Abiogenesis

Brian2 said:

Abiogenesis can only theorise about the chemistry of life.

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What is that supposed to mean? Do you think that science works in absolutes? Yes, it can only theorize about the chemical origin of life. And when it comes to gravity it can only theorize about whether things will fall or not.

Jimmy said:

Sure anyone can believe it happened if they choose. I don’t personally believe the earth is very old in reality.

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What about the stars, distant galaxies, the universe?

Heyo said:

What about the stars, distant galaxies, the universe?

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There is a simple answer. "I don't know how that light broke all of the laws of physics".

It is odd, but some people enjoy being obviously wrong. Look at the Flat Earth movement. There really is no difference between a Flat Earth belief and a YEC one.

Heyo said:

What about the stars, distant galaxies, the universe?

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Same

Jimmy said:

Same

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So "magic" is the answer. I get it.

Jimmy said:

Same

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What would you say is the reason for your belief, ignorance, hubris or delusion?

shunyadragon said:

All science theorizes, even the science that theorized how airplanes fly. Methodological Naturalism is the universal method of science, and the objective verifiable Evidence is the basis of the predictability in our physical existence for falsifying theories and hypothesis. Try an avoid foolish layman uses of theory based on a religious agenda when discussing how theories and hypothesis works uniformly and predictably in ALL of science including abiogenesis and evolution.

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What I was meaning is that abiogenesis is about the beginnings of life and really all they can work on is chemistry. The assumption seems to be that once that is worked out (in theory at least) then we know where and how life began.

Subduction Zone said:

What is that supposed to mean? Do you think that science works in absolutes? Yes, it can only theorize about the chemical origin of life. And when it comes to gravity it can only theorize about whether things will fall or not.

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Chemical origin of life does mean however, given the lack of knowledge of spirit in science, that science is actually looking at matter for the origins of life, and assuming that is the be all and end all of it.

Brian2 said:

What I was meaning is that abiogenesis is about the beginnings of life and really all they can work on is chemistry. The assumption seems to be that once that is worked out (in theory at least) then we know where and how life began.

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Since abiogenesis and evolution are environment driven we do know a lot about the environments and changes in environments where abiogenesis can take place, and over the past billions of years where and how evolution took place in different environments and when environments change.

Yes, we are in the various possible sequences of processes of determining the chemistry of how an where abiogenesis can take place. Yes, there are still unknowns that have nor been fully worked out, but science is progressing to resolve these problems. All the evidence at present has determined that abiogenesis took place naturally. Of course, God may be the Creative cause, and if this is true God Created through Natural Laws and natural processes that are the same as science observes and determines through scientific methods. If God is the Creator, God does not Create contradictions.

We know that abiogenesis took place either volcanic or mid ocean ridge subsurface environments like gas vent caverns, What is known is that at the time continental drift and continent formation began with the first mid ocean spreading zones the first most primitive life is found in subsurface cavern deposits.

Jimmy said:

So obviously the temperature of earth after formation for 1 billion yrs was perfect for life to arise.

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Suitable at least, If it wasn't, then life wouldn't have arisen.

That sucks we’ll never be able to replicate that to validate the theory of abiogenesis.

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We will never have anything besides hypotheses.

Absent time machines that would enable us to go back and observe (and probably contaminate the early earth with life that we brought, the mother of all time-loops) we will never really know.

I suppose that origin-of-life researchers can try to imagine what kind of steps were necessary, and then try to experimentally determine whether those processes are consistent with whatever our current knowledge is of conditions on the early earth. But there will nevertheless probably have been multiple ways that the origin of life might have happened. Different steps in different orders. Choosing decisively which model is what really happened might never be possible.

so it took 1 billion years for non living matter to develop into single celled organisms.

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Some evidence suggests that it might have happened more quickly than that.

Then it took 3.5 billion yrs. for single celled organisms to become multicellular organisms.

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Roughly.

That doesn't mean that nothing was happening in that period. The biggest evolutionary event in the microbiological period was the origin of the eukaryotes. There was also the earlier appearance and development in the prokaryotes of photosynthesis (which produced most of the oxygen in earth's atmosphere) along with the origin of ways to prevent life's extinction from oxidation (oxygen was originally poisonous to life) and then the development of oxidative forms of respiration to exploit the oxygen.

Put another way, evolution in the days when all life on earth was microorganisms was chemical evolution, evolution of metabolisms, biosynthesis and all the molecular genetic stuff that controls it. It wasn't morphological anatomical evolution of multicellular body plans until comparatively recently. Even today the variety of metabolisms found among the prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea) is astounding. While most bacteria look alike to the eye (little sausage shapes) they vary tremendously in what they can "eat"/metabolize and in what chemistry they use to do it.

Multicellular organisms have dominated the last 1 billion yrs.

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More like 600 million years, since the "cambrian explosion" and its edicarian precursers.

this seems weird.

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It's certainly remarkable.

One would think it would’ve taken a shorter time for single celled organisms to become multicellular organisms given that it only took 1 billion years for non living matter to evolve into living single celled organisms.

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Maybe more like a few hundred million years. And the very earliest earth was probably a very inhospitable place for the origin of life, newly congealed from planetismals, under constant asteroid bombartment...

who knows, it probably was the heat that sped things up during the transition from non living to living.
Maybe we’ll discover some of those pre single celled living things in outer space in the future.

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Yes. The relatively rapid appearance of life on earth makes me give more credence to ideas of panspermia. Maybe not the arrival of fully formed life from space, but the arrival of partially formed organic precursers of life.

I'd guess that there's probably a lot more to this origin-of-life story that we don't even suspect yet.

I personally find the history of life on earth to be absolutely fascinating.

An extraordinarily good book on the origin and subsequent history of cells is Franklin Harold's In Search of Cell History (2014 U. Chicago Press)

https://www.amazon.com/Search-Cell-.../ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Brian2 said:

What I was meaning is that abiogenesis is about the beginnings of life and really all they can work on is chemistry. The assumption seems to be that once that is worked out (in theory at least) then we know where and how life began.

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It is not really an "assumption". It is a reasonable conclusion. Yes, life could have been magicked into existence, but why have such a belief?

Brian2 said:

Chemical origin of life does mean however, given the lack of knowledge of spirit in science, that science is actually looking at matter for the origins of life, and assuming that is the be all and end all of it.

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Now there is a bit of nothing. Again, the conclusion that life arose naturally would not be an assumption. When I drop a rock it is not an assumption that it will fall. There may be no need for you to try to turn God into an errand boy. If God exists why couldn't he done his creative event in one amazing naturalistic start. It could have been a Big Bang of creation. No need to stick his fingers in and diddle around because he started the universe the right way.

Brian2 said:

Abiogenesis can only theorise about the chemistry of life.

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Yes, I basically agree. Science will probably never have a conclusive answer as to how life originated. All science will have are hypotheses about how life might have originated. Probably lots of hypotheses, not all of them consistent with one another.

Given the tremendous complexity of even the simplest cells, there must have been an elaborate and extended series of events that led up to them. Some sort of origin of cell walls, molecular genetics, protein synthesis, bioenergetics and all the rest of it.

Origin of life researchers don't really know how any of those steps happened in real life. Let alone how they came together as one so as to form a cell.

About all that they can do at this late date 3.5-4 billion years later is hypothesize about various ways that particular parts of it might have happened. Then they can employ their theory and conduct laboratory experiments to determine whether these hypothesized chemical events are plausible given what is known about conditions on the very early Earth. (Something that's very imperfectly known.)

But this kind of hypothesizing is unlikely to ever condense down to one single answer. There will likely be all kinds of alternative hypotheses, different steps in different orders, all of which might have resulted in LUCA (the last universal common ancestor of all life on Earth).

It's almost impossible to imagine any sort of crucial experiment or observation conducted today, 3.5-4 billion years after the fact, that could differentiate between these various contending hypotheses and justify us in proclaiming just one of them correct.

shunyadragon said:

Since abiogenesis and evolution are environment driven we do know a lot about the environments and changes in environments where abiogenesis can take place, and over the past billions of years where and how evolution took place in different environments and when environments change.

Yes, we are in the various possible sequences of processes of determining the chemistry of how an where abiogenesis can take place. Yes, there are still unknowns that have nor been fully worked out, but science is progressing to resolve these problems. All the evidence at present has determined that abiogenesis took place naturally. Of course, God may be the Creative cause, and if this is true God Created through Natural Laws and natural processes that are the same as science observes and determines through scientific methods. If God is the Creator, God does not Create contradictions.

We know that abiogenesis took place either volcanic or mid ocean ridge subsurface environments like gas vent caverns, What is known is that at the time continental drift and continent formation began with the first mid ocean spreading zones the first most primitive life is found in subsurface cavern deposits.

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Where does the spirit come from if it is all chemistry?
Chemistry is what science can speculate on and should go no further and treat life as if it is nothing but chemistry.

Subduction Zone said:

It is not really an "assumption". It is a reasonable conclusion. Yes, life could have been magicked into existence, but why have such a belief?

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For me it is magic to say that dead matter came to life. There is more to life than chemistry even if science wants to define it these days as an emergent property of matter and claim in the end to know where life came from because of a redefinition of "life".
What we do know now is that life can only come from other life.
That is the state of scientific knowledge.
Anything else is speculation.

Subduction Zone said:

Now there is a bit of nothing. Again, the conclusion that life arose naturally would not be an assumption. When I drop a rock it is not an assumption that it will fall. There may be no need for you to try to turn God into an errand boy. If God exists why couldn't he done his creative event in one amazing naturalistic start. It could have been a Big Bang of creation. No need to stick his fingers in and diddle around because he started the universe the right way.

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If I assume life arose through the intervention of God with matter (because the Bible says so) and science assumes it arose through only matter (because science cannot find a God or spirit), they are both assumptions.
I look at more evidence than science is allowed to consider however.

Yazata said:

It's almost impossible to imagine any sort of crucial experiment or observation conducted today, 3.5-4 billion years after the fact, that could differentiate between these various contending hypotheses and justify us in proclaiming just one of them correct.

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There will be a vote of the peers and one line of hypothesis will get a tick in the end maybe. "Science" might know better, but what gets told to the world is that science says life began such and such a way, and that is what the world believes from the men in the white coats and more people fall away from belief in a God because of misinformation and because people just don't realise that science can only study matter and can say nothing about God or the supernatural.
Naturalistic methodology is an assumption used in science to make life easier and not a philosophy of life in general.

Brian2 said:

Where does the spirit come from if it is all chemistry?

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Science only deals with the physical properties of our existence. The questions concerning religious beliefs concerning 'spirit' are religious/theological questions.

Chemistry is what science can speculate on and should go no further and treat life as if it is nothing but chemistry.

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Chemistry does not involve 'speculation' by definition. Science doe not conclude it is only chemistry. Odd statement on your part.

Brian2 said:

For me it is magic to say that dead matter came to life. There is more to life than chemistry even if science wants to define it these days as an emergent property of matter and claim in the end to know where life came from because of a redefinition of "life".
What we do know now is that life can only come from other life.
That is the state of scientific knowledge.
Anything else is speculation.

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Then you appear to be giving life some magical quality. There is no evidence that I know of that life is not just complex chemistry.

And you are incorrect. What we know is that life needs existing life now. You are making an unjustified assumption when you extend that to all time. There were significant differences in environment way back then.

Brian2 said:

If I assume life arose through the intervention of God with matter (because the Bible says so) and science assumes it arose through only matter (because science cannot find a God or spirit), they are both assumptions.
I look at more evidence than science is allowed to consider however.

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You should not make unjustified assumptions. Those are not allowed in the sciences. And it is very important that you remember that when you make the claim that someone made an assumption you take on a burden of proof that they made an assumption.

In the sciences tentative conclusions are drawn based upon the evidence. Right now the tentative conclusion is that life arose naturally since there is evidence for it and no evidence for any other model.