Is Abiogenesis a fact?

Final warning.This topic is not about determinism.Stay on topic, or you will receive a 24 hour suspension.Edited by AdminNWR, : fix subtitle

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Which was exactly my point, but an acausal effect acting as an indirect cause would be sufficient to preclude describing the system as 100% deterministic. If you want a 100% deterministic scenario you need an unbroken chain of cause and effect going back to first cause.Merely because mutations have a cause does not make them completely deterministic, but being part of an unbroken chain of cause and effect with no indeterministic elements would. I agree. If we knew that the universe was fundamentally deterministic then it would naturally follow that so were mutations. But as it is we don't have such knowledge and most mutations appear random to the best of our ability to discern. Yet another massive assertion with not a shred of evidence to support it. That such a force has not been identified would not preclude its existence. Well obviously. There is nothing, bar our own subjective feelings, suggesting that the human intervention is not the product of deterministic factors. That I perturb the role of a snooker ball is no demonstration of adding an indeterministic factor if the motivation behind my own actions was itself deterministic.TTFN,WK

Sorry about that, the drift was substantially my fault. I knew this was drifting off topic, but the fact that Lex was verging on the coherent encouraged me to persist.TTFN,WK

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Merely because mutations have a cause does not make them completely deterministic, but being part of an unbroken chain of cause and effect with no indeterministic elements would.

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You can't have it both ways. Mutations would no longer be considered random if all variable of an event are accounted for, and if everything in the universe is deterministic then each and every mutation will have a direct cause associated with it - in other words, the mutation can be traced back through cause right down to the first cause what ever it may be in a deterministic universe.

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Well obviously.

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Well then that's the difference. If you believe every word you utter and every thought is deterministic then every action in your life is deterministic too which renders human intelligence useless. And yes, there are no physical or chemical forces that precede our thoughts, do you know why? Because there is zilch evidence to suggest otherwise. If you want me to accept that there is a chemical/physical forces behind thought and decision making then present the evidence and I may consider your assertion.Edited by Lex_Luthor, : No reason given.Edited by Lex_Luthor, : No reason given.Edited by Lex_Luthor, : No reason given.

Repeatedly going off-topic, and ignoring administrator warnings.

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There is a peculiarity about that post (I added the coloration) which nobody seems to have pointed out. From the way the author worked up to the Question (quoted below), it seems to me impossible to call abiogensis anything other than a fact. I am getting the impression that some particular explanation is being referenced as "the theory of abiogenesis", even though it is not detailed. But without such details, just about anything could be called a "theory of abiogenesis". Consider the Intelligent Design notion: The Designer plays with ordinary building-block molecules until an assemblage of them can be "activated" (kind of like starting a fire). Obviously the the assembling/activation-process can be called "life from non-life" or "abiogenesis".The non-I.D. version, of course, simply assumes that if enough building-blocks are lying around, and if they interact in enough different ways, then an equivalent assemblage will eventually form, with "activation" merely being the perfectly natural result of interaction between that assemblage with various independent/loose molecules.In either case we are essentially saying that Abiogenesis is a fact. Why, then, was this Thread started, if the Answer was built into the Question? Because if Abiogenesis is not a fact, then what is the alternative explantion? It must account for both the origin of Life, when every studied molecule in every Life-form, by itself, is an unliving thing -- and it must account for the fact that Life does a huge amount of interacting with unliving molecules.In reading through the posts of this Thread, it has occured to me that Lex_Luthor has been hinting at a certain aspect of Life which perhaps is what the Original Poster was actually talking about. In that and other posts there is an attempt to claim that animate and inanimate matter are inherently different from each other. If so, then the Original Poster could actually be asking this: "Is it considered a fact that the animate form of matter, called Life, could have started its animation spontaneously?" --which counts as a Question that does not appear to have a built-in Answer. Lex_Luthor is clearly claiming the answer is "NO", that some Outside Intial Event was required to start the animation of Life, while others and I would argue that the answer is "YES". That variant Question may open the way for this Thread to encompass all the details about Abiogenesis that have so far been discussed, but only the Original Poster or the Administrators can say for sure. (And since I have a bunch more details I'd like to post to this Thread, related to the animate/inaminate issue, I'm hoping it will be allowed, heh heh. Edited by FutureIncoming, : fixed typo, added some stress to a quote

As far as I can tell, the only plausible alternative is something like panspermia (the introduction of life from outer space).

That just "moves back" the Question. How did that immigrating Life begin? See? Abiogenesis does not require Life to have orginated on Earth; all it requires (per its own name) is that Life arise from non-life. Why should "where" matter in the least? Okay, I see that the Original Post mentions the Earth, and possibly the Thread-narrowness of this Debate Forum might require us to stick to Earth. But at the same time the O.P. includes a pretty generic invitation to discuss abiogenesis, which is not inherently restricted to the Earth (could have happened independently under the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa, maybe). And I even mentioned panspermia myself, back in Msg #33 (although nobody commented on that).Edited by FutureIncoming, : left something outEdited by FutureIncoming, : found something else to add

It doesn't just move it back. Rather, it changes it to a cosmological question. If life arose somewhere other than earth, then there might have been more possibilities as to how life could have arisen. If you are willing to consider a possibility that the universe has existed forever, then it might be that there was always life.My own best guess is that life arose on earth, and that abiogenesis is likely to occur whenever conditions are suitable. But that's just hypothesis at present, and we are a long way from having enough evidence to settle the issue.

Not really. We have no reason to think Chemistry works significantly differently now than it did 12 billion years ago, at any other location in this Universe. (And if you want to imagine a much older Universe, you need to get around some problems, like General Relativity implying that the Big Bang generated the very space/time that this Universe occupies.) Anyway, I also tend to think there was sufficient opportunity for Life to arise independently on Earth (see Msg #33 for details, heh), even while remaining open to the panspermia alternative, since it quite simply can enormously multiply the total amount of biomass that could have been involved in the chemical interactions that resulted in Life.Edited by FutureIncoming, : left stuff out

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We have no reason to think Chemistry works significantly differently now than it did 12 billion years ago, at any other location in this Universe.

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Since we don't know under what conditions will allow chemistry to produce the initial replicating systems that eventually gave rise to the first cells, it seems the panspermia hypothesis allows for many more environments for these suitable conditions to exist and so increases the likelihood that life may have arose somewhere.

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"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the same sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
-- H. L. Mencken (quoted on Panda's Thumb)

Yes, I essentially said that in #144 (not quoted). The first part of #144 was written after I assumed that in #143 the word "how" involved significantly different rules of chemistry, not a mere difference in interacting molecules. Because "different" molecules is somewhat unlikely. The Sun is an early "third generation" star in this approx-12-billion-year-old Galaxy, which means the materials that coalesed into the Solar System 4.5 billion years ago had up to 8 billion years of "preprocessing" (random interactions in interstellar gas/dust clouds). If abiogenesis had occurred in some other earlier star system (and then panspermia-ed to Earth), that system would have formed from gas/dust clouds that had less preprocessing/interaction time --and fewer variety of molecules going into the cauldron that yielded Life.Edited by FutureIncoming, : typo

Well, I've waited a couple days for a response to that, and not seeing any, I'm thinking I might be able to go ahead and post a few things without being too badly out-of-line. Of course, there's only one way to find out....First, to Brad_McFall, I did see your Msgs #52 and #53, but I don't know enough advanced biology to be able to properly reply. Sorry. Well, mere bouncings is not the only thing that can happen. Sometimes they stick/combine. Sometimes both collidants break apart. Sometimes the pieces recombine in different ways than before. And one thing that is known to happen occasionally is Spontaneous Combustion, when certain conditions are met. Next, while the phrase "chain reaction" is most often used with respect to nuclear reactors, the phrase is also applicable to such things as campfires (the fire burns one fresh piece of wood at a time) and chain-smoking. Well, a living organism encompasses a chain of chemical reactions, also, and merely "burns" slower than a fire. Certainly SOME of those reactions could have started spontaneously, simply because we know that Spontaneous Combustion is possible. There are several things wrong with that. First, Q.M. makes very accurate probability predictions. When it says that the result of an interaction is a certain thing 21.628% of the time, you can trust it. But that does not mean that motion in a particular direction is guaranteed to happen, because in general whole ranges of directions are assigned probabilities of being among the possible paths. Second, physicists know exactly why Uncertainty plays a part in the results of Q.M., and this is the simple fact that the act of making a measurent affects the measurement. For example when you apply a pressure gauge to a tire, you do not actually measure the pressure in the volume of the tire, you measure the pressure in both the volume of the tire and inside the pressure gauge --and the tire has lost a bit of pressure to make that possible. And even Einstein tried and failed to find a flaw in this measurement-affecting phenomenon, as it applies to Quantum Mechanics. Finally, while the fundamental Uncertainty yields usually-ignorable consequences at the macroscopic level, that is only a short-term thing. Over the long term, the fundamental error associated with all measurements becomes a relevant factor. The net result, in modern parlance, is "chaos". Chaos is a description of our inability to make accurate long-term predictions, due to the inaccuracy of the measurements behind the predictions. Since the Uncertainty Principle guarantees inaccuracy of all measurements used to determine long-term events, the Universe is in fact not deterministic. All we have are probabilites. Chemistry is actually a branch of Physics. Quantum Mechanics was devised to explain the innards of atoms, and some of those details explain almost all chemical reactions. (There are still some mysteries; nobody knows why the cyanide ion is so attracted to gold, for example.) I saw this several times, but the limits themeselves were never mentioned. However: Are you saying that while spontaneous rapid combustion (fire) is possible, and spontaneous slow combustion is possible (rusting iron), it is impossible for low-speed combustion (Life) to occur spontaneously? I must say I haven't seen very many Laws or Constants that apply to both extremes but not the middle!
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After that, there seems to be much repetitiveness and little new material in many posts. I'd like to add some new material now.
=====================1. The Primordial Soup, wherever it happened to exist (off-Earth if we accept Panspermia), existed in an energy-rich environment. There was volcanic heat, lightning, and ultraviolet sunlight, to name just three things that could affect simple molecules.2. The ancient atmosphere has to be considered "one with the Soup", since it is thought to have contained large amounts of methane and ammonia (and water vapor and carbon dioxide, of course) -- and when a flash of energy (say by lightning) is added to some of those molecules, they can break apart and recombine in quite a few different ways. Big-enough molecules would have fallen out of the atmosphere and ended up in the Soup, of course.3. If we are talking about the Earth and the Sun, then we should take note of the fact that astrophysicists, modeling how stars live, say that the Sun's total radiance has increased by something like 30% since it first started shining. Levels of ultraviolet light would have been considerably less in the early days, than today. (Meanwhile, the Earth stayed warm because methane is a tremendously effective greenhouse gas.)4. Like lightning, UV can break apart molecules. However, if UV is low-level, then a broken molecule here is not necessarily going to encounter pieces of a broken molecule here. I venture to guess that most of the molecular action in the atmosphere was lightning-caused, because lots of molecules are affected, and they are in close proximity. Meanwhile, if UV is low-level, newly-built molecules can more easily survive while falling toward the main body of the Primordial Soup.5. It is an interesting point that after a molecule falls into Soup it receives a kind of protection; ultraviolet light is far less effective at breaking up underwater molecules. So, in the Soup, molecules more complicated than methane and ammonia can accumulate to significant levels (depending on solubility).6. Note that the Primordial Soup contained a lot of different compounds that could persist for quite a while -- but which today on Earth wouldn't last five minutes. That's because existing Life eats those compounds. But since Life didn't orginally exist, those molecules could persist.7. An enzyme can be a fairly simple molecule, and it works as a catalyst. If it encounters some Molecule A that it can affect, it will latch onto it for a while. If, while latched onto A, some appropriate Molecule B is encountered in the Soup, then the enzyme can do work of encouraging A and B to combine to make a more-complicated molecule. And the enzyme drifts away to do this same mindless non-animated thing over and over and over again. Note that this Scenario only requires some sort of enzyme molecule to be randomly constructed from simpler molecules, and of course Molecules A and B are also random. Note also that the work an enzyme does is not a violation of Physical Law. Molecules A and B must be a pair that can unite, first. This usually means that some energy (not necessarily a lot, but something greater than zero) will be released when they combine. A catalyst like an enzyme merely facilitates the reaction.8. Much of the Chemistry of Life is managed by enzymes. They steadily cause molecules to combine in ways that release energy, which is why I called Life "low-speed combustion".Well, I've got more to say, but have to quit for now. Besides, the length of this post is probably going to be complained about. But what can I do? One thing leads to another. That's how abiogenesis did its thing!Edited by FutureIncoming, : Changed 8 numeral-words to digits, for consistency with later posts

I haven't reviewed the beginings of this topic, but I think the essential theme of this topic is that, however it may have happened, life did come from non-life. Even if the event happened off-Earth, it still happened. Thus the assertion that abiogenesis is a fact.I guess the "catch" might be hard core ex-nihlism. That God created life not from non-life, but rather from absolutely nothing. Even then, there seems to be the exception that God created Adam from the dust of the Earth. So God created both by ex-nihlism and non-ex-nihlism, or perhaps by semi-ex-nihlism.The main problem with the Bible, is that the details of the hows of God's creative process is vague to nonexistant. The theist scientific side (theistic evolutionists or quasi theistic evolutionists) would argue that the evidence of what is the universe is the evidence of God's creation process. But then, I probably should have saved this paragraph for my "Great Debate" topic with Faith, Two Different Stories About the Creation - Faith and Moose only.Bottom line - Perhaps both a deeply profound and also a rather wishy-washy topic concept.Moose

Well, since I didn't get lambasted for all that stuff I posted in Msg #147, I guess it might be safe to continue where I left off. Please refresh your memory of the eight items described toward the end of #147; think of them as "background material" relevant to this stuff here.9. When I stated in Item 1 that the Primordial Soup existed in an energy-rich environment, I forgot to mention the emanations from radioactive materials, which was much more significant then than nowadays. For example Uranium-235 has a half-life of something like 700 million years, so on Earth 4.2 billion years ago was 6 half-lives ago, and the amount of U-235 back then would have been 6 doublings of the current amount (64 times the current amount in the world). Potassium-40 has a 1-billion-year half-life (and today's atmosphere is 1% Argon-40 because of the decay of K-40), so that early age was 4 half-lives ago, meaning 4 doublings or 16 times the current world supply of K-40 existed back then. Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4 billion years, so that long ago it was twice as abundant as today. And so on. It is almost laughable how worried some scientists are about the effects of radiation upon Life, when Life evolved in that ancient radiation-rich environment. Well, they do have a point, because Life these days has adapted to much lower background-radiation levels. Still, the biologists have expressed surprise at how well Life is coping these days in the vicinity of Chernobyl. We should not take that as a rationale to have a nuclear war, of course. But we can have more hope of surviving one....10. In an energy-rich environment, water flows uphill. I'll explain that in a moment, and am deliberately phrasing it that way to show opponents of abiogenesis one of the key mistakes they make. They use the fact of Entropy (everything runs down, like water going downhill) to claim that it is therefore impossible for such complexity as Life to happen spontaneously. However, they are forgetting the equally valid fact that in an energy-rich environment, water does flow uphill...by evaporation/rising-as-vapor. Technically, there is no difference between evaporated water and boiled water; energy must be acquired by water molecules to shift from the liquid to the gaseous state -- and this easily happens in an energy-rich environment. Likewise, when plenty of energy is available, some of that energy can become trapped into increased molecular complexity. I described a piece of that, involving lightning, in points 2 and 4.11. A crucial chemical concept here is "equilbrium". Yes, complex molecules can naturally break down into simpler molecules, in accordance with Entropy. And more can be built in an energy-rich environment. A state of equilibrium exists when both things happen at the same rate -- and the total quantity of a particular complex molecule, that will exist in equlibrium, depends on just what its natural breakdown rate is. The more stable the molecule, the more of it can exist. So molecules like water and ammonia and methane and carbon dioxide are very stable and very common....12. It is possible that radioactive K-40 was the most influential of the background-radiation group. Most natural inorganic compounds that contain potassium are soluable in water. So any molecule anywhere in the Primordial Soup had a chance of being zapped randomly, as a result of the decay of some nearby K-40 atom. Depending on the molecule and just how it got zapped, two different significant outcomes are possible. One is for the molecule to be destroyed into smaller pieces. Another is for one small piece, perhaps a single atom, to be snipped off in a way that leaves the rest of the molcule "hungry" to attach to something. "Free Radicals", these kinds of molecules are called. It is truthful to say that a Free Radical is an "energized" molecule, and from the standpoint of it being zapped by radiation, that description is perfectly understandable. Well, if it manages to attach to some other somewhat-complicated molecule, then the total result, of course, is more-complex still.13. In Item 7 it was mentioned how an enzyme works. However, what an enzyme is able to do is actually somewhat more versatile than what was described there. It is more accurate to think of Molecule A and Molecule B as possessing Tab A and Slot B. Perhaps they would naturally encounter each other and unite without the help of an enzyme, but an enzyme still qualifies as a "facilitator" of that reaction. Anyway, the thing being pointed out here is that Tab A and Slot B might exist on more different kinds of molecules than Molecule A and Molecule B. So if Molecule Q has a Tab A and our enzyme latches onto it, that enzyme won't care if it encounters Molecule B or Molecule K; if it has an accessible Slot B, then the enzyme can facilitate the joining of the two molecules. The first randomly-formed enzyme, therefore, is not going to do only one thing in the midst of the Primordial Soup. It is going to help a lot of different more-complex molecules come into existence.14. What if one of the those more-complex molecules that our first enzyme happens to help make is another and different enzyme? This one might connect Tab C with Slot D. Or it might connect Tab A with Slot D. Or it might even be one of those enzymes that can unplug Tab A from Slot B, if first it gets energized somehow. And that shouldn't be uncommon in an energy-rich environment. The net result, if we step back and take a longish view, is that there will exist a kind of "competition" between enzymes for Tabs and Slots. And Competition is a driving force for Evolution, even at the molecular level.Well, that's enough for now; more later.