I'm going to join a pet peeve of my co-admin's, the inclusion of entire messages. Unless they're short you probably don't need to do this, especially in this particular case since my entire message 1) can be found merely by clicking on the link at the bottom of your message, and 2) appears immediately above your message anyway.
We're currently using 97% of our free disk space.
Richard writes: Not from incredulity but from lack of scientific evidence. You cannot have it both ways. Abiogenis is the foundation for evoulution. Neo Darwinism mechanisms are random chance coupled with natural selection. But natural selection can only operate on living forms. |
I can't even guess what lack of scientific evidence you might be thinking of, or even why you think evidence is required. No one is proposing non-thermodynamic processes for abiogenesis. Now, if someone were proposing mechanisms that violated known natural laws, then yes, for that you'd need evidence. Lots and lots of evidence.
The reason that thermo stands in the way of abiogenis is that there are so many variable involved in the spontaneos generation of life that to have all of them come together at once is shown to be statistically impossible. |
Since we don't know the abiogenetic process by which the first life came about, how are you able to assess this unknown process's statistical probability?
Consider the simplest possible life form you would have to have all of the necessary catalysts to make the reactions for favorable for the building blocks of life all there at the same time under conditions that would not degrade them to where they would be useless and then the life form from the very begining must have the necesary genetic complexity to reproduce and do error correction to offset the random mutations and damgage caused by its environment. |
Ah, now I see why you think it statistically unlikely. The first life is not thought to have sprung suddenly into existence from constituent chemicals as you describe here. Current views are that it must have come about gradually over long stretches of time, from primitive self-replicating molecules to more complex self-replicating molecules, and so forth, until you finally have something that we might accept as life.
By the way, statistical unlikelihood is not synonymous with thermodynamically impossible.
What is happening today is just believe us it happend! Do not ask us to present plausible scenarios and test them out. Why should abiogenisis be exempt from rules that apply to every other theory. |
It isn't exempt, but it is certainly an area where speculation plays a larger role than in possibly all other fields of science. As I may have said already, even if we uncover in the lab a chain of processes leading to life, there is no way to establish whether abiogenesis followed that particular pathway.
It's interesting that after all the time that's passed since the Miller experiment, the very first experiment in the abiogenesis field and therefore the least relevant to the current state of the field, it is still the one most often mentioned. When you describe the Miller experiment and say you feel as if scientists are saying, "Just believe us that it happened," it sounds like you might not be aware of the more recent work in this area.
--Percy