I plan to award a prize to anyone who can invent a non-trivial 3D machine which can replicate itself. The machine must be able to make copies of itself without human intervention, except possibly to supply the raw materials. Basically a 3D printer which can print a copy of itself which retains the ability to print a copy of itself, which… A page which can be photocopied does not count, because it is the photocopier which actually makes the copy, unless the photocopy machine also makes a copy of itself; a computer program which duplicates itself does not count unless the computer it runs on makes a copy of itself also.
The prize: the right to speculate about how life originated. Leave your artificial species alone and see how many generations it lasts before going extinct. If it makes accurate copies of itself for 100+ generations, then you also win the right to speculate about how genetic duplication errors might accumulate into major evolutionary advances.
In this German TV interview, W.E.Loennig complains about scientists who will admit they haven’t any idea how to synthesize a blade of grass, yet insist they have no doubt about how it came to exist. It is the astonishing fact that living species are able to replicate themselves without significant degradation, generation after generation, while awaiting rare beneficial accidents, which makes Darwinism seem even superficially plausible. It seems you should be required to have some understanding of how self-replication could happen in engineered machines, before speculating about how life acquired this ability by pure chance and used it to evolve.
And to really appreciate how astonishing reproduction is, especially in higher animals like us, please watch the video below.
Very interesting!
[The following is something that I have written a couple times before, on other threads, which I think is worth is repeating here.]
The problem with Dr. Sewell’s challenge is that to meet it you have to start with an already existing machine (which has the potential to replicate itself) and that is what really needs to be explained. If you are a naturalist/materialist and you can’t explain that– where the first natural self-replicating machines came from– then all bets are off and ID wins– game, set, match!
FYI – for a good discussion of self-replicators and their issues, the last three chapters of “Engineering and the Ultimate” go into great depth on them.
Johnnyb,
I did a “look inside this book” (some pages missing, of course) at your reference chapters and I had no idea there were already several studies on feasibility of my proposed Simplest Self Replicator (by NASA and others). Very interesting, could you summarize these chapters—size of proposed SSRs (100 tons for lunar “seed” factory), etc. Obviously the problem is recognized to be extremely difficult…but I wonder if even these hypothetical SSRs, far beyond current technology, would be expected to replicate themselves for many generations, or just a few? These chapters seem to make the point very nicely, that the simplest possible life has to be incredibly complex, please elaborate a little for our “audience”!
Here is the youtube presentation The Design of the Simplest Self-Replicator at the 2014 Engineering and Metaphysics Conference that was the basis of the three chapters in the Engineering and the Ultimate book linked above by Johnnyb.
The book developed and extended significantly the ideas from the presentation.
InVivoVeritas,
Thanks for the video!
Applying Behe’s “Principle of Comparative Difficulty” I would say until we can intelligently design an SSR, we shouldn’t even try to explain how one could arise by chance. And after watching your video, I’d say a human-designed SSR is a very long way off, and one which can self-replicate indefinitely without significant degradation is surely forever beyond our capabilities. Not to mention one which evolves rather than devolves!
What does self-replication actually get us? I think that is the key question that we need to consider first. I don’t think it gets us very far. I think, if we are intellectually honest, it raises more questions than it answers.
For example, I think the very fact of self-replication raises the question of what I call “evolvability.” Is self-replication alone sufficient for the progeny of a simple cell to evolve into something more complex? For example, is the ability of a smallest known prokaryote, Mycoplasma genitalium, to replicate, sufficient for its progeny to eventually evolve into a eukaryote? (A lot of Darwinists without proof or evidence would “argue” yes.) Do all eukaryotes have the potential of evolving into multicellular life forms? What is it that gives them that potential? And of course, from there follow the questions about higher life forms… specialization and diversification on not only organisms but the specialized cellular architecture and organs within distinct organisms. In other words, if they evolved what are the sufficient conditions for them to evolve? Can evolution, as the naturalist/ materialist believe, occur without evolution itself being designed?
Spiegelman’s Monster is an obstacle for any OoL scenario that starts out with molecular replicators. It demonstrates what we observe every day- that nature tends towards the most simple and efficient solutions, ie the line of least resistance.
Kirk Durston in a recent article at Evolution News entitled, “Inferential Science — What Could Go Wrong?” makes a number of points which I think are pertinent to the discussion here.
https://evolutionnews.org/2019/04/inferential-science-what-could-go-wrong/
These aren’t really conclusions rather they are assumptions based on a naturalistic/materialistic world view. As such they are NOT logical inferences derived from the evidence but a priori philosophical commitments that are faith based.
On the software level there are quines, which are self replicating programs. However, they get the hardware level for free, which is much more complex to assemble.