OOL Researchers: No Soup for You!!

_{Barry Arrington

February 6, 2010

Intelligent Design}

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For 80 years it has been accepted that early life began in a ‘primordial soup’ of organic molecules before evolving out of the oceans millions of years later. Today the ‘soup’ theory has been over turned in a pioneering paper in BioEssays which claims it was the Earth’s chemical energy, from hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, which kick-started early life.

Rest of the story here.

Comments

Mr Giem, There are other proposals for abiogenesis at the surface that treat the energy from UV as a net positive. The page that Mr Arrington links to has a link to another article on the "Zinc world" hypothesis published last year.Nakashima_{February 8, 2010
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Heinrich: “Are you saying that Thaxton, Bradley & Olsen suggested the life from vents scenario 25 years ago? That’s the new perspective that’s being provided.” Give credit where is due. Thaxton et al did provide reasons “why that old and familiar view [the prebiotic soup myth] won’t work at all.”JPCollado_{February 8, 2010
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Zeroseven: "Cannuckian Yankee, I know it gets said endlessly, but ToE is not a theory about the origin of life. It can’t be by definition, as it needs something to reproduce." Yes, I'm aware of this. So why then are these theorists attempting to make ToE into a theory about OOL? Why even speculate on it if the theory can't address it? I personally believe that ToE's inability to address the issue of OOL scientifically indicates a major problem with the theory, and places it within the framework of a philosophical presupposition, rather than a truly scientific theory. And this despite the fact that Darwin's book was "On the Origin of Species," not "On The Continuing Evolution of Species from an Unknown Cause." While I believe this, I do believe that as philosophical theories on life go, it is brilliantly thought-out. It is masterfully more sophisticated than anything the ancient Greeks thought up. But that does not make it a scientific reality.CannuckianYankee_{February 8, 2010
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zeroseven: "Is an earthquake intentional or goal-directed?" No. Only minds possess those capacities. That is a bad analogy. Plus, I've never seen chaotic events like earthquakes create the beauty and order we see in the biological or technological world or to have come about from anything but disorganized and random seismic activity.JPCollado_{February 8, 2010
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mikev6: "You say that like it’s a bad thing. I would be more concerned if it didn’t change as new evidence is discovered. That’s how science works." My cat learns from his mistakes. If going in one direction does not get him to his food repeatedly, he begins to go in another direction, and eventually learns to get to the food. Science in its purest form is a search for truth. If truth is not found in one direction, one would expect scientifically, that going in an entirely new direction may render better results. The problem with Darwinism is that, while it continues to change, it does not go in new directions - it continues with the same philosophical assumptions, which drive the directions it is willing to go. As such, it is not willing to go in any direction which would lead it away from the assumption that only natural causes can exist. It does this purely from an assumption, and not from an evidential extrapolation. When Darwinists respond to this: "well, wait a minute, all we see are natural causes," they are blind to the fact that they are question-begging. So when Darwinists are now suggesting a vent hypothesis to replace the debunked soup hypothesis, they are not changing the basics of the theory one bit, just switching to a new affirmation of the base philosophical assumptions simply because a former "just-so" story proved to be losing support. The more things change, the more they stay the same. To make matters worse for the theory, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever - anymore than there is evidence for the primordial soup hypothesis, that vents on the bottom of the ocean had anything to do with abiogenesis. This isn't science, it's cheap philosophy in the guise of scientific sophistry.CannuckianYankee_{February 8, 2010
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zeroseven: "No, it’s not a valid logical conclusion." Fine, Mr. zeroseven. What is the opposite of something occuring by chance?JPCollado_{February 8, 2010
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"How did the designer actually create life?" That to me seems to be what science is really about. If we learn how the designer create life then we may be able to do it ourselves. We are already learned much from life. Even if we can't create life at least we may be able to create some nanomachines.Smidlee_{February 8, 2010
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I find the summary article fascinating. Life originated from deep-sea vents, because there is no good energy source to drive the reactions necessary for life on the surface of the ocean, and such an energy source is present in deep-sea alkaline vents. I agree with the critique that there is no good source of energy to harness on the surface. Ultraviolet light is not easily available because of the spontaneous formation of oxygen and ozone from water fairly early on, which would tend to block UV. In addition, if UV got to the earth's surface, it would tend to tear apart organic molecules as well as create them, making UV very hard to harness as an energy source. Other surface sources of energy suffer from the same drawbacks. But using sea vents as an energy source, while making the energy source more tractable, trades one set of problems for an even more difficult set. For it is not clear how high concentrations of monomers can exist with only heat and alkalinity to produce them. How do we make alanine, and arginine, and ribose, and cytosine, and guanine, etc., using only thermal and ionic energy? And how do we make the polymers stick together in a strongly basic environment? It seems to me that the proposers of this theory have not thought their proposal through carefully.Paul Giem_{February 8, 2010
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JPCollado @7 - Are you saying that Thaxton, Bradley & Olsen suggested the life from vents scenario 25 years ago? That's the new perspective that's being provided.Heinrich_{February 8, 2010
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JPCollado @ 4, No, it's not a valid logical conclusion. Is an earthquake intentional or goal-directed? It doesn't happen by chance but by a well-understood mechanism. @ 5, Yes, but aren't you a little bit curious about how cars are made? (Aside from the fact that its pretty easy to tell on close inspection). Cannuckian Yankee, I know it gets said endlessly, but ToE is not a theory about the origin of life. It can't be by definition, as it needs something to reproduce.zeroseven_{February 7, 2010
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From the article:
For 80 years it has been accepted that early life began in a 'primordial soup' of organic molecules ... "We provide a new perspective on why that old and familiar view won't work at all"
On that point, ID theorists got them beat by at least twenty-five years (see Thaxton, Bradley, Olsen's The Mystery of Life's Origin, ch.4):
Based on the foregoing geochemical assessment...We may therefore with fairness call this scenario "the myth of the prebiotic soup." (p.66)
Who said Darwin skeptics were not on top of things?JPCollado_{February 7, 2010
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How did the designer actually create life?
Duh, it was designed then "put together". How does an automobile maker "create" a car? Life? What IS life?Borne_{February 7, 2010
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"How did the designer actually create life?" ID does not deal with mechanisms but with final causes. My lack of understanding of how cars are made does not cancel out purposeful ingenuity as the source of their existence.JPCollado_{February 7, 2010
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mikev6: "'X is too improbable to happen by chance; ergo, design'". That is a valid logical conclusion. The opposite of happenstance or chance formations is intentional or goal-directed planification, so that the negation of one is the affirmation of the other.JPCollado_{February 7, 2010
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CannuckianYankee:
Such is the history of Darwinian thinking that we have all become accustomed to. ToE is solid, but oh so ever changing.
You say that like it's a bad thing. I would be more concerned if it didn't change as new evidence is discovered. That's how science works. ID, on the other hand, doesn't seem to change much at all - "X is too improbable to happen by chance; ergo, design". If you don't like the vent idea, or the soup idea, what is your explanation? How did the designer actually create life?mikev6_{February 7, 2010
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So the new "vent" theory? It makes the "soup" theorists sound like the new ice age theorists of the 1970s and 80s. Will they get with the program, and adapt to the new paradigm? After all, emerging paradigms are not always afar off. Such is the history of Darwinian thinking that we have all become accustomed to. ToE is solid, but oh so ever changing.CannuckianYankee_{February 6, 2010
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Thanks for help with the link BA77.bornagain77_{February 6, 2010
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