Abiogenesis and evolution: James Tour

@soothfast said

Your problem, I suspect, is self-awareness. You really feel you're on the right side because how can matter be self-aware? That I could understand, because I ponder that very question often. However, that is not the subject of the thread.

Oh yes, I agree completely. Off-topic here, but the nature of self-awareness is more interesting, and more difficult to grasp, than the origin of life. By which I mean the nature of consciousness, not its origin. What is this state we're in when we're in it? is a much more difficult question to answer than how it came about ( pretty obviously a matter of brain complexity). Contra KJ, we can understand something without knowing how it originated.

@indonesia-phil said
Indeed, science and religion, oil and water, never the twain shall meet. There's nothing 'wrong' with believing in anything so long as it harms no one, indeed manifestations of belief in higher things can stir my small soul, but to try to make it sound like science is where things go awry. To attribute the as yet inexplicable (although in a very short time we have come ...[text shortened]... y toward explaining a lot of it) to supernatural forces is about as far from science as one can get.

But I believe they dovetail together.

I see no reason that God could not have "done it", but to do so, he very nearly certainly had to use natural laws (that he created) in order to "do it". The purpose for this is so that humans' free will is not violated. And by free will, I mean his free will to believe in God or to disbelieve.

Looking at nature, the question remains open, and so the choice is ours, and ours alone.

@Suzianne

I view the account in Genesis not as biological history of the origin of life in general, but as an allegory about mankind's 'ensoulment' if you will, mankind's awakening to moral responsibility. The biological history and the moral allegory do dovetail, in the sense that consciousness of man's mortality is crucial to consciousness of morality. If man were immortal and knew it, there would be no such thing as murder, so there would be no crime which could not, given enough time, be compensated or reversed by some future action. But murder is final, it cannot be compensated or reversed. This is elegantly expressed in the Book of Genesis, that man eats of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (i.e., mankind awakens to responsibility for the consequences of his actions) and thereby loses his childlike (ape-ish) innocence; he also thereby becomes conscious of his mortality, and is banished from his infantile (fool's) paradise. Of course, he wasn't really sent away from a real garden, not literally. He was 'banished' in the sense that life became vastly more complex for him, he had to THINK about things he had never thought about before and take all sorts of precautions against future contingencies he had not thought about before either. He not only needs to build shelter and plant crops, he has to think about securing the tools and materials to do it, and he needs to make laws to prohibit others from stealing the fruits of his labor, a life full of cares and woes unknown to our amoral precursors who still lived in trees and subsisted on low-lying fruit (actually, it was more of a jungle than a Garden of Eden, and, as we know, the Law of the Jungle is not pretty: it's eat or be eaten).

I do not believe that our closest relatives, chimps and bonobos, are conscious of their mortality.

Now, if someone wants to say that the simplest life forms got started by purely naturalistic/chemical causes and at some later time God breathed a 'soul' into what was essentially an ape-with-fire, that's ok with me, I just don't see any evidence for it. Neither do I see any evidence that a 'divine hand' is mixing up molecules or chromosomes and thereby 'guiding' either the origins of life or subsequent evolution.

@soothfast said
I'm not sure where you perceive an insult, really. It seems your skin has become thinner over the years, and mine thicker. Maybe don't pick these fights in a science forum?

My point is this: many currently active researchers are working on the problem of bridging the gap between chemical evolution and the inception of what we define as life. These researchers, theref ...[text shortened]... erstand, because I ponder that very question often. However, that is not the subject of the thread.

No one is arguing against research even Tour is a big proponent of it, and does a lot of work in research. Because we don't understand research is warranted, saying that doesn't mean those things I have said aren't true. James Tour is huge on research they build things from molecules up, this isn't a slam against science or research, it is against stating things simply not true as if they were.

You start by saying life has to have a natural explanation, personally if what is required is a mind, why wouldn't that be the natural cause? It's natural whenever we see code that we know a code writer produced it, if we ponder the Ford engine grasping all the science around the functions of the motor doesn't rule out Henry Ford as a cause no matter how much we know about the engine.

What is natural, did everything come into being out of nothing with no cause, or is the natural thing a cause occurred what is, was produced? What is natural is simply the way it is, what I think you are attempting to do is define out of the universe any cause that cannot be a part of the universe itself as if it could and would create itself out of nothing.

Self-awareness, right and wrong, love, and hate, good and bad, mathematics are not material things yet we acknowledge them as part of the universe, I don't think the material world had a thing to do to produce them and many other things similar to them. Yet instructions direct processes in functionally complex systems, instructions are information that such it guides and directs, a much higher form of information than say just a letter, a number, or something with only meaning.

@moonbus said
Oh yes, I agree completely. Off-topic here, but the nature of self-awareness is more interesting, and more difficult to grasp, than the origin of life. By which I mean the nature of consciousness, not its origin. What is this state we're in when we're in it? is a much more difficult question to answer than how it came about ( pretty obviously a matter of brain complexity). Contra KJ, we can understand something without knowing how it originated.

Yes, we can know something without knowing how it originated, but that knowledge helps us understand more fully. Many people dislike history, if you can remove history you can paint the present any way you want, creating enemies that are not natural enemies into natural ones simply because the past has nothing to do with the present. Your lack of curiosity suggests to me that is exactly what you want, dismiss history because you like to able to paint the present just as you want it to be, history can show your errors so you avoid it.

@kellyjay said
No one is arguing against research even Tour is a big proponent of it, and does a lot of work in research. Because we don't understand research is warranted, saying that doesn't mean those things I have said aren't true. James Tour is huge on research they build things from molecules up, this isn't a slam against science or research, it is against stating things simply not ...[text shortened]... a much higher form of information than say just a letter, a number, or something with only meaning.

The problem here is that you're trying to back-engineer a solution to get somewhere that goes along with your pre-supposed endpoint.

@moonbus said
@Suzianne

I view the account in Genesis not as biological history of the origin of life in general, but as an allegory about mankind's 'ensoulment' if you will, mankind's awakening to moral responsibility. The biological history and the moral allegory do dovetail, in the sense that consciousness of man's mortality is crucial to consciousness of morality. If m ...[text shortened]... p molecules or chromosomes and thereby 'guiding' either the origins of life or subsequent evolution.

That's the point. You don't see evidence for it because there is no evidence for it. If creation was from a higher power's hand, he couldn't have left evidence of it behind. This would trash our entirely free will to believe in him or not, and it would eliminate faith from the equation. As it stands now, it is our choice to have faith, to believe in him even in the absence of evidence, or not.

As far as the Genesis account, it was written for men of Moses' time. There was little to no scientific knowledge of the world or the cosmos. Thus, it had to be simplified, and described in the parlance of the day.

Your viewpoint is interesting, though. I've never actually looked at it as a moral allegory. There is some weight there.

@suzianne said
The problem here is that you're trying to back-engineer a solution to get somewhere that goes along with your pre-supposed endpoint.

Who here does not back-engineer their pre-supposed endpoint? We all have a starting point in mind, and we attempt to make what we see fit into it, and if it doesn't then something is wrong. If I'm wrong about informational instructions all require a mind, even though all of our experience shows this, show me my error with something we can say this is mindlessness at work.

Outside of a circular argument life is an example, there is nothing anywhere else that displays this. Mindlessness doesn't have anything to do with level setting, error checking, improving, or creation of new forms and systems, these are all products of a mind. I'm BEGGING for examples of functionally complex systems that do specified work with error checking being generated by a mindless process, there are none, except in the world of evolution of the gaps in deep time stories.

@suzianne said
That's the point. You don't see evidence for it because there is no evidence for it. If creation was from a higher power's hand, he couldn't have left evidence of it behind. This would trash our entirely free will to believe in him or not, and it would eliminate faith from the equation. As it stands now, it is our choice to have faith, to believe in him even in the absen ...[text shortened]... g, though. I've never actually looked at it as a moral allegory. There is some weight there.

Well, yes, the men of Moses' time didn't know what causes eclipses and plagues; such occurrences were interpreted as omens from God. People did not know that a man and a women each contributes half the chromosomes necessary to fertilize an ovum, much less how old the universe is. It's a lot easier to believe in miracles (virgin births or whatever) when you don't know how really basic physiological and astronomical phenomena work.

I think it may have been Christopher Hitches who said that claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. So if there is no evidence that a super-natural cause is involved in evolution or was involved in the origins of life, then there's no point in even raising that possibility as a scientific explanation (of course, one can still entertain this as theological speculation or as an article of faith).

My mentor, who converted to Catholicism as an adult, used to say that conviction means you are prepared to believe no matter what the evidence or counter-evidence or lack of evidence or lack of counter-evidence might indicate. This is not stupid, but it is also not easy to reconcile with a scientific curiosity which is determined to pursue evidence to whatever conclusion it might lead.

@Suzianne
That still does not answer where life came from. Now you have to ask, if god really exists, WHO MADE GOD? It is in my mind it is just passing the buck when they say God was here FOREVER and that is the end of that discussion.

@sonhouse said
@Suzianne
That still does not answer where life came from. Now you have to ask, if god really exists, WHO MADE GOD? It is in my mind it is just passing the buck when they say God was here FOREVER and that is the end of that discussion.

It isn't passing the buck to say an eternal being wasn't made or created, that is simply by definition denying the contradiction.

@moonbus said
Well, yes, the men of Moses' time didn't know what causes eclipses and plagues; such occurrences were interpreted as omens from God. People did not know that a man and a women each contributes half the chromosomes necessary to fertilize an ovum, much less how old the universe is. It's a lot easier to believe in miracles (virgin births or whatever) when you don't know how re ...[text shortened]... a scientific curiosity which is determined to pursue evidence to whatever conclusion it might lead.

A young universe or an old one both had beginnings, meaning that neither of them started out by creating themselves out of nothing. Adding more time to your answer doesn't answer anything, you are still left with nothing. When the answers cannot be found within the universe itself than outside of it the answers are, elementary my dear Watson.

@kellyjay said
Who here does not back-engineer their pre-supposed endpoint? We all have a starting point in mind, and we attempt to make what we see fit into it, and if it doesn't then something is wrong. If I'm wrong about informational instructions all require a mind, even though all of our experience shows this, show me my error with something we can say this is mindlessness at work. ...[text shortened]... mindless process, there are none, except in the world of evolution of the gaps in deep time stories.

In nature, there is no such thing as an error, therefore there is no such thing as error checking either. Cells make copies of themselves: sometimes the copies are exact, sometimes they aren't. But when they aren't, this not an error. It is simply a mutation. Some mutations continue to reproduce themselves, which is what we call "successful" , whereas other mutations die out along the way (because they do not 'fit' the environment) -- which is what we call "unsuccessful". These are all metaphors, figures of speech.

To speak of error checking or code in relation to what a computer does is literally, factually true. To speak of error checking or code in relation to what a cell does is not literally, factually true; these are a metaphors, figures of speech, a model of how we think about what cells are doing, but it is not how cells do it. The same applies to the phrases "informational instructions", "blueprint", etc. -- these are all anthropomorphisms when applied to cells or DNA; they are not literally, factually true. They are nothing but our images projected onto a mindless (which is not to say random) process.


Let us take a hypothetical example to demonstrate the idea of 'error checking' -- namely, that it is a faulty idea when applied to cells. Suppose a group of 100 cells has become adapted to its environment. The cells duplicate themselves, but not all identically, due to random variations in the copy-process. Are the ones which duplicate themselves identically the correct ones and the ones which duplicate themselves with variations erroneous? No, we cannot say this. Here's why: we don't know yet whether the environment will stay the same, and if it changes, then the variant cells might turn out to be better adapted to the changed environment than the ones which were identical to their precursors. Example: suppose the first generation of cells are adapted to constant temperature in the range of 20-25 degrees C, and can endure temperatures above or below this range only 4 degrees and only for a period of time not greater than 10 hours. Now suppose that, upon duplication, some cells undergo random variations ("mutations" ) whereby 20 of the cells would be able to endure 10 hours of temperature drop of up to ten degrees, but no temperature rise beyond the standard range (20-25); whereas 20 other cells mutate in the opposite direction and would be able to endure temperature rises of up to 10 hours at +10 degrees; and the rest of the population duplicates identically (20-25 degrees, 10 hours and up to + or - 4 degrees). Which ones are the correct duplicates and which ones are the errors? None, so long as the temperature stays the same. Nonetheless, some will survive if the average temperature should shift either up or down. And that is how nature works. There is no plan, no design, no errors and therefore no error checking either; there is simply variation, and some variations carry on whereas others drop out.

Now, to head off one last potential objection here: mutations, molecular variations in the copying process, are random; this does not mean that the whole of nature is random. Which variants survive and which do not is not random; this is subject to the regularity of the repeated operation of natural laws.

@moonbus said
In nature, there is no such thing as an error, therefore there is no such thing as error checking either. Cells make copies of themselves: sometimes the copies are exact, sometimes they aren't. But when they aren't, this not an error. It is simply a mutation. Some mutations continue to reproduce themselves, which is what we call "successful" , wher ...[text shortened]... not[/i] random; this is subject to the regularity of the repeated operation of natural laws.

You don't grasp the complexity of the problem seems to be your problem, feed back loops in life are part of error checking, to say there aren't any such things denies what we see. In code those types of things we do all of the time, and people who study how it works see them, and it is quite predictable when they know something is going on they may not know exactly yet how it is done but the methods are understood.

@suzianne said
That's the point. You don't see evidence for it because there is no evidence for it. If creation was from a higher power's hand, he couldn't have left evidence of it behind. This would trash our entirely free will to believe in him or not, and it would eliminate faith from the equation. As it stands now, it is our choice to have faith, to believe in him even in the absen ...[text shortened]... g, though. I've never actually looked at it as a moral allegory. There is some weight there.

If I might refer briefly to your earlier post, the 'dovetail' analogy describes two pieces of wood which are artificially joined, but are still two pieces of wood, (in our case science and religion) and will never be one piece of wood.

Regarding this post, if a god created life on earth, why would said god not want us to see how he/she/it/they did it? Do you mean that if we could of a sudden create life, or describe with absolute certainty how life began, that you and others of your faith would stop believing in your god? I don't think this is the case, I rather think that you and others would still say 'Look what god did.'

This I think strikes at the essence of our discussions; no matter how science understands, describes and indeed tampers with the natural process, theists will always say 'Yeah, that's what my god did, ain't he clever.' It's a discussion which nobody can win, since you (and others) cannot prove that your god exists, and will not accept evidence of the natural process as anything other than it being your god's work. We therefore go 'round in circles, as we (I mean we as in all of us) have been doing for years; in the end it's simply a matter of faith and belief versus the absence of faith and belief, and no amount of dovetailing will ever bring these two together; the oil and the water will remain forever divided.