http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/media.html

By the way TED tends to feature several atheists in their discussion but certainly not all. It definitely has an agenda but hides behind the concept of cutting edge thinking. It would not be an ID friendly place.

…in Darwinism at all costs – even to the crippling of his own logic – like most Darwinian fundamentalists.

He has no evidence so speculation and conjecture take over the mind till reason goes out to lunch in favor of wishful thinking.

That’s how Darwinists live in their imaginary world where all is magical in non rational nature – no evidence required. Just a good imagination that replaces evidence and reason with nice sounding but extremely childish just-so stories and lot’s of blind faith in those stories. Pitiful.

Following on Crick’s hypothesis and the objection that it just pushes the OOL problem to somewhere else in space and time…

An important question that begs an answer is: What other forms of intelligent agency besides ourselves are possible? If organic IA is not reasonably possible without a precursor IA what other basis might there be?

One very interesting possibility is quantum computers. When quantum incoherence is overcome, even briefly, very very few quantum computing elements are required to perform enormous computational feats.

Quantum_computer

Perhaps self-organization of quantum computing elements with an emergent IA is a whole lot easier than carbon chemistry self-organization in the right conditions.

In any case the notion that we are the first and/or farthest advanced IA in the history of the causally connected universe is almost pure hubris that would make Copernicus roll over in his grave. Given how quickly some materialists toss aside the principle of mediocrity to dispute IDT they should have their materialist membership card revoked. We don’t even know what comprises 70% (dark energy) of the causally connected universe. All we think we know about that is that it interacts with the minor portion of the universe (“normal” matter and energy) at least gravitationally and permeates everything. If we had a theory of quantum gravity it might shed some light on what kind of influence dark energy can exert at the quantum scale of normal matter/energy.

Another problem that cropped up since Miller-Urey is that evidence of life has been pushed back to early in the earth’s history severely limiting the time and environments that any OOL hypotheses must address.

Francis Crick lent the most credence to directed panspermia i.e. life began elsewhere and was purposely placed on our planet early in its history. My emphasis. The part I emphasized is only more true today than when Crick wrote it 26 years ago.

Francis Crick Remembered

The secret of life
by Astrobiology Magazine
Moffett Field CA (SPX) Aug 02, 2004

The British molecular biologist Francis Harry Crick died on Wednesday at the age of 88. Crick changed our understanding of life when, in 1953, he and James Watson announced that DNA came packaged in an elegant double helix structure. Crick reportedly claimed they had found ‘the secret of life,’ and many scientists agree.
The double-helix structure explained how genetic material replicated through nitrogenous base pair bonds. Some see this as the most important development in biology in the 20th century, and Watson and Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery in 1962.

Crick was not content to sit back on his laurels after winning one of the top prizes in science, however. He continued to study the mysteries of life, such as the nature of consciousness, or the possibility that RNA preceded the development of DNA.

In 1973, he and the chemist Leslie Orgel published a paper in the journal Icarus suggesting that life may have arrived on Earth through a process called ‘Directed Panspermia.’

The Panspermia hypothesis suggests that the seeds of life are common in the universe and can be spread between worlds. This idea originated with the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, and was later promoted by the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius and the British astronomer Fred Hoyle.

Versions of this hypothesis have survived to the present day, with the discovery of proposed ‘fossil structures’ in the martian meteorite ALH84001.

‘Directed Panspermia’ suggests that life may be distributed by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. Crick and Orgel argued that DNA encapsulated within small grains could be fired in all directions by such a civilization in order to spread life within the universe. Their abstract in the 1973 Icarus paper reads:

“It now seems unlikely that extraterrestrial living organisms could have reached the earth either as spores driven by the radiation pressure from another star or as living organisms imbedded in a meteorite.”

“As an alternative to these nineteenth-century mechanisms, we have considered Directed Panspermia, the theory that organisms were deliberately transmitted to the earth by intelligent beings on another planet.”

“We conclude that it is possible that life reached the earth in this way, but that the scientific evidence is inadequate at the present time to say anything about the probability. We draw attention to the kinds of evidence that might throw additional light on the topic.”

Crick and Orgel further expanded on this idea in their 1981 book, ‘Life Itself.’. They believed there was little chance that microorganisms could be transported between planets and across interstellar distances by random accident.

But a technological civilization could direct panspermia by stocking a spacecraft with a genetic starter kit. They suggested that a large sample of different microorganisms with minimal nutritional needs could survive the long journey between worlds.

Many scientists are critical of the Panspermia hypothesis, because it does not try to answer the question of how life first originated. Instead, it passes the responsibility on to another place and another time, offering at best a partial solution to the question.

Crick and Orgel suggested that Directed Panspermia might help resolve some mysteries about life’s biochemistry. For instance, it could be the reason why the biological systems of Earth are dependent on molybdenum, when the chemically similar metals chromium and nickel are far more abundant.

They suggested that the seeds for life on Earth could have originated from a location far richer in molybdenum.

Other scientists have noted, however, that in seawater molybdenum is more abundant than either chromium or nickel.

Coming full circle to his groundbreaking discovery of DNA’s structure, Crick wondered, if life began in the great “primeval soup” suggested by the Miller/Urey experiment, why there wouldn’t be a multitude of genetic materials among the different life forms. Instead, all life on Earth shares the same basic DNA structure.

Crick and Orgel wrote in their book ‘Life Itself,’ “an honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”

A fair amount of effort goes into trying to figure out the smallest set of machinery possible and still have a free-living functional cell.

Read Towards synthesis of a minimal cell for a good overview of the state of the art.

There is no theory of abiogenesis. There are nothing but hypotheses.

I will bet dollars against donuts that the first theory of abiogenesis is intelligent design – some group of researchers will succeed in constructing a synthetic cell using hideously expensive/complex lab equipment and every bit of expertise in the field of biochemistry they can possibly bring to bear on it. This will confirm that abiogenesis is possible through intelligent agency.

IDT predicts that there will be no success in demonstrating any way that natural forces absent intelligent direction can conspire to produce a free living cell.

All the “progress” in the area of abiogenesis since Miller-Urey is centered around 1) discovering how difficult it is and 2) falsification of hypothetical natural means.

The so-called RNA World hypothesis still has a little life left in it but not much. If there was ever an RNA World it’s now thought to have been preceded by some kind of pre-RNA World because RNA chemistry just doesn’t work out from scratch in any kind of natural environment. Precursors in the form of homochiralic nucleic acids have defied all attempts to synthesize (in simulated natural environments) in a complete set at concentrations that allow interesting combinations to occur. Complicating matters is that even when artificially synthesized and concentrated nothing interesting happens. Bonds in RNA polymers are too fragile to hold together long enough to form long molecules. They fall apart as quickly as they form unless in the tightly controlled environment inside a living cell. Thus remains the chicken-egg paradox in the form of which came first: the enclosed cell which makes complex RNA chemistry (ribozymes) possible or the hypothetical RNA-based cellular automata required to build and maintain the cell enclosure.

Intelligent agency with sufficiently advanced skill in biochemistry can of course overcome these problems and I trust that will be proven in a matter of decades if not sooner when the first synthetic free-living cell is produced.

What does it mean when scientists — such as Andreas Albrecht of the University of California at Davis, Gary Bernstein of the University of Pennsylvania, Robert Cahn of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Wendy L. Freedman of the Carnegie Observatories, Jacqueline Hewitt of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wayne Hu of the University of Chicago, John Huth of Harvard University, Marc Kamionkowski of the California Institute of Technology, Edward W. Kolb of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and The University of Chicago, Lloyd Knox of the University of California at Davis, John C. Mather of the Goddard Space Flight Center, Suzanne Staggs of Princeton University, and Nicholas B. Suntzeff of Texas A&M University — say things such as:

“Dark energy appears to be the dominant component [some 70%] of the physical Universe, yet there is no persuasive theoretical explanation for its existence or magnitude.”

or such as:

“The acceleration of the Universe is, along with dark matter [some 25% of the physical universe], the observed phenomenon that most directly demonstrates that our theories of fundamental particles and gravity are either incorrect or incomplete.”

Imagine yourself to be a tenured physics professor, skiing confidently down a slope on a bright and cloudless day in the Rocky Mountains and getting ready to negotiate a field of moguls, when all of a sudden, accompanied by two short booms, the sun blinks out of the sky like houselights during a thunderstorm.

It still ends up with the Holy God (greater than nature so not to make any image of Him) vs the nature god(s) of the past.

I have answered the question, don’t pretend I haven’t. Kinesin protein homology provides evidence of a common ancestor, an organism with less sophisticated molecular machinery.

Nonsense. That is completely absurd. Maybe you don’t even understand the link you posted to. You linked to a tree that showed was one of multiple possible phylogenies for existing fully functional Kinesin motors in different taxa. It in no way provided any evidence for descent from a simpler Kinesin motor.

Bio “machines” might not directly be one of the criteria for life, but reproduction is, and how else do you propose reproduction take place unless by some physical mechanism?

Beats me. But that is your problem not mine. I don’t believe in Darwinism so I don’t need to defend it.

Saying life needs at least some crude replicating mechanism is different from saying life needs modern DNA polymerase.

You can posit simpler devices but you aren’t demonstrating any evidence that such devices ever exist or even can exist. Even if such simpler devices are possible, they are more than likely beyond the edge of evolution and irreducibly complex both individually and in the context of the biological organism that they exist in.

Granted, sophisticated proteins are unlikely to have formed at random from the primordial soup, but that’s not what abiogenesis theory suggests or what evolutionary theory requires.

What abiogenesis theory? There is no such theory. Only the great athiest hope that someday such a theory will emerge.

First, Theists are perfectly willing to grant that “Life as we know it might rely on the these biological machines, but that has not always been the case.” (Namely of course, such are very interested in the expression of life that may be described as: SPIRIT-based life!)

Indeed, in that now so-often banned book, we may read that “in the Beginning . . . the earth was formless and void, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters . . .”

Moving on a bit, I see:

sophisticated proteins are unlikely to have formed at random from the primordial soup, but that’s not what abiogenesis theory suggests or what evolutionary theory requires.

Perhaps, the commenter would like to acquaint himself with the summary on abiognesis in the always linked, and onward in the therein linked discussions of the thermodynamics of life-formation as discussed by Thaxton et al twenty-odd years ago?

Let me excerpt a cite in the former:

Give biologists a cell, and they’ll give you the world. [cf discussion of Case II in the same] But beyond assuming the first cell must have somehow come into existence, how do biologists explain its emergence from the prebiotic world four billion years ago? The short answer is that they can’t, yet . . . . While the past half century has seen an explosion of knowledge about the evolution of life after it began, there has been relatively little progress in the past half century on how it began—the so-called origin question . . . . finding the answer to the origin question will require not only money but also progress in understanding how the most basic of biological molecules were put together before life began, how they became organized and self-sustaining, and how they developed into the membrane-bound cells that are our ancestors. Scientists have come a long way from the early days of supposing that all this would inevitably arise in the “prebiotic soup” of the ancient oceans; indeed, evidence eventually argued against such a soup, and the concept was largely discarded as the field progressed. But significant problems persist with each of the two competing models that have arisen—usually called “genes first” and “metabolism first”—and neither has emerged as a robust and obvious favorite. [Robinson, 2005. Emphases and remarks in parentheses added.]

In short, abiognesis after fifty-odd years since Miller-Urey, is at a dead end due precisely tot he challenge of climbing Mt Thermodynamics/Information — as the Appendix 1 in the same linked discusses, they are intimately linked and in fact synonymous — as discussed by Thaxton et al over twenty years ago.

GEM of TKI