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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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."

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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.

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''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.

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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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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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 moved here from the Coffee House forum.

I don't think this will be a waste at all. Consider the two possible outcomes.1. They create a living thing. The enorminity of that cannot be overestimated.2. They do not create a living thing. This will not be that abiogenesis is impossible or just did not happen, it will mean that they, mere mortals, were not able to accomplish that. However, in that outcome may be found a multitude of new chemical processes. Maybe even ways to neutralize toxic waste or to somehow gather it into easily collectable lumps. Is there a limit to the possibilities?But another thought came up: While I agree with the statement, at least one theory has it that black holes are not irreversible. I have read that that they "leak" or "evaporate." The mechanism is found in quantum mechanics.ButI thought of another possiblity. Could there be some limit to the mass of a black hole. Maybe if that limit is reached, physical matter could not exist and all matter in the black hole would become energy. Not haveing any mass, it would no longer be restrained to that particular location. In other words, a truely massive explosion. That would be a decrease in entropy.

Actually, developing a self replicating molecular system would be enough, it doesn't have to meet the qualities of life (no matter how strained).Given what we know about the conditions and possible interactions of {extra-solar\extra-terrestrial} materials (fully formed organic compounds in deep space) and the interactions of meteoric matter with earth-bound soups (forming membranes containing chemical reactions), I think that even if they do not succeed in developing a replicating molecule that they will make progress in the directions necessary, find {mistakes\misconceptions} in current theories and move forward.Now, getting a little OT, but ... The problem is not conversion to energy, we have that, and energy absent mass (light) is still contained in black holes.No, of more interest would be whether the density in the black hole singularity could reach the point where {physics-as-we-know-it} breaks down, where you have a plasma field similar to that at the time of inflation.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand

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RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

Think that creating a self replicating molecule would be enormously important? Its been done.Page not found | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technologyhttp://www.positiveatheism.org/crt/ghadiri.htm Missing Link | Answers in Genesis The next one is mostly computer simulations, not our topic. But near the end of the list are some articles about simulations of molecular replications
http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~sipper/selfrep/But don't get too worried. Replication and reproduction are quite different. We remain so very far from the point at which we might be able to claim that life has been created.

Heh, Safarti gives it the old ID-school try eh? How he can mix ID with AiG is a bit curious.Have you seen my new proposed topic? this is very much in line with it, as that was posted in answer to Ned's concern about the definition of life division between replication and reproduction.http://EvC Forum: Building Blocks of Life - Minimum Requirements?hope it get promoted soon.The other concern I have is the environment that these replicating molecules are in versus the emvironment that would have existed at the OOL point.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand

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RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.