Origin Of Life

Here. Suzan Mazur: It’s clear to me from reading your papers that you have issues with neo-Darwinism. Luis Villarreal: The issues first came up when I began looking at quasispecies in the early 1970s. I was a researcher in the lab of the late John Holland, where there was real enthusiasm for studying evolution theory in the context of actual virus measurements, because the whole concept derived from thinking about RNA viruses. I wasn’t interested really in evolutionary theory at a deep level. I was interested in persistence, and for this the Modern Synthesis didn’t seem to be working. I just assumed that the theory didn’t apply or work in the specific situations we were studying involving persistence, such as Read More ›

What’s really interesting about the latest claim (Science) to have (maybe) solved the origin of life conundrum is the comments. Here’s one: I’m pretty much shocked at the emotionally charged comments. They are simply testing hypotheses for the building-blocks of life and how they were assembled. The intent is not to disprove your god(s) or say ‘haha, we are right.’ … Of course, the commenter is at best mistaken. The reality is that naturalism has gotten nowhere with origin of life and has nowhere to go anyway. The emotional uproar is an outcome of that fact. Nothing will work with origin of life until information is factored in. See also: Suzan Mazur’s interview with an origin of life society president Read More ›

Recently on niwrad’s thread we have had a lively discussion about the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and its potential application to the question of a materialistic abiogenesis scenario. kairosfocus has followed up with another useful post. In the present thread I provide a high level view of some of the key issues and misconceptions surrounding the 2nd Law arguments. Please note, I do so not as any kind of official spokesperson for intelligent design, but based on my experience debating this issue and my individual thoughts on the matter. My intelligent-design-inclined colleagues may disagree with my assessment, but hopefully I have provided some food for thought and, perhaps, an avenue for more productive discourse in the future. Discussions on this Read More ›

Long suspected: SA’s Hubble Space Telescope has the best evidence yet for an underground saltwater ocean on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. The subterranean ocean is thought to have more water than all the water on Earth’s surface. Identifying liquid water is crucial in the search for habitable worlds beyond Earth and for the search for life, as we know it. “This discovery marks a significant milestone, highlighting what only Hubble can accomplish,” said John Grunsfeld, assistant administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C. “In its 25 years in orbit, Hubble has made many scientific discoveries in our own solar system. A deep ocean under the icy crust of Ganymede opens up further exciting possibilities for life Read More ›

Suzan Mazur’s The Origin of Life Circus continues with an interview with David Deamer, a serious origin of life researcher. One gets the sense that previous interviewee chemist Harry Lonsdale, founder and funder of the eponymous origin of life prize, was wedded to the idea that life must come about via Darwinian means. And that the second interviewee, physicist Larry Krauss— the go-to man for the Lonsdale origin of life prize—is something of a showman, though Darwin’s man at heart. In Mazur’s third chapter, we meet a genuine origin of life research scientist in UCal Santa Cruz David Deamer, president of ISSOL (origin of life society): Suzan Mazur: Freeman Dyson told me that the garbage bag world scenario probably went Read More ›

Really small: The snapshots may not look like much, but they’re revealing a lot about lifeforms at this extremely miniscule size. For one thing, their metabolisms are so minimal that they likely depend on resources from other bacteria to stay alive. While there’s still a lot that remains a mystery (it’s not certain what half of the genes do), this up-close imagery could eventually fill in a lot of blanks in biology — it’s clear that there’s a world of unusual organisms that have gone largely unnoticed. Engadget Note: If they depend on other bacteria for resources, they probably aren’t going to help much with origin of life studies. They might well be devolved from more metabolically endowed free-living organisms. Read More ›

Explained by chemist Addy Pross of Ben-Gurion University, author of What is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology (Oxford, 2012): Despite the widespread view that Darwinian Evolution has been able to explain the emergence of biological complexity that is not the case….But Darwinian theory does not deal with the question how [life] was able to come into being. The troublesome question still in search of an answer is: how did a system capable of evolving come about in the first place. Darwinian theory is a biological theory and therefore deals with biological systems, whereas the Origin of Life problem is a chemical problem. (page 8) Significantly, Darwin himself explicitly avoided the origin of life question, recognizing that within the existing state Read More ›

Yesterday a friend sent me a link to a news article with the exciting headline: “No water needed: Methane-based life possible on Saturn’s moon Titan, study says.” Quite remarkable! Amazing enough to immediately attract my friend’s attention and to get him to shoot an email to me with the link, as he knows I am interested in the field. Yet, if the headline weren’t exciting enough, the first sentence of the news article really amps up the message: Researchers from the Cornell University have developed a methane-based, oxygen-free life form that theoretically may exist in the cold and harsh environment of the planet Saturn’s giant moon Titan, defying the idea that water is necessary for life. This is truly an Read More ›

In her new book, The Origin of Life Circus, journalist Suzan Mazur interviewed Larry Krauss because he is the “gatekeeper” of the late Harry Lonsdale’s prize for promising research into the origin of life (Lonsdale, a chemist, proceeded from a chemical and Darwinian view). Readers may call Krauss from John Lennox replies to Larry Krauss’s claim that Higgs boson “arguably more relevant than God”, Christian cosmologist Don Page calls out Larry Krauss on “Why is there something rather than nothing?”, and Celeb atheists Dawkins and Grayling don’t want to debate apologist Craig because … maybe a reason is now emerging … Larry Krauss! (As Krauss tells it, Craig is “disingenuous,” and he “shocked” Larry Krauss in a recent debate.) Incidentally, for Read More ›

Recently I have been thinking a lot about one of the most interesting topics: the origin of life. Specifically, the state of research on abiogenesis, the idea that life arose through purely natural processes without any intelligent guidance or intervention. I have also been thinking about the various viewpoints I have encountered over the years regarding abiogenesis. The various viewpoints about abiogenesis can be categorized along something of a spectrum. Although the spectrum is not necessarily symmetrical and there are probably numerous different views, I found it helpful to break them down into seven different categories in a 3-1-3 distribution, with stronger support for abiogenesis at one end of the spectrum and stronger skepticism toward abiogenesis at the other end Read More ›