Why isn’t life being synthesized in a laboratory?

. By the way JVL, when the scientists of the future go ahead and implement a sequence and a set of coordinated constraints in the system, suddenly the system will require two complimentary descriptions in order to explain its function — just like living cells. How interesting is that? :) Upright BiPed

. JVL, At some point in the future, scientists may eventually develop the technology to assemble any lawful configuration of molecules they wish. They will likely also have the computational power to understand, and even predict, the dynamic interactions of those configurations. That point in time will certainly provide the opportunity to finally cross the threshold and actually build an autonomous description-based self-replicator, like the living cell. But as you already know, it’ll all be for naught until a set of tokens and a set of constraints are established so that functional configurations can become specified among the alternatives in a heritable memory. This is a non-negotiable physical requirement in the same way it is a non-negotiable physical requirement that lift has to be created in order to fly like a bird. You have to have a set of constraints in order to create descriptions, and those constraints have to be specified in the descriptions in order for them to persist over time. So when this point in the future comes, do you think scientists will finally cop out on the stifling dogma that rules OoL research today? Knowing that it is their only way forward, will they go ahead and organize a set of non-integrable constraints, and give it an appropriate sequence coordinated to those constraints (and describes them)? Or will they hold to their deeply-held ideological convictions, and choose merely to “feed the system” — waiting patiently for tokens and constraints to organize themselves into self-referent descriptions? In other words, JVL, will they exemplify your protected ideological preferences, or will they choose to demonstrate what is already known to be true? You see, the thing is, you already know the answers to these questions. Yet you are forced by your personal beliefs to deny and ignore the science and history. This self-inflicted incapacity puts your continued participation on this website into clear perspective, does it not? Please feel free to remind us again what a reasonable follower of science you are. Upright BiPed

As usual JVL (@20) misreads a comment and then raises his own straw man to attack. I said that someone will eventually succeed. That means they will use their intelligence and complicated lab equipment, along with the knowledge from past failures, to assemble some form of life, mostly from molecules derived from living beings - clearly an ID process. That is a far cry from "a way that life arose on earth via blind and mindless processes". And after 150 plus years, no one is closer to finding a set of credible mindless processes that could have produced life on Earth or anywhere else. Fasteddious

JVL@20... You missed the phrase that said "some will succeed in creating." Life has never assembled itself by putting primordial components in a beaker and letting it sit there. And also, where did the components come from? Origin of Anything would be another good field to visit. OOL just assumes matter and components emerged...but no scientifically evidenced answer to its actual existential cause or origin. In the OOL that is being done, it all involves intelligence. Any scientific manipulation of components (purity, chirality, etc), setting of conditions, timing... manipulation=intelligence. zweston

Fasteddious: Eventually some will succeed in creating something that can be said to be alive, but that will say nothing about how life began on Earth. And of course it will just show that ID works. Hang on . . . if someone proposes a way that life arose on earth via blind and mindless processes and then demonstrates that in a lab by recreating the same situation you'll just say: see, that's intelligent design? JVL

One notes that when scientists try to create life in the lab, they use biochemicals made by living organisms, suitably homo-chiral and purified. Even then they don't get very far. Eventually some will succeed in creating something that can be said to be alive, but that will say nothing about how life began on Earth. And of course it will just show that ID works. Fasteddious

It is very unlikely that they will be able to produce life in a lab through natural processes, even if this is how it actually happened. Ignoring the time frame that was likely necessary, labs would be working with litres or a few hundred litres of raw material (water based). Whereas the earth has 1.386 billion km³ of water to work with. Joe Schooner

Marfin I don`t know if any of you guys have ever started a project and 20% into it you realise its going to take 5 times as long as you though, and is far more, complex than you anticipated.

:) The evolutionary biologists are in majority the romantic type they have no clue how function an engine but they talk about cell that is billion times more complex. No wonder why they are good at inventing different stories about how the frog turn into prince instead bringing sound scientific evidences. Lieutenant Commander Data

I don`t know if any of you guys have ever started a project and 20% into it you realise its going to take 5 times as long as you though, and is far more,complex than you anticipated. Why ? because you thought you had all the information you needed going in , but as you got in to you you realised oops ! I never thought of that or I did not foresee that or that`s more difficult than I imagined. Well it turns out thats what OOL researchers face every day and instead of being closer after 80 years to making life in a lab they are further away than ever. Every step they try turns out to open up many , many steps they did not see or anticipate. So 2051 I don`t think so, especially when you are going backwards not forwards. Marfin

. My o’ my. Javor cites David Abel warmly, as having compiled a useful list of the invariant characteristics of life. There is no question that the materialist fascist will need to pay Mr Javor a little visit. We can’t have deniers given even a moment of respect. While they are at it, they probably need to kick a few teeth out of Geoscience Research Institute as well. Isn’t that right Pater, Chuck, Seversky ? Upright BiPed

The absolutely fascinating thing about finding quantum information to be ubiquitous within life, “in a wide range of important biomolecules”, is that it takes a ‘non-local’, i.e. beyond space and time, cause in order to explain quantum correlations in the first place,. As the following paper entitled “Looking beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory” stated, “Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,”

Looking beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory – 29 October 2012 Excerpt: “Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,” http://www.quantumlah.org/highlight/121029_hidden_influences.php

Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, and especially with the falsification of ‘hidden variables’, simply have no beyond space and time cause that they can appeal so as to be able to explain the non-local quantum coherence and/or entanglement that is now found to be ubiquitous within biology.

“hidden variables don’t exist. If you have proved them come back with PROOF and a Nobel Prize. John Bell theorized that maybe the particles can signal faster than the speed of light. This is what he advocated in his interview in “The Ghost in the Atom.” But the violation of Leggett’s inequality in 2007 takes away that possibility and rules out all non-local hidden variables. Observation instantly defines what properties a particle has and if you assume they had properties before we measured them, then you need evidence, because right now there is none which is why realism is dead, and materialism dies with it. How does the particle know what we are going to pick so it can conform to that?” per Jimfit https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/philosophy/quantum-physicist-david-bohm-on-why-there-cannot-be-a-theory-of-everything/#comment-662358

Christians, on the other hand, readily do have a beyond space and time cause that they can appeal to so as to explain ‘non-local’ quantum entanglement.

Colossians 1:17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

Moreover, it is also important to realize that quantum information is conserved. As the following article states, In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed.

Quantum no-hiding theorem experimentally confirmed for first time – 2011 Excerpt: In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed. This concept stems from two fundamental theorems of quantum mechanics: the no-cloning theorem and the no-deleting theorem. A third and related theorem, called the no-hiding theorem, addresses information loss in the quantum world. According to the no-hiding theorem, if information is missing from one system (which may happen when the system interacts with the environment), then the information is simply residing somewhere else in the Universe; in other words, the missing information cannot be hidden in the correlations between a system and its environment. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-quantum-no-hiding-theorem-experimentally.html

The implication of finding ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’, cannot be created nor destroyed, quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every important biomolecule in our bodies, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious. That pleasant implication, of course, being the fact that we now have very strong empirical evidence suggesting that we do indeed have an eternal soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our material bodies. As Stuart Hameroff states in the following article, “the quantum information,,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”

Leading Scientists Say Consciousness Cannot Die It Goes Back To The Universe – Oct. 19, 2017 – Spiritual Excerpt: “Let’s say the heart stops beating. The blood stops flowing. The microtubules lose their quantum state. But the quantum information, which is in the microtubules, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed. It just distributes and dissipates to the universe at large. If a patient is resuscitated, revived, this quantum information can go back into the microtubules and the patient says, “I had a near death experience. I saw a white light. I saw a tunnel. I saw my dead relatives.,,” Now if they’re not revived and the patient dies, then it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.” – Stuart Hameroff – Quantum Entangled Consciousness – Life After Death – video (5:00 minute mark) (of note, this video is no longer available for public viewing) https://radaronline.com/exclusives/2012/10/life-after-death-soul-science-morgan-freeman/

Personally, I consider these recent findings from quantum biology to rival all other scientific discoveries over the past century. Surpassing even the discovery of a beginning of the universe, via Big Bang cosmology, in terms of theological, even personal, significance. As Jesus once asked his disciples along with a crowd of followers, “Is anything worth more than your soul?”

Mark 8:37 Is anything worth more than your soul?

Also of note, long before DNA, ‘negentropy’, and quantum information, were even known about, Christians have always held that life has an author,

Acts 3:15 You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this. John 1:1-4 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.

bornagain77

Moreover, Marshall's claim that “A bit is a record of a choice” is not just some abstract, mystical, academic discussion, but has now been empirically demonstrated. Specifically, it has now been empirically shown, via experimental realization of the Maxwell demon thought experiment, that a bit of information, i.e. “a record of a choice”, has a quote-unquote ‘thermodynamic content',

Maxwell’s demon demonstration turns information into energy – 2010 Excerpt: Scientists in Japan are the first to have succeeded in converting information into free energy in an experiment that verifies the “Maxwell demon” thought experiment devised in 1867.,, In Maxwell’s thought experiment a partition with a small trapdoor is placed in the box, and the trapdoor is guarded by the imaginary being who, without expending energy, selects which molecules go through to the other side.,,, Until now, demonstrating the conversion of information to energy has been elusive, but University of Tokyo physicist Masaki Sano and colleagues have succeeded in demonstrating it in a nano-scale experiment. In a paper published in Nature Physics they describe how they coaxed a Brownian particle to travel upwards on a “spiral-staircase-like” potential energy created by an electric field solely on the basis of information on its location.,, The results also verified the generalized Jarzynski equation, which was formulated in 1997 by statistical chemist Christopher Jarzynski of the University of Maryland. The equation defines the amount of energy that could theoretically be converted from a unit, (i.e. a bit), of information. https://phys.org/news/2010-11-maxwell-demon-energy.html

As Christopher Jarzynski, who was instrumental in formulating the ‘equation to define the amount of energy that could theoretically be converted from a unit, (i.e. a bit), of information’, stated, “This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,”

Demonic device converts information to energy – 2010 Excerpt: “This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,” says Christopher Jarzynski, a statistical chemist at the University of Maryland in College Park. In 1997, Jarzynski formulated an equation to define the amount of energy that could theoretically be converted from a unit of information2; the work by Sano and his team has now confirmed this equation. “This tells us something new about how the laws of thermodynamics work on the microscopic scale,” says Jarzynski. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=demonic-device-converts-inform

The Maxwell demon thought experiment has also now even been extended to build a refrigerator that is powered, not by energy, but by information.

New Scientist astounds: Information is physical – May 13, 2016 Excerpt: Recently came the most startling demonstration yet: a tiny machine powered purely by information, which chilled metal through the power of its knowledge. This seemingly magical device could put us on the road to new, more efficient nanoscale machines, a better understanding of the workings of life, and a more complete picture of perhaps our most fundamental theory of the physical world. https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/news/new-scientist-astounds-information-is-physical/

Moreover recently, via ‘using only information about the particle’s position’, researchers have now built a quote unquote ‘information engine’ and have achieved “power comparable to molecular machinery in living cells, and speeds comparable to fast-swimming bacteria,”

World’s fastest information-fuelled engine designed by SFU researchers – May 11, 2021 Excerpt: The information engine designed by SFU researchers consists of a microscopic particle immersed in water and attached to a spring which, itself, is fixed to a movable stage. Researchers then observe the particle bouncing up and down due to thermal motion. “When we see an upward bounce, we move the stage up in response,” explains lead author and PhD student Tushar Saha. “When we see a downward bounce, we wait. This ends up lifting the entire system using only information about the particle’s position.” “Guided by this insight, we picked the particle mass and other engine properties to maximize how fast the engine extracts energy, outperforming previous designs and achieving power comparable to molecular machinery in living cells, and speeds comparable to fast-swimming bacteria,” says postdoctoral fellow Jannik Ehrich. https://www.sfu.ca/university-communications/issues-experts/2021/05/world-s-fastest-information-fuelled-engine-designed-by-sfu-resea.html

The inference to intelligent design could hardly be more direct. These experimental realizations of the Maxwell demon thought experiment go to the very heart of the Darwinism vs. Intelligent Design debate and completely blow the reductive materialistic presuppositions of Darwinists, (presuppositions about immaterial information being merely ’emergent’ from some material basis), out of the water. A ‘bit’ of Information, i.e. “a record of a choice”, i.e. a bit of negentropy, contrary to what Darwinian materialists hold, is not emergent from some material basis, but a bit of information is now shown to be its own distinct ‘physical’ entity in that a bit of information, i.e. “a record of a choice”, is now shown to have a causal thermodynamic effect on matter and energy. Moreover, on top of all that, (as if that were not already more than enough to falsify the presuppositions of atheistic materialists who hold information to merely be ’emergent’ from a material basis), classical information is now shown to be a subset of quantum information. In the following site entitled “Quantum Information Science”, a site where Charles Bennett, (of quantum teleportation and reversible computation fame), himself is on the steering committee,

Quantum Information Science Steering Committee C. H. Bennett IBM D. P. DiVincenzo IBM N. Gershenfeld MIT H. M. Gibbs University of Arizona H. J. Kimble Caltech J. Preskill Caltech U. V. Vazirani UC/Berkeley D. J. Wineland NIST C. Yao Princeton University https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2000/nsf00101/nsf00101.htm

On that site, they have this illustration showing classical information to be a subset of quantum information

Classical Information is a subset of Quantum information – illustration https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2000/nsf00101/images/figure1.gif below that illustration they have this caption, “Figure 1: The well-established theory of classical information and computation is actually a subset of a much larger topic, the emerging theory of quantum information and computation.”

Moreover, the fact that quantum information is ubiquitous within life has now also been theoretically and experimentally established.

“What happens is this classical information (of DNA) is embedded, sandwiched, into the quantum information (of DNA). And most likely this classical information is never accessed because it is inside all the quantum information. You can only access the quantum information or the electron clouds and the protons. So mathematically you can describe that as a quantum/classical state.” Elisabeth Rieper – Classical and Quantum Information in DNA – video (Longitudinal Quantum Information resides along the entire length of DNA discussed at the 19:30 minute mark; at 24:00 minute mark Dr Rieper remarks that practically the whole DNA molecule can be viewed as quantum information with classical information embedded within it) https://youtu.be/2nqHOnVTxJE?t=1176 Quantum criticality in a wide range of important biomolecules – Mar. 6, 2015 Excerpt: “Most of the molecules taking part actively in biochemical processes are tuned exactly to the transition point and are critical conductors,” they say. That’s a discovery that is as important as it is unexpected. “These findings suggest an entirely new and universal mechanism of conductance in biology very different from the one used in electrical circuits.” The permutations of possible energy levels of biomolecules is huge so the possibility of finding even one (biomolecule) that is in the quantum critical state by accident is mind-bogglingly small and, to all intents and purposes, impossible.,, of the order of 10^-50 of possible small biomolecules and even less for proteins,”,,, “what exactly is the advantage that criticality confers?” https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/the-origin-of-life-and-the-hidden-role-of-quantum-criticality-ca4707924552

bornagain77

as to this comment from the article,

Synthesizing Life in the Laboratory: Why is it not Happening? –by George T. Javor - July 26, 2021 Excerpt: Even though in living cells each reaction is pushed toward equilibrium by an enzyme (so as to forestall the possibility of slower, random non-biological chemical events), if any of the hundreds to thousands of chemical processes could actually reach equilibrium, an irreversible metabolic block would result. Multiple such equilibriums would kill the cell. However, in live cells there are no isolated reactions and the problem of equilibrium is avoided. Rather, chemical events are linked into pathways, so that the products of reactions do not accumulate, but immediately react with another substance. The end products of metabolic pathways are either utilized immediately or they are secreted from the cell. Moreover, regulatory systems such as “feedback inhibition” help maintain homeostasis.,,, Building artificial cells in a modular fashion will inevitably result in the onset of chemical equilibrium within each module. Once equilibrium is reached, the artificial cell, figuratively speaking, “runs into a brick wall”. It is no longer capable of growth or accomplish any net chemical process.,, Until the construction of cell-like structures harboring metabolisms in homeostatic non-equilibrium states become reality, the most sophisticated efforts of synthetic biology will come to naught. https://www.grisda.org/synthesizing-life-in-the-lab?mc_cid=5a79992abf

That 'brick wall' thermodynamic limitation on current Origin of Life research reminds me of the time that a Darwinist challenged me to present him with ANY evidence for intelligent design in biology. I showed him the following Graphical summary of the metabolic pathways found in prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells.

Biochemical pathways. Graphical summary of the metabolic pathways found in prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Biochemical-pathways-Graphical-summary-of-the-metabolic-pathways-found-in-prokaryotic_fig1_44655025

His response was to say something along the lines of, ‘Just because it is horrendously complex does not prove it was designed.’. ,,, To which I responded something along the line of, “Well such ‘horrendous metabolic complexity’ certainly does not bode well for the extraordinary Darwinian claim that such ‘horrendous metabolic complexity’ can possibly be the result of random ‘chemical accidents’. And I firmly believe that this current paper in the OP is pretty dog gone close to 'proving' that such 'horrendous metabolic complexity' can't possibly be the result of random ‘chemical accidents’ and therefore must be the product of vastly superior Intelligent Design. It is also interesting to note just how vastly superior the thermodynamic efficiency of life is compared man's intelligently designed computer chips and computers.

Cell-inspired electronics - February 25, 2010 Excerpt: "A single cell in the human body is approximately 10,000 times more energy-efficient than any nanoscale digital transistor, the fundamental building block of electronic chips. In one second, a cell performs about 10 million energy-consuming chemical reactions, which altogether require about one picowatt (one millionth millionth of a watt) of power." http://phys.org/news/2010-02-cell-inspired-electronics.html The astonishing efficiency of life - November 17, 2017 by Jenna Marshall Excerpt: All life on earth performs computations – and all computations require energy. From single-celled amoeba to multicellular organisms like humans, one of the most basic biological computations common across life is translation: processing information from a genome and writing that into proteins. Translation, it turns out, is highly efficient. In a new paper published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, SFI researchers explore the thermodynamic efficiency of translation.,,, To discover just how efficient translation is, the researchers started with Landauer's Bound. This is a principle of thermodynamics establishing the minimum amount of energy that any physical process needs to perform a computation. "What we found is that biological translation is roughly 20 times less efficient than the absolute lower physical bound," says lead author Christopher Kempes, an SFI Omidyar Fellow. "And that's about 100,000 times more efficient than a computer." https://phys.org/news/2017-11-astonishing-efficiency-life.html The thermodynamic efficiency of computations made in cells across the range of life. - 2017 Dec. Excerpt: Here we show that the computational efficiency of translation, defined as free energy expended per amino acid operation, outperforms the best supercomputers by several orders of magnitude, and is only about an order of magnitude worse than the Landauer bound. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29133443/

Since the paper in the OP is all about the 'problem' for Origin of Life researchers of life being so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium, the question naturally arises, "Just how far out of thermodynamic equilibrium is life?" Well, when working from a thermodynamic perspective, it is found that a 'simple' cell contains 10^12 bits of information.

Biophysics – Information theory. Relation between information and entropy: – Setlow-Pollard, Ed. Addison Wesley Excerpt: Linschitz gave the figure 9.3 x 10^12 cal/deg or 9.3 x 10^12 x 4.2 joules/deg for the entropy of a bacterial cell. Using the relation H = S/(k In 2), we find that the information content is 4 x 10^12 bits. Morowitz’ deduction from the work of Bayne-Jones and Rhees gives the lower value of 5.6 x 10^11 bits, which is still in the neighborhood of 10^12 bits. Thus two quite different approaches give rather concordant figures. https://docs.google.com/document/d/18hO1bteXTPOqQtd2H12PI5wFFoTjwg8uBAU5N0nEQIE/edit

,,, Which is the equivalent of about 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. ‘In comparison,,, the largest libraries in the world,, have about 10 million volumes or 10^12 bits.”

“a one-celled bacterium, e. coli, is estimated to contain the equivalent of 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. Expressed in information in science jargon, this would be the same as 10^12 bits of information. In comparison, the total writings from classical Greek Civilization is only 10^9 bits, and the largest libraries in the world – The British Museum, Oxford Bodleian Library, New York Public Library, Harvard Widenier Library, and the Moscow Lenin Library – have about 10 million volumes or 10^12 bits.” – R. C. Wysong – The Creation-evolution Controversy

It is also important to note that Perry Marshall recently, via Erwin Schrödinger, defined a bit of information in life as being 1 bit of negative entropy, 'negentropy'. i.e. "Choice between two sides of a coin = 1 bit of negentropy,,,"

Biology transcends the limits of computation – Perry Marshall – Oct. 2021 Excerpt: Table 2 Computational Choices Information is measured in bits, not kilograms, meters, seconds, joules, or other physical quantities. A bit is a record of a choice. All codes and communication systems reflect choices (Pattee, 1969). A 64-Gb USB stick holds 549,755,813,888 bits, which yield 2^549,755,813,888 choices or degrees of freedom.,,, Negative Information Entropy or Negentropy In “What is Life?” Erwin Schrödinger introduced the term ‘negentropy’ or ‘negative entropy’ (Schrödinger, 1944). He states, “It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of ‘equilibrium’ that an organism appears so enigmatic ….What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy.” Negative entropy is necessary to create information (Schrödinger, 1944) Negentropy is extensively discussed in the literature, and after 75 years, the consensus has barely changed (Davies, 2019) from Schrödinger’s views. Choice is negative information entropy (i.e., the opposite of noise) because it converts uncertainty to certainty, order out of chaos.,,, Negative information entropy is measured in bits, just as in information transmission. Coin toss = 1 bit of entropy Choice between two sides of a coin = 1 bit of negentropy,,, 5. Discussion 5.1. Choices by definition are not computable Choice is intrinsic to information theory (Shannon, 1948), where one bit of information is a choice. This paper takes as axiomatic that choice is not an illusion. This axiom is ubiquitous and essential in society, from consequences for committing crimes to the ability to propose and debate mathematics and scientific laws. I have not arbitrarily defined codes, goals, inductive reasoning, and evolution as choices, and presumed them to be non-computable. The very definition of choice and the observed behaviors of agents dictate that they are necessarily non-computable. Thus, there is a vast chasm between life and non-life, and things as “ordinary” as language and abstract mathematics do not exist, and in principle cannot exist, without cognition (Pattee, 2012). This chasm is an inevitable consequence of Gödel, Turing, and Shannon. It is interesting to compare this with proposals by Chalmers (1995) and others that consciousness is an “irreducible fundamental property of mind with its own laws and principles” (Walker et al., 2017). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610721000365?via%3Dihub

Thus, when working from a thermodynamic perspective, it is found that 10^12 ‘choices’ had to be made, and bits of information created, in order for a bacterium to come into existence, and in order to explain the “negentropy” (Schrödinger, 1944) of a ‘simple’ bacterium, i.e. in order to explain why a 'simple' bacterium is so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium. bornagain77

Pater @5 So, your guess iis - Life in Lab in 2051, right? Let me remind you, what famous origin-of-life researcher Nobel laureate Jack Szostak predicted in 2014: Szostak said, that he will create ‘life in lab’ in 3 to 5 years, and more likely in 3 years. That is what he said in 2014 ... Now, in 2022, he even don’t started... zero progress... he got literally nothing ... he has not move ... he is where he was in 2014 ... https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1406/S00007/jack-szostak-life-in-lab-in-3-5-years.htm So i was wondering, what makes you think that 2051 is that year ? You wish... Wont happen ... ever ... unless scientists take a different approach .... I never understand what you Darwinists expect of these experiments... You really think, that mixing some chemicals, heating It up, cooling it down, shaking it a little will make billions of molecules work together for a purpose (as we see it inside the cell) ???? Seriously, how absurd are these experiments ??? martin_r

Pater K:

ID’er : ” If you really understand how life evolved, you should be able to reproduce it in the laboratory”

You must be daft. We say that if life is reducible to physics and chemistry, and you understand the physics and chemistry, you should be able to produce a basic living organism in the lab using physics and chemistry.

Scientist: “We have just reproduced evolution in the laboratory”

Nice equivocation. "Evolution" isn't being debated. ID is not anti-evolution. What is wrong with you? ET

Guys, did you catch this howler? "Why would we expect to be able to synthesize life in a laboratory after just a few decades of trying?" Why, indeed? Well, okay, if you guys want to nit-pick, it should be a few "generations", not a few "decades". Whatever. I mean, we're looking at an effort that will probably take millenia. So whether its 30 years or 80 years, that's small potatoes. Anyhow, why would we ever give up on materialistic abiogenesis? Or any other non-falsifiable theory? Perpetual motion, for example. Top peer reviewed Scientists, they'll always plug away on a dead cat if they can get some more time, and of course, more funding. I figure this: Origin of Life Research is like the description of heaven that is given Cardinal John Henry Newman's hymn "Amazing Grace" "When we’ve been there ten thousand years, Bright shining as the sun, We’ve no less days to milk our NSF grants*** Than when we’d first begun. ***For those unfamiliar with the original, it used the phrase "to sing God's praise", instead of ""to milk our NSF grants" TAMMIE LEE HAYNES

A lot of assumptions are being made in the fantasy scenario posted above, to which it appear’s a naturalist position is taken as the default stance. I believe it’s readily admitted we really have no idea how life came about(speculations not withstanding). So to state (in the fantasy scenario) that if scientists were to recreate Evolution(however it’s being defined here) that it would follow a naturalist path is simply a statement of belief and nothing more. Bob

Pater Kimbridge 2021 ID’er : ” If you really understand how life evolved, you should be able to reproduce it in the laboratory” Scientist: “We are working on that.” 2051 Scientist: “We have just reproduced evolution in the laboratory” ID’er: “See, that just proves it required an intelligent designer”

:) Atheists have not only unprovable beliefs from the past but they reinforce their current beliefs with other beliefs ...from the future. Impressive. Lieutenant Commander Data

We have just reproduced evolution in the laboratory

But they haven't. Do you have an example? Remember micro evolution has nothing to do with the Evolution debate. jerry

2021 ID'er : " If you really understand how life evolved, you should be able to reproduce it in the laboratory" Scientist: "We are working on that." 2051 Scientist: "We have just reproduced evolution in the laboratory" ID'er: "See, that just proves it required an intelligent designer" Pater Kimbridge

seversky:

Why would we expect to be able to synthesize life in a laboratory after just a few decades of trying?

Because we know the chemistry involved. If life was reducible to physics and chemistry scientists should have already synthesized it. ET

Why would we expect to be able to synthesize life in a laboratory after just a few decades of trying?

If one has a cell that is living, One has everything necessary for life. Then that cell dies, but everything necessary for a living cell is present. Thus, all the ingredients for life is materially available but something else is missing. What is it? jerry

Seversky Why would we expect to be able to synthesize life in a laboratory after just a few decades of trying?

:) Why would scientists declare that life emerged by chance if they have no the scientific evidence to prove that ? What clown-science is that when a scientist says it's a fact that life appeared by chance even if there is no evidence . "We have no evidences that life emerged by chance because we have been trying only for one century ..but it's a fact." No evidences but it's a fact. This is the science of Seversky. :) Lieutenant Commander Data

Why would we expect to be able to synthesize life in a laboratory after just a few decades of trying? Seversky