Szostack is one of the few OOL researchers (in my opinion) who is not desperately trying to prove a point, and has not (in anything I have read, at least) denigrated the ideas of others. He has even published a paper that is very forthcoming about the problems facing a naturalist explanation of abiogenesis.
Thanks for you interest in my presentation. You might be interested in this paper and in this blog post.
Go to here: Random Letter Sequence Generator
Set it to length=50
Generate your own personal miracle. Repeatedly.
The paper you quote only applies to a particular type of metabolism first models called GARD models. The authors themselves have published papers subsequently showing that alternative forms of metabolism (such as reflectively autocatalytic) exhibit much more âopen-endedâ evolution. And then it is of course true, as they say, that the âjobâ of the metabolic reactions isnât necessarily to evolve by themselves, but to yield the substrates that can combine into simple polymers, which could in turn evolve.
Other papers have been published that claim to rebut the results in the one you reference, such as: Lancet D, Zidovetzki R, Markovitch O. 2018 Systems protobiology: origin of life in lipid catalytic networks. J. R. Soc. Interface 15: 20180159. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2018.0159
Of course, one issue with all this work is that it is mathematical modeling. And the extent to which any given real metabolic reaction correspond to the GARD, or other autocatalytic models of metabolism, isnât really known either. This is why claims that anything has been falsified in anything but an extremely narrow sense is premature.
You need to engage intellectually, rather than polemically. The context of my remark, under discussion by Joshua, was abiogenesis, a specific event.
So your random letter sequence generator needs to generate life, or at least the explanation of it⌠repeatedly. How often has it done that for you? However, Iâd settle for an easier target: how often have you used it to generate a 50-character string of prose in any known language?
That, of course, depends on how its ârandomnessâ is established: random number generators only simulate randomness.
How is that at all relevant? Abiogenesis is supposed to be problematic BECAUSE it has a probability of (say) 10^-50. Right?
If itâs probability of 10^-50 is not what makes it problematic, then in what way does it make sense to invoke itâs probability of 10^-50 as any kind of important point?
If we are supposed to reason to the effect that abiogenesis is implausible, because it has a probability of 10^-50 or lower, then this rests on the presumption that events with probabilities 10^-50 donât happen. Thatâs what is supposed to make it implausible, itâs low probability of occurrence?
That, of course, depends on how its ârandomnessâ is established: random number generators only simulate randomness.
How is the outcome of a pseudo-random number generator, which works deterministically from some seed, substantially different from (say) one that use atmospheric or thermal noise as itâs input? One could of course just request a âtrulyâ random sequence from some service based on quantum effects.
The thing is we only have one set of circumstances to analyze, which is 'life".
lsg hvc ucf xvu oah bxf oyu nru ohw wwp lqa gll xlm pqn zsd hef ieo acl ekd rch tvr xkw swl drv ucl fxs ubf viz eea xpq oey mjx cjk uoq yfm cgg dvp luf yws fko osy dxx rvb gga yax omu pxx kcd ljw hoj
Thatâs one set of letters. If that were the only set we had to analyze, could we say it was incredibly improbable that we happened to have that particular set?
It only looks specific because you are specifying it after the event. You have to specify it before it happens if you want to use that âspecific eventâ kind of reasoning.
The fact is that probability only has meaning with respect to ignorance of a particular set of circumstances. The random letter calculator (why did anyone think that was worth setting up?) can be predicted to have a 100% chance of generating a 50 letter sequence. It can also be predicted to have a 0% chance of generating a 50-letter word, because none exist in English.
Presumably the number of three-letter English words can be extracted from a dictionary, and that number compared with the total number of possible three-letter sequences to give probabilities that any partiicular number of English words will occur in a single run. We could also predict the likelihood any particular word.
We then discover that âeggâ has appeared on the test run. Since there is no ignorance about its appearance, its probability is, trivially, 1. But that does not tell us how often it will turn up.
But we could still, using our previous figures, estimate the probability of its happening again under the same circumstances - producing a very low figure - and since the circumstances are the same, we can use the same figure to deduce how likely it was to have appeared the first time, before the event.
That, of course, presupposes ignorance of the actual causes at work (for chance is not a cause, but only a measure of ignorance about cause), meaning that we have assumed each letter appears equally frequently. But if we werenât ignorant in that way, there would be no point in a probability calculation anyway. We could instead simply examine whether the causes available would ever produce âeggâ, and when, and the probability would be either 1, or 0.
For example, if God or a biased algorithm intends âeggâ to appear on this run, the advance probability will be, to him,1. But to us it, ignorant of that fact, it will be whatever figure we calculated.
Iâm not following you. @nwrickert has stated the point more succinctly than I did. Any given result of the letter generator is equally improbable. We only have one result of the processes which led to life available to examine. How can we tell that our result is more improbable than any other possible result?
Youâre not followwing me because youâre assuming that @Rumraket brought me into this conversation by representimng my position. He didnât.
My original comment was to deny the possibility of absolute probabilities, and that larger universes increase those probabilities. I started off by asking where the figure being used had come from.
He took that as a claim for some some absolute probability on my part.
I understand. I also didnât respond to you because I believe you think abiogenesis has a probability of 10^-50. My argument was with the principle of it. The idea of ruling out that something canât happen because it has a low probability. I donât think that can be done, and it is trivial to give examples of events with incredibly low probabilities happening.
You think it highly improbable that God exists. 
(Donât rule it out.)
Ah - your argument was based on your unfounded belief about me. I prefer to rely on data.
I never made any such assumption. I simply couldnât understand what you wrote, at some length. You donât seem to be grasping my point either, or at least youâre not addressing it.
You misunderstand. I should have said that I didnât actually think you believed that, so that is not the reason for why I responded to you.