Not much can be written after you watch the two videos above…
It is pretty easy to understand for those who choose to understand that the theory of abiogenesis and the probability of life spontaneously self-assembling is just a science-fiction story to fill the void for those who need to believe in something other than the obvious…
If the living cell can’t be reassembled in a lab, what evidence is there that life spontaneously self-assembled other than in science-fiction stories?
Now, let’s listen to the excuses…
And then there’s that fictional story of a magic man poofing things into existence.
I don’t know much about the origin of life, but perhaps you could enlighten us all. How did it happen, and how do you know that? Have you ever seen it happen? Can you reproduce the event in the lab?
Can a pureed sandwich be reassembled in the lab?
Christ, that is the dumbest “argument” that the pseudoscientists have ever come up with.
It’s worthy of J-mac, which shows how low Wells goes.
Glen Davidson
Does uncooking an egg count as a step?
I’m beginning to see a pattern …
Intelligent Design has (so far) failed producing life, so it must be Intelligent Design!
A living cell won’t arise from a test-tube containing all the ingredients. But the same is true for, well, anything. Rocks, sand, and minerals of all sorts. Planets, stars, mountain ranges, glaciers, oceans, clouds and storms in their unlimited number of possible shapes, volcanic islands, lava flows, beaches, rivers, lakes, continents, natural nuclear reactors. Anything really.
If you dissolve the constituents of these in test-tubes, they also won’t spontaneously reassemble. What the fuck is this supposed to tell us? Well it can’t really tell us anything other than dissolving them in water isn’t how they came to be in the first place. Doh!
Just say “God of the gaps” and save us all some time.
A scientific experiment with watermelon( dead) has shown ticks( life) will spontaneously appear. Your hypothesis has been refuted.
#3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z-OLG0KyR4
I took my camera apart and put the parts in a test tube and shook them, and got no camera. Therefore cameras are not intelligently designed. Did I done get that right?
Hi everyone,
I’m going to side with J-Mac here. I think there is something to Wells’ argument. I’ve written about it previously here:
Putting Humpty Dumpty back together again: why is this a bad argument for design?
You’ll find that my article addresses many of the objections made by commenters on this thread. Scroll down to “Bad refutations of Dr. Wells’ argument, and why they fail” and see especially part 3.
Glen Davidson asks: “Can a pureed sandwich be reassembled in the lab?” That’s not a fair comparison. In Wells’ thought experiment, the original living cell does not get scrambled: it simply leaks. As Wells puts it: “I take a sterile needle, and I poke that cell, and all its stuff leaks out into this test tube.”
Rumraket writes: “A living cell won’t arise from a test-tube containing all the ingredients. But the same is true for, well, anything. Rocks, sand, and minerals of all sorts.”
However, no scientist has ever claimed that non-living matter could assemble itself into rocks, or for that matter a sandwich, whereas most biologists would seriously argue that billions of years ago on the primordial Earth, non-living matter assembled itself into a living cell. It is perfectly reasonable to ask why such the re-assembly of a living cell is agreed by all chemists to be impossible, even in a perfect environment containing all the ingredients, in just the right proportions (Wells’ sterile salt solution containing a leaking cell), whereas we are supposed to believe that the self-assembly of a living cell was possible on the primordial Earth, where there would have been a dickens of a problem not only in synthesizing the right ingredients, but in getting the right ingredients together in the first place.
OMagain attempts to turn the tables: “I took my camera apart and put the parts in a test tube and shook them, and got no camera. Therefore cameras are not intelligently designed.” But no-one is arguing that cameras were intelligently designed by a process of shaking. And no-one is claiming that life was intelligently designed by a process of shaking, either. The objection is irrelevant.
Oh please, that’s a distinction without a difference.
Anyway, the original living cell does get scrambled because it leaks out. Why don’t you know that? Do you actually think that the parts are kept in proper order as diffusion takes place? Why must you make such lame objections? Are you really that wedded to stupid creationist arguments that you have to ignore what actually happens when a cell’s contents leak out in order to pretend to make a point?
Really? Do you think rocks have always existed, or what?
And then evolved a great deal in order to become a modern cell. Are you that incompetent that you would ignore something that important?
Complete nonsense. Clearly it’s theoretically possible, and with some repair it may be practically possible in some more knowledgeable future.
It’s the only mechanism that’s a known possibility. Come up with evidence for something else and we’ll consider it. Your god of the gaps really is impossibly useless. And we’re not saying we know it happened, we’re just looking at the only processes known to exist back then that conceivably could do it, because those are all that are legitimate to infer as causes for such an event.
Glen Davidson
A living cell? Seriously?
vjtorley,
why would the first self replicator need to be even remotely as complex as an extant cell, with proteins, DNA and the whole 9 yard? Last time I asked you about this in the James Tour thread I got no response.
The whole Humpty Dumpty crap is built on an all too obvious straw man.
We had a nice discussion a few months ago about this article: “The Secret of How Life on Earth Began“. It’s a good overview of the current state of the art — what we don’t know, what we do know, and what seems likely given what little we do know. I’m reasonably optimistic that the origins of life will be figured out during our lifetime (though possibly not before the collapse of civilization).
I wonder if J-Mac’s Part 3 will be the “life can’t spontaneously arise in a jar of peanut butter” argument? That’s about his depth of scientific understanding.
Well, what process are people claiming that life was intelligently designed by?
What did you mean by this remark, Vince? Surely not what it actually says!
Uhh yes they have. In fact that’s what the whole field of geology says happens. Rocks form through basic physical processes without any intelligent design. Just not when their constuent atoms are dissolved in test tube solutions. That’s the whole point of the list of known-to-form-through-basic-physics entities I made.
That these entities all form without any kind of intelligent design involved.
They just don’t form when their constituents are dissolved in test tubes. Nevertheless, there ARE conditions under which they form without intelligent design. So the test-tube argument is plain idiotic. Nobody suggests any of these objects, including living cells, should just spontaneously assemble from dilution.
ALL proposals for the formation of physical objects involve something else than spontaneous assembly from test-tube dilutions. Planets form from gravitational coalescing of dust, gas, comets, asteroids and so on. When planets have formed, heat from radioactive decay and gravitational forces can keep the materials hot enough for convection, so continents and plate tectonics can form, which in turn can produce mountain ranges. The gravitational attraction of the planet can maintain an atmosphere, which under rotation is gradually heated and cooled every “day” under the local star’s radiation, producing complex weather patterns, clouds, storms etc. etc.
The point is that all of the entities have some explanation in physics and chemistry, for how they form without intelligent design. Yet for all of them, it would also be true, just as for living cells, that if you dissolve them in a test-tube, they don’t spontaneously reassemble.
Then it can’t be an argument for anything that living cells don’t spontaneously assemble themselves in test-tubes either. Obviously, just as for rocks, planets, mountains and so on, there could be some physical circumstances under which they can form. It just isn’t “when diluted in a test tube”.
Yes, like the continents, and oceans, and clouds, and the planet itself, just not from a dilution of molecules sitting in a test tube. But under some local conditions, with the right physical structures in local rocks and minerals, with the right concentratoins of metals and minerals in solution, the right local cycles of drying and wetting, heating and cooling and so on. Just like there are the right local conditions for the formation of, say, Serpentinite.
The idea is that there is some physical process that satisfies the conditions for their formation. “I broke it and it doesn’t spontaneously jump back together” isn’t an argument for anything. The same is true for everything. Volcanic islands. How do they form? Well if you annihilate a dead volcano with giant nuclear explosions, it also won’t spontaneously assemble itself again. Oh well gee I guess volcanoes can’t form then.
Isn’t it painfully obvious why that line of thinking is stupid? That question was rhetorical. Yes, it is painsfully obvious that line of thinking is stupid.
But that’s the fucking point. The issue is indentifying what the conditions were. Wells can also dissolve limestone in pure water and it won’t spontaneously assemble itself back into what it was. Nevertheless, that limestone did form once upon a time in some way that has nothing to do with intelligent design.
The primordial Earth, like now, wasn’t just “a test tube”. Even now the Earth contains millions of very different macro and microenvironments. Even if we removed all life from it’s surface, no two places would be exactly the same. To pick something out of a hat, consider some sandstone outcrop in the Sahara desert versus deep in a volcanic hotspring on Iceland. A sub-glacial river in the himalayas vs the process of serpentinization.
There are wildly differing circumstances in the presence of minerals, metals, humidity (in fact some environments are fully aquatic, while others are basically entirely free from water), temperature, pressure, the geometric and spatial layout of the environment. Some rock surfaces are smooth, others are highly porous. Some rocks repel water, others adsorb it. Some dissolve in water, others precipitate out because they’re insoluble. Consider this list of minerals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minerals. Many require wildly different conditions to form. Yet the geology of the Earth is and has been complex enough for allow for the formation of all of them (excluding those that formed in space). And over time, conditions change so they can eventually come together and form new amalgamations too.
The Earth is not and never has been a single environment. You can’t just think of the Earth as a single environment, with the same, simple, ubiquitous conditions everywhere. There are no volcanic hot springs in the Sahara desert. Why? The conditions aren’t right there. Nevertheless, there are conditions somewhere on Earth where volcanic hot springs can form. There isn’t any good reason to think the same could not be true for the first living cells.
Rumraket,
Excellent summary of the issues, Rum. Thanks!
Soborom geothermal field and Yerike hot spring, Chad
The Sahara’s a big place.
Not the point, I know, but to keep the facts straight…
Glen Davidson
Kantian Naturalist,
Thank you for the article. I had a chance to look it over briefly and enjoyed the review.
I am less optimistic that we will discover a purely material solution to OOL.
As the article says that recent theory says that lots of complexity needs to arrive at the same time. Genetic information, raw materials for metabolism (amino acids or equivalent) and enzymes that can rapidly turn genetic information into metabolic structures. Has there ever been such a thing as a simple living structure? Something which could evolve into a bacteria? Then is it reasonable to believe a bacteria can evolve into a eukaryotic cell? In addition is it reasonable to believe a single eukaryotic cell can evolve into a multicellular organism on its own?
Where does all additional genetic information come from to pull off these major transitions?
Did you read that paper I linked you to? Energy + Matter = Increasing Complexity. You know, that one.
Fair enough, I learn something new every day!
Hi everyone,
My remark that “no scientist has ever claimed that non-living matter could assemble itself into rocks” seems to have attracted a hornets’ nest of criticism. However, it should be perfectly obvious what I meant. Rocks don’t “assemble themselves,” for the simple reason that they’re not assemblages; they’re aggregates. (Living things can be called assemblages, because they’re “intricate little machines,” as the BBC article on life’s origin which Kantian Naturalist helpfully linked to puts it. As such, they have a well-defined structure.) Rocks are formed either by the cooling of magma (igneous rocks), or by the accumulation and cementation of fragments of earlier rocks and minerals, or alternatively, via a process of precipitation (sedimentary rocks), or by the transformation of a pre-existing rock under heat and pressure (metamorphic rocks). I wouldn’t describe any of these processes as “self-assembly”; to do so would be an odd use of English. On the other hand, I’d be happy to describe the formation of a mineral as “self-assembly,” because although it’s not a machine, it’s a crystalline lattice with a well-defined structure, unlike most rocks, which are assorted mixtures of various minerals. But in fact, we know that minerals can form in test tubes. Which brings us back to the question: why can’t life?
Rumraket objects: “Wells can also dissolve limestone in pure water and it won’t spontaneously assemble itself back into what it was.” Limestone is composed predominantly of the mineral, calcium carbonate. Crystals can self-assemble. In fact, some limestones are formed by the chemical precipitation of calcite or aragonite, i.e. travertine. To quote Wikipedia: “Travertine is a banded, compact variety of limestone formed along streams; particularly where there are waterfalls and around hot or cold springs. Calcium carbonate is deposited where evaporation of the water leaves a solution supersaturated with the chemical constituents of calcite. Tufa, a porous or cellular variety of travertine, is found near waterfalls.” Can you show me anything equivalent to that with life?
Glen Davidson sarcastically asks: “Do you actually think that the parts are kept in proper order as diffusion takes place?” Of course not. I have studied chemistry at university, thank you, and a little geology as well. But if you’re going to use that as your excuse for why a cell can’t reassemble once it has been pricked with a sterile needle, then your problems are magnified a million-fold in the primordial ocean, where the parts would have been scattered far and wide, not to mention the problem of getting these parts to form in the first place.
Glen Davidson adds that the first cell would have “evolved a great deal in order to become a modern cell,” and in a similar vein, dazz asks: “why would the first self replicator need to be even remotely as complex as an extant cell, with proteins, DNA and the whole 9 yard?” Short answer: I’m not saying it necessarily was. I’d be happy if you could show me how even a simple self-replicator self-assembled, and explain why it’s plausible to believe that such a self-replicator could have subsequently given rise to a modern cell.
Rumraket also argues: “The Earth is not and never has been a single environment. You can’t just think of the Earth as a single environment, with the same, simple, ubiquitous conditions everywhere.” He adds that different minerals “require wildly different conditions to form.” That’s a perfectly valid point, if you’re attempting to explain why the different components of a cell required different conditions in order to form in the first place. But it’s an entirely different matter when all the components are already there, as in Dr. Jonathan Wells’ leaking cell example. All you have to do is get them together. Why haven’t scientists managed to do this?
I’d like to return to the helpful BBC article on life’s origin, linked to by Kantian Naturalist. Curiously, rather than invoking a multitude of different environments, it argues that in the right environment, with all the building blocks in the one place, life could have self-assembled quite rapidly, perhaps within a matter of minutes:
Finally, I should point out that Dr. Jonathan Wells isn’t the only scientist who has used the example of a newly destroyed cell in order to cast doubt on scientific theories regarding abiogenesis. The same illustration was also used by Professor James Tour, who in 2009 was ranked one of the top 10 chemists in the world over the past decade, by Thomson Reuters. In an interview with Lee Strobel, Professor Tour used the image of a cell which had just died, to explain his skepticism of claims by scientists that they can explain the origin of life:
In the passage quoted above, Professor Tour made no attempt to argue for the existence of God, but he clearly thought that his illustration of the leaking cell undermined the scientific respectability of abiogenesis. Tour is not an Intelligent Design proponent, but he is (as readers of this thread will know) openly skeptical of abiogenesis, although he doesn’t rule it out.
So, will the new abiogenesis experiments yield fruitful results and generate a self-replicator that could have given rise to modern cells? Time will tell. But if they do work, then I would expect that self-replicator to be able to reassemble, when taken apart.
If that happens, then the answer to Dr. Wells’ question will be as follows: the reason why a modern living cell can’t reassemble is that its components are mutually inhibitory, getting in the way of one another and preventing their reassembly, whereas the components of the first living organism did not inhibit one another in such a fashion. In other words, modern cells are no longer capable of self-assembly, even under ideal conditions. They’ve actually lost a vital capacity possessed by the first living thing.
Now, that may well turn out to be true, and if it is true, it’s really intriguing. But right now, we have no evidence for that. Until scientists can generate this Ur-organism, an attitude of skepticism (as opposed to diehard disbelief) remains appropriate.
Guess what? No reasonable person thinks that life “assembled itself” originally either. Anyway, the point was supposedly that nothing can reassemble a cell, not an issue of “self-assembly.”
Can the strawman. That’s the real issue.
Because it’s not a mineral. Or simple. And technically, minerals can’t form in test tubes because officially they’re not minerals if made with artifice.
No, and why should anyone care?
Then don’t give me some idiotic claim that the cell’s parts aren’t scrambled. They are, and you have no reason to say, ” In Wells’ thought experiment, the original living cell does not get scrambled: it simply leaks.” It doesn’t “simply leak,” everything gets scattered and mixed, which you should know if your claims about what you know are true. Which they probably are, but you’ll repeat any number of ID idiocies regardless.
It’s just one thing, the mindless tripe that J-mac and Wells pushed, and that you defended, ineptly.
Oh don’t get try to get cute. There are many possibilities for concentration, from dehydration to complexing with minerals, like clay. Rumraket covered that pretty well, it’s not all one big ocean out there, a whole lot of chemical environments occur. And no one is talking about “parts” of cells, except possibly in the barest manner, like nucleotide strands.
Why do you repeat the canard about reassembly of a modern cell, then? Why don’t you begin to deal with these things in a reasonable fashion?
Go study the literature. There are proposals, and certain experiments, that suggest such possibilities (not self-assemblage altogether, but some of that, like with membranes), and it’s appalling that you resort to your childish tactics rather than learning.
And what would be the point?
Reassemble a crushed opal.
Yeah, that’s as impressive as you making stupid statements about leaking cell parts not being scrambled, and then defending said tripe by bringing up the education that means you should know better than to do so. Get some other pseudoscientist (with respect to biology) to agree with Wells, and you’ve got two people bringing up an idiotic strawman.
Yes, he is inane in his attacks on abiogensis.
Why? And what would that prove?
Yes, they evolved quite other functions. Christ, why do you make the same mistakes over and over again?
In the sense you’re using for “self-assembly,” you’re the only one here making that claim. Without cause or justification.
Oh really? So why are you implying that we have no such skepticism?
Mostly, I don’t think most of us care a whole lot. What’s unknown is unknown, but in the meantime we’re not buying the fiction that you prefer in the stead of reasonable conjectures and empiricism.
Glen Davidson
vjtorley,
What attitude would you recommend toward alternative theories?
Whatever label you want to stick on the process of formation seems to me completely besides the point. Some entities are assemblies, some are aggregations. Okay, in general I think the underlying principle holds. It takes some particular set of conditions for the entity in question to form, whether you want to call it an assemblage or an aggregate.
Some minerals can, some minerals can’t. It’s not that simple. They can when the conditions are right. Such as the evaporation you bring up. If calcium is dissolved in the water, evaporation will leave it behind, supposing there is evaporation. But then we’re no longer talking about just having the constituents in a test-tube, we’ve added something more to the scenario. Such as evaporation. A process that separates the solvent from the constituents and brings the constituents together. As the water evaporates, the calcium is dissolved in a progressively smaller and smaller volume of water, until the concentration is so high the remaining water can not contain any more calcium, and it starts to precipitate out.
If you’re clever, you can see where this is going. To get your minerals, you need more than their constituent atoms in some solution. At the very least you need a process that favors their condensation and precipitation. We can make the conditions in the test tube more complex, by adding heat that evaporates the solvent.
They can be made even more complex with compartments, different minerals with different properties, reactive gases, catalysts and so on. All of them things that happen on Earth in many different microevironments. The point is, there could be such a combination of local environments and processes happening in them that they lead to something more complex, than simply having the constituents in a mere passive dilution could.
Yes, with evaporation. Happens to all my glass and kitchen ware all the time. But we’ve made the scenario more complex now. We’ve added evaporation.
But that’s what scientists are working on, trying to identify what those conditions are, if any, that yield life.
As with limestone, life doesn’t spontaneously spring out of solution. You need more than the constituents dissolved in water. In the case of limestone, you need evaporation (or some other process that leads to supersaturation of the water and precipitation).
I’m sorry but the test-tube argument remains stupid for the same reason.
Which is why nobody is suggesting cells form in the open ocean. Same is true for hundreds of types of minerals, they can’t form in the middle of the water column. Same could be true for the first cells. There could be conditions where they form, but those conditions aren’t “the open ocean”.
Have anyone actually tried that experiment, to puncture a living cell and then try to push it’s contents back in? That’s your first clue.
Second, what would it even show? It’s not like anyone would think cellular life originated by humans traveling back in time and mechanically assembling the first cell anyway.
For the most part, the research is still stuck at identifying how the the individual constituents formed in the first place, and whether those constituents subsequently could facilitate some sort of evolution.
They didn’t form in a test tube. Neither did the Himalayas. Oh gee well then I guess it couldn’t happen.
Perhaps. Who knows?
I don’t care how famous these people are. The argument is bunk no matter who makes it. For reasons already elucidated.
Which, despite him never explicitly trying to argue for God, makes it painfully obvious his God-blinders are preventing his otherwise sound critical faculties from functioning properly.
I can also dissolve a mineral (such as calcium carbonate, yes) in water, and it won’t spontaneously reassemble unless the right conditions are met.
Why would it be different with living cells? Why should it not be possible to break them in water? Isn’t it rather obvious that they wouldn’t just spontaneously assemble themselves once you’ve broken them apart, unless something happens that is conducive to their assembly?
What environment is conducive to their assembly? Was there a period of evolution of replicators, before something akin to cells even came about? If so, where did these replicators originate and evolve? Not the open ocean, and not a test tube. But so what?
I’m sorry but your whole line about bringing up Tour looks to me like a textbook case of the appeal to authority fallacy. The fact that James Tour is engaged in the same fallacious reasoning with test-tubes makes it no less fallacious.
Why? Doesn’t that depend on how it is taken apart? And whether the conditions that allow the formation of the replicator is the same as the conditions that facilitate it’s replication?
Trees form by a particular process, but if you chop them down they don’t spontaneously reassemble. How is this any different?
If some self-replicator forms by A joining with B, then [A-B] with C, and then this [A-B-C] assembly is what can replicate itself, and you break it up into A and [B-C], then if A can’t spontaneously join with [B-C] (in the same way that [A-B] can join with C), have you somehow managed to show that [A-B-C] can’t form? No, of course you haven’t.
That’s probably true, but not even the whole story. Partially (I think) it also has to do with whether the conditions they exist in are right. Go back to the limestone example. Suppose I take a large block of limestone and crack it in two. It won’t reassemble itself, right? Is this because the limestone has somehow “lost” the ability to form that it once had? Or does it have more to do with the fact that the general conditions for the formation of limestone just aren’t satisfied?
I’d be with you in an attitude of skepticism towards any particular hypothesis on the origin of life, as with all untested scientific hypotheses. The time to believe it happened in some particular way, is when that hypothesis survives it’s testable predictions being tested.
But this is different from saying the concept of abiogenesis as a whole is implausible. I simply don’t see why.
Do I have to remind you again about James Tour’s remark about abiogenesis?
There’s clearly an assumption that the first replicator was a cell very much like the ones we currently observe. That’s ludicrous. And it means that Tour is a Liar too, because he insisted that anyone who claim to know anything about how life begun is a liar. And that’s what he did right there: he claim to KNOW that it was based in complex modern molecules.
The rest is just you and your argument from personal incredulity. You ask why it’s plausible to believe that a simple replicator “self-assembled”. Why would it be less plausible than “someone” assembled it fully formed?
VJT:
I’d be interested to read any paper or article that in fact made that claim.
Hi everyone,
I think our opinions may finally be converging.
Rumraket writes:
These are substantive points, and I don’t disagree with them. For reassembly to occur, certain highly specific conditions would have to be met. For limestone, they’re fairly easy to describe: evaporation. For crushed opals (to use one of Glen Davidson’s examples), you need water carrying dissolved silica, plus a suitable crack into which the solution can be carried, followed by evaporation. For life, however, the reassembly conditions appear to be far more complex. We still haven’t identified them.
Rumraket adds:
That’s a good point, too. One of the reasons preventing a leaking cell from reassembling may be that some of the components link up too soon, which means that the correct assembly sequence can no longer be followed.
However, I strongly suspect that an additional factor is at work: the components of a modern living cell are mutually inhibitory, getting in the way of one another and preventing their reassembly, whereas the components of the first living organism were able to assemble themselves under the right conditions. If my speculation is correct, then it will never be possible to design an experiment resulting in the formation of a modern living cell from non-living ingredients. A very simple replicator will always be the best we can do.
I won’t comment on Glen Davidson’s remarks, beyond saying that he clearly needs to brush up on his people skills.
dazz writes of Tour’s abiogenesis lecture:
Tour is assuming that four classes of chemicals – carbohydrates, nucleic-acids, lipids and proteins – are required before evolution can begin. Notice that he says “evolution,” not life. He’s probably thinking of standard theories of evolution, in which mutations have to occur in an organism’s DNA. In this scenario, nucleic acids and proteins will clearly be essential. If you want to enlarge the theory of evolution to include transformations in very simple replicators, that’s fine, but you need to say a little about how such changes would be inherited, and how natural selection would work, under such a scenario.
In his lecture, Tour focused on carbohydrates. Even here, as he showed, the problems are pretty formidable – and I really can’t see how you could have terrestrial life of any sort without carbohydrates.
dazz adds:
Are you sure those are the only two alternatives? And isn’t it a little desperate to argue for a claim simply by asserting that counter-claims are based on even weaker evidence?
Unlike Rumraket, I remain skeptical of abiogenesis, but I’m willing to change my views if new experiments turn up promising results. I’ll let Rumraket have the last word:
We know that far-from-equilibrium systems can form spontaneously. What we need to get from far-from-equilibrium systems to genuinely autopoiesis (life) is a way of organizationally insulating the far-from-equilibrium system from the larger systems in which it is embedded (so the system is partially isolated from perturbations) but also energetically open so that energy from the larger systems can be used to sustain a far-from-equilibrium attractor.
Doing that would require, at a bare minimum, both (a) an autocatalytic network (wherein A is necessary for the synthesis of B and B is necessary for the synthesis of A) and (b) a semi-permeable membrane.
But we know that both autocatalytic networks and semi-permeable membranes can form spontaneously in nature.
How probable is it that autocatalytic networks could become enclosed within a semi-permeable membrane? That’s hard to gauge, because the probability of a chemical reaction depends on how much energy is available to drive it. If there was sufficient energy available on the early Earth — whether volcanic eruptions, UV rays, comet bombardment, etc. — then events that are highly improbable now could well have been much more probable then.
Oh, yeah, sorry I pointed out that your attacks were so wrong. I guess it’s my fault that you attack where there is no fault.
You need to brush up on decency skills. Learn not to use your mindless creationist “arguments” as if they were truth.
Glen Davidson
More shifting the burden of proof from you… I don’t need to show anything about early replicators to demonstrate that Tour is full of it.
Oh, that’s brilliant! So if we define evolution in terms of modern organisms, the components of modern organisms are required for evolution! What a great mind Tour’s is!
How can you defend such a dumb position, Vincent? Saying that there can’t be evolution without organisms based on the same complex molecules, DNA and mutations we find today implies that the first living form had to be very complex. This is an implicit claim about how life originated. And he’s pulling it out of his rear end.
I don’t think any of those is an alternative at all. “self-assembling” or “god-assembling” are non-explanations to me. A good explanation would presumably include chemical reactions, descriptions of potential early replications and all that stuff science thrives at: providing proper explanations.
The difference is that no one on my side believes or will claim that live just “self-assembled”, while everyone on your side actually believes that god assembled it.
J-Mac,
Aren’t you assuming that the first living thing was like modern living things?
Surely you can see the difference between disassembling a car and attempting to randomly reassemble it and disassembling the first “car” mechanism, a circular stone with a hole and a stick in that hole?
I mean, rivers put sticks in stones with holes in them all the time so all you have to do now is demonstrate that the first living thing is at all like the thing you are breaking up into component pieces and expecting to reassemble. Good luck with that.
Kantian Naturalist,
Energy plus a catalytic agent that can produce the reactions fast enough to sustain life. Enzymes are what make this possible however the ultimate origin of a system (currently DNA replication and translation) that can produce these rapidly enough in production to sustain life remains a mystery. Some are saying that life was possible before DNA replication and translation but there is not even a reasonable concept behind this specious claim.
OMagain,
Are you assuming that it was not? If so what evidence backs up your assumption?
Bill doesn’t understand what assuming means. As usual you struggle with the simplest of concepts
Yeah, OMagain, how do you know that the common ancestor of bacteria, archaea, and eukarya wasn’t a platypus?
Glen Davidson
That is still far short of life as we know it.
And those “membranes” are just so like the membranes of living cells. Not.
What does the simplest bacterium have besides an autocatalytic network and a semipermeable membrane?
So you are assuming that it was. I’m assuming nothing, it’s you making claims.
On what basis do you make that assumption?
So you are also assuming that the first living thing was a modern cell. Why?
Presumably because you can then claim that it’s impossible that such a cell was created by tornados in a junkyard? Is that the best Intelligent Design can do, define every alternative as impossible so only ID is left?
Under ID I’d have no problem with the first living thing being, for example, a gazelle. Why not. There’s nothing stopping that being the case, an intelligent designer could have done whatever it liked.
Why are you assuming the first living thing was not a gazelle Mung?
True, but if they were like the membranes of living cells they wouldn’t work, because those aren’t actually semipermeable. They’re pretty much impermeable. Cells from extant life use specialized membrane transport machines to control what enters and leaves the cell.
Interestingly, the kinds of semipermeable membranes that are known to form spontaneously from simple fatty acids are pretty much required at the putative beginning stages of cellular life, presumably before specialized membrane transport machines evolved and the virtually impermeable phospholipids we see in extant life.
I think we’ve spoken about this before. I remember citing a number of publications by the Szostak lab and others that have done work on this.
This is a good point, dazz.
I have this idea that like heavy elements being created in supernovae, some compounds of life were created in very unusual and rare phenomenon. Possibly some phenomenon that occurs in the early stages of the solar system. I doubt life “spontaneously” assembled here on Earth, though I do wonder if there might have been a series of events that provided a natural assembly line situation for some early quasi-life components.
All quite possible.
OMagain,
Its what the evidence is showing us?
What evidence are you referring to? I have to say that you and evidence so far do not seem to be on a first-name basis.
Or whatever you feel, apparently.
Not really the same thing in science, though.
Glen Davidson