Synthesis of life in a laboratory is intelligent design:
Synthetic biology is liberated from the considerable burden of doing biochemistry under primordial conditions. Now laboratories are free to use whatever means they have available to construct living matter! Indeed, there is considerable optimism that synthetic biology will finally accomplish the “holy grail” of biology, the production of an artificial living cell. Accordingly, a concluding remark of a relatively recent review article on the subject states: “The synthesis of a living artificial cell from components will open the door to many more adventurous lines of research…”[18] However, a more cautious reviewer of the subject states: “…it is important to note that minimal life has not yet been achieved in the laboratory. Does this mean that it is in principle not possible? I do not believe so, although as a scientist it is always good to have a bit of doubt (perhaps we missed something important in our theoretical analysis)”.[19]
This communication points to just such an oversight, the underestimation of the essential nature of the “out-of equilibrium” state of living matter.
George T. Javor, “Synthesizing Life in the Laboratory: Why is it not Happening?” at Geoscience Research Institute (July 26, 2021)
But using intelligent design only means we’ve left the world of fantasy (“it all just sort of happened a long time ago… ”). Here’s an example of a typical real problem: Living cells cannot reach equilibrium because their metabolisms would stop.
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.
George T. Javor, “Synthesizing Life in the Laboratory: Why is it not Happening?” at Geoscience Research Institute (July 26, 2021)
Javor notes that you can kill a cell in such a way that all the components are intact but it is lifeless. “In live cells, superimposed on all of the necessary biopolymers is the steady state non-equilibrium dynamics of all chemical events.”
So life consists of dancing as fast as one can while the music is still playing. It’s very difficult to make all this work in an artificial cell.
You may also wish to read: Jim Tour’s Wild West challenge: Go ahead. Make a cell. Make a cell, win the Nobel…
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. 🙂
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?
seversky:
Because we know the chemistry involved. If life was reducible to physics and chemistry scientists should have already synthesized it.
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”
But they haven’t. Do you have an example? Remember micro evolution has nothing to do with the Evolution debate.
🙂 Atheists have not only unprovable beliefs from the past but they reinforce their current beliefs with other beliefs …from the future. Impressive.
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.
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”
Pater K:
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.
Nice equivocation. “Evolution” isn’t being debated. ID is not anti-evolution.
What is wrong with you?
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 ???
as to this comment from the article,
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.
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.
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.
,,, 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.”
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,,,”
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.
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’,
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,”
The Maxwell demon thought experiment has also now even been extended to build a refrigerator that is powered, not by energy, but by information.
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,”
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,
On that site, they have this illustration showing classical information to be a subset of quantum information
Moreover, the fact that quantum information is ubiquitous within life has now also been theoretically and experimentally established.
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,”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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?”
Also of note, long before DNA, ‘negentropy’, and quantum information, were even known about, Christians have always held that life has an author,
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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 ?
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.
🙂 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.
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.
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: 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@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.
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.
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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.
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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? 🙂