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Probabilities and the Genesis of Life

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The important thing to keep in mind concerning probabilities and the origin of life is that proteins, and everything else in a living cell, are manufactured by machinery which is controlled by an abstract-representation digital coding system. Proteins not only don’t self-assemble, they cannot self-assemble, because basic chemistry drives the process in the opposite direction.

Once this is taken into consideration all arguments that assert, “But it could have happened by chance,” are rendered ludicrous on their face.

By way of analogy, the basic Darwinian argument for the origin of life goes something like this:

1) Clay occurs naturally.
2) Bricks are made of clay.
3) Therefore, there is some (given enough time) probability that houses made of clay bricks came about by stochastic processes and the chemistry of clay.

This is the way I see it, and so do most people with common sense. Apparently, one needs a Ph.D. in Darwinian Speculation (or sufficient indoctrination in this academic, “scientific” specialty) not to recognize the obvious.

Comments
Collin (#78) Thank you for your vote of support. By the way, 4,540 million years (the figure I quoted for the age of the Earth in #69) is equivalent to the figure you quote of 4.5 billion years, so we are in agreement. (To be precise, 4,540 million years is 4.54 billion years.) 1,000 million equals 1 billion.vjtorley
December 15, 2009
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This is a quote from wikipedia: "The details of the origin of life are unknown, but the broad principles have been established." Hahahahahahaha! How do they know that their broad principles are correct? I'm sure that their belief is sincere and I shouldn't mock it. But it isn't science.Collin
December 15, 2009
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joseph, I was simply correcting a simple error on Mung's part. I'm so pleased that you know what RNA and DNA stand for.Dave Wisker
December 15, 2009
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Vjtorley, The earth is 4.5 Billion, not million years old. But I agree with your point, even in that length of time, evolution is unlikely.Collin
December 15, 2009
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Mr Vjtorley, My apologies. I was in the middle of composing a long reply and my browser crashed. I will attempt to reply later.Nakashima
December 15, 2009
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vjtorley: But the fact is that you have made several posts in this thread, attempting to rebut assertions by researchers – including chemistry professors such as Dr. Walton – that the origin of life through undirected processes is massively improbable, and that the RNA world scenario is simply not feasible.
An appeal to authority is valid when * The cited authority has sufficient expertise. * The authority is making a statement within their area of expertise. * The area of expertise is a valid field of study. * There is adequate agreement among authorities in the field. * There is no evidence of undue bias. The scientific consensus of those in the field is that life arose spontaneously, but that there are yet many questions and no adequate theory. The vast majority of scientists in the relevant fields of study also strongly support the Theory of Evolution. Abiogenetics has been a fruitful area of research. The proper argument against a valid appeal to authority is to the evidence.Zachriel
December 15, 2009
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Dave Wisker, The first clue should have been RNA = Ribonucleic acid and the second DNA = dioxyribonucleic acid. But anyway... (shrug, sigh)Joseph
December 15, 2009
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Graham:
No one is claiming life started as a ‘first cell’. It is presumed to have started as extremely primitive compounds that dont have DNA as we know it. There may have been some other completely different scheme for reproduction, that later evolved into the DNA we see now. It is then possible to evolve into some other scheme again in the future.
The point is there isn't any evidence for any of that.Joseph
December 15, 2009
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Mung writes:
(1) amino acids to RNA
This should be nucleic acids to RNA. Amino acids are the constituents of protein molecules. Nucleic acids for RNA and DNA.
RNA and DNA are nucleic acids. They are composed of monomers called nucleotidesDave Wisker
December 15, 2009
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Gil, In what way would origin of life through intelligent design (not to call it creation) be observably different from spontaneous generation? And to cut the likes of Mung off at the pass: I am not referring to researchers who might eventually produce life in the laboratory. You know what I am talking about: the origin of life without human interference. What would it look like, if not the presence of life where shortly before there wasn't any? fGfaded_Glory
December 15, 2009
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lryna, What of Phil Skell's qualifications are you calling into question? Is it that he is an emeritus prof at Penn State, or is that he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences? What about Norman Nevin, emeritus prof at Queens College? Or Edward Peltzer at Scripps? Do they have something in their background that should disqualify them from voicing an opinion in favor of Meyer's book? What is the actual point of your comment? Is it that there can be no dissenting opinions? How exactly does that work in science? Are you simply suggesting we should consider the Alfred Wegener argument for consensus in science? The Georges Lemaître/Gregor Mendel law of group approval, perhaps?Upright BiPed
December 15, 2009
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Mung (#66) In your response to Cabal regarding the reasonableness of assuming abiogenesis occurred naturally, you wrote...
Do you know of a reason why it (life) could be the result of natural processes?
And by that I assume you meant that the alternative--namely that life is the result of non-natural processes--is just as reasonable a statement to make. However, that statement is not only not reasonable, it is non sensical. A "process" is by definition natural. If you are going to argue that life could have happened non-naturally, then you are going to have to come up with some alternative language so as to allow it to make sense.lastyearon
December 15, 2009
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vjtorley:
If you’re wondering whether to believe the claims made in Dr. Meyer’s book, just have a look at the Reviews page on his Web site, and see how many chemistry and biology professors loved it.
No doubt a random sample of chemistry and biology professors.IrynaB
December 15, 2009
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vjtorley, You wrote "If our ignorance is that severe, then scientists are in no position to affirm that abiogenesis is scientifically possible. A non-quantifiable possibility is mere hand-waving." Given that you believe the universe-and life-had a beginning, then at some point, wether here on earth, or somewhere else, non-life became life. Some scientists are doing good work trying to figure out how that happened. They don't know, probably aren't close to knowing, and may not ever know. But that doesn't change the fact that abiogenesis isn't just likely, it is certain to have happened. Life exists.lastyearon
December 15, 2009
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Graham objects to my statement of there being a "first cell". Maybe a philosopher like vjtorley can help me out, but I guess Graham's denial of the first cell only allows for two other possibilities. Cells always existed or no cells have existed. Which option does Graham believe? Note: I reject the idea of many cells popping into existence at once because of the difficulty of establishing the idea of simultaneous events due to the effects of quantum phycics E* delta t > hbar. And the special theory of relativity. ( Whether events are simultaneous or not depends on your inertial frame of reference )JDH
December 14, 2009
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Kevlar (#34) Thank you for your post. You write:
Even if the current model is mistaken, how do you get around the observations regarding the cosmic microwave background radiation?
I don't. My whole point was that the total number of possible theories which scientists could formulate in order to explain the development of the cosmos is very large, and that to date, only a handful of theories have actually been formulated by scientists. The fact that the Big Bang theory is far and away the best of these paltry few, doesn't make it true. You also wrote:
So perhaps the details aren't ironed out, but why prefer the idea that the universe has always been suitable for life when the data from COBE and others suggests completely the opposite?
It certainly does seem to suggest that - although I should add that the COBE data only applies to the observable universe. At the present time, we don't know how big the universe is, so we can't say if the rest of it was hot or cold, ten billion years ago. Now, I believe in God, so I'm quite happy if research points to the universe having a beginning. My point was simply that an atheist, confronted with evidence that abiogenesis was astronomically improbable, would be rational to propose the least improbable scenario for how we got here today. Let me illustrate. About 100 years ago, the world's leading physicist, Lord Kelvin, confidently pronounced that the Earth was 20 to 40 million years old. What did sensible Darwinists do? They knew perfectly well that this was not enough time for life to have arisen naturally, so they took a scientific gamble that Kelvin was wrong. They knew that it would have been silly to accept Kelvin's physics, and then propose a "mud-to-man" scenario occurring over a mere 20 million years. As it happened, their gamble paid off. We now know the Earth is 4,540 million years old. But there's a new problem. Getting from "mud" to the first cell appears far more difficult than Darwin envisaged. Once again, the time span appears insufficient: 500 million years doesn't seem to be enough. There are several independent reasons - discussed at length in Dr. Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell - for thinking that barring a miracle, life could not have arisen naturally on Earth over that time period. (If you're wondering whether to believe the claims made in Dr. Meyer's book, just have a look at the Reviews page on his Web site, and see how many chemistry and biology professors loved it.) To make matters worse, the world's top cosmologists and physicists are now claiming that 13.7 billion years ago, the entire Universe was unimaginably hot and dense, precluding the possibility of life. What's a Darwinist to do? Well, if I were one, I'd either question the physics (are we sure the Big Bang happened?), or endeavor to minimize it (maybe it happened, but it was only local). The last thing I would want to do is suppose that massively improbable events occurred. That would be too miraculous - and Darwinists don't believe in miracles, do they? That was the point of my earlier posts, in which I was arguing (in devil's advocate fashion) for an eternal universe. I don't believe in an eternal universe any more than you do. Finally, you conclude:
You still need to establish that a theory which claims that the universe has always been suitable for life is easier to fit with our observations than not.
First, I don't need to establish anything - after all, I'm not an atheist, am I? Second, I hope it is clear now that what a smart atheist would need to establish is that the probability that some part of the universe was not hot and dense 13.7 billion years ago is significantly greater than zero, leaving the door open for life to have either existed eternally or evolved over a much longer time period, thereby giving the atheist some breathing space. That was all I really wanted to say.vjtorley
December 14, 2009
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I seem to have a bizarre talent for instigating long threads. Perhaps it's because I know how to touch sensitive nerves. The bottom line is that the phenomenon of life coming from life, and not from non-life, is as close as anything we know to a universal law of nature. Those who assert that life can come from purely materialistic causes should be required to provide evidence that their thesis is defensible, in contradiction of this observational universal law. Go ahead: Attempt to defend spontaneous generation, but let's see some evidence that this discredited hypothesis has modern scientific support. The burden of proof clearly rests on the shoulders of the spontaneous-generation crowd.GilDodgen
December 14, 2009
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vjt:
I can only keep a limited number of things in my head at once (four’s about the limit, I’m afraid), and those are the key steps.
I consider it a design flaw that I can keep more things on my head at one time than I can keep in my head.
(1) amino acids to RNA
This should be nucleic acids to RNA. Amino acids are the constituents of protein molecules. Nucleic acids for RNA and DNA.Mung
December 14, 2009
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...we have no means of knowing the mind of the designer.
What designer?
Nothing says he couldn’t have set it up to look the way it looks.
Well that's pretty obvious, since the way it looks is the way it looks.
...abiogenesis as a natural phenomenon seems the most reasonable option.
Why? What's reasonable about it?
We know no reason why it could not be the result of natural processes.
Is this why you think "abiogenesis as a natural phenomenon" is reasonable, because you know of no reason why it is not reasonable? Seriously?
We know no reason why it could not be the result of natural processes.
Do you know of a reason why it could be the result of natural processes? Usually, for a belief to be reasonable, it needs to have some basis in reason.
It may be a little premature to write it off yet.
Most lenders write off bad debts after a reasonable amount of time has passed. I think we're at the point now where we're asking for the debt to be paid. Consider it notice. If it continues to be unpaid, we have every right to "write it off."
As soon as we invoke a designer we open a Pandora’s box of possibilities:
What designer?
As soon as we invoke a designer we open a Pandora’s box of possibilities:
Not knowing anything about the designer, making assumptions about what the designer is capable of is a bit premature, don't you think?
He may have set it up any way he wants; even to create the world 6000 years ago making it look like it is 4.6 billions.
So what? We deal with the world as it appears to us. If it was created 6000 years ago how will that change they way that it looks to us and "put an end to science"? Your objection is irrelevant.Mung
December 14, 2009
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Mr. Nakashima I would like to ask you a simple question: are you a chemist of some sort? I respect people's right to privacy, and I'm not asking you to reveal your identity. But the fact is that you have made several posts in this thread, attempting to rebut assertions by researchers - including chemistry professors such as Dr. Walton - that the origin of life through undirected processes is massively improbable, and that the RNA world scenario is simply not feasible. The question I have to ask myself is: should I believe you, and if so, why? You may respond that you shouldn't have to identify yourself; your arguments stand or fall on their own merits. That would be fair enough, except for one small problem: I simply don't understand your arguments. To me, they read like so much gobbledygook, because of the technical jargon they employ. Although I have studied a little chemistry at university level (two years of undergraduate chemistry, WAY back in 1979-80, and it was mostly inorganic chemistry at that), I am NOT a chemist. My background is in philosophy. So when I come across an argument which I cannot fully understand, in which you contradict a chemistry professor, I'm inclined to believe the professor. To overcome this natural bias in my belief-forming system, you'll have to either raise your credibility (e.g. "I am a senior chemist with 20 years' research experience," or "I'm not a chemist, but a chemist who is a friend of mine, Dr. X, has vetted my post and vouches for its accuracy") OR make your arguments a lot clearer. Take this statement of yours, attacking Dr. Stephen Meyer's probability calculations for the origin of life:
Of the original 10^-164, 45 orders of magnitude was from producing only peptide bonds, and templating on RNA supports that. Another 74 orders of magnitude was functional specificity, and the RNA was functionally specific for arginine-arginine sequences while the polypeptide showed enzymatic activity for the associated RNA. (The remaining 45 orders of magnitude were chirality, which this experiment does not address.)
With regard to "templating on RNA," I have to say that your statement sounds rather vague. (The link you provided to an article entitled Direct templating of amino acids on RNA wasn't much clearer, either: it spoke of a "simple model system," based on "the observation that several RNAs modestly accelerated the chemical ligation of the two basic peptides." The rest went over my head.) Are you asserting that the peptide problem has been solved, and we can all go home now? If not, how much work remains to be done? Could we have a progress metric, please? The same goes for your remarks on functional specificity. Functional specificity, as Meyer uses the term, is something you can quantify. Can you quantify the degree of specificity found for arginine-arginine sequences and compare it with that required for the synthesis of RNA? In other words, how far along the road are we? Yes, you can talk of progress, but one step on a thousand mile journey would hardly count as significant progress. And what if the journey I thought was a thousand miles long suddenly turned out to be two thousand miles, due to an unexpected roadblock? I'd like to return to the journey metaphor. When people embark on a journey, they usually have a good idea where they want to go, how far they will have to travel, and how long it will take them to get there. If they'll be stopping at a couple of places along the way, they also know the relative distances between these places - i.e. which leg of the trip will be the longest, and which will be the shortest. All right. Let's go with that. At the moment, the most promising naturalistic model for the origin of life is something like this: simple organic chemicals (e.g. amino acids) => RNA => (DNA and protein) => first cell. Sorry for skipping over so many vital steps, but I can only keep a limited number of things in my head at once (four's about the limit, I'm afraid), and those are the key steps. I've identified three steps: (1) amino acids to RNA, (2) RNA to DNA and proteins, and (3) DNA & proteins to first cell. What I want to know is this: (1) Which of the three steps is the most difficult to achieve, and which is the least, in a given time period, under plausible prebiotic conditions? This is a qualitative statement. If you cannot even answer this question, then how can I possibly trust your quantitative assertions, in which you critique Dr. Meyer's probability estimates? (2) At the present time, can scientists quantify the relative probabilities of the steps involved (e.g. step 2 is 1,000,000 times harder to achieve, over a given time period, than step 1)? (3) At the present time, can scientists quantify the probabilities of any of the key steps in absolute terms, given plausible assumptions about the prebiotic Earth and the amount of time over which they took place (say, 500 million years)? (4) Breaking it down into small steps, suppose we follow the long path from amino acid to first cell, focusing on the largest chemical molecule at each stage along the way, and tracking its growth as it gets bigger and more complex. For simplicity's sake, we'll ignore all the other molecules that it must have reacted with. We're just looking at the most direct chemical pathway from amino acids to the first cell. Using this metric, how many chemical steps were there from amino acid to first cell, to the nearest order of magnitude? 10,000? 1,000,000? 1,000,000,000? More? (5) Typically, journeys have a known distance. The relevant analogue to distance here might be the estimated probability of getting from amino acid to first cell, or the number of steps that must have been traversed. Newspapers always report breakthroughs in origin-of-life research, but they never reported unexpected roadblocks: that doesn't sell with the reading public, who only want to hear about progress. So I would like to ask: has the estimated probability of life arising by undirected natural processes risen or fallen over the past 15 years? Ditto for the number of steps required. Now that would be a valid measure of whether abiogenesis is more difficult to achieve than scientists had first anticipated, or whether it is easier than they first thought. Now, I respect honest ignorance, and it may be that no-one in the world knows the answers to any of these questions (although I very much doubt it). In that case, proponents of aabiogenesis should have the intellectual honesty to admit their ignorance, and then maybe we can all return to this discussion in 20 years' time. But if that's the case, then it would not be fair of you to criticize researchers who identify problems in abiogenesis, by downplaying the improbabilities involved. Instead, a more appropriate response would sinply be: we don't know. Which brings me to question (6): If we don't know, then when will we? And if we don't know that, then we really are up salt creek without a paddle. If our ignorance is that severe, then scientists are in no position to affirm that abiogenesis is scientifically possible. A non-quantifiable possibility is mere hand-waving. But suppose you have some answers to my first five questions, and suppose that your answers are significantly at variance with Dr. Meyer's. Here's my suggestion. Let's have an online debate - or series of debates - between opposing teams of biochemists. I for one would like to get to the bottom of this. After all, the question of whether life on Earth could have arisen by undirected natural processes during the time available is an important one. It's a question with philosophical and theological implications, and it affects how we live our lives. Over to you, Mr. Nakashima.vjtorley
December 14, 2009
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Graham #61 "There may have been some other completely different scheme for reproduction, that later evolved into the DNA we see now." Would you mind providing some kind of empirical evidence to substantiate this speculation? Fascinating that those of your persuasion ( I assume here that you subscribe to evolution by means of random mutation and natural selection ). You might as well be talking about the flying spaghetti monster here. Where are your naturalistic processes in this scenario?toc
December 14, 2009
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Whats inane about it ? If you postulate an 'agent' capable of creating all life on earth, then why stop there ? Why could he not have created us yesterday ? Do you know the mind of the creator ? Do you have some insight into his big plan ? If you do, I wish you could share it with us.Graham
December 14, 2009
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Graham,
He could have created the unsiverse last Tuesday, creating us with all our memories, etc, so we have simply no basis whatever for distinguising this from any other miraculous intervention.
You all read from the same playbook don't you? I had a professor in college make the same inane argument. It was then, and it is now.Clive Hayden
December 14, 2009
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To JDH: What a confused mess. What is this 'first cell' thing ? No one is claiming life started as a 'first cell'. It is presumed to have started as extremely primitive compounds that dont have DNA as we know it. There may have been some other completely different scheme for reproduction, that later evolved into the DNA we see now. It is then possible to evolve into some other scheme again in the future. Regarding the origin, it is possible that God could have kicked off the process at any stage whatsoever, and the current thinking regarding evolution would be completely unnafected. In fact, if God/Creator/Designer were sufficiently clever, he could do this and leave absolutely no trace. He could have created the unsiverse last Tuesday, creating us with all our memories, etc, so we have simply no basis whatever for distinguising this from any other miraculous intervention.Graham
December 14, 2009
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JDH, Well said.Collin
December 14, 2009
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Cabal, Forgive me, but I think you missed the entire point. Here it is shorter. 1. A pillar of Darwinian theory is unguided natural selection. 2. As soon as you allow the first cell to have DNA chosen as the method of inheritance - you are restricted to producing life forms that can proceed on the given machinery. 3. This is going to favor some evolutionary paths over others. 4. Therefore, evolution begun by anything else other than chance and necessity is no longer unguided. This is why Darwinian theory is absolutely linked to OOL by chance and necessity. Darwinian theory can not be scientifically honest, and divorce itself from OOL.JDH
December 14, 2009
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Give my condolences to your friend (for being a lawyer, not for being your friend, haha).Collin
December 14, 2009
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Mr Collin, Not me, a friend of mine!Nakashima
December 14, 2009
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Nakashima, I bet I know your profession based on some of your vocabulary. Where did you first hear the word "dispositive?" I heard it first in law school.Collin
December 14, 2009
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Cabal: Since I'm sure you are not familiar with Professor Whitesides' qualifications in OOL chemistry, I should have added that he is part of the Harvard origin of life project. http://origins.harvard.edu/ I think its safe to assume that he keeps up with the subject, to put it mildly.Gage
December 14, 2009
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