On the Design Disquisitions YouTube channel, I’ve posted a new video where I recommend several books of interest, specifically pro-ID literature. Most of the suggestions may be familiar to you, but hopefully there are a few that you’ve not read before. I also give a brief summary of the content of each book. I don’t Read More…
Origin Of Life
Origin of Life: Brian Miller’s take on debate between James Tour and Dave Farina
From the intro: “Miller and Anderson boil it all down and argue that Tour is right and Farina wrong on multiple levels.”
Did the Great Oxygenation Event 2.5 bya support or suppress life?
So if the value of oxygen is dose-dependent, life probably had even less time to work with to become large and complex.
“Professor Dave” goes after eminent chemist James Tour
Organic chemist Royal Truman: I found the ad hominems vulgar and no substitute for an understanding of what Prof. Tour has been explaining. The evidence Prof. D. presented was ridiculously superficial and misleading. If I were him, I’d get rid of this video, since this is a pure gift for Prof. Tour.
Granville Sewell on origin of life as a provably unsolvable problem
Sewell: I cannot think of anything in all of science that can be stated with more confidence than that a few unintelligent forces of physics alone could not have rearranged the basic particles of physics into Apple iPhones.
Claim: We are making headway with the origin of life
The article is an interesting summary of the various hypotheses on offer but it’s not like there are any big breakthroughs. However, actual breakthroughs are hardly the point. From a materialist perspective, the point is to keep up the pursuit of a random, non-intelligent origin of life. That’s all the success that is really required.
If photosynthesis could really be as old as life itself…
Well, that’s good news for the hope of finding life on other planets! But researchers hoping to rush in and save Darwinism should know that if the earliest organisms could photosynthesize, an intelligent origin of life is virtually certain.
A contradiction in Charles Marshall’s “white smoker” origin-of-life argument?
Paul Nelson: … unless I misunderstand (always a live possibility), we’re back to postulating a “freak environment,” meaning the OOL explanation is a one-off event after all. The chemical determinism of hundreds of thousands, or millions of alkaline chimneys operating in parallel disappears, and we’re back to one very lucky setting.
New origin of life thesis: Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) wasn’t actually a single cell
Marshall favors horizontal gene transfer as a key method of early development because ancestor–descendant evolution is a “very slow” (42:25) evolutionary process. HGT among multiple independent lineages, by contrast, allows a “vast exchange of information,” thus sharing innovations and leading to faster development. Okay. And in the midst of all that, Dawkins’s Selfish Gene got lost in a crowd somewhere and was never heard from again.
James Tour tackles the origin of information
Also known as the information enigma re the origin of life.
Minimal synthetic cell turns out to be an argument against naturalist origin of life, says biomedical engineer
Rob Stadler: Abiogenesis [random origin of life] advocates claim that life started with “protocells” because extant life is far too complex to have started by natural processes. But, all of our efforts to simplify extant life to produce a “protocell” have shown us that extant life is about as simple as it can be.
Researchers: Lightening strikes, not just comets, played a vital role in origin of life
But then a question arises: There are plenty of lightning strikes. Why isn’t life always coming into existence? Why does it only ever come from previous life?
Researchers: Surface bubbles could have somehow become Earth’s first cells. Hey, James Tour will LOVE this — um, not!
Origin of life and Darwinian evolution seem to attract the airiest, flimsiest speculations. Is it just a coincidence or could there be a reason for that?
NASA stresses naturalist origin of life to kids
Example: In response to a question re space aliens, ““The question presumes that aliens do exist. And again, because we haven’t found any yet, we don’t know if they do. It is possible they may exist, for one simple reason: we exist. Whatever made the likes of bacteria evolve into complex bodies with intelligent brains on Earth may have also occurred on another planet.”
Renowned chemist James Tour’s origin of life vids 4-6
The new vids feature homochirality, carbohydrates, and the building blocks of building blocks of life.