The author, a science writer, keeps orbiting the topic of moving beyond Darwin:
How did life originate? Scientists have been studying the question for decades, and they’ve developed ingenious methods to try to find out. They’ve even enlisted biology’s most powerful theory, Darwinian evolution, in the search. But they still don’t have a complete answer. What they have hit is the world’s most theoretically fertile dead end…
Krakauer shares many of Schrödinger’s views. He thinks that there are many forms of life – that Hamlet, for example, is alive, and that computer viruses and cultural networks might rightly be considered life forms, too. He also thinks that we don’t yet understand the principles of life. I asked Krakauer whether he thought that Schrödinger, in these closing reflections, was a mystic or provocateur or something else. He said that Schrödinger was interested in understanding consciousness and that he wasn’t being mystical with his suggestions. As Krakauer explained: ‘Schrödinger was struggling to find the principles that would unify cultural evolution with organic evolution.’ In short, he, too, was seeking broader principles of life.
When we look at the work in origins of life from the time of Darwin on, we see that the field is astonishingly resilient – perhaps not unlike the emergent life systems that it studies. When it hits a dead end, it spontaneously reconceives of itself. The theoretical frameworks that animate its research have adapted Darwin’s thinking in myriad ways, and now they’re moving beyond Darwin into new theoretical frames.
Natalie Elliot, “Origin story” at Aeon
Her survey of the scene suggests that researchers are moving beyond Darwin in a variety of different directions. Not clear how they will all meet up…
“Theoretically fertile” is the problem. There’s no point in generating theories for an intrinsically untestable concept. We can’t go back 3 billion years and rerun the experiment several different ways, so all we can do is speculate. By the definition of ‘theory’, these speculations AREN’T THEORIES.
Among the various speculations, “God said let there be life” is indistinguishable from “Random said let there be life.” Random is just an alias for God.
Polistra
But “Random” does not impose morality. God does. And this is what the fight is all about.
The “Random” goddess allows you to occupy her place, because “she” doesn’t care at all.
God, on the contrary, does not.
Life cannot come from no-life anymore than the universe can come into existence from a state of nothingness. Without God, there is no theory that can adequately explain the origin of the universe, nor can any theory explain the origin of life. There are a lot of hypothesis, but hypothesis require no evidence and no requirement to replicate the results. Without witness and replication, no hypothesis can become a theory. It does not matter how elegant the hypothesis may be, since theory has nothing to do with elegance.
“But they [Darwinians clowns] still don’t have a complete answer.”
WHAT ????
After 150 years they have got NOTHING… ZERO …
ZERO…ZERO…ZERO….
the origin-of-life-research is a desperate hopeless project …
One may wonder why :)))))))))))
Martin_r
The “darwinian clowns” do not yet understand that “materialism” is dead.
A failed worldview that is sinking faster that the Titanic.
Materialism’s Failures: Hylemorphism’s Vindication. (Aristotle is back).
Darwin’s work was not about the origin of life but neo-Paleyists don’t seem to have grasped that.
6 Seversky
Au contraire, Bishop Berkeley. It was the stupid philosophical materialists who tried to convince gullible people that “darwinian evolution” could explain the OOL.
How is your conversion from “materialist” to subjective idealist going?
“Materialism”: garbage philosophy that belongs into the dustbin of History. 🙂
Materialism’s Failures: Hylemorphism’s Vindication. (Aristotle is back).
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