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Contemplating the Undead

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Origin of Life theories attempt to account for the transition from prebiotic matter to biotic matter.  Beginning with Darwin’s warm little pond and continuing through the present day, scientists have tried to explain how this intuitively unlikely jump could have been made.  In his wonderful article On the Origins of Life (here), David Berlinski summarizes some of the more important assumptions scientists must make in trying to resolve this weighty question:

“First, that the pre-biotic atmosphere was chemically reductive; second, that nature found a way to synthesize cytosine; third, that nature also found a way to synthesize ribose; fourth, that nature found the means to assemble nucleotides into polynucleotides; fifth, that nature discovered a self-replicating molecule; and sixth, that having done all that, nature promoted a self-replicating molecule into a full system of coded chemistry.”

As I was contemplating this issue, something occurred to me.  Why are scientists taking on such a hard job up front?  Why not start with an easier problem and gradually increase complexity.  Instead of starting from nothing and trying to work forward to a full-blown living being, why don’t they start with “almost everything” and work their way backwards?

This is what I mean.  Some enterprising researcher eager for a trip to Oslo should take the very simplest single-celled critter he can find and bump it off.  Then he can take the recently bumped off critter and zap it with electricity or something and make it come back to life.  The critter was, by definition, not alive, so in a sense we can call it prebiotic matter.  But after the zapping stage of the experiment, the critter will be alive (or at least undead).  This will prove that living things can come from non-living matter.

This experiment should be easy.  There are gazillions of very simple single-celled critters running around who, I am certain, would be honored to help advance our understanding of science.  Some of them may even be publicity hounds and therefore eager to be the subject of a Nobel prize winning experiment.  Not even PETA would object to bumping off a couple of these wee beasties in the interest of earth-shattering scientific progress.

On the other hand, it seems like this experiment would involve a huge risk for metaphysical materialists.  In my experiment the non-living matter has every single building block of life readily to hand.  Unlike present origin of life research, no one has to conjure up any critical ingredients through convenient assumptions.  The only thing that is missing is the mysterious “anima” of living things.  But if the researcher can’t make this stuff come alive (or undead) under such ideal conditions, isn’t the attempt to come up with a plausible origin of life scenario under far less propitious circumstances utterly doomed to failure?

I’m sure I’m not the first person who has thought of this.  What say our intrepid readers?

Comments
Houdin:
Charlie, you bring up an interesting subject. In science, theories are overturned every day with relatively little fuss and no violence. The people who do the overturning are given honors and prizes and become famous.
I didn't bring up any such subject, interesting though it may be. I did note that you have dismissed the hypotheses, just as the ignorant masses had prior to your ruling, and thereby any claim to evidence that they provided for abiogenesis. I am glad that you, like me, can see that some of them had no evidence going for them at all and were not even serious theories. I propose that their being forwarded, and accepted, had only to do with providing a rationale for a belief in naturalistic/materialistic evolution, and nothing to do with evidence. I guess that you had no belief in a naturalistic chemical evolution until you were made aware of the subterranean version.
Theories get overturned in religion, too, but it sometimes results in things like the Thirty Years War and people who overturn a religiious theory often get killed for their efforts.
This is an interesting subject as well, but one I am not interested in researching and discussing. If you truly want to explore the causes of the Thirty Years war, and find out if it had anything whatsoever to do with overturning a religious theory, I am sure you can do so without my help. I can't help but notice that your comments are full of religious statements and pronouncements. This often seems to be the case when 'science-defenders' try to support their assumptions and their acceptance of what constitutes the evidence for Darwinism.
Underground, it’s a completely different world! As I’ve mentioned before, you get high temperatures and pressures, which speed up chemical reactions a thousand fold, you have every kind of mineral in the world (including your moist clay) in contact with hot chemical laden water, plenty of catalytic activity as dissolved chemicals contact minerals and rock surfaces, changes in temperature and pressure, different streams feeding into each other - it’s like a giant chemical factory! You even have your beloved deep sea vents to play with.
Sea vents are not my beloved. Since changing pressures, temperatures and catalytic environments etc. can be accomplished in a lab quite easily I guess you have an instance of such resulting in life from non-life as evidence? Or is there some geological evidence left over from the time when gazillions of cells were dividing say, once a day, and evolving from something very simple into some very complex systems?
It’s no wonder that the subterranean theories quickly took over once we learned how much life is underground. (Probably more life than is above the ground, by the way, both in number of organisms and in total tonnage.)
No wonder, among those who need such a theory to shore up their philosophical/religious commitments. No wonder given the paucity of evidence for the previous theories. There is also life in antarctic ice and high in the atmosphere. Look for theories involving these locales when the latest rage passes.Charlie
September 25, 2006
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Just ran into this interesting story, which fits right into this coversation, courtesy of www.dvorak.org: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1879891,00.html? Scientists turn dead cells into live tissue. Scientists have taken cells from "dead" embryos and made them into stem cells! Some problems: how do you know the cells are really dead? If the embryo died, maybe there's something wrong with the cells?Houdin
September 25, 2006
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gpuccio, when I say that a designer cannot be simple, it's not dogma, it's knowledge. We know too much about minds and intelligence to believe in "simple" intelligence any more. We don't know exactly how the (human) mind works - yet - but we know beyond any possible doubt that it involves huge amounts of carefully arranged information. Non-human intelligences are the same. Intelligence IS information changing other information. This is something new. In the past, as long as we've had philosophical and theological discussions about minds and intelligence, people could get away with describing supernatural minds as "simple". You can't do that any more. If it's simple, it's not a mind. Full stop. Which opens up a yawning chasm for religion. Where does God get His information from? From His creator? He's not supposed to have one. Besides, where did His Creator get his information from? An infinite regress doesn't answer anything. "He always had it." Sorry, but whether something has always existed or was just formed, it's a lot more likely to be something simple than complex. The more the complexity (i.e. the more information it contains), the more unlikely its existence. As Dembski has argued, by the time you get even a few hundred bits of information, the odds of its coming into existence (or always having existed) are so low that if every subatomic particle in the known universe was formed into a computer and computed for as long as the universe has existed, you still wouldn't have a ghost of a chance of that information. Now this is no problem when we're talking about human and animal minds. We have a mechanism for slowly adding information to a genome: variation and natural selection will leach information out of the environment and build it into the DNA that runs the organism. And we have plenty of time to do that leaching - billions of years for life and hundreds of millions of years for minds. Religion has neither the mechanism nor the time. The complexity of the universe is also easily explained. It's the complexity you get when you throw a handful of rice down on a table. It's the result of several simple laws (gravity, Newton's laws, etc) working over a large period of time. The universe's complexity is accounted for. Our mind's complexity is accounted for. But The Designer has no way to acquire a complex rational mind.Houdin
September 25, 2006
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Charlie, you bring up an interesting subject. In science, theories are overturned every day with relatively little fuss and no violence. The people who do the overturning are given honors and prizes and become famous. Theories get overturned in religion, too, but it sometimes results in things like the Thirty Years War and people who overturn a religiious theory often get killed for their efforts. The warm little pond theory was never very serious. Darwin used it in a private letter by way of describing a protein's fate today: "[If] a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed." He was more interested in showing why you don't see abiogenesis today than in theorizing about how it happened four billion years ago. The problem with warm little ponds (or warm oceans) is that just pouring chemicals into a reaction vessel doesn't usually do much. If you want to generate complex molecules, you have to change temperatures and pressures, use catalysts, remove by-products, etc, and you just can't do much of that in a pond or ocean. Underground, it's a completely different world! As I've mentioned before, you get high temperatures and pressures, which speed up chemical reactions a thousand fold, you have every kind of mineral in the world (including your moist clay) in contact with hot chemical laden water, plenty of catalytic activity as dissolved chemicals contact minerals and rock surfaces, changes in temperature and pressure, different streams feeding into each other - it's like a giant chemical factory! You even have your beloved deep sea vents to play with. It's no wonder that the subterranean theories quickly took over once we learned how much life is underground. (Probably more life than is above the ground, by the way, both in number of organisms and in total tonnage.) Meanwhile, science continues to furnish the world with a mechanism (variation and natural selection), fossils showing the evolution of life over four billion years, DNA studies showing how present day life is related to each other, lab experiments which show evolution in action and artifical life experiments which show evolution in action in a computer. Of course, that's not enough to convince every one, especially people who refuse to even look. But it's a hell of a lot more than ID gives to the world: "It looks designed to me!"Houdin
September 25, 2006
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Houdin, I can understand your point of views, but I don't agree with any of them. What I can't understand is your dogmatic belief that you are the only one who is right, and that you have all the answers, and that all that you say is truth, and that every diferent idea is DEAD. Maybe your faith about not having an immotal soul is at stake, and that is making you a little bit nervous? Just to be clear, you say: "The Designer has to be extremely intelligent and possess a huge amount of knowledge - and that’s NOT simple!" Again, you have your philosophical views, but they need not be mine, or everybody else's. And they are not scientific truth. Like many other supporters of darwinism and materialism, you just equate your personal convinctions to scientific truth, and that's not fair. Try to consider that, for instance, I may well believe in a God who is simple, and who has created all complex things. He has created mathematics, languages, physics, matter, thought, other beings, and so on. In this model, God is utterly simple (let's say, pure, transcendent consciousness). Everything else is complex, but is produced by that simple transendent consciousness, just like our universe comes out of a singularity in the Big Bang. Space, time, the known forces, all come out ot something much more simple, according to actual theories, or out of God's consciousness, according to my model (and we could be talking of the same thing, as no one knows what that singularity was or is). Your assumption that "The idea that ANY INTELLIGENT ANYTHING is in any way simple is DEAD" is not even bad philosophy, it's just propaganda. You seem to have solved all controversies about the nature of consciousness and intelligence, and your statements are just in line with the strong AI model. Well, you should accept that the strong AI model is not the only one, that it is not universally accepted, and that I think it is completely wrong. In the best case, it is an arbitrary assumption, just like darwinism. So, you are free to believe that consciousness and intelligence are just organized information, but that's just your opinion. For me, consciousness and intelligence are in no way explained by the complexity of the things they manage and observe. They are different things, still not understood by scientific thought. This is my philosophy, and it has at least the same right as yours to exist and to be expressed. And, luckily, your affirmation that something is DEAD does not make iy dead at all (you are not God, after all).gpuccio
September 23, 2006
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Houdin, You have restated the assumption once again, this time affirming that you believe it, and stating that those who don't are ignorant. It is still an assumption, unverified and unsupported by scientific experimentation. I still ask "Where is the evidence that some very complex systems would evolve from some very simple ones?" I see you believe that warm little pond theories, and primeval sea theories are dead. I presume you would include at that funeral deep-sea vent and moist clay theories as well. For decades these now dead theories constituted scientific evidence to the informed and were doubted only by the ignorant masses, But, according to you, the ignorant masses were the ones who were right about those theories. When your underground abiogenesis theories have been fleshed-out and debunked, and lie dead with the others on the scrap-heap and 'science' has moved on to the next all-the-rage hypothesis it will again be the ignorant masses who had it right.Charlie
September 22, 2006
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Me: 'Take gazillions of organisms, dividing say, once a day and I’d say there was plenty of time for some very complex systems to evolve.' Charlie: "That is a restatement of the theory, time+chance=everything, but is exactly the assertion being questioned. Where is the evidence that some very complex systems would evolve from some very simple ones? Houdin is arguing against the charge of making assumptions by restating the assumptions." The Darwinian "assumption" (brought into congruence with twenty first century knowlege of genetics and information theory) is that random mutations generate new information, of unknown quality, and that natural selection sorts this information out and acts like a ratchet by saving the new information that helps the organism get through life and deleting the information that doesn't. (As I mention in more detail in a previous message.) We can see this "assumption" at work as we look at DNA in differently related ancestors today and there's no real doubt that it works. It's resisted by people who think their religion is at stake and by those who don't understand the argument, which is an unfortunately large group. As for the warm pond and the dilute soup, they are as dead as the idea that an Intelligent anything is simple. I'll write a proper message on why all the action is underground soon, but for now, re-read my message of Sep 14th 2006 at 4:40 am.Houdin
September 22, 2006
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DaveScot: Reading the messages here makes me think you're wrong. And why not drop the pretense? It was always a ruse to get a basic religious belief into the schools and since Kitzmiller, that ain't gonna happen, so drop it and your arguments will automatically improve one hundred percent.Houdin
September 22, 2006
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gpuccio: "50-100 bits of information are perfectly manageable" Ah... let's see, according to the microsoft calculator, 2^50 = 1,125,899,906,842,624 different compounds. Let's say you can check ten of them each day, that's only 112,589,990,684,262 days to check them all, given 365 days in the year and assuming no holidays and we're looking at oh about 300 Billion years to test them all. But, there are five billion people on the planet right now, so put them all to work full time and it would only take sixty years except that we'd all starve to death in year 1 of the search because nobody was growing food. I think it might be a little bit harder than writing Windows XP! ME: “The bottom line is that the ‘God is utterly simple’ argument doesn’t work any more. Utterly simple things are also utterly stupid and are incapable of designing organisms containing hundreds of megabits of information.” gpuccio: "Again, this is a philsophical affirmation, and a very debatable one. You can’t pass that for scientific truth." There is nothing remotely debatable about it! You're talking about an INTELLIGENT designer, one smart enough to know how to put a living creature together. That means He or She has to be at least as smart as you and me AND It has to know a huge amount, like how to put all of those atoms and molecules together to make a living, self reproducing organism. The Designer has to be extremely intelligent and possess a huge amount of knowledge - and that's NOT simple! Now if you were a Mormon, you might have a response to this challenge, since they seem to believe that Gods become that way through some sort of evolution (caution: most of my knowledge of Mormon theology comes from anti-Mormon tracts) and Darwinian evolution is a ratcheting process that adds information and checks it for "correctness" a few bits at a time. But as far as claims that an Intelligent anything is "simple" or "totally simple" or "always existed" or "just exists" or any other argument that doesn't account for the incredible complexity of any intelligent thing it's postulating whatsover is now DOA, at least to anyone that realizes that intelligence is not magic, it's highly organized information. Let me give you an example: do you think that an Intelligent Designer understands English? There are 850 words in Basic English. Let's say 10 bits of information per word for 8,500 bits. Then you need to know the simplified rules for making plurals - say another fifty bits, regular verbs - at least another hundred bits. Now how many bits of information go into understanding the meaning of those 850 words? Or understanding what nouns and verbs are? Or of even simple grammar? Let's not fool ourselves here - we're looking at tens of thousands of bits of carefully organized information just to understand the simplest form of English possible. How about chemistry? I think a designer would have to know what a carbon atom was, and hydrogen and oxygen and all the other fifty or so types of atoms that are found in biological material. How many bits there? And what about the laws of chemistry? There's several tens of thousands of bits of information right there. Let's make it even simpler: do you think that God knows your name? How many bits of information in an average name? And how many people does God know by name? Five billion? That's billions more bits of information that have to be carefully filed away so that they cross reference with each other and with the humans they belong to. Let me summarize: The idea that ANY INTELLIGENT ANYTHING is in any way simple is DEAD. You can only call Intelligent Designers "simple" if you're talking to someone who's never thought what goes into intelligence out.Houdin
September 22, 2006
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I’m glad that one effect of the Kitzmuller decision is that ID, at least on Uncommon Descent, is dropping the totally unbelievable claim that they mean anything other than the God of Christianity when they say “Designer”) Not true.DaveScot
September 22, 2006
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Houdin: "An interesting challenge - duplicate something that we don’t have a sample of, is submicroscopic, existed ~ 4 billion years ago and that was “manufactured” in a “laboratory” that encompasses the entire surface of the earth down to a depth of a mile or so. And you know something? I think that science will do that someday. But I doubt if that will end the philosophical debate. One side of the debate thinks that their immortal soul depends on evolution being false and mere facts aren’t going to change their minds. One thing I guarantee: ID will NEVER do it because they aren’t even trying" It's a fair challenge. I don't suggest to duplicate anything, just to design it, with the intelligence, knowlegde and tecnhology we have, if necessary borrowing the tools from living existing things. Where is the enormous difficulty? we an easily build nucleic acids, DNA emlates, and so on, thogh they are submicroscopic (where is the problem? geneic engineering is all about submicroscopic things). 50-100 bits of information are perfectly manageable, weare not speaking of the last verson of Windows XP... So, again, whee's the problem? Try! Build a putative RNA precursor, or anything else you believe was formed by chance in the beginning, from your 50-100 bits of information. Try diferent models, if you want. Let's discuss the results. If one of these putative precursors works (duplicates), let's put it in a compatible environment (in the lab). Let's see how it evolves. You have to do that, not ID. The hypothesis is yours, not ID's. At least, let's not pretend that the scientific method requires one to prove others' hypothesis. "The bottom line is that the ‘God is utterly simple’ argument doesn’t work any more. Utterly simple things are also utterly stupid and are incapable of designing organisms containing hundreds of megabits of information." Again, this is a philsophical affirmation, and a very debatable one. You can't pass that for scientific truth. Nobody knows the real nature of consciousness and of cognition, so your decision that everything that produces intelligent information must necessarily be more complex than what it produces is, at least, arbitrary. Again, let's stick to scientific debate. "When I speak of “The Designer” (or God - I’m glad that one effect of the Kitzmuller decision is that ID, at least on Uncommon Descent, is dropping the totally unbelievable claim that they mean anything other than the God of Christianity when they say “Designer”), I assume that he is at least intelligent enough to hold a conversation with a human being - something like the famous talking bush, say." I have no reason to include the God of Christianity in this debate. Or any other God. It was your argument that ID is implying an "infinitely more complex being", and therefore should explain that complexity. ID is only implying a designer, and in no way stating that it is complex, or "infinitely more complex". That was your assumption and, as the "infinitely" you used clearly pointed to some Godlike concept, I just remarked that many conceptions of God do not imply that He is complex, but just the opposite. Again, unless you can demonstrate that consciousness or intelligence are complex in their nature (and not only in their operation), your assumption is arbitrary.gpuccio
September 22, 2006
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gpuccio: "So, I am really interested to this hypotethical 50-100 bit precursor. I suppose it should be some simple RNA polymerase, or something like that. Well, 50-100 bits are not many. That’s why again I suggest: you who believe in that hypothesis, try to build a real model of such a molecule, and to test it in the lab. Let it reproduce, if possible evolve. Let’s try to get rid of hypothetical, generical assumptions which cannot be tested. We must find experimental answers, or we will go on debating about phylosophy forever." An interesting challenge - duplicate something that we don't have a sample of, is submicroscopic, existed ~ 4 billion years ago and that was "manufactured" in a "laboratory" that encompasses the entire surface of the earth down to a depth of a mile or so. And you know something? I think that science will do that someday. But I doubt if that will end the philosophical debate. One side of the debate thinks that their immortal soul depends on evolution being false and mere facts aren't going to change their minds. One thing I guarantee: ID will NEVER do it because they aren't even trying. gpuccio: "A las note about a philosophical assumption made by Houdin, which I don’t think is justified. He says: “where did the designer come from and why is it somehow “simpler” to postulate an almost infinitely more complex being as the explanation for a one celled organism?” Well, that is an old argument, and many have already answered. I would like only to suggest that there is no reason to affirm that the designer (in the sense of God, which is what Houdin is speaking of in that sentence) is infinitely complex. One of the most common phlosophical and religious views about God (one which I agree with) is that God is simple, indeed totally simple. Everyhing else is complex. So, no need to think of God as complex. And I think that nobody should be surprised that one can conceive of the extreme complexity of the world and of life as coming from something totally simple. After all, astrophysics believe just that about the “singularity” which should be the cause of the Big Bang." When I speak of "The Designer" (or God - I'm glad that one effect of the Kitzmuller decision is that ID, at least on Uncommon Descent, is dropping the totally unbelievable claim that they mean anything other than the God of Christianity when they say "Designer"), I assume that he is at least intelligent enough to hold a conversation with a human being - something like the famous talking bush, say. We know enough about how intelligence works, both in humans and in less intelligent animals, so that we can say with complete confidence that it requires enormous amounts of carefully arranged information. For instance, just to do something as simple as reply to you, I need to know such things as English grammar, your handle, what your argument means and what humans are like mentally plus such "simple" things as how to type, etc. I don't know how much information is required, but it's clearly in megabits or gigabits or maybe even more. How much information is in the human brain, for instance, and how much more information would the designer that made that brain have to have? The bottom line is that the 'God is utterly simple' argument doesn't work any more. Utterly simple things are also utterly stupid and are incapable of designing organisms containing hundreds of megabits of information.Houdin
September 22, 2006
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Houdin asked: So how many gazillion gazillion cells were alive during that period? This seems to me to be a good question. How many were there? Does anyone here know? What is the geological evidence left behind of all these cells, and their formation? Take gazillions of organisms, dividing say, once a day and I’d say there was plenty of time for some very complex systems to evolve. That is a restatement of the theory, time+chance=everything, but is exactly the assertion being questioned. Where is the evidence that some very complex systems would evolve from some very simple ones? Houdin is arguing against the charge of making assumptions by restating the assumptions. We know that philosophically Darwinists need a simple-to-complex scenario. Darwin said himself that "nature does not make a leap". And we know that historically, back as far as 2000 years ago, and through Darwin to the modern day, a warm little pond, later Haldane's hot dilute soup, was the preferred locale for such activity - a philosophically necessary hypothesis, not one based upon evidence. As Hubert Yockey said:
If one looks at the geological record, one finds no evidence that a primeval soup ever existed.
If the soup were so dilute as to have left no geological evidence it would have been too dilute to have allowed life to advance from mere chemical reactions via chance.
Charlie
September 19, 2006
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Well, maybe this thread is becoming too long... Anyway, thanks, Karl, for the book reference. I hope to read it soon, and perhaps we can resume this discussion about evo-devo in the future. Houdin makes some interesting statements, for instance that: "For 200 million bits of information to form spontaneously is so unlikely as to be effectively impossible." So impossible, indeed, that he scales down the first "precrsor" to 50-100 bits. Well, I fully agree with the impossibility for longer sequences. I would like to recall that a small protein (let's say 100 aminoacids) has an information content of 20^100, which is in the range of Dembski's universal upper limit (and believe me, that's really a limit!). So, I am really interested to this hypotethical 50-100 bit precursor. I suppose it should be some simple RNA polymerase, or something like that. Well, 50-100 bits are not many. That's why again I suggest: you who believe in that hypothesis, try to build a real model of such a molecule, and to test it in the lab. Let it reproduce, if possible evolve. Let's try to get rid of hypothetical, generical assumptions which cannot be tested. We must find experimental answers, or we will go on debating about phylosophy forever. I am not saying that an assumption has no value. But we must always remember that it is only an assumption, until we have some true evidence to support it. Archea we can observe. Simpler precursors, we can't. 50-100 bits is not a hypothesis beyond modern technology. Test it. A las note about a philosophical assumption made by Houdin, which I don't think is justified. He says: "where did the designer come from and why is it somehow “simpler” to postulate an almost infinitely more complex being as the explanation for a one celled organism?" Well, that is an old argument, and many have already answered. I would like only to suggest that there is no reason to affirm that the designer (in the sense of God, which is what Houdin is speaking of in that sentence) is infinitely complex. One of the most common phlosophical and religious views about God (one which I agree with) is that God is simple, indeed totally simple. Everyhing else is complex. So, no need to think of God as complex. And I think that nobody should be surprised that one can conceive of the extreme complexity of the world and of life as coming from something totally simple. After all, astrophysics believe just that about the "singularity" which should be the cause of the Big Bang. In philosophical terms, and in many religions, God is conceived as a transcendent entity, beyond space and time, beyond dimensions, beyond cause and effect, beyond reason, beyond anything the human mind can understand and conceive. Beyond, but not in contradiction with all that. That's the philosophical meaning of "transcendent". Simple, not complex. And therefore, no need to ask for a cause of that. Causal relations, like space and time and dimensions, are a feature of phenomena. I understand that's philosophy, but Houdin's objection was philosophical in its nature, and so it deserved an answer at that level. Finally, Occam's razor. Ah, that's really funny. I think we should leave Occam alone at last, and let him rest in peace. Two reasons fot that: first, Occam's razor is not, as far as I know, a law of nature, it is just a methodological principle which may be useful in many contexts, but not necessarily in all. Second, the principle can be, and has been, reasonably applied pro darwinian evolution or pro ID: it depends, again, on your previous assumptions, if you believe that a God can never exist, you will find simpler to postulate evolution, while if you believe (like Dembski, Behe, and many others including me) that complex information of the kind we observe in living beings can never be generated by chance, than it is simpler to postulate God than to believe the impossible. Evidently, we start from different assumptions. So, let's discuss them, if possible let's test them, but please, let's leave Occam's razor application to more pertinent contexts.gpuccio
September 19, 2006
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gpuccio: "Archea, as we know them today, are probably the oldest living cells, and as far as I know they are probably, today, just the same as they were 3,5 billion years ago. They are so old that it is difficult to understand when they could have evolved, given that they were probably already there after only one billion year of earth’s existence, and in that billion year earth’s conditions were not probably such that they could allow evolution of life..." Yes, the first living cells that we have fossil evidence for may have had "as little as" 100 million years in which to evolve from the first self-reproducing whatever to something similar to modern cells. So how many gazillion gazillion cells were alive during that period? Take gazillions of organisms, dividing say, once a day and I'd say there was plenty of time for some very complex systems to evolve. gpuccio: "Again I state that any simpler kind of life is, at present, only a supposition, unsupported by any data. Moreover, it seems. from genetic studies, that archea may be more related to us than bacteria." So our unsupported assumption is that at time A the earth is molten and that at time B, hundreds of millions of years later it's covered with rudimentary life and it's somehow a stretch to hypothesize that something dirt simple (and hence not too unlikely) formed by chance and then had an ample period of time to evolve into crude archaea? What are the alternatives? Seeded from another planet, possibly by sentient beings? Where's the evidence for that? And where did the original life (and the beings!) come from? Designed and created by a supernatural creature millions of times (if not infinitely) smarter than we are? I realize that ID enthusiasts find this question very annoying, but where did the designer come from and why is it somehow "simpler" to postulate an almost infinitely more complex being as the explanation for a one celled organism? Explaining something simple by postulating something infinitely more complicated is going the wrong way! DaveScot: "The modern argument for spontaneous generation is incredible. It’s essentially the same argument as maggots spontaneously generating from rotten meat and mice spontaneously generating in grain storage bins." No it's not! Maggots have tens of millions of base pairs in their genomes. C. elegans is a worm, probably simpler than a maggot since it doesn't contain the information for making a fly, and it has 97-million base pairs in its genome. That's nearly 200 million bits of information and 20,000 genes. For 200 million bits of information to form spontaneously is so unlikely as to be effectively impossible. ALL existing life forms have way too much information in their genomes to appear spontaneously. The first self reproducing thing has to have just enough information to reproduce. When a scientist talks about the first living thing, he's postulating something that embodies perhaps 50 to 100 bits of information, not 200 megabits.Houdin
September 18, 2006
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gpuccio asks:
1) How is it that, in multicellular beings, each cell succeeds in transcribing jus the part of the genetic information (the same in all cells) which is necessary for that cell and at that moment? 2) How is it that multicellular beings develop from a single cell, with a single information, which differentiates with a specific order in thousands of different cells, each one with a specific “personalization” of that information, and in a general spacial and temporal frame which is, in itself, extremely complex? (think, for instance, to neuronal spacial connections in the CNS). Where is the information, the code, the regulation for all that?
gpuccio, The extremely hot field of evo-devo is tackling those very questions. For an excellent overview, see Sean Carroll's book Endless Forms Most Beautiful.Karl Pfluger
September 18, 2006
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Steveh: "I don’t know why you are telling me that my point should be that it is easy. We don’t know what the precursors were, and we certainly don’t have those available to hand now to use in this experiment." I'm telling you that for you it should be easy, because you seem to believe that it happened by chance, somewhere, sometime. In my way of thinking, things that are so difficult never happen by chance. And I don't see how natural selection could be invoked for an event like the assembling of the first cell from precursors, leaving therefore only random - I would not say mutation, shall we say encounters? - as the only causal mechanism for something which is so difficult that we have no idea of how to begin to do it. "I don’t know why you are telling me that my point should be that it is easy. We don’t know what the precursors were, and we certainly don’t have those available to hand now to use in this experiment. None of this is easy. If the Standord Protein Folding Project was anything to go by, just figuring out how a simple protein will fold is difficult enough even if you have hundreds of thousands of computers working on it for some years. That’s without working out how they will interact with each other and other parts of a complex environment." That's exactly my point. I agree with you with all my heart on that. As I have already said, that's why I don't believe it happened by chance, unless someone give me evidence. "Why anyone should think it reasonable to claim victory because their opponents can not produce a step by step mutation history of the first cell or first flagellum or reenact it in the lab less than 60 years after the discovery of the structure of DNA is beyond me." Here I beg you to really believe me: I am not claiming any victory. As I have tried to say before, for me this is not, or at least should not be, a war. Just an intellectual confrontation. I claim no victory, because obviously you have all the rights in the world to stick to your hypothesis about evolution or abiogenesis, unless we can produce absolute evidence that it is false (I think we will in time, but some more work is needed). But let us admit, serenely, that what you say is true, that is: our "opponents can not produce a step by step mutation history of the first cell or first flagellum or reenact it in the lab". In other words, you stick to your hypothesis, but when I say that no fact supports it, I am not claiming any victory, only trying to agree with you about known facts. I hope that's not beyond you.gpuccio
September 17, 2006
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"Obviously, the experiment is not easy. Indeed, from my point of view (and Barry’s, I believe) it can never work. That’s exactly our point." Your point seems to be that it's not possible to do the preparation work (create an cell from constituent parts), Barry's was that even if we could (or rather if we started with a fully formed but dead cell), it would not be possible to animate it. There's a difference. My point is that the dead cell is physically not like the living one, even if they look similar to a lawyer bacause there are already lots of physical changes in the dead cell that we can not repair. If you don't damage the cell enough, it won't be provably dead, it will be argued that it was just "put on hold" for a while, or it will die over a period of time in which additional non-reversible physical changes will occur. The zapping with electricity part is easy - The preparation is difficult. It's a bit like me claiming that it's not possible to gargle water on Mars because of the redness of the planet. Gardling water is easy, therefore someone should have done this test by now, but they haven't, so I win. "The opposite point (it should be yours) is that it should be easy enough and work, because abiogenesis supporters do believe that something like that really happened, that it happened probably many times, and that it happened by chance." I don't know why you are telling me that my point should be that it is easy. We don't know what the precursors were, and we certainly don't have those available to hand now to use in this experiment. None of this is easy. If the Standord Protein Folding Project was anything to go by, just figuring out how a simple protein will fold is difficult enough even if you have hundreds of thousands of computers working on it for some years. That's without working out how they will interact with each other and other parts of a complex environment. Why anyone should think it reasonable to claim victory because their opponents can not produce a step by step mutation history of the first cell or first flagellum or reenact it in the lab less than 60 years after the discovery of the structure of DNA is beyond me.steveh
September 17, 2006
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Steveh: "Remember Barry said “This experiment should be easy.” let’s see how easily you or he can accurately reconstruct a cell from its disassembled parts and after you’ve done that we can begin the test proper." Obviously, the experiment is not easy. Indeed, from my point of view (and Barry's, I believe) it can never work. That's exactly our point. The opposite point (it should be yours) is that it should be easy enough and work, because abiogenesis supporters do believe that something like that really happened, that it happened probably many times, and that it happened by chance. However you conceive abiogenesis, there must have been at least one point in time and space (possibly more than one) when single parts, let us call them precursors, assembled by chance in a living cell (at least an archea in my opinion, but those who believe in simpler cells are welcome to produce a model of them and then try to assemble it). So, an intelligent engineer (for instance, a darwinian biologist of the 21st century who does not believe in any form of vitalism) could well try to duplicate such phenomena in his lab. May be it takes some technological skill still unavailable, but you know, one must start somewhere. Besides, we vitalists are patient people, and can wait. To Karl Pfluger: Thank you for your kind and documented anwer. I am well aware that many don't agree with Penrose, but still he is a respected scientist in his field, and his views are discussed at many levels. That's exactly my view of what should happen for ID: not wars and libel, but discussion, and recognizion that ID'ideas are not stupid and fanatical. They may be wrong (like any idea in the world), but they certainly deserve to be respected and discussed. So, thank you again for discussing. Indeed, I don't necessarily agree with Penrose's model od neuron activity, although I do believe that a new perspective of physics and quantum mechanics is necessary to understand how neurons work. Personally, I believe that the same advancement will be necessary to really understand how cells work, in general. So, you are right about my point, I believe that new rules are necessary both for understanding consciousness and for understanding life (Penrose would not probably agree on the second point, but I am not sure). What I find really intersting in Penrose is his mathematical argument from Godel's theorem, to show that consciousness cannot be totally algorhytmic, because it can always observe, in meta-level, its proceedings, at least in mathematics (that's only my personal philosophical summary of Penrose's argument, of course). Regarding the problem that known physical laws should be violated if some principle not yet understood (life, consciousness) were at work, I don't agree. There are a lot of models (Penrose's idea of amplification of quantum phenomena is one of them) that could allow new principles to work without violating known laws. Quantum mechanics is not violating Newton's laws. Dembski, for instance, has suggested that information could be added to a physical system without any kind of energy, and without any violation of physical laws (I don't know if he is right, but it is an interesting possibility). Moreover, we should remember that biophysics is still a very pioneristic science. You must not think that everything at the cellulare level is well understood chemistry. Quite the opposite is true. Cellular systems are in general far from equilibrium systems, and I believe that understanding of such systems is at present just at he beginnings. You ask for an example of some biological process which may require the assistance of quantum phenomena (or, I would add, of any other yet unknown phenomenon). I will try to give you an example: DNA transcription. And I don't mean just the simple (well, not so simple, indeed) biochemical process of transcription. I mean the regulation of transcription, which is still a complete mystery. That's the point where, apparently, information is continuosly "added". That's the point where, to understand life, we need some kind of answer to at least two fundamental questions: 1) How is it that, in multicellular beings, each cell succeeds in transcribing jus the part of the genetic information (the same in all cells) which is necessary for that cell and at that moment? 2) How is it that multicellular beings develop from a single cell, with a single information, which differentiates with a specific order in thousands of different cells, each one with a specific "personalization" of that information, and in a general spacial and temporal frame which is, in itself, extremely complex? (think, for instance, to neuronal spacial connections in the CNS). Where is the information, the code, the regulation for all that? At present, the answer to both questions is completely lacking, or is just of the kind: "some lucky network of billions of biochemical feedbacks luckily stimulated and regulated by random interactions with the environment". hat's why I believe that future advancements in physics, chemistry, informatics and biology will certainly be of help.gpuccio
September 17, 2006
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tribune7 asks:
Karl do you really believe the laws of physics and chemistry are sufficient to sustain life once it is in existence?
Yes. If they were not sufficient, then we would find cases where these laws were violated in living things. In other words, we should find cases where the behavior of matter inside a living body is different from the behavior of matter under identical conditions outside a living body. We have never found such a case. Atoms behave the same whether they are inside or outside a living body. gpuccio, Penrose brings quantum phenomena to bear on the question of consciousness by proposing that microtubules amplify quantum phenomena sufficiently that they influence the firing of neurons. Although this idea has virtually no support among neurobiologists, Penrose can at least argue that it remains possible until neurobiology rules it out. (Reminiscent of ID, isn't it?) You seem to believe that a Penrose-style quantum amplification process may apply to life in general, and not just consciousness. What do you think are the normal functions of living cells (analogous to neuronal firing) that would require this quantum assistance in order to take place? By the way, for a cogent critique of Penrose's ideas regarding consciousness, see http://mind.ucsd.edu/papers/penrose/penrosehtml/penrose-text.htmlKarl Pfluger
September 16, 2006
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steveh, "Remember Barry said “This experiment should be easy.” let’s see how easily you or he can accurately reconstruct a cell from its disassembled parts and after you’ve done that we can begin the test proper. " The experiment shoud be easy for an intelligent designer...Hawks
September 16, 2006
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"If a microbe is scattered all over the place into its functional parts I’d consider that effectively dead." Can't argue with that. However, AIUI, Barry's prediction is that even if we then put the parts back together exactly as they were atom for atom (which is not a part of the test), the result could not be re-animated because the "life force" is gone. The problem is, we can't set up the inititial conditions for this test (confirmed dead but physically identical to a live cell). Remember Barry said "This experiment should be easy." let's see how easily you or he can accurately reconstruct a cell from its disassembled parts and after you've done that we can begin the test proper.steveh
September 16, 2006
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how do you determine if the subject of the experiment is properly dead to begin with?
We're a long, long way from being capable of disassembling and reconstituting, say, a mouse. If a microbe is scattered all over the place into its functional parts I'd consider that effectively dead.Patrick
September 16, 2006
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BarryA. "Thanks for the reference to the research. But don’t you see that this demonstrates my point?" No, it does not demonstrate your point. A point it DOES demonstrate is your strawman caricature of abiogenesis. "I’m not sure what you mean by “demonstrates.” If you mean it in the sense of a confirmed empirical test, your statement is simply false. If you mean that SF writers can imagine robots that are no different from humans, I agree SF writers do imagine that. Why should I care what they can imagine. I can imagine green elephants with yellow polka dots, but I’m not going to go looking for one." No, I did not mean in any sense of confirmed empirical test. That would simply be a ridiculous claim. I was merely pointing out one of the reasons why I like SF. The word demonstrate might have been an unfortunate choice, but at least it gave you the chance to come out with another strawman: "On my first point. Wait a minute. I forgot that evolutionary biology is the only field of science where the imagination of the researcher counts as evidence. Never mind then. "Hawks
September 15, 2006
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Yes, very funny. But how would you do it really?steveh
September 15, 2006
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steveh writes: "BarryA, how do you determine if the subject of the experiment is properly dead to begin with?" Steveh, I would hold a mirror up to its mouth.BarryA
September 15, 2006
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BarryA, how do you determine if the subject of the experiment is properly dead to begin with? It seems to me that if someone does bring a cell or an animal back to life, you will howl indignantly that it can't have been quite dead after all. ISTM that whether the subject is an animal or a cell, it is complex and its death is not a single event but a process in which different parts stop working at different times. If you wait for, say, the last sign of brain activity in an animal to cease, there's a good chance that other parts of the brain will already be well on their way to being goo.steveh
September 15, 2006
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Patrick:
I don’t see what would prevent a scientist–other than lack of knowledge, capability, etc.–from disassembling a bacteria into its functional parts and then reassembling it.
When a person dies, his body doesn't vanish. I was saying that nothing can have beingness without God continuing to hold that being in existence. As to your bacteria example, I think what you propose is unlikely, but, a priori I wouldn't completely rule it out--since you're talking about parts, and, at that microscopic level, various parts might persist in functionality for some time. But, again, I wouldn't bet on it.PaV
September 15, 2006
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On that other topic of there being an intrinsic "soul" to life...I'm fairly surprised that the Christian position is that ALL life requires this. For humans, sure, I can understand that belief but for every bit of the animal kingdom down to the lowly bacteria? I don't see what would prevent a scientist--other than lack of knowledge, capability, etc.--from disassembling a bacteria into its functional parts and then reassembling it.Patrick
September 15, 2006
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Karl Pfluger:
To clarify, when you say that life requires God’s active participation, do you mean that God “props up” the laws of physics and chemistry, but that otherwise life is simply the unfolding of those laws for a particular configuration of matter, or do you mean that God overrides those laws (whether in a detectable way or not) in order to allow a living being to continue to live?
I see this as a false dichotomy. God is the "Lawgiver"; hence any laws of nature come from His hand. Yet, these "laws" work on matter and energy, which have an existence of their own, and nothing can exist outside the primary agency of God. St. Paul: "...the living God, in whom we live, and move, and have our being". Again, this is theology, not science. From a "scientific" point of view, what I state above is almost immaterial (no pun intended). However, the "facts" of nature, newly discovered over the last 50 or so years, leads a thinking person to conclude that in the order, complexity, and structure of biology, some kind of "design" is involved. Rather than making this a "proof of God", it is better to speak of a "Designer". But, to stress the point here, this is a 'rationalistic' approach, not a 'theological' approach. Darwinists should concede on logical grounds without fearing the theological overtones of such a concession. As they said of Clinton in the days surrounding his impeachment: "We can compartmentalize." I can put on my theological thinking cap, take it off, and put on my scientific thinking cap. It's not hard to do. Nonetheless, I go back and forth between these two realms. In the Catholic Church, this notion of the realm of science ("reason") and theology ("faith") came up over nine centuries ago. This tensions was resolved, more or less, with St. Anselm's formulation: "Faith that seeks understanding." The Pope's recent remarks about Islam that have sparked such an uproar in the Muslim world I believe contained comments along the line that the religion of Islam does not conform with the dictates of reason. Truth is truth; and "theological truth" should not contradict the "truth of science." There are many physicists who see in the Big Bang Theory, for instance, a substantiation of the biblical account of creation wherein the world is brought into existence ex nihilo. But, again, the Big Bang doesn't "prove" the Creation accounts; yet, nonetheless, there certainly is a congruence between them. Mitochondrial DNA points to a "mitochonrial Eve", and the Y-chromosomes point to one, single Adam. Again, there is congruence between science (reason) and theology (faith). But, this doesn't "prove" there was a single Adam and a single Eve since there is a fair amount of induction involved in the 'mitochondrial' argument. But, you get my point.PaV
September 15, 2006
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