"We can know nothing about the origin of life"

Wow--Anthony is still at it? Anthony:here is evidence of the origin of life, in real time!

When you stumbled over here, you were known for irrational, incredibly non descript phrases, sentences, and poor reasoning smashedup into HUGE paragraphs of almost incomprehensible logic bombs.

Now look at you! Growing up, into not necessarily-always focused on Anthony phrases; some reading skills,combined with shorter paragraphs, sometimes two way conversations, and listening skills!

Good job! Gold Star, class champ, you're waking up! You are starting to LIVE!

To whit: "you haven't approached how that very dilute liquid formed life and what that life was like, which is a good part of the problem, those surrounding reproduction another good part of it."

Look at your earlier posts, and how thick and gooey they were--in contrast to the now somewhat dilute flow of conversation here with Steph!

See, even Anthony can crawl up from the muck, and make a life for himself at Gregs blog;-)

Oh--did I forget to mention white female privilege, Steph? I bet competitive Tony has some thoughts on that!

https://pornalysis.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/rule-number-one-never-never…

Stephanie Z. I've known what probability means in a mathematical sense since about 1968. Yours and Laden's condescension doesn't do a thing to make your case any better. You are lacking knowledge of the event to calculate probabilities from. You have no way of knowing how probable many aspects of actual relevance to the actual origin of life were. Knowing the probabilities of any proposed aspect of that happening would still not tell you what did happen. You would need physical evidence no matter how impressive your math looked.

Life is a far more complex affair than you seem to want to believe. You still don't understand that you are talking about a specific event that happened in a specific way with a specific result, nothing you address that wasn't relevant to that event is relevant to it and you have no way to know just what was relevant to it.

Bee, Bagger, TSTBW.

This is a thread on which I decided early on that lurking was the better part of valor. Two points, though, I see getting confused here.

A. "The question of the origin of life" has two possible meanings:
1. Can we identify the first living organism on earth?; and
2. Can we identify ordinary chemical processes by which life is able to form from non-life?

These are not at all the same question. 1. will be much harder to answer than 2., if it is answerable at all. Among other problems with 1., I'm amazed no one has brought up bacterial conjugation-- bacteria exchanging genes, even though they actually replicate by division. This phenomenon has been studied since the 1940's. It offers convincing evidence that we will never be able trace back a neat line of ancestry, since, among other problems, there's a certain amount of, aah, bestiality, in the prokaryotic community. (Bacteria picking up genes from single-celled individuals who aren't closely related.) This turned out to be easy to study because bacteria sex lasts several lifetimes, and coitis interruptis can be forced by whirring the bacteria in a blender. [Pornonymous, why don't you do something useful and write up a disquisition on this?]

The biggest advance on question 1. is probably discovering that RNA can act as both genetic material and as an enzyme. The question of which came first, DNA or protein, used to be considered unanswerable by science (usually with the implied answer 'therefore God.') Now it turns out neither one needed to come first.

As anyone who actually read the sources Greg cited now knows, the question, 2., of whether there are ordinary chemicals pathways which result in structures associated with life, has resulted in some solid findings. The papers which Greg lists presented, among other things, evidence that membranes similar to modern cell membranes will form spontaneously in certain conditions. In answering question 2., the Miller-Urey experiments were a huge advance, even though they got the conditions on pre-biotic earth wrong.

If it turns out that life is still forming from non-life today in underwater vents, only to be gobbled up by bacteria, it will be relatively easy to answer question 2., how life can form from non-life. And question 1., what was the actual first life form on earth, will become a possibly interesting, but not really important, question.

I've noticed Leveler has focused exclusively on question 1., ignoring or even sneering at the mass of evidence regarding question 2. I don't expect he or bks will respond to this post with anything other than incomprehension, but I would be interested if any of the rest of you find dividing the question of the origin of life into the two questions above useful.

"Predict what the structure of those were like as they assembled by chance out of nonliving matter of no one knows what character, in who knows what way."

Are you insisting on a "chance" based model? No selection allowed? Why do we have to use matter of which no one knows the character? Why not matter that we understand based on a combination of direct and indirect evidence? What do you mean "who knows what way"?

I'm starting to think you are begging the question here, maybe.

I assume you won't assert that was easy, seeing the enormous effort it took some extremely good scientists to first find the structure of DNA,

What was hard about it once the technology of x-ray diffraction was developed and applied? Yeah, that was some good work, but really, once the tools were developed, had they become widely distributed before FWC this result would have developed at dozens of labs in a matter of monhts .

You should get points off for excessive cuteness.

A lot of people tell me that.

Considering that I've said from the start of this that there are only two things that you could know about the origin of life, that it produced a living thing and that it reproduced, its offspring eventually evolving and producing the diversity of life around us, you are just stalling.

I didn't realize that you had admitted that we could know anything! But your insistence that the two things you decided you will accept are the only things that we could possibly know does not conform to this.

As the rest of your comment is quibbling in order to avoid answering questions

You have asked, essentially, "How do you know X based on an unknowable Y and an inadmissable Z, and you must answer the question in a way that relies on irrelevant A, B and C" ... and after repeated requests your question has not become any more useful.

Claiming to know about the origin of life requires you to know an event without any evidence of it.

I didn't claim that.

the evaporation of a pool containing amino acids condensing into larger parts assumed to be relevant to the original form of life

Is that your theory? That's not the most common thinking right now on this topic. You should check out the lit from, say, since you were born.

. It offers convincing evidence that we will never be able trace back a neat line of ancestry, since, among other problems, there's a certain amount of, aah, bestiality, in the prokaryotic community.

When the gene exchanges happen, the genes are not digested. They are more or less retained. All DNA phylogeny is about the phylogeny of genetic lineages not organisms. The organisms are a secondary (but useful) inference. So no, there is no way in which bacterial exchange (which may have evolved long after bacteria evolved) obviates paleogenetics.

Having said that, I don't think DNA phylogeny was ever considered a way of addressing question 1 of yours. And that question does have the same grammar-related ambiguity that Anthony insisted on, so you should consider rewording. It assumes the way you've worded it that a thing we could classify as living is unambiguously classifed as living as opposed to some similar thing that is not (ie that our working definition of life is settled) and then, it assumes that there is one of them in the past ("THE first living organims[no "s" here]") That may not be how it was at all.

The biggest advance on question 1. is probably discovering that RNA can act as both genetic material and as an enzyme. The question of which came first, DNA or protein, used to be considered unanswerable by science (usually with the implied answer 'therefore God.') Now it turns out neither one needed to come first.

And more broadly that the current configuration is probably a subset of possibilities. This is a point Anthony could have pointed out in favor of his "we can know nothing" approach but I don't think he knows enough about the research.

Funny, that. I've been pointing him to evidence that he is correct (which may also be evidence that he is incorrect) all along yet he has refused to look at it.

Regarding your question 2, I wrote a few words on that, which got me in trouble with some of Anthony's friends, here:

http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/12/nasas_new_organism_the_meanin…

Repetitive lying troll is still repetitive. And still lying.

bks--

I missed your comment maybe, or didn't have time to deal with it. Anyhow, the short version is that given that every modern life form's DNA involves a certain set of elements, it isn't unreasonable to think that whatever origin life has, it probably involves them in some fashion. That is, as I have pointed out several times, since we do not see DNA made of gallium, tin or lead in the place of carbon, there is a reason for that. So, for conditions on earth, if you want to make something like DNA, you have to use those (or more accurately, a class of elements that resembles them).

This narrows down the problem considerably. Since we can eliminate from consideration origins that involve noble gases, and probably radioactive metals, and a host of other things that say, react violently with water.

The stuff you're talking about also has some pretty hard constraints. Clay world, for instance, means you have to have clays, which only form in water. OK, so life probably isn't forming with lithium or sodium in that instance.

Once you have that, it's not so hard to come up with the classes of phenomena that you can plausibly say result in life forming. That still leaves tons of room to experiment in though, which is why there is any scientific controversy about the OoL at all. In that sense it's like studying the origins of the universe: there are a lot of things you can say about that too, and certain classes of theory that we are pretty sure are wrong given the way the universe looks now. Anthony would probably say we can't know anything about it tho, since the universe has changed so radically int he last 15 billion years.

Is that your theory? Greg Laden

Maybe you should try reading the article we were talking about, Greg Laden. It was one mentioned as being of enormous improbability in it.

I have no theory, many other people have many, though I'd think those should really be called "guesses". As I've stated, my only guesses is that all living beings today have a common ancestor and even if that ancestor was the survivor of some bottle neck, it's original ancestor was the product of the origin of life which has left us no evidence that we can use to understand the origin of life.

I wonder if any other allegedly skeptical blogs is paying attention to this eye-opening discussion. Not that I'd expect them to do more than cheer on their team.

Claiming to know about the origin of life requires you to know an event without any evidence of it.

I didn't claim that.

You claimed that much was known about the origin of life, far, far more than is supported by evidence that can be linked to that event.

You've had well over a week to come up with something linking the studies you assert produced knowledge of the origin of life and the actual event and you have come up with nothing but come up with a series of dodges that is rapidly looking more like dissembling. Which I'd not expected, considering the general content of your blog.

Claims of knowledge can be challenged to produce evidence supporting those claims. If the one claiming knowledge can't produce evidence, their claim to know something is unsupported and deserves real skepticism. Anyone who wants to, is within their rights to point out that your unsupported claim isn't known but is believed.

Politically, in the present atmosphere when creationism is making dangerous inroads on science, overselling claims of belief related to the well supported fact of evolution is dangerous and foolish. Without evidence claims about the origin of life should be presented as being entirely contingent and unknown, not as being known. There is no reason not to as that is the actual case.

But the overselling of simulated evidence created in the absence of real evidence, on the bases of theories, which the simulated evidence, big surprise, supports the theories they were made from, is rampant in several areas that get called science, these days. My guess, that is a habit that began, in large part, from the promotion of ideological materialsm, that seems to account for a huge swath of it in the socalled sciences.

I despair at the state of science after this discussion. Though I will use it.

I'm done.

Without evidence claims about the origin of life should be presented as being entirely contingent and unknown, not as being known.

Got any specific examples of invalid or unsupportable claims made by actual scientists? You've had over a week to back up such vague insinuations, and you've never done so. Why? Because there are no such incidents to report, and you know it. You're a liar engaged in a premeditated campaign to defame people who don't agree with you.

I despair at the state of science after this discussion.

Oh Heavens, scientific accomplishments like solar power, wind power, flight, antibiotics, space travel, improved farm productivity, electric cars, the Internet, and a vastly greater understanding of our Universe than we ever had before, aren't good enough for Little Lord Trolleroy? Pray tell us, your Lordshit, what more must science do to get back in your good graces?

Or perhaps you have in mind something else that's had more and better accomplishments than science? Perhaps Your Lordshit would deign to tell us what that wonderous and mysterious tool may be...?

Go to bed, little man. Maybe if you ask nicely enough, perhaps Karl Rove will give you another pearl necklace to clutch, ifyouknowwhatimean...

It's God-in-the-gaps all the way down.

Raging bee, re comment 510:

Open research casts doubt on arsenic life
Blog documenting quest to replicate finding could be taste of things to come.

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110809/full/news.2011.469.html

I just mention that one because it came out yesterday. I think I could provide hundreds of others. See also comment 107.

--bks

Is that your theory? Greg Laden

Not sure what you are referring to here. I've not presented any theories.

it's original ancestor was the product of the origin of life which has left us no evidence that we can use to understand the origin of life.

That is incorrect.

I wonder if any other allegedly skeptical blogs is paying attention to this eye-opening discussion. Not that I'd expect them to do more than cheer on their team.

That would be "are" not "is"

You claimed that much was known about the origin of life, far, far more than is supported by evidence that can be linked to that event.

That is incorrect.

You've had well over a week to come up with something linking the studies you assert produced knowledge of the origin of life and the actual event

Are you talking about time machines again? My Tardis is in the shop.

Politically, in the present atmosphere when creationism is making dangerous inroads on science, overselling claims of belief related to the well supported fact of evolution is dangerous and foolish.

Demonstrate that such a claim has been made. Don't just say it again and again, but prove it.

simulated evidence

Wht is "simulated evidence."

I'm done.

This, I doubt.

TTT: It's God-in-the-gaps all the way down.

Anthony is definitely not a creationist.

bks, thanks for that link, had not seen that yet. Very interesting!.

bks: thanks for the interesting article, but how does it support any of Anthony's claims about scientists making unsupportable claims? All I see here is some scientists saying their research shows one thing, and others doing similar research and coming up with differing conclusions, so they argue about who is right. Some of those claims will be proven, others disproven, but in this case at least, all of the claims appear to be supported by at least some evidence and experimentation. If you see a claim in there that's TOTALLY without support, by all means quote it.

And there's certainly nothing here showing unsupportable claims about the origin of life.

Anthony, that's what you think has been said about probability in this thread? Do you actually read any comment for comprehension or just to pull out some phrase you think merits attack?

For those who actually care about the topic, understanding the probabilities is accumulating knowledge. Knowledge, not certainty. That's why we talk about these things as conditional probabilities. All you've done in endorsing bks's link is point to another scientist saying we can determine some of these probabilities based on the kind of evidence Greg listed in this post. Congratulations for making our point for us.

Greg @506-- from the post you cited on "NASA's new organism" "What I'm suggesting here is that the origin of life involved several different biochemical experiments that would now and then spatially overlap, and when they did so, sometimes combined."

That's pretty much what I was trying to talk about [post #503] apparently not very clearly. There may not have been one, single solitary "first life." In fact, my bet would be that there were repeated instances of chemical combinations spontaneously developing metabolism and/or reproduction (or parts of those processes). And knowing what goes on in bacteria, they probably did sometimes combine. That would make the question of whether we still have chemical processes in our bodies which we inherited from the *very first* living organism, versus, say, the tenth or the three-hundred-and-eighty-seventh-- or if we got metabolism from one source and reproduction from another-- a pretty uninteresting thing to know, compared to knowing that life can, in the right circumstances, evolve from non-living systems. And on that last point, it looks more and more likely that we will, in fact, learn how things that metabolize and reproduce can develop from things that can't.

I just couldn't stay away - though in part, that is because there isn't much that interests me elsewhere.

Anthony -

...but when that is overturned due to the primitive state of the technology it is based on and the vagueries of what is known from it means...

You really are fucking clueless about science. Of course I expect to get things wrong - though I also expect to get shit right too. I am going to get a bit right and a lot wrong. Then later, someone is going to come along and building on my work, prove that I am wrong and get a little something right in the process - as well as getting a good bit wrong. Then the process will repeat - each step along the way, our understanding of behavior increasing a little - even if it is just to know more about just what we don't know.

Indeed, I expect that I will probably come along after my own work and realize that I fucked up.

The thing is, if we don't try and fuck up to begin with, we will never get it right. Just like we can't come up with better technologies, without building on, or noting the weaknesses of more primitive technologies. I think neural imaging technology is a brilliant fucking example of this phenom. Both the equipment and procedures have continually improved over the past nearly forty years - at an increasingly rapid pace. The advances made in this field in the last 8 years, is greater than the advances made in the thirty years proceeding them.

Anybody who tells you we have absolute certainty about much of anything is lying to you. Science is about what is supported by the best evidence available at a given point in time. There are things that are supported by stronger evidence than others, but about the only place we have real certainty, is in overarching theories. Such as evolution. We know it happened and is happening - but within the field of evolutionary biology, there is a lot of science that is hotly debated - largely because so many people have been wrong, we have a great deal to build on and this leads to conflicting ideas, which in turn lead to more research - more refinement.

That is what science is about.

Raging bee: You seem to have dropped the word "invalid" from your question. Hedging? Well at least the Tourettes Syndrome has abated.

But even with your redefinition, it's trivial to find examples:

http://tech.mit.edu/V111/N25/balt.25n.html
http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2008/06/the_hellinga_retractio…

Just drop it. You're on the wrong path.

--bks

This was just posted on sciencedaily.com... < a href = "http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110809144517.html">plausible theory on origin of life?

bks, I just had a look at both of your citations, and neither of them substantiate any of Anthony's accusations. In both cases, some scientists got something wrong, and some other scientists proved them wrong by trying to duplicate the experiments. Anthony's bogus accusations about unspecified scientists making unspecified unsuppoertable claims about our knowledge of the origin of life remain just that -- bogus accusations.

And why are you telling me to "just drop it?" Are you trying to bluff me off the trail?

quietmarc, somehow your link did not survive:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110809144517.htm

RB: Now you're playing Fizzbin[1]. I'm responding to what you said and what you said was nonsense. But you know what? You write down the set of rules for satisfying your question and then I'll answer it, but you will not be allowed to import new categories for me to jump through like flaming hoops nor to drop old categories as you just did. I'm betting that you've forgotten exactly what you're talking about, if you ever knew. No handwaving, be specific.

--bks

[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_in_Star_Trek#Fizzbin

Thanks Greg. I was having an html moment.

"Import new categories?" What the fuck are you talking about? My original demand was for specific incidents that support Anthony's vague allegations that unspecified scientists were making unspecified unsupportable claims regarding our knowledge of the origin of life. That demand has not changed, and if you're trying to say otherwise, you're a fucking liar.

RB: You are quite right to hide behind a pseudonym. This correspondence is closed.

--bks

RB: You are quite right to hide behind a pseudonym.

...says the guy who's running away behind a pseudonym.

Anthony @47:

I'm taking an agnostic position. What you don't have any evidence of, you can't know scientifically.

Anthony at Josh Rosenau's blog:

I believe in God, I believe God created the entire universe and everything about it. I believe that God is not susceptible to the network of causality that contains the subject matter of science. I believe it is an act of idolatry to turn some human conception of God into a mere thing that can be subjected to science. The insistence that God can be seen through science is an act of desecration. That God might be seen in the majesty of the universe is not the same thing, it is an acknowledgement that God is only knowable, in an absurdly miniscule part, through living experience of a kind far to broad and far too complex for science.

And now we know Anthony McCarthy's prejudice and his reason for fighting scientific progress as he has. Despite his claims of agnosticism, he argues like a theist because he's a theist.

Hat tip for the link to commenter Ildi over at my blog. :)

Thanks, Jason, for confirming the predictive power of my original analysis of Anthony's rhetoric.

So he thinks it's an "act of desecration" to use the minds and senses God gave us to more fully understand the Universe he created? That's ridiculous even by theistic standards.

@503 hoary puccoon:re, bacteria in blenders " [Pornonymous, why don't you do something useful and write up a disquisition on this?]"

Hoary puccoon, you might just be one of the few who actualy kinf of get it! I love the idea! Sex in a blender, and coitus interuptus!

That is very funny, and thanks for the nod of sarcasm--you inspire me to go do something bacterial in a blender...hmmmm.

Jamba Juice, anyone?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110809144517.htm
Study Builds On Plausible Scenario for Origin of Life On Earth

pornonymous @530

Um, thanks. I think.

But the research about coitis interruptus in bacteria in blenders wasn't something I invented. It was really done, starting in the 1950's, at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. And, being French and not fond of prissy euphemisms, they really did call it coitus interruptis.

I was going to write something prissy myself about what went into the blender was E coli, not bodily emissions. Then I remembered that Andre Lwoff, the head of that research unit, admitted that he got the original research program started by using E coli from his own gut. In 1965, Lwoff and two colleagues were awarded the Nobel prize in medicine. It was the only case in history where a researcher truly deserved to be honored for data he pulled out of his ass.

OK, @bks, let me get this straight. You like to call yourself a "pantheist" and claim that "the Universe is alive." Soâ¦

â¦interesting variation on the Panspermia dodge. All you're doing is pushing the origin of life back to coincide with the origin of the universe. That leaves you with an even thornier double-barreled question:

How did life AND the universe start simultaneously?

Or - instead of turtles - is it "universes all the way down"? Enquiring Minds⢠want to know! =^..^=

MadSciKat, I agree 100% with the implication that if the Universe is alive, then OoL and the Big Bang are coincident, However, framing it that way doesn't help anyone on any side of this discussion. You might just as well ask, as did Einstein: "Why is gravitational mass equal to inertial mass?"

I pointed out above that Panspermia just pushes the OoL problem offworld, as you state.

As to Pantheism, please read:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pantheism/#PaT

I think you'll find it much more comfortable than Atheism.

--bks

MadSciKat, I agree 100% with the implication that if the Universe is alive, then OoL and the Big Bang are coincident, However, framing it that way doesn't help anyone on any side of this discussion.

Right -- it's a nice enough thing to believe, but it doesn't help in any kind of scientific discourse because once you've asserted that the entire Universe is "alive," the word "alive" loses its meaning and descriptive value. And you're still stuck with the question of how the self-sustaining chemical reactions that make up our particular subgroup of "life" got started.

I believe in God, I believe God created the entire universe and everything about it. I believe that God is not susceptible to the network of causality that contains the subject matter of science.

As the concept of life cannot be considered as scientifically sound but on the contrary is a metaphysical concept, litterally speaking, it is true to say that âWe can know nothing about the origin of lifeâ (as it is true to say that âWe can know nothing about the origin of the soul, of God etc.â). However it is not true that we can know nothing about the origin of the primordial ancestor on Earth and of the processs at the origin of all the terrestrial systems with the property of Darwinian evolution: we can know much more about the origin of Darwinian evolution. For instance, within the paradigm of open, far from equilibrium systems that should maintain their level of organization, it is possible to only envisage three conditions that would permit the systems to get the property of Darwinian evolution:
-1. Local conditions that allow the emergence of open non-equilibrium structural systems, organized on a macroscopic level, generated by a flow of matter and energy that is continuously supplied. These open far-from-equilibrium systems can maintain themselves far-from-equilibrium because they are able to use the matter and energy supplied by the favourable local environment;
-2. The systems must be able to self-reproduce;
-3. The systems must be capable of acquiring heritable structure/function properties that are relatively independent from the local environment, i.e., the fact that they belong to a specific lineage should not depend on the nature of the nutriments they receive from the local environment. This last condition is required for the emergence of distinct lineages allowing Darwinian natural selection.
I do not mention an interesting fourth condition:
-4. These properties may change sporadically while remaining transmissible to the descendants.
This fourth condition, although favouring a much more efficient and faster evolution, is not mandatory to allow room for selection if the potential of the systems is very large for the emergence of new distinct lineages. One interesting feature of this set of three conditions is that it does not necessarily involve a genetic component related to nucleic acids. For example there is at least one model, a lipidic vesicle-based model, which can be proposed to address the issues raised by the three conditions above, without involving nucleic acids (Tessera 2011).

Reference:
M. Tessera. Origin of Evolution Versus Origin of Life: A Shift of Paradigm. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2011,12,3445-3458.

The issue Greg Laden posed was the extremely difficult question of the origin of life. That is about a specific event, one which really happened. A phenomenon no one observed which, in no sense, gives up an obvious line of investigation. Having what you assume is "a general sense" of the environment in which that happened or "a general sense" of any other aspect of the problem just adds uncertainty to what is already an unknown event. What you get from that is not knowledge, it's supposition at most, complete nonsense, quite frequently.

The above paragraph is (IMHO) a classic example of obscurantism: a strategy used by anti-rationalists, creationists and other denialists, religious con-artists, and anyone else with a vested interest in getting people to mistrust or ignore the fruits of rational enquiry. In the above example, Anthony is trying to distort and misrepresent how science works, and what we already know or can conclude from the available evidence, in order to maintain a pretense that a certain line of enquiry (in this case, inquiry into the origin of life) can NEVER be expected to offer any results that people need take seriously. Note that Anthony continues to maintain this pretense despite having seen explicit corrective information from other commenters here.

First, the origin of life need not be ONE specific event, or even ONE specific set/chain of events. Second, the fact that no one has directly observed the events in question does NOT prevent us from developing useful hypotheses based on currently-available evidence (this is just a much wordier version of the old "were you there?" BS we hear from creationists -- and yes, it can just as credibly be used WRT George Washington as well). Third, postulating a "general sense" of what the early Earth was like does not add uncertainty, it reduces it by narrowing the range of speculation down to what can reasonably be guessed/assumed. Fourth, the fact that we're not talking about specific events now, does not mean we can't narrow things down over time; most specific theories start as vague suppositions. Fifth, what we get from this sort of reasoning has always been more useful knowledge, not "complete nonsense" (except in the eyes of the ignorant, of course). And sixth, the London Underground is not a political movement.

If scientists want people to believe what they say, they should avoid overselling the status of what they claim. Asserting that they have knowledge that they don't doesn't do a thing to enhance the real status of those claims.

Citation please? Who, exactly, is "Asserting that they have knowledge that they don't?" This is a typical Rovian tactic of making insinuations when you know you can't support a direct accusation.

I've only had a quick glimpse at Anthony's web site, but it seems to be a lot of anti-liberal BS ("Suicide of Liberalism?" Really?!), with lots of gleeful, self-inflating blather about how much abuse and hate-mail he gets and expects to get. In other words, a right-wing hater with paranoid delusions. But even if that guess proves false on closer examiniation, we're still dealing with a pretentious, verbose, deeply dishonest anti-rationalist.

You say "nail down an absolutely material explanation" like it's a BAD thing. "Absolutely material explanations" are the ONLY explanations that actually do anyone any real good. If you doubt this, see how far you get with non-material explanations in, say, bridge-building or crime-solving. This is a matter on which Christians who actually WANT to do real good are in total agreement with atheists.

No, I say it like it's something that ideological materialists are always claiming for everything.

Got any specific instances where "ideological materialists" have been wrong in such claims?

I'd like to know how you propose to back this up with evidence.

Um...just every new theory or inovation that's done any real good in the real world? I'm pretty sure thay're all based on purely materialistic explanations of something.

However,we weren't talking about whether or not an absolute, materialist explanation of the origin of life would do anyone any good.

That's probably because you're not concerned with doing anyone any good. I'm pretty sure that the scientists who are working on this will somehow figure out how to do someone some good with whatever insights arise. That's pretty much how they roll: do pure research, then find uses for it.

I figure it's of absolutely neutral value in that regard since it happened and there's not much we can do about it.

Something happened, therefore an explanation of how it happened is of neutral value? You really don't care enough to think any of this through, do you? Where would we be if police detectives thought that way about criminal actions?

There is a huge difference between asserting a material explanation when there is physical evidence and asserting it when there is NO material evidence.

"NO material evidence?" That's pure dishonest bullshit. As others have already explained, there IS material evidence pertaining to the origin of life -- just not quite enough to form a specific theory. Yet. They're still working on it.

First, I suspect you and several others on this blog thread assume I'm a Christian when, it happens, I'm not.

I did not "assume" you were a Christian; I DEMONSTRATED, by quoting you, that you are a dishonest obscurantist.

...anyone who is arguing that they KNOW much about the first life on Earth other than that it was alive and that it successfully reproduced is asserting knowledge they don't have.

Specific quotes, please, or I'll have to conclude you're misrepresenting what scientists have actually said. Seriously, is ANY real scientist actually saying we KNOW how life came from nonliving matter?

I'm always very interested to see the status of scientific method among the materialists.

Your repeated use of the vague word "materialist," without any qualifiers, as an epithet, strongly implies that your agenda has more to do with politics, religion and tribalism than it does with actual pursuit of knowledge. (Oh, and how's the scientific method doing among the immaterialists?)

What I'm learning from these arguments is that many atheists...

What makes you think we're all atheists? (I, for one, probably believe in more Gods than you do.) And what does our alleged atheism have to do with the validity of this or that scientific theory on the origin of life? Your bigoted religious agenda is showing.

Did Anthony change his handle to "AM?" I wonder why. Is he morphing after being banned? Or is he trying to hide something about himself?

The problem with what's come of liberalism in 2011 is that it's stopped being liberal, it's stopped believing in equality, justice and the fair distribution of resources and the necessities of life.

Compared to who? Republitarians who openly pander to racism and religious bigotry, always opposed every legislative and regulatory attempt to reduce inequality, and support policies that have widened the gap between the richest and poorest Americans?

I'm a leveler...

Wow, that sounds pretentious. You mean you actually levelled things yourself, with your own hard work?

Your political discourse is just as bogus, and just as full of tired old right-wing lying-points, as your scientific discourse.

No worries, Jason, it's not like AM or bks will actually acknowledge your responses honestly when they do come.

Raging Bee, you completely avoided a simple direct question: Heredity first or Metabolism first?

I don't have to answer that question because: a) I'm not a scientist and I never pretended I had the answer; b) that's not what we're arguing about here; and c) it's totally irrelevant to my main point, which is that you and AM are acting like dishonest denialists and obscurantists.

Besides, why does it have to be one or the other? Maybe it was heredity frist in one part of the Earth, metabolism first somewhere else, then the ocean curents mixed them together and after awhile, something evolved that incorporated both in a more complex process that came one more step closer to what we now call "single-cell life forms." (But hey, that's just my own Pagan interaction-of-opposites mindset talking here: light and dark, matter and energy, destruction and creation, summer and winter, rise and fall, Yin and Yang...it doesn't have to be one OR the other, it can always be both in dynamic equilibrium.)

These are not two sides of the same coin, these are completely different models.

And the mere fact that we have such models disproves your allegation that we do not and can not eventually know how life arose on Earth. Each of those models represents bits of useful knowledge whose existence and usefulness you've both been denying.

bks, the second sentence of your first comment here is as follows: "Science knows next to nothing about what "Life" is or how it came to be." That assertion is refuted by the existence of useful models -- among other things.

Also, I was addressing both you and AM, who DID assert that we can not know how life first arose on Earth. I can address you both collectively, because you're both using bogus obscurantist arguments, and you're both demonstrably wrong.

Um...thanks, Stephanie, you've pretty much summed AM up...with far fewer keystrokes than I wasted on him. Your point is certainly reinforced by this earlier quote of his: "I figure it's of absolutely neutral value in that regard since it happened and there's not much we can do about it."

Let's see if that prediction I made about the junking of evo-psy...

Changing the subject again? What does evo-psych have to do with the origin of life?

Once again, it's looking like the know-nothingism, anti-rationalism, and vague blitherings about "materialism" are based on old grudge(s) against scientists in other, unrelated fields of study; not on any understanding or concern about the origins of life.

As for Greg's poll, I haven't read any of it. It wasn't necessary in identfying or debunking anti-rationalist BS.

Greg Laden, I'll ask again, when you are talking about The Origin of Life, are you talking about an actual event which happened, in the only way it happened? And if anyone says it happened in any other way than that way it did happen, that they are not talking about the real and only Origin of Life on Earth but are, in fact, wrong about that?

If you aren't talking about the actual event, you aren't talking about something that actually happened.

Does this bit of blithering have any meaning at all? What, exactly, are you asking? It sounds like you're still stuck on something we've discussed before: we're not talking about specific events -- YET -- we're talking about what we know of the early-Earth conditions in which the first life-forms arose, based on what we currently know, and speculating about what specific events are likely to have occurred then to create living matter.

How do you know you know something about the origin of life if you can't observe direct evidence left from that event or even the descendents of that life for many millions of years after it happened?

WE have evidence that tells us a good bit about early-Earth conditions, plue evidence from repeatable experiments that tells us a bit about how living things can be created under certain conditions. That's not the whole job, of course, but it's as good a start as many other scientific advances have.

Short answer: while you sit at your keyboard and insist we can't know anything about the origin of life, other people are actually doing real work and learning things about the origin of life. Their work is nowhere near finished, of course, but your criticisms of it are just plain ignorant and self-serving.

I'm interested in this tactic of allegedly rational people pretending that clearly stated questions make no sense. I've run into it a number of times now...

Well, if more than one person voices the same criticism of your questions, maybe there's something to the criticism that can't be blamed on just one critic. Ever consider that possibility?

Oh, and what was your response to those other critics?

...Freudianism, Behaviorism and a number of other, minor isms in the behavioral sciences. Which have pretty much, one after another, been junked.

Once again, you show your ignorance of how theories are born and changed over time. The "isms" you mention above were not "junked" altogether; some of their central premises/postulates/whatever you want to call them, were carried over into more refined and up-to-date hypotheses. Saying those ideas were "junked" is a bit like saying aviation was "junked" when the Wright Brothers' original airplane went out of use.

AM's blithering about "artificial life" is a bit of a side-issue and a distraction. Experiments aimed at creating primitive life-forms under simulated-early-Earth conditions, are done for the purpose of determining what sorts of conditions are required to create life, and how, exactly, life-forms get created under said conditions. The purpose is not so much to mimic EXACTLY the kind of life originally created; as to give ourselves a better idea of how living systems might (or might not) have been created, and/or what sort of living systems might have been created.

It's a bit like archeologists building a replica of Stonehenge to test their theories of how the original was built. The point is not to make an exact copy, or to know every exact step the ancients took in building the original; it's to see whether their ideas of primitive engineering work in real life, and to at least rule out alleged practices that prove impractical or impossible. Simulations of this sort are done in many different fields, from archeology to disease-control to solar physics.

AM's blithering about "artificial life" is a bit of a side-issue and a distraction. Experiments aimed at creating primitive life-forms under simulated-early-Earth conditions, are done for the purpose of determining what sorts of conditions are required to create life, and how, exactly, life-forms get created under said conditions. The purpose is not so much to mimic EXACTLY the kind of life originally created; as to give ourselves a better idea of how living systems might (or might not) have been created, and/or what sort of living systems might have been created.

It's a bit like archeologists building a replica of Stonehenge to test their theories of how the original was built. The point is not to make an exact copy, or to know every exact step the ancients took in building the original; it's to see whether their ideas of primitive engineering work in real life, and to at least rule out alleged practices that prove impractical or impossible. Simulations of this sort are done in many different fields, from archeology to disease-control to solar physics.

Oops, sorry about the double post.

Oops, sorry about the double post.

It is one thing we can know fore sure: there was a period when both metabolism and replication were controlled by RNA. The problem is to know how the first RNA and replication were first generated. But I think we are all the time getting closer to the solution to these questions.

"The problem is to know how the first RNA and replication were first generated."

WHY is that a problem, though? All we need to know is how it could have happened and demonstrate that.

Unlike creation, which we haven't ever seen happen.

"I believe that God is not susceptible to the network of causality that contains the subject matter of science."

Demonstrate that this is true.

PROVE god is not susceptible in that way. The only one that can is the deist one that is no different from god not existing.

"All we need to know is how it COULD have happened and demonstrate that." Yes. If we have shown that life is created by a certain process, then that would probably be enough. But that is not very easy. Every attempt so far has been unsuccessful. I have my own thoughts about how the first processes of life created the most basic molecules, the RNA molecules. I have presented these thoughts at http://sandwalk.blogspot.no/2009/05/metabolism-first-and-origin-of-life…