@Thacker , have you ever thought about what goes on inside cells? The business of enzymes is speeding up chemical reactions. As a rule, enzymes speed things up by many orders of magnitude. Thus, everything that happens in a cell happens much, much more rapidly than would otherwise occur. This, along with the inescapable energy flow that accompanies metabolic processes, paints a picture wherein the insides of a cell are much like, say, a hurricane.
Much like, but not exactly. Image a hurricane with wind speeds in the tens or hundreds of thousands of kph. That’s the inside of a cell. And, believe it or not, such a maelstrom is absolutely essential for the assembly of all that incredible complexity you see in cells.
The “membraneless protocell confined by a heat flow” experiment (Floroni et al., Nature Physics, 2025) did not generate life or new genetic information. What the authors actually did was remove the working molecular components of life from their cellular context and hold them in a precisely controlled microfluidic pore under a temperature gradient of about 30–70 °C. The thermal flow replaced the role of a membrane by physically confining a cell-free expression system—a laboratory mixture containing purified ribosomes, polymerases, tRNAs, nucleotides, amino acids, and cofactors. When DNA templates were introduced into this environment, normal gene expression occurred: transcription of DNA into RNA and translation of that RNA into a fluorescent reporter protein.
In other words, the team very carefully replicated the cytoplasmic conditions of a living cell, then replaced the membrane with an engineered thermal chamber. The system functioned only because it already contained all the machinery of life. It’s the biochemical equivalent of bench-testing a diesel turbo by blowing air through it; it shows the parts can still run when externally powered, not that the turbo built itself or that the process explains how it was made.
Along this line, I think a lot of CG animations of cellular activity (particular those used by ID sources) give people a false impression of what goes on inside cells. Such videos usually depict a highly ordered, methodical, and precise process. Whereas the actual activity is far more chaotic.
This is also where analogies tend to break down when comparing cellular activity versus computers or other machines.
Irrelevant. The point is the thermal gradient collected and confined the constituents into a narrow space so their functions could proceed.
Exactly. The temperature gradient in the pore did the ordering. Mere heat exchange across the pore.
Yep. The flow of heat across the pore. Heat is kinetic energy. An energy flow created functional organization, an organization which was absent when heat did not flow across the pore.
It didn’t function until heat flowed across the pore. That’s the point. That a heat-flow did the organizing part of bringing the components together so they could react and begin their functions. An energy flow created functional organization.
All irrelevant since the experiment isn’t purported to have demonstrated the origin of life. It merely debunks your now demonstrably wrong assertion that energy flow can’t create functional organization. It clearly can.
What is the amount of functional organization/information in a painted, furnished house, and how does that amount compare to the amount of functional organization/information contained in a scattering of wood and nails from a lumberyard? What are even the parameters of the problem, that the results depend on? How would I begin computing this “functional organization/information” quantity enough to actually speak of it scientifically in the current context? Something tells me it’s not an actual evaluation, but rather just consulting what either structure feels like to one or all of us subjectively. But I’ll gladly stand corrected.
Well, it’s definitely the case that all self-replicating systems we have evidence of are chemical[1], and it is the case that all data-storage systems we have evidence of are chemical[1:1]. We have plenty enough evidence of chemical pathways leading to such structures from simpler chemical substances. We even emulate the environments known to yield them, when we are in need of them and recovering them in the wild is too expensive. Of course, we also have no evidence whatsoever that anything other than the laws of physics ultimately govern those reactions. I’m at a bit of a loss as to what it is exactly that’s missing here.
A safe assumption to make, frankly, seeing as we have no evidence to suggest an alternative. What exactly is non-undirected chemistry?
We do not find new, functional, or self-preserving code in nature. All we find is chemicals following chemical interactions. There is nothing premature or unreasonable in assuming that how we observe chemicals behaving now is a consequence of their inherent structure, considering we have nothing else to go on, and that the predictions made under that assumption continue to accurately predict observations going into the future.
If you want to say that chemical behaviour is due in some part to something other than the physics that underlies it, the onus is on you to demonstrate that the predictions made assuming this additional factor can compete in accuracy with those made without it enough to justify the conceptual cost of that additional entity.
by some interpretation of “chemical”; they are certainly material↩︎↩︎
Look, I’m 100% with you, I agree, it was likely humans, no question. My point, however, is… it wasn’t brain dead humans, or absurdly unintelligent humans who did it, someone thought about it, planed a scheme to get it done, prepared the site, selected the rocks suitable, obtained the tools necessary to accomplish the task, had a model of what he intended to make, and went about methodically chipping all the rock that didn’t belong in the form he intended to create.
What I’ve just described is intelligence and the process by which all intelligent creations are produced. As such, it stands as a good standard for 1) the identification of what might be or not a product of Intelligence, and 2) one which can be used for this subject we’re discussing; some constructs, like coding, decoding, transmitting, error correcting informational systems, like the Statues defy unguided, non-intelligent sourcing, to even float such a theory is laughably dismissed.
With regard to inference to the best explanation we certainly cannot say that a designer is the best explanation of life without examining it. And yet that is exactly what ID does - there is no attempt to establish that there us a likely design explanation - or even come up with anything but the vaguest of explanations, which really explains very little.
Even if we only credit the presumed designer with creating the first life, Is the idea that an undesigned designer with the capability and the desire to create life on Earth really more likely than naturalistic abiogenesis? It is certainly not obviously so. And there seems to be no attempt to establish that it is likely.
Is this designer itself alive? If it is then we must presume abiogenesis elsewhere - but that hardly seems a satisfactory move for either side. But if it is not alive, what is it? And if it is presumed to be some completely unknown entity surely that must count greatly against it’s likelihood.
And what if intent? We are not given any reason why the presumed designer is likely to want to create life. While it is possible to come up with speculative ideas there are none that we can say are likely.
So it seems to me that the vague “explanation” offered by ID is very poor indeed - and arguably inferior to naturalistic abiogenesis.
In the context of distinguishing carved statues from natural wind/water erosion, we do this based on preexisting knowledge of those respective processes, understanding of the physical form of the outputs and pattern recognition applied to the objects in question. In most cases, simply viewing the respective form (geometry) of the objects in question is enough.
If you want to apply the same approach to inferring some designer insofar as biological organisms go, then I would start by asking what preexisting knowledge do we have with a designer creating biological organisms. At the very least, we need some sort of hypothesis as to how a designer went about doing things as a starting point. Without that, we don’t have anything to work with.