Further to the thesis that the lunar ice could be hiding the building blocks of life, a revealing origin of life event will be held this year, following an international OOL conference hosted by Japan: Open Questions on the Origin of Life …
The scientific question about the origin of life is still unanswered: it is still one of the great mystery that science is facing. We all accept the 1924 idea of Oparin, according to which life originated from the inanimate matter through a long series of step of increasing molecular complexity and functionality. The real mile stone came 1953 with Stanley Miller flask experiments, showing that amino acids can be formed under prebiotic conditions from a mixture of gas presumably present in the prebiotic atmosphere. Which conceptual progress have we made since then? It is too much to say that we didn’t really make any, if we look at data under really and honest prebiotic conditions?
Adding that this situation is not due to shortage of means and finances in the field- but to a real lack of difficulty to conceive conceptually how this nonliving-living passage really took place?
This is perhaps a too provocative way to introduce the OQOL workshop which will take place at the IIAS (International Institute for Advanced Studies) of Japan and July 12-13, 2014. In fact, while the larger ISSOL meeting should shed light on the new results and progress, the purpose of the OQOL workshop is to indicate instead the shadowy, un-answered aspects of the field. …
Would it be fair to say no progress so far, and none in sight?
The difficulty is that, depending on how one defines the task, it may be impossible. They may be looking for things that did not happen, or in ways those things couldn’t have happened.
They hope to refine their discussion to seven questions. We just hope there’s a transcript.
Maybe they should invite Jerry Coyne as a keynoter. Coyne solves the problem handily: He won’t debate doubters like Moshe Averick. 😉
See also: Is there a good reason to believe that life’s origin must be a fully natural event?
and
Does nature just “naturally” produce life?
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Throughout history there have been valuable scientific results as spinoffs (such as accidental discoveries) that stemmed from the original research. That, IMO, is the only merit to Materialistic OOL research. These people are guided by a worldview (Materialism) in which a purely natural, unguided OOL did “in fact” occur. They have no other option left to them. But they are wrong. They can work for 1,000 years and spend trillions of dollars – they will never get life to originate without intelligent input and guidance – physics and mathematics prohibit it. So look for any spinoff results while they waste the rest of their labor and resources on a futile search.
The materialists’ scope for defining ‘life’ is fundamentally defective, even granted gratuitous and insanely improbable abiogenesis as the origin of life, since there is the little problem of assigning how Mother Nature’s designs, her ongoing caring role (when she’s not acting as if ‘red in tooth and claw’) is to be explained.
Is this too, a matter of random chance, Nature, as a great juggernaut carrying all before it in its artistic and scientific brilliance – but caring with it? A wonderful god, to be sure, is random chance: the secret of gaia! Everything watched over by the all-seeing eye of the blind watchmaker, as a ‘mother hen her brood’. Pro magnam gloriam fortunae aleatoriae (my own cod Latin motto for our friends).
Odd to think that the least obiter dicta of Dawkins are relayed by friend and foe alike, as if he had as much as half a brain-cell that wasn’t undercut by his dogged, religious fundamentalism. Future generations will marvel at it. The power of our depraved media to write the playbook to which all must advert from time to time.
Incredible!!
An honest and obvious commentary, about the failure of the Origin of Life Boondoggle, from a Scientist.
Interesting that it comes from Japan.
Its a country isolated by distance, language, and culture. So much so, that outrageous rank heresy is allowed.
In the mainstream West, we discuss with a straight face whether life began on the Moon .
Fortunately, we can depend on Scientists getting the Japanese back on the reservation.
The Shrouding of Origin of Life Research – Dec. 14, 2013
Excerpt: we’re up against these three or four paradoxes (for the origin of biological life),,, The first paradox is the tendency of organic matter to devolve and to give tar. If you can avoid that, you can start to try to assemble things that are not tarry, but then you encounter the water problem, which is related to the fact that every interesting bond that you want to make is unstable, thermodynamically, with respect to water. If you can solve that problem, you have the problem of entropy that any of the building blocks are going to be present in a low concentration; therefore, to assemble a large number of those building blocks, you get a gene-like RNA — 100 nucleotides long — that fights entropy. And the fourth problem is that even if you can solve the entropy problem, you have a paradox that RNA enzymes, which are maybe catalytically active, are more likely to be active in the sense that destroys RNA rather than creates RNA.”,,,
http://www.darwinthenandnow.co.....-research/
as to: “Adding that this situation is not due to shortage of means and finances in the field- but to a real lack of difficulty to conceive conceptually how this nonliving-living passage really took place?”
How we could create life: The key to existence will be found not in primordial sludge, but in the nanotechnology of the living cell – Paul Davies – 2002
Excerpt: Instead, the living cell is best thought of as a supercomputer – an information processing and replicating system of astonishing complexity. DNA is not a special life-giving molecule, but a genetic databank that transmits its information using a mathematical code. Most of the workings of the cell are best described, not in terms of material stuff – hardware – but as information, or software. Trying to make life by mixing chemicals in a test tube is like soldering switches and wires in an attempt to produce Windows 98. It won’t work because it addresses the problem at the wrong conceptual level.
– Paul Davies
http://www.guardian.co.uk/educ.....ucation.uk
And would also note that even Davies’s approach, since he doesn’t include consciousness in his ‘conceptual level’, falls far short explaining the ‘origin of life’
I believe that a name is needed for the Settled Science on the Origin of Life
Here’s the concept:
“Life originated from the inanimate matter through a long series of step of increasing molecular complexity and functionality”
How about this name: Stalinist Abiogenesis
It honors the Great Benefactor of the Scientists who gave us the concept.
Did I not get the memo? I thought this has been debunked…
The little glitch with Miller and Urey was in the amino acids that they made. Amino acid molecules can be either right or left handed.
Living things are made out of right handed ones. However Miller and Urey made racemic acids, which are mixed up, both right and left handed.
So Origin-of-Life-wise, their efforts were useless. But their discovery was still a Great Moment in Science. Shampoo can be made from racemic acids.
chris haynes,
Yes, the racemic mixture is an issue. But as far as “glitches” for OOL, there are several more.
Miller-Urey, if viewed objectively and without the rose-colored glasses of materialism, teaches us just how far away purely natural processes are from forming anything even approaching life.
Finding amino acids in a Miller-Urey flask and saying it shows how life could have started spontaneously on the early earth is like finding a bag of LEGO blocks and saying it shows how LEGO art could have spontaneously formed on a table top.
When debating evolutionists, I notice that when you state that it is mathematically impossible for the key components of life to have arranged themselves by accident, they state that evolution doesn’t deal with the origin of life.
Which came first?
The generation of ATP which requires the use of proteins and enzymes, or the transcription/translation mechanisms that produce proteins and enzymes but requires ATP.
Hello Design,
Good Question.
Unless one wants to simply throw up their hands at a chance organization, the ATP system couldn’t be organized without the translation process. So, obviously, that would lead one to suspect translation occurred prior to ATP.
What is most interesting from a purely physical standpoint, is that an irreducibly complex system of representations and transfer protocols had to precede the translation process.
From an environment absent any organization whatsoever stemming from translated information, they had to rise in order to bridge the discontinuity between nucleotides and proteins (i.e. the medium and its effect) while simultaneously preserving it.
It’s just amazing what chance can do. 😉
mjazzguitar:
Yes, this is one of the rhetorical ploys of the materialist evolutionist. Their doctrine is that everything comes about as a result of particles bumping into each other over time, but when pushed into a corner on OOL, they quickly say, “Well, that is not a problem for evolution, we don’t have to deal with that.”
Notwithstanding the fact that nearly every biology textbook that discusses evolution includes origin of life generally and, often, the Miller-Urey experiment specifically, as part of the overall concept of “evolution.” The fact is, the word “evolution” is used in many different senses, and one sense most definitely includes origin of life.
Furthermore, most evolutionists aren’t really opposed to the origin of life being part of evolutionary theory. Rather, they just think once a “self-replicating molecule” exists, then Darwinian evolution can take over to produce first life. So it is really just that elusive first self-reproducing molecule they are hoping for, after which the magic of evolution takes over.*
And if they aren’t willing to look squarely in the face of the probabilities of an initial self-reproducing molecule or simple self-reproducing organism as part of evolutionary theory, then we can ask, “So, you would be willing to consider, then, the possibility that first life was designed?” That usually brings them scurrying out of their rhetorical hiding place.
However, even if we grant that OOL is not part of evolutionary theory proper, it doesn’t get us anywhere interesting. The fact is that random mutations (the key engine of evolutionary change, certainly early on) have no possibility of producing the kinds of systems we see in living organisms. So even assuming the existence of a first, fully-functional, self-reproducing organism (as Darwin did in The Origin) the math is definitely against the evolutionary storyline.
The good thing about focusing on OOL, however, is that it strips the materialist of the mystical and magical wand of “natural selection” that they think can be simply waved over any problem in biology.
—–
* I always laugh when I hear references to that first self-reproducing molecule. While critical to the materialist evolutionary creation myth, such an entity has never been seen or observed. And there is good reason to think such a thing has never existed. But a story for another time perhaps . . .
At this conference, they will discuss 7 open questions out of the list of these 15:
These questions give you a good idea of what scientists do NOT know and what problems they are still facing. There is a further explanation of the problem under each question at the following web page:
http://www.lifephys.dis.titech.ac.jp/oqol2014/?page_id=180