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.
Origin Of Life
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.
Renowned chemist James Tour’s episodes 1-3 on origin of life
David Klinghoffer: Tour got going with this 13-part series of lectures in response to a hapless critic, Dave Farina. As a correspondent quips, “I don’t know who Dave Farina is, but he’s kicked the wrong dog.” Indeed so.
Researchers: A form of Darwinism preceded and enabled the origin of life
Those of us who are already skeptical of the immense role Darwinism is supposed to play after life already exists will find this prebiotic Darwinism hard to swallow. But reader Eric Anderson writes to assure us that that is in fact what origin of life researchers really do believe. Question: If it’s that simple, why isn’t life coming into existence from non-life all the time? As opposed to, say, never?
The origin of life problem is forever on the verge of being solved
And yet always just as far off.
Chemist James Tour offers a YouTube series on abiogenesis, treated as a form of magic
“In this compelling series of lectures on abiogenesis, James Tour’s riposte slices through both hype and myths using science to critique “science”, demonstrating how experts in the field truly remain clueless on the origin of life.” We recommend that inveterate yay-hoos find someone else to attack.
At ScienceNews: “Fake” fossils more common than real ones
“Fake” here just means inanimate objects called bimorphs that form naturally and resemble microfossils. Doubtless, this will complicate searches for the earliest life, which is most likely evidenced as microfossils if it is evidenced at all. That is, of a given specimen, was it ever life?
Avi Loeb suggests that the design of life might have been a black hole. Michael Egnor responds
Michael Egnor: Both an intelligent designer (assuming we’re talking about God) and a black hole are supernatural, in the sense that they are not objects in the natural world. This may not surprise you about God, but it is also true of black holes.