Harvard to sponsor abiogenesis project

Dunno if this is the right place for this, but: Project on the origins of life launched. Probably requires registration, but you could try BugMeNot.

quote:

---

Harvard University is launching a broad initiative to discover how life began, joining an ambitious scientific assault on age-old questions that are central to the debate over the theory of evolution.

​

The Harvard project, which is likely to start with about $1 million annually from the university, will bring together scientists from fields as disparate as astronomy and biology, to understand how life emerged from the chemical soup of early Earth, and how this might have happened on distant planets.

​

Known as the "Origins of Life in the Universe Initiative," the project is still in its early stages, and fund-raising has not begun, the scientists said.

​

But the university has promised the researchers several years of seed money, and has asked the team to make much grander plans, including new faculty and a collection of multimillion-dollar facilities.

​

…

​

Many of science's most interesting questions are emerging in the boundaries between traditional disciplines such as physics, chemistry, and biology, yet universities are largely organized by those disciplines. Harvard's president, Lawrence H. Summers, is a proponent of the view that universities must develop new structures to encourage interdisciplinary science. And new science laboratories based on this are at the center of the plans for a sprawling new campus in Allston.

​

The Harvard origins initiative is on a short list of projects being considered for this campus, along with the widely discussed Harvard Stem Cell Institute, which aspires to bring together biologists, chemists, doctors, and others.

​

Today, scientists said, Harvard is considered something of an underdog in the field of the origins of life, compared with powerhouses such as the University of Arizona, the California Institute of Technology, and the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.. But the university has tremendous resources, including leading scientists who work in related areas.

​

…

​

There is a deep philosophical divide between this scientific community and the advocates of intelligent design.

​

Szostak recalled that he had been surprised to see his own research, which he interprets as progress in understanding life's origins, on religious websites, which cite the work as evidence of how difficult it would be to create life without a designer -- because, Szostak said, ''not even Harvard scientists can do it."

​

Michael Behe, a biologist at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and one of the leading proponents of intelligent design, said he was glad that Harvard was going to try to address the issue.

​

''If, as I suspect will happen," Behe said, ''they fail to find a plausible answer without invoking intelligence, then maybe science will be less hostile to folks who see intelligent direction in the history of life," he said.

---

Unless they show that chemical autocatalysis IS NOT orginally a part of this hopefully disciplined approach I predict it will be a waste of dollars. Natural Selection of alternative alleles is not ALL that any collected vital stastics could reveal. They(the researchers) should think like albino deer rather than bears.I base this prediction on the failure of Williams "black hole" 92

quote:

---

These losses would be examples of what Harvey and Partidge(1988) call evolutionary black holes. They are paths often taken in evolution, but once taken are largely irreversible.

---

pxiii
to retrodict his "common chemical property" of 66.

quote:

---

Evolutionary adapatation is a phenonmenon of pervasive improtance in biology. Its central position is emphasized in the current theory of the origin of life, which proposes that the chemical evolution of the hydrosphere produced at one stage an "organic soup" of great chemcial complexity, but lifeless in its earlies stages. Among the complexities was the formation of molecules or molecular concentrations that were autocatalytic in some manner. This is a common chemical property. Even a water molecule can catalyze its own synthesis.

---

I will try to show in the coming months that not only was wrongful credit given to Williams which he recognized

quote:

---

A few years after 1966, I was being given credit for showing that the adaptation concept was not usually applicable at the population or higher levels,...My recollection, and my current interpretation of the text, especially Chapter 4, indicate that this a misreading.

---

but that coherent adapations of higher level function (macrothermodyanically) are so-called biotic adapations which would preexist any kind of thought of life off Earth. The TV show on the "blue planent" looked like planet of the apes to me. This should not be the direction the research searches iN. Viruses ought be cognized as alive rather than the analogy of flight to planes lifting whales!!Who knows? maybe aliens artifically selected the limits of natural selection on the some rock beyond the newest planet in the solar system?? If Sagan sent a record out there then we should set the record straight!While it might be human perogative to surmise that there is not or is no likely progress in adaptations due to analytical biology of natural selection this can give a false positive as soon as the first non-Kantian alien is encountered. Of course I consider such the off pink unicorn but NOT God, more like volta's view instead& that's a lot of corn fields but nair fuel.Quotes from ADAPTATION AND NATURAL SELECTION 1966 and 1992 by GCWilliams, priNceTON.

Thread copied to the Harvard to sponsor abiogenesis project thread in the In The News forum, this copy of the thread has been closed.