A century later we know that the overwhelming obstacle facing spontaneous generation is probability, or rather improbability, resulting from life’s enormously complex phenotypes. If even a single protein, a single specific sequence of amino acids, could not have emerged spontaneously, how much less so could a bacterium like E. coli with millions of proteins and other complex molecules? Modern biochemistry allows us to estimate the odds, and they demolish the spontaneous creation of complex organisms.
Looks like IDists aren’t the only ones to appeal to probability arguments. How does Wagner know what the probabilities are, or that spontaneous generation is even within the realm of what is possible?
This does not mean that spontaneous creation did not occur in life’s early history. A natural origin of life even requires it, but in a much humbler form than a modern cell or even a modern protein.
Wagner just told us that not even a single protein could have emerged spontaneously but now he insists spontaneous creation must have occurred because “a natural origin of life requires it.”
That’s known as begging the question. I also love the appeal to spontaneous creation.
The origin of life is a problem for chemists, not biologists.
That’s odd. Is the origin of the chemical elements a problem for physicists, not chemists? Is the origin of organic compounds and organic materials a problem for inorganic chemistry, not organic chemistry?
Quotes are from Arrival of the Fittest by Andreas Wagner.
Does modern biochemistry allow us to estimate the odds of spontaneous generation?
If it cannot happen, why does Wagner insist that it must have happened?
I don’t recall any scientist saying that even the simplest cell that we see today could “spontaneously generate”. The only people making such rediculous claims are creationists.
In the section you quote, he asks if a protein could not originate by chance? He doesn’t at least there claim they cannot in anybway.
Regardless, we know it’s wrong because there’s nothing in principle preventing (as in making it impossible) the spontaneous polymerization of functional proteins. It is merely unlikely.
Once again; Impossible =/= improbable
The question of the exact probabilities involved depends on what the starting conditions are and what macromolecules (RNA? Proteins? Peptides? How big? How many?) are thought to be involved. We just don’t know the answers to these questions.
So while we can’t give final probabilities, we can estimate relative probabilities, as in model-A is more likely than B because it involves shorter and fewer polymers with a smaller “alphabet’ of monomers.
Mung,
Funny how all IDists want to talk about are the arguments for evolution. Given how poorly ID has been doing it’s odd how little effort is put into progressing ID by the likes of Mung.
But then again, Mung accepts the entirety of evolution apart from some tiny bit. So in that light, what’s the point of this OP?
Given that your designer created some proteins from scratch all in one go, I’d say that’s of more relevance to ID then anything else. So, what are you doing about it Mung? Reading some more books on evolution?
Those things aren’t incompatible. Personally, I don’t think functional peptides can arise abiotically. But that is not the entire space of all possibilities for OoL.
At least mung hasn’t concluded that the difficulty of understanding OOL is so great the one shouldn’t make the attempt.
I just had a thought. Doug Axe could set up some vials of promordial soup, and if life doesn’t spontaneously emerge, that will prove it isn’t possible.
No
Inferring that it could and did happen is the most reasonable assumption based on the following
-The formation of the solar system and earth can be explained entirely by natural causes
-The evolution of life from the most simple forms to the present day can be explained by natural laws…and there is overwhelming evidence for the action of those natural laws.
-Sparse evidence for the natural origin of life
-Our present understanding of living things indicates that very simple functional proteins can exist and much simpler chemical systems capable of reproduction can exist.
The alternative is to assert that a supernatural ( or just super) creator for whom there isn’t a shred of evidence and has attributes that are impossible ( such as having a mind but not having a body or existing in time ) acted in a very brief period billions of years ago and then vanished..
Not your kind of evolution. Your kind of evolution died years ago. Waiting for you to catch up.
Natural Genetic Engineering and Natural Genome Editing
I respect honest scientific inquiry. I like scientific storytelling too, if it’s factual. Sadly, Wagner jumps from it might have happened to it did happen.
ETA: I do enjoy science fiction too but it doesn’t present itself as scientific fact.
petrushka,
We would have a better chance of finding a non-telic origin for Stonehenge.
REW,
That is your opinion. Unfortunately sheer dumb luck is not an explanation and it is all that you have.
And yet no one can do so. Strange, that.
Look no one even knows how to test the claim that ATP synthase arose via natural selection, natural laws, drift or neutral construction. That means you have nothing but bluffs and bluster. Not quite what science requires.
Mung,
I understand your point about circular arguments but I found his analysis of metabolism interesting. He did some real work here. I disagree with the arguments that say if not this it must be that. Sometimes saying we don’t know is a better conclusion. Someone using the science as a reference point can get derailed by a speculative conclusion. If we analyze a process and get lots of black swans, as Sal would say, then I think that process is an unlikely cause.
Sheer dumb luck is an explanation for many things although scientists wouldn’t call it that. They’d call it a stochastic process.
I’m pretty sure 100% of planetary scientists would say planetary systems form by natural laws. There’s overwhelming evidence that the planets coalesced out of a disk of material surrounding the sun. Most other stars have planetary systems and we can even see one forming with optical telescopes.
I can’t speak for Wagner, haven’t read his work so I don’t know how he makes his case. Nevertheless I do think it is possible to make a respectable case for “it must have happened” regarding a natural origin of life.
It would go more or less like this:
One big hint is that biogenesis must have broken down sometime in the finite past. Even if the universe has already existed, we have pretty overwhelming evidence it was once so hot and dense, that chemistry could not take place, and atoms could not persist for anything but the tiniest fractions of nanoseconds. Atoms came to exist, coalesced into stars, gast and dust, and heavier elements were produced by nuclear fusion and supernova explosions later in the history of the universe, producing planets and so on. This implies at least that the basic atomic building blocks would be available.
Another big hint is that life is made of atoms and that those atoms act according to well-described physical and chemical laws. Life as we know it is a complex mix of physical and chemical reactions, all of which individually, have mirror processes found in other natural entities. There is no unnatural, nonphysical property of cellular life observed so far.
By inference it is reasonable to postulate life must have begun from non-living atoms, when these processes, either by chance or through another process, came together in the same entity and produced the first life-form.
Their stochastic processes do not produce any predictions nor testable hypotheses. And not one of that 100% can demonstrate that our system formed via natural laws. The evidence presented in “The Privileged Planet” says otherwise.
Strange that all other known systems look very, very different from ours. That was unpredicted…
Frankie,
I notice that you did not mention Intelligent Design in that laundry list. Is it possible to test the claim that ATP synthase arose via Intelligent Design?
If so, how?
If not, then what difference does it make to you how else you can’t show it arose?
Stochastic processes do produce testable hypotheses. Think of rolling a pair of dice.
Its true that the pattern of our solar system is relatively rare. Earth-like planets are probably also rare. There may be only a few tens of millions to hundreds of millions of earth-like planets in the galaxy.
Rumraket,
This is an interesting point. I agree that atoms are common to matter and life, however how they are organized is very different. Outside of life you don’t see complex molecules produced rapidly and continuously which is essential to maintain a living organism. How this process came about is not straight forward. I think this is why Herbert Yockey said in his 1977 paper that the origin of life is as difficult a problem as the origin of matter .http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0022-5193(77)90044-3
REW,
How do you define “earth-like planets”? First you have the right type of star. Then you need a relatively large orbiting moon. You need to be in the habitable zone of that star.
So a terrestrial planet isn’t good enough.
Try responding in context, please. Or do you think that solar systems arise by rolling dice?
No but there are similarities. Both events follow natural laws but the results of any individual event is unpredictable. Only when you examine a large number of events do you see patterns that result from the natural laws.
Let’s see, humans manufacture and roll dice. So by your logic humans made the solar system.
There isn’t any way to test the claim that our solar system was the result of stochastic processes alone.
Since you have avoided OM’s question about how you would test the claim that ID is responsible for ATP synthase, I look forward to you avoid explaining how you would test the claim that ID is responsible for the solar system.
Yes you do. Asphalts, tars, bitumens, kerogens and similar polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons produced by intense heat are amazingly complex organic molecules, they’re just not alive. Leave sugar on your frying pan till it’s black and it will have become so complex it’s basically insoluble.
All it takes to generate complexity is heat. Once again, there is no in principle property of life not individually found outside of it. Life just has a unique combination of processes, they’re not found combined in the same entity anywhere else (otherwise, it’d be life). But as far as we know, none of those processes are somehow beyond the natural.
Nobody currently working on the origin of life believes in the kind of process advocated by Hubert Yockey there. Among other reasons because he assumes life began with large complex proteins as found in extant life. I’m simply not aware of any extant model of abiogenesis that postulates such a scenario.
In a hundred years, OOL will look like “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Do tell us all about the “context” of the creation of the solar system!
What did the Intelligent Designer do first?
Define complex. Define living organism. Do it to such a degree that someone can point to test cases and you and others using your definition will agree. I think you’ll find it harder then you imagine.
petrushka,
In a hundred years the OoL will be settled as via Intelligent Design
I will especially look forward to reading all of the papers describing how the ID hypotheses were tested. Since you and Joe and Virgil all claim that ID is testable, maybe one of you can advise one of the ID scientists.
And that is why ID is unfalsifiable, design can never be ruled out with an unknown designer.
ID is falsifiable and IDists have said exactly how to do so. Just because you are unable to falsify it is something completely different.
Actually it is why your position is untestable and because of that not science.
Yes, just now reading Chapter 3. All this talk of hyper-astronomical numbers though, he must just not understand how the metabolism space is configured. 😉
ID is horseshit and adhockey.
Of course you would say that. However it is a given that A) you cannot find any support for an alternative to ID and B) you don’t know squat about science.
And that makes petrushka very hungry
You got this from reading his paper?
heh
Mung,
Was Kolmogorov a creationist or IDist and that is why evos have a difficult time with the word “complexity”?
Wagner writes:
Mung reads:
See how he did that? Wagner says IF the origin of life was a natural event, it must have begun with something “much humbler than a protein.” Mung says Wagner says that proteins couldn’t have occurred spontaneously but nonetheless must have occurred because Wagner says this is required. Nowhere does Wagner actually say that modern proteins, much less a living cell, occurred spontaneously except after a very long extended sequence of development.
Wagner can also be read as saying that the earliest protolife was humble enough to occur, but wasn’t yet life. All you need is imperfect replication and time, and you’ll get life sooner or later – probably within 100 million years or so.
Actual experiments show that the odds of complex organic molecules forming spontaneously is very high, if not unity. I see no questions being begged here, UNLESS we carefully and deliberately misread Wagner to be saying there was no protolife development period.
Not because I proclaim it so. Rather, because IF it was a natural process, it must have taken time. Kind of like saying weather produces fantastic rock formations over time.
I agree here. IF it was a natural event, most likely the initial set of required molecules was MUCH smaller than life itself required.
Again, I agree. I have (somewhat facetiously) proposed a “biologist 50 index”. You take a thousand biologists back into the past, to right after the earth’s crust solidified. You move forward taking a sample every million years and examining it. After some number of samples, the percentage of biologists on this expedition who consider what they’re examining to be “alive” will exceed 50%. We can somewhat arbitrarily say this was the first life.
I speculated this might take about 100 samplings.
Flint,
That has nothing to do with what you were responding to. The following from you is total BS:
I love how Flint can attack me without worrying about being censored yet when he proves to be a hypocrite my comment goes to guano.
What a sad bunch of moderators this place has
No, it’s simply a bit over your head. Consider that replication increases the population of replicators. Within some period of time, this population will exhaust the resources necessary to replicate. However, since this replication is imperfect, all of these replicators might be different (and many will surely be different). SOME of them will be better at extracting resources than others – perhaps some will extract them from other replicators, perhaps some will be able to use some new unexploited resource, etc. In other words, we have competition.
Now, competition is an interesting phenomenon, because it implies winners and losers. The losers stop replicating, either because they were dismantled for resources or because they can’t get the necessary resources. Every generation produces losers, and the winners keep getting better at the competition. They HAVE to keep getting better, since only winners keep replicating.
SOME of these winners will be succeeding because they are becoming more complex, more capable. Others will succeed (perhaps even more varieties) by being parasites. Eventually, even YOU would have to regard these competitors as being alive.
Flint,
No, Flint, it is propaganda and that is over your head. And Spiegleman’s monster applies
I personally don’t think anything you’ve posted should be removed. And quite a few of my posts have been sent to guano, often for reasons I cannot fathom.
I am satisfied that I made a good-faith effort to explain what I meant. This is the best I can do. If you choose not to read and understand, this lies outside my ability to control. Perhaps others will suffer through my posts, I don’t know.
It is frustrating and hey we agree on something. I will call it a day on that…
I read and understand that it is pure fantasy. I take it you don’t know about Spiegelman’s monster
I understand that you regard an evolutionary process of any kind as being pure fantasy. I think we are fortunate that those investigating biogenesis are open to a range of fantasies, because even their failures are informative.