No, this isn’t a post about TSZ. It’s about how to get abiogenesis without a designer and how to build a nanocar.
We have no idea how the basic set of molecules, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids and proteins, were made and how they could have coupled in proper sequences, and then transformed into the ordered assemblies until there was the construction of a complex biological system, and eventually to that first cell. Nobody has any idea on how this was done when using our commonly understood mechanisms of chemical science. Those that say that they understand are generally wholly uninformed regarding chemical synthesis.
“Those that say oh this is well worked out, they know nothing, nothing, about chemical synthesis. Nothing.”
From a synthetic chemical perspective, neither I nor any of my colleagues can fathom a prebiotic molecular route to construction of a complex system. We cannot even figure out the prebiotic routes to the basic building blocks of life: carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids and proteins. Chemists are collectively bewildered. Hence I say that no chemist understands prebiotic synthesis of the requisite building blocks let alone their assembly into a complex system. That’s how cluelss we are.
“Nobody understand this. So if your professors say it’s all worked out, your teachers say it’s all worked out, they don’t know what they are talking about. It is not worked out.”
Given our current level of knowledge, the claim that life arose by naturalistic means must surely qualify as an extraordinary claim. A claim for which not only is there not extraordinary evidence, but a claim for which there is no objective empirical evidence whatsoever. You may as well claim to believe in magic. Sure, let’s be skeptical. You first.
What does that even mean? What’s an “origins professor” and why would Lawrence Krauss have one?
https://origins.asu.edu/
Allan Miller,
If you send me your email to my message box I will send you the papers(PDF) were I see a bigger potential for alternative splicing.
Suzan Mazur: There a widespread view in the scientific community that we’re beating a dead horse with the RNA world. It hasn’t worked. Stu Kauffman recently told me why he doesn’t think an RNA world can work. Here’s what he’s written:
Would you comment?
Sara Walker: I find it hard to envision how an RNA-only world would operate. . . . Even in modern life, no individual molecular systems replicate independently without interacting with other cellular machinery — cellular replication is a collective process.
So, I think we need to move away from treating a strict RNA world scenario as the central accepted answer for the origin of life because most of the origin of life community don’t think that’s the definitive answer.
Mazur, Suzan. The Origin of Life Circus: A How To Make Life Extravaganza
Loren Williams: Well, I want to be careful not to offend anyone. But please understand that I am a simple-minded biochemist. When theorists and physicists go off on emergence, complexity and coherence, I always say (very quietly) ‘show me the molecules’. We have very powerful and well-developed concepts like free energy (G), enthalpy (H) and entropy (S). Those concepts explain and predict. Emergence, complexity and coherence don’t mean anything to me.
Sounds just like James Tour.
I cannot decide whether it is funny or sad that so many put stock in a tabloid journalist’s anti-evolution crusade. Collecting the opinions of a couple of malcontents and presenting it as unimpeachable gospel is what undereducated creationists have done all along. Now, they have Mazur to do it for them. Grand.
As far as Tour goes, he comes across as a typical educated-dumb guy creationist. On his website, he fully admits to being a layman on the subject, yet feels compelled to ramble on about his opinion. I no more care what Tour says about abiogenesis or evolution than I care about what Mung says about anything.
Curious as to why Tour does not take his ‘world renowned’ status in nanotube organic chemistry and explain how Yahweh turned silica into lipids and proteins and such by willing it thus. Odd, isn’t it, how IDCs or YECs never bother to actually explain their own tales, and instead feel content to merely attack science.
Tour: “We have no idea how the basic set of molecules, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids and proteins, were made ”
I suggest Tour lookup Robert Hazen’s work, for starters.
Me either! But it’s a book about Origin of Life research.
It appears that you didn’t actually watch the video.
Where did Tour attack science?
Mung,
Sounds just like me, as far as it goes. Any model of OoL must take account of these things. I doubt it’s news to Szostak, Lane, Martin etc either. Where we might differ is in Tour’s implicit “… so you might as well just stop looking. Right now.”
Mung,
I find Kauffman’s puzzlement puzzling. He ackowledges ribozymes, but sees RNA as a ‘mere’ intermediary for specifying protein enzymes. There is no fundamental reason for this. Most of the fundamental chemical transformations required to do what proteins do have been found in ribozymes. Building a full working system is hard, of course. That’s why Design seems such a non-starter …
If it’s down to ‘what we can envisage’, I have no trouble envisaging what Kauffman cannot. On the other hand, his ‘self-organising’ system seems as waffly as anything he proposes it to replace.
You didn’t watch the video, did you. You people crack me up, really.
Q: Do you think there are some scientific problems that are just too hard for us to ever solve.
A: No.
start here
Mung,
On the contrary, I at least started to watch the video, but 10 minutes in I found it too painful to stick with it all the way through. Reading of slides in a dead monotone does not do it for me. Your clip starts at one hour eighteen. Gimme a break.
So, are you telling me that born-again Creationist James M Tour is a keen advocate of research into the origin of life, and hopes that a ‘naturalistic’ answer can be found? I doubt it.
That is why I said ‘implicit’, and not explicit. It is a subtext. It seems generally to be the case, when an overtly religious person is pointing towards some unsolved issue in biology, chemistry or cosmology, especially when wrapped up in the kind of rhetoric you extract in the OP, that they want people to conclude ‘God’, and not ‘gap’.
From 1:18 to the end then is about 5 mins and you can hear it from Tour himself instead of having to make things up.
Ahh, the great thread of quoted opinions.
“We know many ways the molecules of life could be made in natural environments” – me
Buy my book! Watch my youtube video! Anything except actual science!
Mung,
Yeah, got that, I’d already done it. But I see no reason to revise my opinion. Tour’s attitude to OoL research is not defined by a 5 minute sound bite in response to a question (which he immediately goes off on a tangent about).
When Tour demands “the chemical details of macroevolution”, or tells an audience “if your professors say it’s all worked out, your teachers say it’s all worked out, they don’t know what they are talking about.”, he does not come across as a seeker of a naturalistic answer to these questions, but as one who is convinced they cannot be found. Sure, a nod to human ingenuity. But he’s also telling people they have been lied to (when they haven’t).
It’s Pavlovian, I admit. Trigger: “I am a convinced Christian, and this is the problem with evolution … “. Response: “Oh, here we go again”.
Rumraket,
“Yeah, molecules. Um … replicator. Entropy? Yes, but it’s not comms … ok, but …” – me.
If Tours ramblings were not supposed to be part of an argument for godbelief, Mung wouldn’t be linking his video. Simply put, this thread would not exist. Heck, Tour would not have done the talk.
If all Mung intended to do was emphasise that we don’t know how life originated he could have quoted, for example, Larry Moran. Heck, he could even have quoted (gasp) Richard Dawkins or Jerry Coyne. But instead he’s choosing to link a 1.5 hr talk by a christian fundamentalist. Complete with veiled hints that we’ll probably never figure it out. The whole talk is oozing with such between the lines reasoning.
Steve Benner: We have failed in any continuous way to provide a recipe that gets from the simple molecules that we know were present on early Earth to RNA. There is a discontinuous model which has many pieces, many of which have experimental support, but we’re up against these three or four paradoxes, which you and I have talked about in the past.
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.
– Mazur, Suzan (2016-03-07). The Origin of Life Circus: A How To Make Life Extravaganza.
Mung,
Excellent, so Steven Benner agrees that the problems of OoL have not been solved. I’ll add him to the list.
J. Tour @ 1:09:22
“If the mechanism doesn’t explain the facts, you discard that mechanism”
So after expending over an our babbling about how we have no idea about how life might have arisen, he wants that unknown “mechanism” discarded?
Of course what he means is we should discard abiogenesis in general, even if there’s no known mechanism to (not) explain the facts.
God of the gaps 101. And then he has the audacity to respond to that guy pointing out to him that it’s all god of the gaps nonsense that he never brought god up. LMFAO.
He uses all the crackpot techniques, like claiming that some scientists told him unmentionable stuff behind close doors but he must promise to never reveal their names… yeah, sure.
So here’s the guy with an obvious religious agenda blowing the whistle on this purported conspiracy in mainstream science. Lying for jeebus at it’s best.
I’ve never, ever, heard a biologist claim that we have an answer to the OOL question, but if I wanted to know about what is going on in the field, I would probably want to attend a conference where metabolism first is discussed, for example, instead of this crap from a guy who admits he’s failed miserably at even trying to look for an answer, because we all know he believes in the “poof” theory of life
If the Designer doesn’t explain the facts, you never ever discard the Designer.
Because, you know, it can do anything. We’ve got lots of Holy Writ saying so.
Glen Davidson
At least Mung is trying to stuff his god into an actual gap, which is certainly an improvement over those creationists who flat deny what is well known in order to recreate gaps where their god used to live. The god of biogenesis is marginally more plausible than the god of the flud.
Suzan Mazur: Has your thinking about origin of life changed significantly since the second edition of your book Origins of Life 13 years ago? And do you still say everyone is equally ignorant about origin of life?
Freeman Dyson: Yes, I would still say that.
Poor Mung. Still searching desperately for that one special quote which will disprove evolution and win the day for his incompetent little Creationist God. It’s just gotta be out there in some obscure interview somewhere, it’s just gotta!
Freeman Dyson is not an atheist according to Wikipedia. Actually he’s a christian, so Mung fails this time at the typical argument from authority/ignorance that creationists resort to when they constantly quote (often quote-mine) atheists. Dyson is not a biologist though, so that’s a check (quoting someone who is out of his/her depth is another hall mark of creationist argumentation). Actually, Dyson seems to be totally clueless about evolution:
https://www.edge.org/discourse/dawkins_dyson.html
Not everyone is equally ignorant about the origin of life!
People like Mung and Frankie seem quite convinced they know the answer. It’s just a shame they won’t share it with the rest of us….
Oh, f’God’s sake, how many more? How many more people have to be wheeled in to bolster the case that no-one disagrees with, that OoL is unsolved?
(Dyson, incidentally … Dyson of the ‘Dyson sphere’. He should have stuck to vacuum cleaners).
Do you want an exact figure?
Do you think people should be skeptical then, about a naturalistic origin of life? Or should they just assume that it must have happened because there is no alternative. Perhaps if people here were more skeptical…
Mung,
Shouldn’t people be skeptical about a supernaturalistic origin of life? I think you are highly selective in what you think people should be skeptical about. Or credulous.
We can, after all, point to all those unknowns in history that were eventually filled with supernaturalistic explanations.
Oh, wait a second…
He seems to think one should be about equally skeptical of scenarios involving observable causes as of scenarios involving non-observable causes. Or even more skeptical of the former.
And, that arguments from authority aren’t something about which one should be skeptical. Much like UD, for that matter. When it’s especially those sorts of “arguments” that skepticism exists to probe and question (however well or poorly it applies such questioning).
For that matter, just because it’s The Skeptical Zone neither ensures that it is solely dedicated to skepticism in the first place, nor that people who come here are. It’s bizarre how Mung tries to judge everything here according to skepticism (I suppose other than theists who show up here, anyhow), as if everyone roughly in favor of the site and its goals took an oath to skepticism. Almost as bizarre as his mangled conception of what skepticism entails.
Glen Davidson
Skepticism for thee but not for meee.
Mung,
I invite people to make their own minds up. Not for me to tell them what they should and shouldn’t think.
But the issue that these various authorities have been brought in to support is that the problem has not been solved, not that the problem cannot have a solution. Yet no-one thinks the problem is solved AFAIK.
Of what? You can’t pick and choose what people are skeptical of. I’m skeptical of the ability of a designer to micro-manipulate atoms into position without them reacting. That is the kind of thing implicit in many people’s view of what they think did happen, although there are other ways of getting the assumed ‘minimal cell’ configuration. Including the reasonable possibility that it was a result of physics and chemistry, without any awareness or intent of a manipulator. It’s a system that runs on physics and chemistry; it is not wildly unreasonable to think it possible that it always has.
Allan Miller,
As hard a problem as this is, I see the same or greater difficulty in other transitions. The eukaryotic cell is a huge technological leap. I am skeptical that we understand the HOW of any of these transitions.
Which aspects of the eukaryotic cell are you thinking of?
That’s a good place to be. It’s often the start of productive research! Get cracking!
I consider this approach worthy of consideration. ALL solved mysteries have had natural explanations, NONE have ever had any supernatural component. Kind of like flipping a coin a thousand times. If it has come up heads every time for the first 200 honest flips, the probability of the coin having heads on both sides is high enough, to quote Gould, it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent that this probability is very high.
Mung apparently considers it unreasonable to stick to an approach that has always worked, rather than give equal probability to an approach that has never worked. Sticking to the only approach that ever works is closed-minded.
People should be willing to examine whether they are being consistent in their supposed skepticism, or if they simply use it as a tool to protect their views from criticism.
If this site is to be a skeptical site, as Patrick desires, why not be skeptical of skepticism?
Pretty much everything that distinguishes eukaryote cells from non-eukaryote cells.
John Harshman,
The three main challenges that come to mind are the emergence of:
-The spliceosome
-The nuclear pore complex
-histones and chromosomes with nuclear proteins controlling transcription
Give us an example of that paying off.
Sure, but being consist means being skeptical of things for which there is limited or no evidence and accepting those things for which there is prominent evidence. Of course, there are those folks who may not be able to grasp why something constitutes a preponderance of evidence and such folks are going to be skeptical regardless of the soundness of that evidence, but such does not place any burden of skepticism on folks who do understand the evidence.
You mean, aside from the fact that such would constitute a contradiction in terms?
Basically Mung, no rational skeptic is obligated to consider anything but science. That some do is a personal perspective, but there’s nothing “anti-skepticism” in dismissing claims made outside science. That’s just what skepticism (as an ‘ism’) means. That you don’ t like or agree with it hardly constitutes a concern on anyone else’s part.
Pretty easy really.
So, it is perfectly rational to be skeptical of claims of fact regarding Zeus. It is equally rational to be skeptical of factual claims regarding ghosts. And in the same vein, it’s rational to be skeptical of factual claims regarding the Christian God. However, since I know a fair amount about biology and paleontology, it would not be rational for me to apply the same skepticism to factual claims about human child development or species evolution. That would be totally irrational.
I’m skeptical of skepticism of skepticism. Does that count?
For one thing, that would end up eating its own tail. To be skeptical of skepticism is to invite gullibility. I don’t think we should be gullible about gullibility. Now what you really mean, apparently, is that we should be skeptical of the motivations of skeptics. I don’t see why, and anyway that’s against the rules, isn’t it? So I won’t speculate why you are perfectly comfortable swallowing a camel, while the gnat won’t go down.
A better approach would be to be skeptical of all arguments, meaning that they should be examined carefully.
Now, was that helpful? Are you actually saying that you can’t imagine a pathway from prokaryotic to eukaryotic ribosomes or from lacking mitochondria to having them? Anyway, you failed to guess colewd’s answer.
I think Mung is treating skepticism and atheism as isms that people believe, rather than as approaches to knowing.
Well, I certainly don’t see any reason not to be skeptical of skepticism, if the point is to come to an answer as to how we might gain reliable knowledge. If it’s merely nay-saying, though, who needs it?
Certainly people have been skeptical of ancient skepticism, which really was a thorough-going doubt of everything, including existence. Mostly, that has been decided against total skepticism. You want to be a solipsist, or skeptic who denies existence of even the self, go ahead. It’s not really irrational, just useless and not going to lead to interesting discovery or to an understanding of the apparent beings around us.
Current “skepticism” is mostly an empiric stance. There’s nothing wrong with FMM’s questions of “how do you know that?” of course, it’s just that he totally favors something that doesn’t obviously lead to the results he claims, while he denies the reliability of more or less winging it with what we perceive, and solidifying our knowledge via cross-correlations and intersubjective agreement and disagreement. The latter has been productive in general as well as specifically, so we’ll go with it–and thus we’ll be completely skeptical of FMM’s claims (which wouldn’t fly in court, either, fwiw).
Especially if you take philosophy courses, it’s really routine to look critically and skeptically of today’s “skepticism,” which is about testing claims against the evidence (and, clearly, against interpretations of that evidence). Indeed, that’s what Hume is about, what epistemology is about, and why science is about claims based upon evidence while it does not categorically deny claims made without evidence (at this point I’d include intersubjective agreement on apparent bases of “truth” in the evidence–mathematic axioms, etc.). It seriously doubts the usefulness of any such claims, but knows that it can’t state with certainty that leprechauns aren’t just staying out of sight, or that gods don’t exist. And generally it’s not held that science is indisputably true, but that it leads to very useful results.
So fine, be skeptical of skepticism. If you’re really interested in finding out things, though, you end up using “scientific skepticism” to find things out, while disregarding what can’t be backed up with observation. That’s because science with its skeptical questioning reliably produces practical knowledge, while religious dogmas and presuppostions do not.
Glen Davidson