Origin Of Life

 From Moshe Averick, author of Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused World of Modern Atheism: It is common for people to talk about the development of complx life forms from simple living organisms or higher animals like mammals andpromates evolving from primitive forms of life. Th use of these types of terms is an egregious and inexcusable distortion of the reality. It only adds insult to injury that it I mainly scientists—who supposedly pride themselves on their pinpoint precision terminology—who are the truly guilty parties in the perpetuation of this distorted view. With this understanding then we clear up the final point of confusion about the Argument from Design: there is no such thing as simple or primitive life. Read More ›

From Michael Le Page at New Scientist: Many of the genes in our cells evolved billions of years ago and a few of them can be traced back to the last common ancestor of all life. Now we have the best picture yet of what that ancestor was like and where it lived, thanks to a study that identified 355 genes that it probably possessed. Half alive? One characteristic of almost all living cells is that they pump ions across a membrane to generate an electrochemical gradient, then use that gradient to make the energy-rich molecule ATP. Martin’s results suggest LUCA could not generate such a gradient, but could harness an existing one to make ATP. That fits in beautifully Read More ›

From Science News: By carefully crushing rock salt, researchers have measured the chemical makeup of air pockets embedded inside the rock. This new technique reveals that oxygen made up 10.9 percent of Earth’s atmosphere around 815 million years ago. Scientists have thought that oxygen levels would not be that high until 100 million to 200 million years later. The measurements place elevated oxygen levels well before the appearance of animals in the fossil record around 650 million years ago, the researchers report in the August issue of Geology. “I think our results will take people by surprise,” says study coauthor Nigel Blamey, a geochemist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada. “We came out of left field, and I think Read More ›

The “hard problem” of life From Arxiv: Chalmer’s famously identified pinpointing an explanation for our subjective experience as the “hard problem of consciousness”. He argued that subjective experience constitutes a “hard problem” in the sense that its explanation will ultimately require new physical laws or principles. Here, we propose a corresponding “hard problem of life” as the problem of how `information’ can affect the world. In this essay we motivate both why the problem of information as a causal agent is central to explaining life, and why it is hard – that is, why we suspect that a full resolution of the hard problem of life will, similar to as has been proposed for the hard problem of consciousness, ultimately Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur’s Paradigm Shifters: Suzan Mazur: Do you have a definition for life? Mae-Wan Ho: I would define it as a quantum coherent system. It is a circular thermodynamic system that can reproduce. Suzan Mazur: How do you think about origin of life? Mae-Wan Ho: I think there was an origin of lifel If you look at water, which has been the subject of my research for a number of years – the physic o life depends on wter in a very fundamental way. Water has all the characteristics of consciousness. It’s very sensitive, it’s flexible. It responds to light. Electromagnetic fields, etc. Suzan Mazur: Have you commented about electrons and consciousness? Mae-Wan Ho: It was Alfred North Whitehead’s Read More ›

He’s back! At Amazon: Is Atheism more rational than Monotheism? Atheists claim so, but this fascinating, original and meticulously researched masterpiece proves otherwise. Exploring the Modern Atheistic movement in its failed attempts to confront the baffling scientific mysteries of the Origin of Life and Human Consciousness, Man’s Search for Meaning, and the relentless human drive to seek coherent abstract Moral Principles; Rabbi Averick demonstrates conclusively that nearly everything that modern atheist thinkers have to say about God is simply nonsense. A powerful and compelling presentation that reclaims the intellectual high ground for the rational believer in God in the 21st Century. Using razor-sharp logic, a rapier wit, and irony-laced humor, Rabbi Averick exposes the gaping flaws in atheistic ideology in Read More ›

From Sarah Lewin at Space.com: When life originates on a planet, whether Earth or a distant world, the newborn life-forms may have to overcome incredible odds to come into existence — and a new equation lays out exactly how overwhelming those odds may be. Well, it’s good that someone is admitting that there aren’t billions and billions of them out there. If we can’t factor in information, we can get precisely nowhere, though there may be some good luncheon talks in the meantime. “It’s not an answer; it’s a new tool for trying to think about the issues involved,” Ed Turner, an astronomer at Princeton University, told Space.com. Turner was not involved in the work, but the paper’s definition of Read More ›

Here: More. He advises hi audience to depart if they are looking for simple solutions to the orgin of life problem. Here at YouTube: See also: Professor James Tour points the way forward for intelligent design (Vincent Torley) and What we know and don’t know about the origin of life Follow UD News at Twitter!

David Kaplan explains at Quanta (scroll down for vid) how the law of increasing entropy could drive random bits of matter into the stable, orderly structures of life. More. According to our favorite physicist Rob Sheldon, the guy’s hair is way more formidable than his ideas. Okay, Sheldon didn’t put it quite that way but here is what he did say: There are a number of fallacies in this video, which unfortunately, are like zombies and keep being resurrected. In addition, there’s a rhetorical “strawman” argument used to deflect rightful critique. Let’s address the strawman, and then the fallacies. (1) life is really, really, really different from non-life. So some highly simplistic feature of life is extracted–in this case–“structure”. Then we show Read More ›

From Talk Origins, a lengthy excursus on the views of mid-twentieth century Nobelist George Wald (1906-1997), excoriating those who misquote him: We nonetheless read that he really did say with amazement: When we consider the spontaneous origin of a living organism, this is not an event that need happen again and again. It is perhaps enough for it to happen once. The probability with which we: are concerned is of a special kind; it is the probability that an event occur at least once. To this type of probability a fundamentally important thing happens as one increases the number of trials. However improbable the event in a single trial, it becomes increasingly probable as the trials are multiplied. Eventually the Read More ›

From Nathaniel Comfort at Nautilus: Hydrothermal vent models transform the origins of life from unlikely to near-inevitable.What most goes against our intuition is that complex structures can be better dissipaters of energy than simpler ones.11 Catalysts help you up an energy hill so that you can drop even further down on the other side. Casting our gaze across the entirety of biological evolution, each organism is such an energy hill. It forms only if it is thermodynamically favored—if by pumping energy uphill to create it, even more energy is released. A lizard, for example, requires more energy to make than a lizard’s-worth of E. coli, but it consumes more energy at a greater rate. A world that contains both lizards Read More ›

From Ohio State University: A study in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides the strongest evidence yet that proteins—the large and complex molecules that fold into particular shapes to enable biological reactions—can’t fold themselves. Rather, the work of folding is done by much smaller water molecules, which surround proteins and push and pull at them to make them fold a certain way in fractions of a second, like scores of tiny origami artists folding a giant sheet of paper at blazingly fast speeds. Dongping Zhong, leader of the research group at The Ohio State University that made the discovery, called the study a “major step forward” in the understanding of water-protein interactions and said it answers Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Although scientists generally agree that eukaryotes can trace their ancestry to a merger between archaea and bacteria, there’s been considerable disagreement about what the first eukaryote and its immediate ancestors must have looked like. As Thattai and his colleagues Buzz Baum and Gautam Dey of University College London explain in their paper, that uncertainty has stemmed in large part from the lack of known intermediates that bridge the gap in size and complexity between prokaryotic precursors and eukaryotes. As a result, they say, the origin of the first eukaryotic cell has remained “one of the most enduring mysteries in modern biology.” That began to change last year with the discovery of DNA sequences for an organism that no Read More ›

Our Earth consists of silicate rocks and an iron core with a thin veneer of water and life. But the first potentially habitable worlds to form might have been very different. New research suggests that planet formation in the early universe might have created carbon planets consisting of graphite, carbides, and diamond. Astronomers might find these diamond worlds by searching a rare class of stars. More. Is it worth pointing out that we don’t know of any planet that has life other than ours? See also: Maybe if we throw enough models at the origin of life… some of them will stick?

From Evolution News & Views: Hardly a month goes by without a celebration in the news that the “building blocks of life” have been found somewhere in space, or that chemical reactions “show how life emerged” on the primitive earth. Recently, the University of Bern triumphantly announced that “Rosetta’s comet contains ingredients for life.” All that was detected was glycine (the simplest and the only achiral amino acid) and the element phosphorus (which is tantamount to calling any other element, like hydrogen or oxygen, an “ingredient for life”). New Scientist chimed in: “Building blocks of life spotted around comet for the first time.” Meanwhile, PhysOrg suggested there might be life on the asteroid Ceres. Why? Because water ice probably exists Read More ›