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At Mind Matters News: Will AI chemistry robots finally discover the origin of life?

One problem: Before life exists, there is nothing for purely natural selection to select. How the robots, themselves a product of design, can help is unclear. Read More ›

Why the origin of life is not reducible to physics

Just look what the hopeful researchers have to say in order to claim that. They are not able to get away from the need for design. Their actual claims sound panpsychist, which would be fine if it were admitted. Then we could at least discuss things honestly. Read More ›

Getting away from the AHA! Moment re the origin of life

The good news with the interdisciplinary approach is that a greater awareness of the sheer complexity of the situation will be forced on the researchers so perhaps we will be hearing fewer “lucky strike” origin of life theories. The bad news… well, they might want to talk to chemist James Tour about that. Read More ›

James Tour on what is wrong with origin of life research – at Inference Review

It’s an impossible exercise if you leave out design: The same shortcomings and omissions that plague current OOL research can also be found in the paper under review. Indeed, these issues are so routinely ignored by researchers that the field appears to have become numbed to their absence from the literature. OOL researchers are prepared to assume that an ever-increasing list of obstacles were overcome on the prebiotic earth, but do not consider these hurdles as problems to be solved in their own work. The following five shortcomings in the research presented by Krishnamurthy et al., are emblematic of broader issues that need to be addressed. James Tour, “Much Ado About Nothing” at Inference Review (January 2022)

New animated short on the origin of life is a lot of fun

At ENST: Stadler and Anderson explore how origin-of-life papers and popular media reports have misled the public, evidenced by a survey underscored by Rice University synthetic organic chemist James Tour. Read More ›

Origin of life theories discount the problem of degradation

Stadler and Tan: Hundreds of millions of years of “deep time” is frequently cited as the saving feature for the profound improbability of each step of the Stairway [to Life]. Yet time is only an ally of a slow constructive process if degradation is ignored. Read More ›

An utterly serious look at origin of life claims

Well adapted to the believability of mainstream claims. The thing to see here is that origin of life is history, not science. That point is often missed. Science is about how laws act in nature; history is about the details of what actually happened. If you want to know how life originated, you want to know history. It may or may not be accessible. We might never know how life originated for the same reasons as we may never know whether Neanderthal man had a religion. Anything anyone says on the subject is conjecture or ideology, not evidence. Read More ›

Physicist: Laws of thermodynamics can account for origin of life

Jeremy England: Far from being a freak event, finding something akin to evolving lifeforms might be quite likely in the kind of universe we inhabit – especially if we know how to look for it. Read More ›