modern conceptualizations of abiogenesis have their roots not in science but the philosophy and the religion of the ancient Greeks. As one source eloquently explained:
Even before the Presocratic philosophers came on the scene, religious mythology was already setting the conceptual stage for philosophical speculation. Religion, then as now, was a powerful social force in shaping views of human nature and the cosmosā¦
Two aspects of their mythology deserves mention for their impact on early philosophy. First, their cosmologies do not attribute the creation of the world to the work of the gods. While Zeus is the supreme god, he is not described as the creator. While Zeus is the supreme god, he is not described as the creator. Homer takes the universe as a given, and Hesiod describes its origins as follows:First Chaos was created, then wide-bosomed Earth, the eternal unshaken foundation of the immortal gods who inhabit the snowy peaks of Olympus or the gloomy Tartarus within the depths of the wide-pathed Earth. Love then arose, most beautiful among the immortal gods, which who loosens the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and mortal men. [Hesiod, Theogony ]
According to Hesiod, first there is emptiness, then earth, and only then do the gods appear. And, when the gods do appear on the scene, they behave in a disorderly way, and often bend the operations of nature according to their whims. This all leaves much room for speculation about how the physical cosmos emerged, what it was composed of, and what gives it order.
https://www.utm.edu/staff/jfieser/class/110/1-presocratics.htm
So when we speak to people who believe that some sort of unguided abiogenesis occurred, it is important to understand that they are coming from the same headspace as the ancient Greeks. Most do not believe in a Creator, even if they believe in God or the gods they believe as the ancients did that the order that we see in the universe arose without any agency of the divine.
So Iām not here to tell someone what to believe or invest their time studying, and I am willing to think that just like the study of astrology led to astronomy, and alchemy led to chemistry. OOL research can lead to many useful discoveries even if it is based on ancient concepts that arenāt demonstrably real in any meaningful way.
Thereās no evidence that abiogenesis is impossible. In fact given that life exists and couldnāt have always existed, we should be extremely skeptical of any such inference of lifeās impossibility of origin.
No, contemporary OOL research is based chielfy on two observations. The continued success of the natural sciences at explaining physical phenomena, and on the observational reality that life is a physical and chemical phenomenon. Living cells are made of atoms obeying the laws of physics.
There is overwhelming historical precedent for thinking the explanation for lifeās origins will eventually become another feather in the cap of science, considering how many other observed phenomena science has explained with merely physical causes.
From the universeās expansion from an extremely hot and dense state, to the origin of our solar system and planet, to the formation of the atmosphere, the continents and the oceans. Including processes occurring in all life we know of. Consider the success of the physical and chemical sciences in explaining the fundamentals of growth, energy, and nutrition, the innumerable variants of cellular metabolism, and even the mechanism of inheritance, to the inexorable consequence of the mechanism of reproduction: biological evolution.
All things once thought the remit of inscrutable Gods creating the heavens and the Earth. People used to think (and some still do think) diseases and natural distasters like earthquakes and tsunamis are the consequence of sin leading to punishment from immaterial divine beings. That people with epileptic seizures are possessed and must be exorcised, or that infections and associated fevers(and hallucinations that accompany them) are caused by witchcraft or evil spirits.
The fantasy that lifeās origin will somehow turn out to be different from all the other phenomena that science has so far explained is what is a leftover from a pre-scientific age of fables and magical beings.
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That makes about as much sense as attributing my eating of grapes to the influence of ancient grape eaters in Mesopotamia.
What would Aristotle have me research? What would Plato think? Really?
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Ironic, when you @Geremy are coming from the same headspace as the ancient Jews, and Christianity derived from a Binitarian Jewish heresy
For example, the angel Metatron (who was believed to be Enoch after his ascent to heaven) is called the lesser YHWH in 3rd Enoch 12:5;
(5) And He called me THE LESSER YHWH in the presence of all His heavenly household; as it is written: āFor my name is in himā.
More reading/listening
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I doubt if Aristotle would have understood your research, at first glance at least since so much has been learned since then, but he would be quite familiar with the philosophical assumptions that it is based on. If you told him that you were an atomist in the Epicurean tradition who had a deeper insight into the workings of the atom he would have a general understanding of your thinking. 
A very concise history of the atomist philosophical tradition is mentioned in the linked article from Stanfordās online encyclopedia of philosophy, it sumās up the history this way:
The re-introduction of Greek and Roman atomism in the Renaissance, with the recovery (1417) and printing (1473) of Lucretiusā philosophical poem On the Nature of Things , introduced to a literate European audience a series of influential cosmological speculations that included a naturalistic account of the origin of species integrated into a non-teleological materialist cosmology that contrasted markedly with the received Scholastic, Aristotelian, and Augustinian-Platonic traditions. Into the eighteenth century, these speculations, and those drawn from other atomist sources (see the entry on natural philosophy in the Renaissance), were often in the background of novel early modern reflections on species origins and their possible transformation in time throughout the eighteenth century (Bowler 2003: chp. 2; Oldroyd 1996; Greene 1959).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolution-before-darwin/
Even when he was renaming the concept of a primordial spontaneous generation of life abiogenesis 150 years ago, Huxley explained his thoughts as a philosophical faith when he wrote:
Belief, in the scientific sense of the word, is a serious matter, and needs strong foundations. To say, therefore, in the admitted absence of evidence, that I have any belief as to the mode in which the existing forms of life have originated, would be using words in a wrong sense. But expectation is permissible where belief is not; and if it were given me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time to the still more remote period when the earth was passing through physical and chemical conditions, which it can no more see again than a man can recall his infancy, I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from not living matter. I should expect to see it appear under [257] forms of great simplicity, endowed, like existing fungi, with the power of determining the formation of new protoplasm from such matters as ammonium carbonates, oxalates and tartrates, alkaline and earthy phosphates, and water, without the aid of light. That is the expectation to which analogical reasoning leads me; but I beg you once more to recollect that I have no right to call my opinion anything but an act of philosophical faith.
https://mathcs.clarku.edu/huxley/CE8/B-Ab.html
This absence of scientific evidence is in fact much more profound today than it was in Huxleyās day. In Huxleyās day the belief that bacteria were simple bags of protoplasm led him and others to think that observable cells found in nature without nuclei could form spontaneously, modern OOL researchers are not under any such misconception, that spontaneous chemistry can create any observable form of life. An so their focus is on the imagined precursors of life none of us have ever seen. One ancient writer wrote:
Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
I simply accept the constraints for how biology can work must be based on actual biology that we can see, not the the purely hypothetical organisms OOL researchers have confidence must have existed in the past, but that can neither be explained based on existing evidence nor seen.
We can see the folly of this type of argument by simply substituting in any phenomenon science historically had yet to find the process or mechanism responsible for producing. For the longest time we did not have any evidence that there were even planets around other stars, and there were people seriously arguing that this was literally because they did not even exist, by Godās design. As previously mentioned, similar things were true for the mechanism of inheritance, the germ theory of disease, and the physical basis of life itself.
But the greatest irony in all this is that we are seeing a person make it who literally is positing something not only unseen, but fundamentally invisible and untestable is responsible for lifeās origin. Every single argument you are invoking to support the inference that lifeās origin must be fundamentally impossible applies equally well or better to your own position.
If us not presently being able to show how something occurred is supposed to compel us to conclude it couldnāt, then creationism must fall under the same swing of that sword.
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This seems obviously wrong.
The modern view of abiogenesis comes, at least in part, from the scientific evidence that life existed on earth very early, not too long after the early earth had cooled enough to allow life. This suggested that natural abiogenesis might be easier than had been previously assumed.
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I am quite okay with that, I just donāt like the idea of a single edged sword that only cuts down theistic beliefs as unscientific while elevating by default unscientific physicalist beliefs. It seems that the position that we donāt have scientific evidence that explains the origin of life is infinitely better than to say that there is scientific evidence for the existence of phenomenon when there really isnāt, and the proposed phenomenon probably doesnāt actually exist.
When I first began tracing the history of abiogenesis and discovered the philosophy of physicalism I decided that as a believer myself it would make sense to study the beliefs of others and show respect for them as opposed to attacking such beliefs themselves. Instead I am more than content to explain why I donāt think such philosophies have any fundamental truth based on my study of it.
As I understand it physicalism is a metaphysical argument against the fundamental reality of anything not explainable by physics. It attempts to use science as a logical filter to invalidate other metaphysical concepts, but accomplishes this only by undercutting itās own logical basis. For example if physicalism is true then the cause of the existence of the universe which can not be measured by physics, must have been physics. Unfortunately for physicalists, the only way to describe such unmeasurable physics is metaphysics, but since physicalism is an argument against the validity of metaphysics we have no reason to assume that the physicalist explanation is true. After all what could be more fundamental than the cause of the existence of the universe itself. However any physicalist explanation for the existence of the universe or even the absence of one, would be an example of a fundamental truth that exists beyond the ability of physics to validate. Since we can not use physics to demonstrate that the only explanation for the existence of physics that is acceptable to physicalists actually existed, we must accept that physicalism as a philosophy is unable to demonstrate its own reality in a way that is logically consistent, much less demonstrate the nonexistence of other explanations for the existence of reality.
So when I look at various hypotheses of abiogenesis I do so having already applied the logic of the physicalist philosophy that it assumes to be true, to physicalism itself and found it to be self refuting.
I am not a great philosopher by any means but I have found both atheist and religious philosophers who agree that physicalism and all it entails is unlikely to be true. A good example of an atheist philosopher who think physicalism is untrue is Thomas Nagel, who wrote the book, "Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly Falseāā.
Do not get me wrong, among the ancients the Greeks were special. Considering that all they had to work with was their critical thinking and observation of nature, their insights were sometimes uncanny and their questions perceptive. But with fire Prometheus brought the godās argumentativeness, so one can always find some Greek who was glancingly prescient to a given stream of modern thought. I agree with Steven Weinberg that modern science has no dependence on them, or any theology or much of philosophy for that matter, and has largely charted its own course.
https://www.amazon.com/Explain-World-Discovery-Modern-Science/dp/0062346660
As this is a tangent to the topic, I will leave it at that for my part.
With what specifically? That creationism falls under the very same sword youāre purporting to swing to cut down abiogenesis? That seems like an absurdly self-contradicory position to take since youāve also basically stated that youāre a creationist. Are we supposed to take this to imply you have a double standard, and that you do not personally submit to the logic of the arguments you subject other positions to?
What unscientific physicalist beliefs are you talking about? Who is it that holds āunscientific physicalist beliefsā? The claim that lifeās physical and chemical origins is impossible is not a scientifically supported conclusion.
Iām with you this far. It is better to say we donāt have scientific evidence that(fully, at least) explains the origin of life, than to say there is evidence for the existence of a phenomenon when there really isnāt.
Itās just that it is false to say there is no evidence for the physical and chemical origin of life. There is such evidence. Scant little, but it does exist. For example: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/ast.2008.0280
From what do you extract this conclusion that the āproposed phenomenon probably doesnāt actually existā, and what specifically is the proposed phenomenon youāre referring to? If youāre speaking of the existence of an RNA world as a historically early stage in lifeās known history, or lifeās physical and chemical origins, no thing you have brought or argued in this thread can rationally support the conclusion that it āprobablt doesnāt actually existā.
Great. Are you aware that one does not require adopting the metaphysics of physicalism to think that lifeās origin is likely to have a physical and chemical explanation?
No, physicalism is a position in ontology. It is the proposition that only physical things exist. It is not an āargumentā against anything. Proponents of physicalism presumably would give arguments for why they are physicalists, and Iām sure some of those arguments are actually counter-arguments or responses to various non-physicalist positions and arguments. But I also think youāre actually talking about proponents of scientism, not merely physicalism.
But the inference that lifeās origin is likely to have a physical and chemical explanation does neither require adopting scientism, nor physicalism. Those are total red herrings.
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I would add a third: the first life was extremely simple, and stayed simple for billions of years. If abiogenesis is true then we would expect to only find simple life early on.
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With what specifically?
I am comfortable living in the real universe where science has neither discovered nor demonstrated the fundamental causes of all phenomena after a few centuries of research.
That creationism falls under the very same sword youāre purporting to swing to cut down abiogenesis?
It actually doesnāt, unless you have in mind young earth creationism which assumes time constraints that lack empirical support from known physics, in much the same way that abiogenesis assumes processes that lack empirical support from known chemistry and physics. Can it demonstrated that this phenomenon called life is likely the result of chance, or natural law what? If not why should anyone assume that life spontaneously emerged from non life?
Theists who believe in the God of the bible believe that life has always existed in the person of God. If this belief is true then the question isnāt what is the origin of life it is what is the origin of cells.
That seems like an absurdly self-contradicory position to take since youāve also basically stated that youāre a creationist. Are we supposed to take this to imply you have a double standard, and that you do not personally submit to the logic of the arguments you subject other positions to?
I subject all positions to the same criteria, as I see it there are three commonly held positions all of religious origin:
- The universe has all of the powers attributed to God, it is neither alive nor conscious but it in some inscrutable way creates life and consciousness.
- The universe is in some inscrutable way conscious and life is but a wave that emerges from that proto panpsychism.
- Life always existed in the person of God, and life and the universe as we experience it is just the result of God sharing the ability to be a conscious living being with us.
Of all of the above claims the one requiring the most from unguided natural processes is option 1. The fact that comparing what option 1 claims unguided natural processes are capable of, to evidence of how natural processes actually work in nature results in those claims not being supported by the available evidence isnāt a double standard, it is just how the evidence flushes out.
What unscientific physicalist beliefs are you talking about?
Gradual primordial spontaneous generation of life aka abiogenesis, the eternal universe, the multiverse and other philosophical claims based on the belief that the philosophy of physicalism is in some objective way true.
W ho is it that holds āunscientific physicalist beliefsā?
Everyone has some unscientific beliefs, be they moral, social, political, religious, humanist, or in this case physicalist. If one believes in something that isnāt supported by scientific evidence it is in fact an unscientific belief, even if it is actually true. Philosophers have demonstrated the opposing view called logical positivism that all true beliefs are scientific in nature to be self refuting, that is to say easily defeated by its own logic.
The claim that lifeās physical and chemical origins is impossible is not a scientifically supported conclusion.
We need to drill down on this statement a little, if you mean to say that life as we know it is a physical phenomenon that conforms to physics and chemistry, I then would agree with you. If however you mean to affirm that biological organization is just a natural consequence of mindless processes of chemistry and physics then that would be an opinion that not only goes beyond but actually contradicts available scientific evidence. I also do not affirm that there is scientific evidence that unguided abiogenesis is impossible, just that there isnāt evidence that it is possible, nor any logical (as in mathematical) reason to believe that is possible. It very well may possible, in the same way that Miguel Alcubierreās starship may be possible, there just isnāt evidence that either are possible.
From what do you extract this conclusion that the āproposed phenomenon probably doesnāt actually existā, and what specifically is the proposed phenomenon youāre referring to? If youāre speaking of the existence of an RNA world as a historically early stage in lifeās known history, or lifeās physical and chemical origins, no thing you have brought or argued in this thread can rationally support the conclusion that it āprobably doesnāt actually existā.
I have already spoken to the lack of evidence taken from chemistry that RNA molecules can form due abiotic chemistry, and to the problems with RNA error rates. So I might as well point out more contrary evidence this time from mathematics. In a paper entitled, āInsuperable problems of the genetic code initially emerging in an RNA Worldā, one OOL researcher used differential equations to compare various speculative models one based on the inexplicable spontaneous generation of RNA, and the second the even more inexplicable from a chemistry standpoint spontaneous generation of RNA couple to peptide, he writes:
The direct evolution of inherited genetic information coupled to encoded functional proteins, as is observed in real-world molecular biology, is far more plausible than any scenario in which there was an initial RNA World of ribozymes sophisticated enough to operate a genetic code. The preservation of encoded information processing during the historically necessary transition from any ribozymally operated code to the ancestral aaRS enzymes of molecular biology appears to be impossible, rendering the notion of an RNA Coding World scientifically superfluous. While this conclusion is grounded in an understanding of exactly how the dynamical architecture of molecular biology can solve the computational chicken-egg paradox of code evolution, it leaves a host of problems concerning the evolution of the complex apparatus of translation unresolved.
A huge part of the problem with most OOL models is that they often treat the cell as if it is the result of chemicals simply bumping into each other, when that is obviously not the case. I think that itās reasonable to conclude that all current mathematical models of protein synthesis are only reductionist simplifications of the processes involved, nevertheless one model that has been especially useful in discovering how biology works is the model of the cell as a Turing machine. First I think it is worth watching a short video about how a Turing machine works, and then I will talk about why it is such an effective method to bring order to the molecular chaos of a microscopic environment in cells.
The parts of a Turing machine demonstrated in the video above using a slightly more formal terms are the
- The instruction table which provides the key to how the computer should translate the information on the input tape into the information on the output tape.
- The tape contains linear blocks of discrete information stored in the input side of the tape, corresponding to discrete actions or states (as in state of mind) the head should take as it prints out a tape of discrete blocks of information. Each block of output information or state is determined by its corresponding block of input tape by the head.
- The state register stores the state that the Turing machine is in as determined by the input tape. There are a limited number of states, including a starting state, and various discrete information processing states, and a state in which information processing halts.
- The head which has at least two units one for scanning the input tape, and another for printing out the output tape.
With the characteristics of a Turing machine firmly in mind we can demonstrate protein synthesis to be a computational process, dependent on the inherent computational logic of the entire process as opposed to only a self ordering process predetermined by the chemical substrate. The table below should be helpful in understanding how this conceptual model applies:
| Instruction Table | DNA Codon Table |
|---|---|
| Input Tape | DNA |
| State Register | RNA |
| Head | Ribosome |
| Special starting state | AUG (or other appropriate start codon) |
| Halting | UUA,(or other appropriate stop codon) |
| Processing | All codons that code for amino acids. |
| Output Tape | Proteins |
The similarities between protein synthesis and the Turing machine, which is just a mathematical abstraction developed by Turing back in the 1930s designed to replicate the actions of a thinking person with a machine, before the discovery of the DNA helix and the genetic code is consistent with the hypothesis that the principles of computation where discovered by computer scientists and mathematicians as opposed to invented by them. It also explains the algorithmic behavior of proteins since they can be modeled as finite state machines that are manufactured by Turing machines.
Based on the above it should be obvious that ribosomes are also finite state machines, which is something that has been rigorously articulated by mathematicians, an example of such an detailed explanation is linked below:
https://faculty.math.illinois.edu/~kkirkpat/Oct2018BeckmanTalk.pdf
The challenge this poses to OOL theorists who believe in unguided abiogenesis is pretty obvious. We all know that computational systems can be designed and we know that they exist in nature. So the existence of computation in nature is wholly consistent with the hypothesis that just as the computation in computers was the result of living beings designing a machine to perform the computations automatically that normally only occur within human minds, the mathematical computations that are universally found in biology and that actually build cells are simply replicating the processes that originally occurred within a conscious mind of some sort. For strictly philosophical reasons OOL theorists generally ignore this possibility, despite it being the only known cause for the existence of computational systems, to investigate the possibility that cellular function can emerge from the computational properties of intracellular components such as ribozymes, and proteins which do have some some computational abilities as independent finite state machines, just not enough to run cellular processes.
While many feel that unguided abiogenesis is an reasonable explanation for the existence of life I think that is more a product of their personal beliefs not scientific evidence. Speaking frankly to his readers, on pg 391 of his book āThe Logic of Chanceā Eugene Koonin wrote:
The origin of life is one of the hardest problems in all of science, but it is also one of the most important. Origin-of-life research has evolved into a lively, inter-disciplinary field, but other scientists often view it with skepticism and even derision. This attitude is understandable and, in a sense, perhaps justified, given the ādirtyā rarely mentioned secret: Despite many interesting results to its credit, when judged by the straightforward criterion of reaching (or even approaching) the ultimate goal, the origin of life field is a failure ā we still do not have even a plausible coherent model, let alone a validated scenario, for the emergence of life on Earth. Certainly, this is due not to a lack of experimental and theoretical effort, but to the extraordinary intrinsic difficulty and complexity of the problem. A succession of exceedingly unlikely steps is essential for the origin of life, from the synthesis and accumulation of nucleotides to the origin of translation; through the multiplication of probabilities, these make the final outcome seem almost like a miracle.
All of which supports the conclusion, as does the earlier points that I made that unguided abiogenesis likely never actually occurred. Of course we are still here, so we got here somehowā¦
But you havenāt said anything that would explain why the central enzyme in protein synthesis is a ribozyme. Why is that?
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Where are the experiments demonstrating the actions of a supernatural deity forming life? If you reject abiogenesis because there is a lack of experimental observations, then why donāt you reject a supernatural origin of life on the same grounds?
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What does that have to do with what you agreed with?
Of course it does if the premise upon which youāre claiming to have ruled out abiogenesis is that it has not been observed or demonstrated, then not having observed the supernatural creation of anything must be ruled out too. You canāt just make up different rules for different hypotheses.
If ācan it be demonstrated at this moment in time?ā is the crucial criterion upon which the truth or falsity of a hypothesis is to be judged, then the supernatural creation of life is dead and buried.
Now, as for whether there is reason to think life is the result of a physical and chemical process, I have already given both evidence and arguments that imply this. That life is a physical phenomenon subject to natural law in both itās constituents and functions(including both the fact that life reproduces and evolves physically), and the historical success of science in explaining the origins and functions of innumerable other physical phenomena relevant to life supports the inference lifeās origin will also be solved as another physical process eventually.
Then thereās a broader context of natural history, into which lifeās physical and chemical origin sits very well, beginning with the condensation of matter into atoms following big bang nucleosynthesis, stars, galaxies, and planets following the universeās expansion and cooling, that stars churn out the elements of which life is made in large quantities, and that once life existed, it continued to evolve and diversify. This whole picture implies lifeās origin is just another āstepā or āeventā in this extremely long process of physical change and increasing complexity of emergent physical phenomena. At some point the universe contained basically nothing more complex than hydrogen, helium, and beryllium nuclei, before that it was subatomic particles. Billions of years later it contained stars, planets with geology and atmospheres.
Then thereās more direct evidence from life previously mentioned. Evidence for the existence of an RNA world which you seem to give no explanation for (you seem to just ignore it and focus instead on the fact that we donāt yet know how that arose and the error rates of ribozymes evolved by artificial selection but not selected for replication fidelity, which researchers have already stated they will be selecting for in future experiments).
Then thereās evidence in the form of the consilience between the distribution in the frequency of amino acid usage in the most ancient, ancestral nodes in the phylogenetic trees of universally conserved proteins, and the kinds of amino acids most abundantly produced in abiotic organic chemistry experiments, and also observed in carbonaceous chondrite meteorites. The further we go back in time, the more the proteins become like the āabioticā distribution. This same abiotic distribution is also inferred from multiple different methods analyzing genetic code and translation system evolution. The genetic code appears to have begun by using the must abundant abiotically produced amino acids, implying they really were produced abiotically.
Then thereās the sorts of functions these ancient proteins have (core metabolism, genetic replication, and translation/transcription), the sorts of co-factors they use (inorganic mineral clusters, metals that would be highly abundant on the early Earth, nucleotide derivatives).
All of this heavily implies living cells of the sort we see in the world today, originated and evolved through some physical and chemical process we still donāt understand, and at some point went through an RNA-world-like stage with RNA constituting the primary genetic material and being responsible for most catalytic functions.
Ahem, excuse me. Above you complained that a metabolism, or an RNA molecule, isnāt life because itās not a self-reproducing cell. Allow me to here complain that God isnāt a cellular life-form either, so if the law is that cells only come from cells, God must be out of the picture. Now since we know cells can not have always existed, it naturally follows they must have originated in another way than cell division. The first cells emerging through some sort of physical and chemical process is one such candidate explanation. And at least, in contrast to the God hypothesis which can only be supported by faith, the physical and chemical origin of life is testable in principle.
I know of no person who believes that. God is defined as omnipotent and omniscient, and perfectly morally good. I know of no person who believes that of the universe. The universe is not omnipotent (it clearly canāt do everything), nor omniscient (itās not even clear what it means to say the universe āknowsā anything), and it is at best totally morally indifferent.
Life, a physical phenomenon, having arisen through a physical and chemical process, is not a religious position. Itās an inference from the data I mentioned above.
Particular physical phenomena arise given particular physical conditions. Hurricanes, as a far from equilibrium dissipative structures only form under certain conditions at liquid-gas interfaces and temperature gradients. They donāt form inside the Earthās crust, or in outer space. Life is another example of a far from equilibrium dissipative structure, and probably requires some even more unique and special conditions to form. It is entirely possible there is some undiscovered (or unexplored or poorly understood) chemical and physical interface, where another such disequilibrium is driving the physical and chemical origin of life.
And the next two options are the ones requiring the most from invisible and untestable divine beings described in ancient fables, which also detail and expound on demonic possessions, exorcisms, angelic visitations, witchcraft, and evil spirits as explanations for things like diseases caused by physical neurological disorders, mental health disorders, and infections from microorganisms.
What natural processes are those, where have they been tested, under what ranges of conditions, and what fraction of the total space of possible and plausible physical and geological settings were explored in those tests?
You canāt extract the conclusion that the town contains no people named Heinrich by only taking a quick glance through a window of the nearest house. Thereās so much more work that needs to be done, and you want to pretend itās already all over.
Not an unscientific conclusion for reasons I have stated multiple times. Thereās evidence this actually happened, and frankly it also makes the most sense in the context of already known natural history as just another in a long line of increasingly complex, emergent physical phenomena.
Ironically there are even some religious people who think the universe was created so as to give rise to life. That the laws of physics, and initial conditions of the universe, were fine tuned so that physical processes in the universe would eventually result in stars, galaxies, and solar systems, that those stars would produce the elements of which life is made, that those elements would combine to form planets with continents and atmospheres, and that physical processes on those planets would give rise to life, and that this life would then go on to evolve.
Even though I donāt believe Gods exist myself, that view makes a lot more sense in the context of known natural history, than the idea that all those processes would run up to the formation of planets with geology, oceans, and atmospheres, and thenā¦ nothing. No, God has to intervene and kick-start the engine again. Like a broken dawn lawn mower God has to start pulling on the starter cord to get it running again so life can evolve.
Youāre welcome to take that argument up with people who believe that.
Thatās not really the definition of logical positivism(again I think youāre speaking of scientism), but since I am also not a proponent of logical positivism, nor scientism, I canāt be bothered following that rabbit hole.
No, it contradicts nothing, and there is evidence for it. Already mentioned.
We already know lifeās origin is possible. Possibility is a rather low burden. There is nothing in principle that prevents the spontaneous coming together of the atoms and molecules of life to form a modern complex cell, just by chance, itās just very very unlikely, in the same way it is possible but very very unlikely for all the molecules of air in your living room to spontaneously sort themselves with all the oxygen in one corner.
Thereās not a single physical interaction or chemical reaction we can imagine in such an event that isnāt strictly possible. There is no sort of law of nature or physical force that stands in the way of something like this. Of course, given itās very very low probability, nobody is seriously advancing that hypothesis for lifeās origin. But is it possible? Yes, definitely.
Which I have all rebutted. āLack of evidenceā is only evidence of absence if you have reason to think you have exhaustively explored the relevant search space. We have not, not by a long shot. I have already referenced multiple articles that show this in considerable detail. There is little worth complaining about āRNA error ratesā for molecules not evolved under selection against errors, and the possibility of replication-before-self-replication undermines your hand-wave to that pop-sci article.
I also have to mention again that youāve repeatedly ignored evidence that an RNA world existed, which really just further undermines the inference you are trying to erect on the basis of ālack of evidenceā.
Uhm, dude. Thatās a paper about a model for the emergence of the translation system in an RNA-peptide world, not against there having been an RNA world where the primary genetic material was RNA(and where RNA also played a much broader and more fundamental role in catalysis). Heās simply arguing about a particular scenario where the first aminoacyl-tRNA-synthetases are envisioned to have gradually taken over the roles of ribozymes. Heās arguing translation must have emerged in itās most rudimentary form simultaneously with the emergence of replication. Heās not saying there was never an RNA world, just that it likely involved small, initially random peptides to begin with, and that these from the beginning took roles in both replication and translation.
And that scenario actually makes MORE chemical sense, since messy chemistry is more plausible than pure chemistry at the origin of life. Since it is actually more difficult to imagine a sort of very selective process of chemistry that can produce pure RNA (both the sugar and nitrogenuous bases) without also producing a lot of other nitrogen-containing compounds, such as amino acids, the scenario described is not more but actually less āinexplicableā.
Never come across an article that thinks cells emerge and result from chemicals simply bumping into each other. Iām calling BS on that one.
None those challenges have anything to do with whether proteins can be considered finite state machines.
Quite a lot of computation is happening in organisms other than just humans.
No, the reason OOL researchers arenāt chasing your pet hypothesis that life was wished into existence by an immaterial, non-cellular but living and divine computer, is that it is both ridiculous and isnāt supported by evidence. And computational systems such as animal brains actually evolved. And computation, by all evidence, appears to require a material substrate. I guess God must have been a cellular lifeform after all, or is āonly accept what can be demonstrated with evidenceā now suddenly out of fashion again?
Thank you for quoting Eugene Kooninās personal beliefs not based on scientific evidence. But heās just wrong there. Particularly his statement that:
Despite many interesting results to its credit, when judged by the straightforward criterion of reaching (or even approaching) the ultimate goal, the origin of life field is a failure ā we still do not have even a plausible coherent model, let alone a validated scenario, for the emergence of life on Earth. Certainly, this is due not to a lack of experimental and theoretical effort
Thatās just as wrong when he says it as it is when you do. There really have been a dearth of serious experimental effort. And theoretical efforts are as always limited by computation speed. The more realistic, larger, and longer-term you want to simulate relevant processes, the more computationally demanding they become. We simply donāt have the technology to accurately simulate real environments at the scale and level of detail that would be necessary to make any headway on the origin of life question. That means weāre consigned to real experiments and simplified mathematical models that are difficult to relate to real chemistry. But on the experimental front, the vast majority of experiments in prebiotic synthesis have been simple one-pot or synthetic multi-step reactions designed only with the goal of trying to produce a particular type of organic molecule (such as RNA nucleotides), with the number of experiments attempting to actually recreate a full-size, realistic, and plausible prebiotic environment, that runs on relevant timescales, being countable on less than even one finger. Itās zero.
For all the reasons mentioned, that support fails.
And on the last point, we have evidence there was an RNA world, and that must have got there somehow.
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So I think it would be useful to focus on a single point, and that is can a cell without enzymes actually function? I think that the real problem is that a real cell that has enzymes is at least a hundred million times more efficient at controlling its own chemistry than any imaginary RNA world cell, and incalculably more efficient than any thing seen in actual chemical experiments that could be described as a precursor to ribozymes by theorists.
In the supplemental materials section of his paper entitled, āInterdependence, Reflexivity, Fidelity, Impedance Matching, and the Evolution of Genetic Codingā, written by the same author (Carter) to advocate his model of the RNA peptide writes:
Proteins are widely appreciated to be superior catalysts, but it is worth emphasizing the basis for and quantitative extent of their superiority. Wills (Wills 2016) has noted that because amino acids are on average less than half the size of nucleotide bases, and because there are twenty possibilities, rather than four, the active site of a protein typically offers around 32 bits of information for its computational specification (ādesignā) compared with the approximately 5 bits for the active site of a ribozyme (Wills 2014; Wills, et al. 2015; Wills 2016). The number of ways of assembling the amino acids that occupy the active site of a typical protein enzyme is therefore between millions and billions of times greater than the number of ways to assemble bases into the active site of an equivalent RNA ribozyme. That combinatorial superiority of the ability of proteins to engineer nanoscale chemistry does not take into account the increased volume of the backbone elements in nucleic acids, which doubtless enhances the advantage of protein catalysts by allowing more compact assembly of reactive species around substrates. Compared with ribozymes, proteins can therefore exert ~100 million times finer control over local molecular chemistry.
So if we reduce the efficiency of any system to 1/100,000,000 of itās current function, should we expect it to function? We obviously wouldnāt, but what about if we reduced the efficiency to 1/2,000,000 of itās current efficiency, that is a whole lot more efficient than 1/100,000,000 the level of control, should we then expect it to function? Again I donāt think that any engineer is capable of constructing a logically coherent argument that such a claim is possible, but that is precisely what the RNA peptide world claims. Carter is claiming that since the RNA peptide model has 50 times more efficient control of its chemistry than the RNA world that it is more plausible than the RNA world alone, which sounds like a reasonable hypothesis until we realize that he is arguing that a chemical system that had only 1/2,000,000 as the level of control over its own chemistry as the model we see in nature in some unexplained way controlled its own chemistry well enough to survive, reproduce and function as a prototypical cell, something that based on his own math should be a practical impossibility. This is what I mean when I state that these models of abiogenesis contradict evidence taken from nature of how chemistry or physics actually work.