Category: Origin Of Life

ID Foundations, 15: Mignea’s “simplest” self-replicator, the vNSR and a designed origin of cell-based life

The recent Engineering and ID conference was obviously fruitful. I find it — HT: JohnnyB — helpful to compose Mignea’s schematic for self-replication, and discuss it a bit in the context of the origin of self-replicating entities given von Neumann’s requisites of a successful kinematic self-replicator. [Henceforth, vNSR.] Let me extract from the just updated… more

The Design of the Simplest Self-Replicator

The first video from the Engineering and Metaphysics conference is from Arminius Mignea. His talk is about self-replication, and what is really required for self-replication to occur. Mignea reviews current attempts at self-replication, and shows the minimal structures needed for it to occur. The slides for the talk are available here. Enjoy! more

The cat dragged my origin of life theory away … No wait, my kid pulped it into a birthday pinata.

Why don’t these people invent their own life form from scratch and then see if it could possibly happen by chance? If not, they can take their pick, as to origins, between space aliens, a self-organizing principle or … more

Winners of Harry Lonsdale’s $50,000 Origin of Life Challenge announced

The wonderful thing about the whole business is that Lonsdale is doing it with his own money, not yours. more

Earth’s early atmosphere impossible to recreate?

“Novak explains that this synthetic prelife approach is favorable for a host of reasons.Firstly, it’s impossible to recreate the atmosphere that existed when life began four billions years ago.” more

Remember the arsenic eating bacteria? Paper in Science refutes claim

“It’s a fairly short paper but there are many observations in it which quite directly contradict the earlier results.” more

On the Impossibility of Abiogenesis

Modern science takes for granted that the naturalistic origin of life, called “abiogenesis” or “chemical evolution” or “pre-biotic evolution” is extremely improbable but not impossible. “Life” here means a single self-reproducing and self-sustaining biological cell. Science claims that life can arise from inorganic matter through natural processes. This unsupported claim is based on the conviction… more

Life originated before plate tectonics, deepening mystery

” … , the Earth, under the first third of its history, developed under conditions other than what can be explained using the plate tectonics model.” more

Conformism in science fueled by unproductive competition, says researcher who got around it

Ninety per cent of the research is on 10% of the genes. And industry is relying on us to be innovative? … we’re not doing society a service in the way we do research. more

David Abel: Formalism not only describes, but preceded, prescribed, organized, and continues to govern and predict Physicality.

“Chance, necessity and mere constraints cannot steer, program or optimize algorithmic/ computational success to provide desired nontrivial utility.” more

New evidence for ancient water flows on Mars?

“Evidence of ancient water at a Martian crater is the latest in a long series of discoveries by a surprisingly long-lived Mars Exploration Rover … ” more

Billion-year-old organism is not a fungus, alga, parasite, plant or animal ….

No one knows what it is and they are calling it “protozoa” for now. more

Origin of life: Early cells were a mess but somehow survived via redundancy?

This theory maybe works if you suppose that hits matter and misses don’t. more

It’s all these “could haves” and “would haves” that are the fundamental problem for origin of life studies.

How about a ten year moratorium on the terms? Thoughts? more

He said it: Fred Hoyle on randomly solving a Rubik cube

“Suppose a blindfold person were given a thoroughly scrambled Rubik cube. ” more

Origin of life: Organic haze on early Earth, due to “intense microbial activity”

Flip(flop-ing) between one stable state and another? Sounds like design. Don’t tell anyone. more

RNA world hits a brick wall?

Can anyone here spell “irreducible complexity”?
more

David Abel in The First Gene: “Mere possibility is not an adequate basis for asserting scientific plausibility.”

“A precisely defined universal bound is needed beyond which the assertion of plausibility, particularly in life-origin models, can be considered operationally falsified.” more

Scientist banned for doubting Darwin has presented challenge to our definition of life

Darwinism is not only an error, it is a costly error. We need these challenges, and we don’t need Darwinism. more

Life’ origin explained, no problem!, by natural selection?

“… natural selection requires replication. But as far as we’re aware, life cannot replicate until many parts are present. ” more

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