From The First Gene, Chapter 9: “Inanimate nature … cannot scheme to locally and temporarily circumvent the 2nd Law.”
| February 22, 2012 | Posted by News under News, Origin Of Life |
In The First Gene, David Abel’s Chapter 9 covers “Examining specific life-origin models for plausibility”:
Abstract: All models of life-origin, whether Protometabolism-First or pre-RNA / RNA World early informational self-replicative models, encounter the same dead-end: no naturalistic mechanism exists to steer objects and events toward eventual functionality. No insight, motive, foresight or impetus exists to integrate physicochemical reactions into a cooperative, organized, pragmatic effort.
Inanimate nature cannot pursue the goal of homeostasis; it cannot scheme to locally and temporarily circumvent the 2nd Law. This deadlock affects all naturalistic models involving hypercycles, composomes and chemotons. It precludes all spontaneous geochemical, hydrothermal, eutectic, and photochemical scenarios. It affects the Lipid, Peptide and Zinc World models. It pertains to Co-evolution and all other code-origin models.
No plausible hypothetical scenario exists that can convert chance and/or necessity into an organized protometabolic scheme. In this paper the general principles of previous chapters are applied to the best specific models of life origin in the literature. Tibor Ganti’s chemoton model and the pre-RNA and RNA World models receive more attention, as they are the most well-developed and preferred scenarios.
Here are the chapter topic heads:
Introduction: Every naturalistic life-origin model encounters the same great impasse 232
1. Cairns-Smith clay life 233
2. Silicon and Boron based life 234
3. Geochemical self-organization models 236
4. Protometabolism First Models 238
4.1 Composomes 239
4.2 Compartmentalization 240
4.3 The problem of sequencing 241
4.4 Hypercycles 241
4.5 Tibor Ganti’s well-developed chemoton model 242
5. Self-replicative, auto-catalytic, informational models 256
5.1 RNA World models 256
5.2 PreRNA World and RNA analogs 260
6. Early photosynthetic models 262
7. Code-origin models 264
8. Composome, Chemoton, and RNA evolution models would have been extremely 265
limited
9. Panspermia 269
10. Conclusions
42 Responses to From The First Gene, Chapter 9: “Inanimate nature … cannot scheme to locally and temporarily circumvent the 2nd Law.”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
We see yet again that the attempt to explain away Life’s Origin as the lucky draw of a cosmic lottery underestimates the difficulty. A lottery can be explained…The emergence of complex information from chaos has no physical explanation.
The fact that Abel (mis)uses the infamous creationist Second Law of Thermodynamics argument, which even some of the wiser young-earth creationists have abandoned, is a huge point *against* Abel’s argument and competence, not an argument for his view. Ouch.
Life is a kinetically-dominated process, not a thermodynamically-dominated one.
[Cue some Christian rock apologetics song on youtube by ba77]
So entropy, instead of being the universal principle of degradation that nothing in the universe can escape the clutches of for any extended period of time, in the hands of neo-Darwinists, entropy, suddenly, magically becomes either the driving force for neo-Darwinism, or is a supporting character for neo-Darwinism???
Why by golly I think I may have just seen the last bit of reason completely leave neo-Darwinian thought! 
I know this is probably beneath your dignity Nick, seeing as you must now save the entire world from Global Warming (on top of your already pressing duties insuring school children are lopsidedly indoctrinated into neo-Darwinian thought),, but I must really ask, Exactly what is your empirical evidence that falsifies Abel’s null hypothesis?
cue music and verse for you Nick:
The law of biogenesis still rules the natural.
The fact that Abel (mis)uses the infamous creationist Second Law of Thermodynamics argument, which even some of the wiser young-earth creationists have abandoned, is a huge point *against* Abel’s argument and competence, not an argument for his view. Ouch.
Hey Nick,
Should we take the NCSE’s dealings with Gleick, and Scott’s apparent justification of his actions (not to mention, passing off what very much looks like a forged document as the real deal) as an argument for or against the arguments and competence of NCSE leadership?
“Life is a kinetically-dominated process, not a thermodynamically-dominated one.”
So it’s not a violation of thermodynamics, it’s a kinetic system. It’s only the kinetics that violate thermodynamics. Take that fundies!
I hold that there is no necessary violation of the 2nd. But with all due respect it’s not a valid argument to claim that Barack is not the president, Obama is.
Dr Matzke:
It is time that several NCSE riding horse talking points on thermodynamics and the relevance of such to the molecular basis of cell based life were put out to pasture.
Thermodynamics, as you should know, comes in two relevant and complementary flavours, classical and statistical; the latter grounding the former on the atomic-molecular view of the world that finally prevailed after Einstein’s clever analysis of Brownian motion as a directly observable molecular effect. And, let us doff hats and remember the casualty along the way, Boltzmann.
In this context, building on Maxwell (and his demon), Szilard and Brillouin, Jaynes et al have built an informational approach to thermodynamics that is instructive. That view was highly controversial for many years, but as Wikipedia recently summarised (speaking inadvertently against ideological interest), we may clip:
Boiling down, if a system is in a sharply constrained state that reflects itself in a more or less macro-observable result, that state is highly informational relative to the possible alternative arrangements of mass and energy at what Brillouin called ultramicroscopic level. That is, to clump then organise molecular components to form a nanomachine, is highly informational and reduces the relevant entropy (viewed in information terms) dramatically. So also, given the vastly larger number of physically possible micro-arrangements of the components, compared to the number of possible trials on the gamut of the observed cosmos or our solar system, we can see that spontaneous chemical action is going to have a major challenge explaining such nanomachines. For instance the 10^57 atoms of our solar system will have about 10^102 possible Planck-time quantum states, but something that embodies 500 bits of functionally specific and complex information (explicitly or implicitly) exists in a context of 3 * 10^150 possible configurational states — for instance, think of monomers chained in a linear polymer acting as a string data structure. For D/RNA, 500 bits worth of storage comes very fast, 250 monomers.
So, there is a major sampling the space of possibilities — search for the needle in the haystack, or monkeys at keyboards typing at random — challenge to any spontaneous formation of functional DNA argument. Notice, this is NOT a probability argument that pivots on how we may calculate probabilities, a favourite strawman talking point. this is a sampling the space of possibilities challenge and the well known point that a relatively small blind sample will normally reflect the BULK of a distribution, not special and unrepresentative clusters. In the case in view, we could compare to taking a blind one-straw sized sample from a cubical haystack 3 1/2 light days across. Even if a whole solar system lurked within, like ours out to Pluto, sampling theory tells us the overwhelmingly likely outcome of such a sample will be straw, and nothing else.
In that context, the standard “open systems” talking point used to dismiss thermodynamics linked concerns on pre biotic soup or volcano vent or comet etc spontaneous chemistry origin of life speculations falls apart. Sure, uncorrelated injections of energy that are not coupled to a mechanism do occur all the time. Overwhelmingly, they tend to push systems towards less and less constrained states for the same reason why in Clausius’ key example used to ground the classic understanding of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, the heat-receiving subsystem, B, INCREASES its entropy and drives the overall rise in entropy of the isolated system of A and B with d’q of heat transferred to B. Clipping the note that is always linked through my handle here at UD:
In short, merely observing that the earth etc are open to mass and energy inflows does not solve the underlying challenge of explaining the complex functionally specific organisation and associated information found in living systems. Nor is this issue exactly news. As a leading spokesman for the NCSE for years, you had a duty of care to note and appropriately respond to the following from the very first technical ID work by Thaxton et al in 1984, TMLO, at the close of ch 7 (linked as a useful online reference, the whole book is online here as a PDF):
The increasingly obvious disarray of OOL studies underscores that, for coming on thirty years since, no credible, empirically warranted model of OOL has emerged based on Darwin’s warm little electrified pond or whatever “plausible” prebiotic environment du jour. Indeed, the field is ideologically propped up by the question-begging a priori imposition of the materialistic assumptions and assertions that this “must” have happened, and that it is somehow “anti-scientific” to question it, especially if — shudder — such an alternative might allow that hated Divine Foot in the door. And, the NCSE has been in the forefront of this imposition of ideological materialism dressed up in the holy lab coat.
As well you know.
So also, setting aside “open system” strawmen and “Creationist” bogeymen, the issue is not (a) what is a logical and physical bare possibility, but instead (b) what is sufficiently likely to happen as to be a practically observable outcome on the gamut of available resources. For parallel instance, nothing physical or logical prevents all the O2 molecules in the room where you read this from rushing to one end, leaving you gasping for breath, but the number of mixed microstates so overwhelms the number of clumped states, that with all but certainty, this will not happen once in the observed universe across its lifespan. Diffusion is effectively irreversible, absent an active intervention. And if we do see a room with that clumping, the best explanation would be design.
Going beyond mere clumping, the organisation of chains of glyphs into coherent functional messages of 500 bits or more length on the gamut of our solar system is not blocked from happening spontaneously by logical or physical impossibility, but by the same issue of the overwhelming number of disorganised states relative to organised ones for such a clumped system.
That is the context in which we need to lay aside the NCSE’s favourite dismissive talking points and listen again seriously to what Wicken and Orgel had to say in 1979 and 1973 respectively:
Now, Dr Matzke, I remember pointing this out to you before, and I do not find it a reasonable thing for you to keep on drumming out talking points that have long since been adequately answered.
Please, do better than that.
G’day
GEM of TKI
In my opinion, Abel makes a careful distinction between order and organisation. He is also careful about the 2nd law. For open systems there exists the S-theorem due to Klimontovich, an analogue of the H-theorem of Bolzman for isolated systems. According to the S-theorem, the further the system gets from the equilibrium in an open system, the smaller the normalised entropy becomes. This in essense explains the spontaneous emergence of regularities in matter. However, every time Abel talks about this, while acknowledging the truth of spontaneous emergence of regularities, he points to the absence of any empirical observation of spontaneous emergence of cybernetic control. He points out that self-ordering is not the same as self-organisation. He is absolutely right.
kairosfocus:
So the 2nd isn’t necessarily violated, just nervous. Valid points here though and we’ll see if they can be answered.
Problem solved: It’s just the increase of ideological entropy. And while it’s valid to note that they are creatively hobbled we cannot get to:
One cannot deny the gOOLs implausibility and miracle when putting forth your own miracle as an alternate. No matter, one off events do not make bell curves and have no place in science. It makes not a whit whether your ideological blinders are correct, or theirs are, or anything else.
Nick: “[Cue some Christian rock apologetics song on youtube by ba77]”
LOL! (Sorry, bornagain77, but I had to laugh at that one! No offense.)
——
Nick, though, you are grasping at some pretty incredible straws:
So, life is characterized by movement (kinetic), rather than thermodynamic processes? What the heck does that even mean? What is driving and controlling this movement?
Yeah, the replication process (it isn’t a “reaction” it is a detailed and coordinated process with numerous physical and chemical reactions as a part of it, but we’ll forgive their poor choice of words) has very careful kinetic control. But again, where does that control come from? The movement itself?
A new sub-division of chemistry, really? In which, we are led to believe, the normal chemical processes give way to . . . wait for it . . . movement . . .
I’m not arguing for a particular thermodynamic approach here, just pointing out that this new alleged “kinetic” “replicative chemistry” doesn’t give us any reason to doubt that the normal operational chemistry we have all learned to know and love is driving the process (under the direction of information). As an argument for how evolution could work, and as an argument against the thermodynamic issues, this “kinetic” stuff is a non-starter.
BTW, the “open system” business — the idea that a system is somehow amenable to evolutionary processes if the system is “open” — is such a complete load of nonsense it is hard to overstate. I presume everyone on this thread is up to speed on that point so we don’t need to spend time on it . . .
No offense taken, I was glad to provide Nick this very fitting song for the empirical predicament that he has in actually proving anything he asserted:
If Nick could answer your question, bornagain77, let me see if I can guess what it would be…
“Pass…”
Now, he’ll respond, but it’ll be a cockameenie evasion. IDers’ adducing empirical evidence is dealing from the bottom of the deck to the evolutionists’ eyes.
‘There are more things in Randomness and Chaos than were ever dreamt of in your philosophy, IDers.’ A whole universe and.. and… a multiverse.. with G-String theories and everthang.’
Dr Selensky:
You are quite right.
The issue is that we are here dealing with organisation, in very special zones of the space of possible configs of the atoms and molecules in say our warm little pond.
The organisation includes: smart polymers sequenced to fold and fulfill specific functions, grouped in ways that are integrated to form a metabolising, self replicating automaton, where the self-replication facility involves digital codes, instructions, data storage elements, algorithms and the like, what Abel so carefully discusses as prescriptive information.
Indeed we have a metabolic entity with a von Neumann self-replicator.
The “fluctuation” to get to such a co-ordinated functional state defies the statistical imperatives of stat mech.
H’mm maybe this will help us see what is going on. Take a can of soup, open and pour into a pot. Keep on pouring in cans and turn on low heat. If you want you can pass electric currents through it and shine lights on it. Will you be likely to somehow end up with organisation of a new form of life, using the rich soup of life components in the pot?
Why or why not?
Similarly, set up a sterile flask, and do a prick and decant exercise with the contents of a living cell. Keep on pricking and pouring in. Will you at all be likely to form a new cell from the actual cell components?
Why or why not?
Remember, you are adding both relevant matter and energy in both cases.
(NB for onlookers: Statistical mechanics refines classical thermodynamics to not say things are outright forbidden on induction from experiment and related analysis, just that things that are sufficiently unusual will be so swamped by the bulk of ultramicroscopic possibilities for distributing energy and mass relative to the available macro-level constraints that they will not be observed with all but certainty. Classical thermodynamics worked from the macro observables to the famous laws, stat thermodynamics gives the molecular underpinnings in effect. Here’s the tickler, dumping in energy in an un-co-ordinated way will as a rule simply go into boosting available energy for random effects, i.e an energy importing subsystem tends strongly to get more disordered. Which is exactly what Clausius’ analysis to ground the 2nd law in classical form is saying. Remember, form the informational perspective, as Gilbert N Lewis and Jaynes et al put it, the entropy is in effect the measure of the freedom to form new configs that a system has under certain macro constraints. Of course, once we have life in hand the functionality of life is a constraint that can then be associated with a new dynamic, or metabolism and self replication, but the issue here is to get to that. And the challenge is to find a fluctuation which delivers the sort of organisation we are looking at. the numbers are simply out of reach for the available resources on our solar system or observed cosmos. That is what we are not seeing being fully and frankly faced.)
So, let us hear a good explanation for the origin of the relevant organisation, backed up by empirical evidence.
Otherwise it is all blue smoke and mirrors.
Here are Orgel and Shapiro on that, to what looks like mutual ruin for metabolism first and genes first models:
KF
Yeah, Nick is right- we exist and we know there wasn’t any dang-darn designer involved, so we know the second law was not violated.
Unfortunately for Nick and Andy Pross we are still waiting for a testable hypothesis, predictions and positive evidence for the premise living organisms are reducible to chemicals (matter & energy) and undirected endo + exothermic reactions.
LOL Axel,
sort of reminds me of this humorous article a while back lamenting the lack of any coherent creation account for atheists:
Likewise, Steve Martin laments the fact that Atheists really don’t have any traditional songs since they really have nothing to sing about:
But alas, what can you do for a philosophy that has everything backwards?
KF,
For some reason, it is not possible to leave a comment under another comment. So here it goes.
Spot on. Control defined by Abel as a formal procedure to steer a system to a goal state needs intelligent interference because upon massive observation it is clear that nature is inert to teleology. Inanimate nature can only provide constraints, not controls. I believe that in 50-100 years time they will count the likes of David Abel among the greatest thinkers of our time. Another profound thought I found in his book is that mathematics and the scientific method themselves due to (a) their formality and (b) their ability to grasp the essence of material reality point to an intelligent cause behind it. Formalism and control are reliable markers of intelligent agency. It’s that sort of books which you read and keep asking yourself, why haven’t I thought about this before?
Dr Selensky:
UD has reverted to timelined comments.
And I too have found Abel refreshing reading.
KF
Hi guys,
Please go read the wikipedia page on “kinetics” as it is used in the field of chemistry. You obviously do not know what it means or how it applies here, as no one has even addressed Pross’s point.
Re: Thaxton & co (1984) — I am very familiar with it. E.g.:
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/suppl.1/8669.full
As for the “no new information” argument:
And for the not-enough-detail argument:
http://www.nature.com/ni/journ.....6-433.html
Yes, yes, I’m aware that Behe did not use the words “not good enough”. But it’s true that he didn’t think they were good enough to rebut his claim that the scientific literature had “no answers” on the evolution of the immune system — when in fact it has a ton of answers, in a ton of peer-reviewed articles published in top journals.
Any response to this that does not acknowledge the existence of the transposon hypothesis, exhibit a decent understanding of that hypothesis and the evidence scientists cite in favor it, and give a more detailed alternative explanation, isn’t serious and isn’t worth responding to. The IDists haven’t provided one yet, I’m sure you guys won’t be able to either.
Oops, quotes and subquotes somewhat screwed up in last quote of previous, see links for original.
Hump that strawman Nick!
That is not the claim and you have been told that on several occasions. So either you have a learning disability or you are dishonest.
Also, Nick, ID is not anti-evolution so your continued equivocations are a fool’s folly.
See also Dr Behe Responds to Jones
Although just about everything Nick wrote is severely misleading, as usual, lets just focus on his claim, in the last part of his ‘atheistic’ diatribe, that claimed the immune system evolved to show just how severely misleading Nick is with the actual evidence:
Nick claims ‘tons of answers’:
Yet in the real world the fact is this:
It is interesting to note that many times evolutionists will try to use the highly choreographed mutation/selection process of the immune system itself, claiming that the brilliantly designed immune system is actually proof of evolution. Yet the immune system is almost exactly what we have with the evolutionists claims for ‘evolutionary algorithms’ in that the immune system is carefully designed from the outset to converge on a solution. It would be surprising, and deadly, if the immune system did not do exactly what it was ‘designed’ to do:
In this following podcast, Casey Luskin interviews microbiologist and immunologist Donald Ewert about his previous work as associate editor for the journal Development and Comparitive Immunology, where he realized that the papers published were comparative studies that had nothing to do with evolution at all.
The blatant deception (literature bluff), from neo-Darwinists at Dover, did not stop with immunology;
Cue Christian Rock song for you Nick;
Hi ba77.
1. Show me where I was advocating atheism in this thread. In fact, show me anywhere, anyplace, where I have ever advocated atheism. Good luck.
2. You apparently don’t know the difference between a claim about an evolution-like-process working in the current operation of today’s adaptive immune system, and a claim about how the adaptive immune system evolved. I was talking about the latter, your rebuttals are mostly about the former. How can we even discuss something if you just toss random unrelated links around? Why should any scientist take you seriously?
As for Ewert, I’ll see your one guy with dubious expertise in evolutionary immunology, making unpublished, and rather vague, claims about evolutionary immunology, under the careful guidance of Casey Luskin, who is desperate to get something, anything, with which to rebut the crashing defeat of Behe in the Kitzmiller case, versus the published, peer-reviewed work of hundreds of scientists in top journals. Any judge would pick our side faced with that evidence, it wasn’t some fluke unique to Judge Jones.
Dembski and other IDists have stated that irreducible complexity is a special case of specified complexity. If Behe is wrong about IC, then Dembski et al. are wrong about specified complexity. If Dembski et al. are wrong about specified complexity, then even the emergency-backup attempt to save the bogus, much-scorned “evolution violated the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, just like the YEC fundamentalists said 50 years ago, yay!” fails as well.
That’s an argument. Try making one instead of posting random links.
Nick, how come this song reminds me of you robotic Darwinbots?:
Nick you ask:
So Nick, if you are not advocating atheism, do you now admit that the Bacterial Flagellum is Intelligently Designed? Or have all your thousands upon thousands of words you’ve authored saying the Bacterial Flagellum was not Intelligently Designed just been a sham to hide your Theistic belief?
Speaking of which Nick, let’s see how far we can establish Theism as true for molecular biology shall we?
Falsification Of Neo-Darwinism by Quantum Entanglement/Information
Neo-Darwinian evolution purports to explain all the wondrously amazing complexity of life on earth by reference solely to chance and necessity processes acting on energy and matter (i.e. purely material processes). In fact neo-Darwinian evolution makes the grand materialistic claim that the staggering levels of unmatched complex functional information we find in life, and even the ‘essence of life’ itself, simply ‘emerged’ from purely material processes. And even though this basic scientific point, of the ability of purely material processes to generate even trivial levels of complex functional information, has spectacularly failed to be established, we now have a much greater proof, than this stunning failure for validation, that ‘put the lie’ to the grand claims of neo-Darwinian evolution. This proof comes from the fact that it is now shown from quantum mechanics that ‘information’ is its own unique ‘physical’ entity. A physical entity that is shown to be completely independent of any energy-matter space-time constraints, i.e. it does not ‘emerge’ from a material basis. Moreover this ‘transcendent information’ is shown to be dominant of energy-matter in that this ‘information’ is shown to be the entity that is in fact constraining the energy-matter processes of the cell to be so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium.
notes:
Falsification of neo-Darwinism;
First, Here is the falsification of local realism (reductive materialism).
Here is a clip of a talk in which Alain Aspect talks about the failure of ‘local realism’, or the failure of reductive materialism, to explain reality:
The falsification for local realism (reductive materialism) was recently greatly strengthened:
of note: hidden variables were postulated to remove the need for ‘spooky’ forces, as Einstein termed them — forces that act instantaneously at great distances, thereby breaking the most cherished rule of relativity theory, that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. This following video illustrates just how ‘spooky’, to use Einstein’s infamous word, this quantum action truly is:
And yet, this ‘spooky’ quantum entanglement, which rigorously falsified local realism (reductive materialism) as the ‘true’ description of reality, and blatantly defies our concepts of time and space, is now found in molecular biology on a massive scale!
Quantum Entanglement/Information is confirmed in DNA by direct observation here;
The necessity of ‘transcendent’ information, to ‘constrain’ a cell, against effects towards thermodynamic equilibrium is noted here:
i.e. It is very interesting to note, to put it mildly, that quantum entanglement, which conclusively demonstrates that ‘information’ in its pure ‘quantum form’ is completely transcendent of any time and space constraints, should be found in molecular biology on such a massive scale, for how can the quantum entanglement ‘effect’ in biology possibly be explained by a material (matter/energy space/time) ’cause’ when the quantum entanglement ‘effect’ falsified material particles as its own ‘causation’ in the first place? (A. Aspect) Appealing to the probability of various configurations of material particles, as neo-Darwinism does, simply will not help since a timeless/spaceless cause must be supplied which is beyond the capacity of the energy/matter particles themselves to supply! To give a coherent explanation for an effect that is shown to be completely independent of any time and space constraints one is forced to appeal to a cause that is itself not limited to time and space! i.e. Put more simply, you cannot explain a effect by a cause that has been falsified by the very same effect you are seeking to explain! Improbability arguments of various ‘specified’ configurations of material particles, which have been a staple of the arguments against neo-Darwinism, simply do not apply since the cause is not within the material particles in the first place!
,,,To refute this falsification of neo-Darwinism, one must overturn Alain Aspect, and company’s, falsification of local realism (reductive materialism) !
And to dovetail into Dembski and Marks’s previous work on Conservation of Information;,,,
,,,Encoded ‘classical’ information such as what Dembski and Marks demonstrated the conservation of, and such as what we find encoded in computer programs, and yes, as we find encoded in DNA, is found to be a subset of ‘transcendent’ (beyond space and time) quantum entanglement/information by the following method:,,,
,,,And to dot the i’s, and cross the t’s, here is the empirical confirmation that quantum information is in fact ‘conserved’;,,,
Further notes:
The following describes how quantum entanglement is related to functional information:
Anton Zeilinger, a leading researcher in Quantum mechanics, relates how quantum entanglement is related to quantum teleportation in this following video;
A bit more detail on how teleportation is actually achieved, by extension of quantum entanglement principles, is here:
And quantum teleporation has now shown that atoms, which are suppose to be the basis from which ALL functional information ‘emerges’ in the atheistic neo-Darwinian view of life, are now shown to be, in fact, reducible to the transcendent functional quantum information that the atoms were suppose to be the basis of in the first place!
Thus the burning question, that is usually completely ignored by the neo-Darwinists that I’ve asked in the past, is, “How can quantum information/entanglement possibly ‘emerge’ from any material basis of atoms in DNA, or any other atoms, when entire atoms are now shown to reduce to transcendent quantum information in the first place in these teleportation experiments??? i.e. It is simply COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE for the ’cause’ of transcendent functional quantum information, such as we find on a massive scale in DNA and proteins, to reside within, or ever ‘emerge’ from, any material basis of particles!!! Despite the virtual wall of silence I’ve seen from neo-Darwinists thus far, this is not a trivial matter in the least as far as developments in science have gone!!
It is very interesting to point out that even though ‘transcendent’ quantum entanglement/computation/information is found in molecular biology, on a massive scale, scientists are having a extremely difficult time achieving even the first tiny steps of quantum entanglement in machines, even though the payoff, and investment, is huge!;
And despite all this Nick and his Darwinbot cohorts will continue pretend with all their strength that neo-Darwinism is fact as well established as gravity! Go Figure?!?
Verse and music:
Hi NickMatzke:
No one knows how any immune system evolved. There isn’t any way to test any of the speculations pertaining to that subject.
That does not follow. What level is your education that you would say such a thing?
YOU said that IC is a SPECIAL CASE of SC. So that does not mean if you refute IC that you have refuted SC, just that special case.
However you are far from refuting IC, and you don’t have any idea of how to even go about doing such a thing.
Joe says:
Um, no. IDists assert that SC cannot evolve. IDists also assert that IC is a form of SC. Therefore, if IC can evolve, then SC can evolve. It could still be that some SC cannot evolve for other reasons, but being SC isn’t the reason, since that generalization has been falsified.
Joe says:
…completely ignoring the evidence of just such testing that was presented:
See original for links to the cited papers. In places like Nature.
*This* behavior of determined ignorance — of totally uninformed, yet brazenly confidence opposition to mainstream science — is why you ID guys are never going to be taken seriously in science. You might as well go to a Star Wars convention and start yelling to people that Chewbacca doesn’t have any hair.
Nick you state that IC (Irreducible Complexity) CAN evolve, yet I know of not one example of a molecular machine being evolved from scratch. For you to claim that these machines can evolve without actually demonstrating the origination of such a IC molecular machine from scratch, by purely neo-Darwinian processes, is certainly begging the question. Exactly why should I, or anyone else, take your thousands upon thousands of words that any IC system can evolve without you, or anyone else, actually physically evolving one by neo-Darwinian processes??? It is simply ludicrous beyond belief for you to be so dogmatic, not to mention ‘unscientific’:
Notes:
In spite of the fact of finding molecular motors permeating the simplest of bacterial life, there are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of even one such motor or system.
The following expert doesn’t even hide his very unscientific preconceived philosophical bias against intelligent design,,,
Yet at the same time the same expert readily admits that neo-Darwinism has ZERO evidence for the chance and necessity of material processes producing any cellular system whatsoever,,,
further notes:
List and videos of specific molecular machines
The following article has a list of 40 (yes, 40) irreducibly complex molecular machines in the cell:
Moreover, for whatever ‘transposon’ processes you listed, it seems readily apparent to me that the processes are NOT neo-Darwinian processes, in that they are not ‘random variations:
Nice line about Chewbacca, Nick.
NickMatzke:
No, Nick. IDists say that blind and undirected processes cannot produce IC- and that does not refer to all IC because it is clear that a two-part configuration would be IC.
See above.
As for your “evidence” similarities does not = evolution. And again it does not say that blind and undirected processes didit.
Your whole problem is that you just refuse to understand what Intelligent Design is and you have some straw man version that you keep refuting.
That nonsensical act does not fly on a Pro-ID blog- it may fly amongst your evobuds, but here it is a joke.
The following may have been updated:
Irreducible Complexity:
Dr Behe responds to IC criticisms:
Michael Behe on Falsifying Intelligent Design – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8jXXJN4o_A
Nick Matzke @19:
Thanks for the link. I didn’t look into this carefully enough and thought the abstract was referring to classical physics kinetics, which I see was my bad. I therefore withdraw my comment #10, which was obviously too hasty.
However, I don’t see how Pross’ paper is at all helpful. The head post to this thread quoted Abel as saying, in sum:
Part, though by no means all, of Abel’s argument appears to rest on his assessment of the inability of inanimate nature to, as he says, “pursue the goal of homeostasis; it cannot scheme to locally and temporarily circumvent the 2nd Law.”
Now, with that thermodynamic issue in mind, you have offered the Pross article, which builds on “Eigen’s ‘replication first’ model for life’s emergence.” Pross suggests that he is providing a new framework for “understanding life’s evolutionary driving force.”
This driving force, according to Pross, can be summarized as “the kinetic consequences of autocatalysis operating on specific biopolymeric systems.”
So the basic approach is this: (i) we have a biopolymer (let’s set aside for a moment how it came to exist), (ii) the biopolymer is involved in a chemical reaction, with the help of a catalyst, (iii) the reaction produces, in part, the catalyst (thus, autocatalysis), (iv) the reaction occurs at a particular rate (the “kinetic” part of the chemistry), and (v) because the reaction produces the catalyst that catalyzed the reaction in the first place the reaction can continue apace with a new biopolymer and/or even increase its rate if the original catalyst is not altered in the particular process and can be re-used.
Can anyone please explain how any of this could conceivably solve the thermodynamic/entropy issue that Pross acknowledges exists? What is it about autocatalysis and reaction rates that can possibly solve the problem? If what Pross is arguing is that because autocatalysis produces the very catalyst needed to perform the reaction in the first place, then fine, I’m on board with that. And in that sense, we could hypothesize that, given enough raw material, a particular reaction could continue to take place at a certain rate or even an increasing rate (the kinetic part of the theory).
But there are two fundamental problems with this idea. First, the catalyst simply facilitates (typically by speeding up) the reaction. The reaction could occur without it, it would just take longer, so all we’ve done is buy time, I haven’t changed anything fundamental about the replication process or the evolving or any of that. Second, the reaction continues, either linearly or exponentially, until it runs out of raw material. But I can get the same result from a forest fire. Again, whether the reaction rates are maintained or increased doesn’t tell us anything about what controls the rate or maintains a stable state.
No-one is arguing that catalysts aren’t involved in life’s reactions. They obviously are. No-one is arguing that life has the ability to temporarily beat back the incessant march of entropy. It of course does; that is one of its most interesting features. But to suggest that reaction rates and autocatalysis have, of themselves, resolved the issue is absurd.
For the record, I don’t think Pross is suggesting this much. He seems to be simply saying that some autocatalytic reactions can temporarily overcome classical thermodynamic considerations. If that is all he is saying, fine. I don’t disagree. But I also don’t think it is relevant to the question of life’s origin or subsequent diversification.
Pross’ abstract summarizes by saying “the replication reaction is an extreme expression of kinetic control.” It’s not real clear what this means, but yeah, OK. But wait a minute, what provides the control? There must be some kind of mechanism (apart from the pure chemical reactions and reaction rates) that provides this “extreme” control. What provides this control? Pross doesn’t say. And that is part of Abel’s point about mechanistic origins theories.
Finally, Pross ends with a cute word play on natural selection:
In essence, this is just a restatement of the ‘replication-first’ idea: we have some polymers that start to replicate, and they slowly evolve to add new features, and then one bright day they have added so many features that they are considered living. It is not at all clear how taking note of chemical reaction rates – important as they are – has any relevance to inanimate matter’s ability to come together in the right way, replicate, evolve, and become living.
Incidentally, I would also note that in proposing his new “replicative chemistry” Pross acknowledges that the thermodynamic issue and increasing entropy is a live problem for the evolutionary process and an active area of debate. So it is strange to hear people still deriding the entire issue as some “creationist” nonsense. I applaud Pross for trying to come up with a solution, but his “replicative chemistry” does not appear to provide any meaningful answer to the thermodynamic issue Pross acknowledges exists. It is even further from addressing the other critical issues of information content and control, which I consider to be more central than thermodynamics.
—–
Nick: “Life is a kinetically-dominated process, not a thermodynamically-dominated one.”
Life is dominated by chemical reaction rates? Yeah, sure, whatever. What does this even mean? There is nothing in chemistry — kinetic or otherwise — that even begins to explain the origin of living systems.
Nick, I may be wrong, but it appears that you saw this thread, did a quick PubMed search, and then threw out a paper that included some of the key terms in the abstract (evolution, thermodynamics), but which doesn’t actually address the well-known problems with origin of life scenarios, including those issues raised by Abel. I am sure that Pross is doing great science and that his work can add to our understanding of biochemistry. But, based on his abstract, I don’t think his paper demonstrates what you claim it demonstrates (or rather, what you implied, but purposely did not explicitly state, it claims). It sure feels like another one of your all-too-common literature bombs (although, mercifully, a small one).
Eric Anderson @36
I found a paper which expains more clearly the authors view of how he thinks kinetic stability relates to lifes origins. Here is the link: http://www.bgu.ac.il/~pross/PDF6%20PAC.pdf
Sorry, wrong link. Here it is: http://www.bgu.ac.il/~pross/PDF-6%20PAC.pdf
Thanks, kuartus. I’ve downloaded the paper and it looks to be somewhat interesting. Will take a while to go through, but hopefully in the next few days.
However, as far as origin of life goes (the subject of this thread), I’m not too optimistic. The abstract doesn’t give me much confidence (again, I’ll see what the rest of the paper says).
Folks:
The basic problem being dodged on this one is that with cell based life, we are dealing with a von Neumann self replicator, involving:
The existence of carefully set up autocatalytic reaction sets does not answer to the origin of such an irreducibly complex entity. In short, this is a case of the two drunks.
A: what are you looking for?
B: My contact lenses.
A: Let me help.
{ . . . 1/2 hr passes)
A: Are you sure you lost them here?
B: No, I lost them over there in the dark, but this is where the light is.
KF
I’ve now gone through most of Pross’ paper (2005) Stability in chemistry and biology: Life as a kinetic state of matter. In an attempt to keep this at least mercifully brief, I will just summarize what I’ve found. (If it is too big for a comment and needs a thread, I’ll leave that to the moderators.)
1. Pross recognizes the validity of the thermodynamic issue that has been raised against spontaneous generation of living systems from non-living matter. It is unclear to me whether his use of the word “thermodynamic” is completely consistent or accurate throughout the paper, but he understands and accepts that it is a live issue. It is assumed throughout his paper as the underlying problem he is trying to address, and one passage in particular makes the point:
I would add that it is not just that living systems tap into external sources of energy, but that they are capable of using that energy in just the right way. But in any event, Pross acknowledges it is a real issue and that it raises a real question, in contrast to many evolutionists’ quick dismissal of the thermodynamic issue as a non-issue, as a creationist talking point, or as being solved by the silly “open-system” argument. I don’t happen to think the thermodynamic issue is as important as information, for example, but it is a real issue and needs to be acknowledged as such.
2. Pross does not claim that he has found a way to overcome the thermodynamic issue per se. Rather, what he claims is that thermodynamics becomes a minor player to the “kinetic” considerations he is proposing, as discussed below. Thermodynamics is thus held at bay or overcome by kinetics, in other words.
3. Pross builds his ideas on a “replication first” model. In short, the model is that at some point a molecule of inanimate matter gained the ability to self-replicate. It self-replicated with variation. That variation led to greater complexity. That complexity turned to systems and eventually to the point where it could be considered “alive.” Pross contrasts this view with that of the “emergent property” school of thought, a la Kauffman, and states that emergence is not a viable answer. He also dismisses panspermia because it simply relocates the problem to another location. My estimation is that Pross’ view – the replication-first view – is probably the most common view among proponents of abiogenesis. For example, Szostak’s lab at Harvard is specifically operating under this assumption.
4. Pross should be commended for laying out his assumptions up front, which he does in some detail. The most telling, for purposes of this thread and Abel’s work, is the following:
Well, that is the $64,000 question, isn’t it!? Pross’ work, by definition, does not address ID proponents’ challenge to the ability of natural laws to create life without intelligent input, because Pross doesn’t address the issue – indeed, he assumes it away. I’m not necessarily faulting Pross on this point. His paper is intended to address a separate issue: thermodynamics. But it is important to keep our eye on the ball here so that we understand what is demonstrated and what is assumed.
There are additional interesting quotes on this theme, but the above will suffice.
5. Pross develops his concept of “kinetic stability” as a term that he can apply to populations of replicators (either single molecules or organisms). His basic idea is that, yes, thermodynamics tends to drive inanimate systems to a stable state, but that something else drives replicating systems to a different stable state. And what stable state would that be? Well, Pross adopts Dawkins’ argument that “stable” means “persistent, unchanging with time.”
In other words, Pross argues, “stability” in the living realm is equated with “survival of the fittest.”
If at this point, it seems to you that Pross has gone off the rails, you are not alone. This is simply a rhetorical exercise of re-labeling “survival of the fittest” with the term “stability.” Then the magic begins.
6. Pross argues that because survival of the fittest of replicating organisms (or early molecules) represents a kind of “stability,” populations can continue to thrive and replicate at such stability, indeed, will even tend toward that stability. In other words, although inanimate systems tend toward thermodynamic stability, living replicating systems tend to continue living and replicating (i.e., tend toward Pross’ and Dawkins’ concept of stability).
This is, unfortunately, a non-substantive labeling exercise. What causes the organism to replicate? What controls the replication reactions? What determines the timing and frequency of the replication? All we’ve done really is redefine successful “replication” to mean “stability.”
7. Pross’ idea seems to have credence only insofar as the biological details remain sufficiently vague. Indeed, there are some statements that appear simply incorrect from a biological standpoint. Pross may be forgiven for referring to the hypothetical first self-replicating molecule (can anyone point me to a self-replicating molecule?), but it seems even less appropriate for him to discuss a phage or virus as a two-part “replicating system.” He later acknowledges that “the cell’s replication machinery is then taken over” for the virus to propagate, but it doesn’t seem to sink in how important it is that embedded in this cellular machinery is a whole suite of systems, controls, translation machinery, software protocol hierarchies, and so on.
8. Pross further acknowledges that his phage example “is only applicable in a biotic environment where the phage can exploit the metabolic and replicative machineries of its host cell.” What relevance would this have to a pre-biotic world? Well, let’s just assume it is relevant!
There is much here to critique, but let’s just parse that last reference. What does it mean to be “kinetically selected?” As near as can be ascertained, this simply refers back to the idea that organisms that effectively replicate (i.e., are “stable” populations under Dawkins or Pross) will be selected. Selected, of course, in the sense of “survival of the fittest,” which a la Dawkins, means the population is “stable.” If this seems to you an exercise in circularity, you are not far off.
9. One of the most astounding statements in the paper, however, is the following:
Did you catch the logic? If you need to re-read that quote, please do. The assertion is that because we don’t have good examples of simple replicators (especially that elusive self-replicating molecule), but we do have lots of examples of complicated replicators, then obviously complicated replicators are more successful at replicating. This in turn means, if you allow us to throw in our new definitions, complicated replicators are more “stable,” in which case, replicating systems do tend toward complication and, therefore, stability. Thus there is no violation of thermodynamic concerns.
I’m trying to think of a charitable way to characterize all this . . .
The paper continues in a similar vein and we could labor the point, but this is already too long and covers the essentials.
In Sum
Deapite the title of the paper, Pross has not identified any new property of matter. He has not identified any new form of organizational structure. He has not identified any law of physics or chemistry that would cause the first replicator to form. He has not identified any engine to drive the wheels of change and development. He has not addressed the fundamental issues of information content and control.
Once we strip away the new terminology and focus on the real substance there isn’t much to go on. In essence, what Pross has done is (i) take the general concept of “survival of the fittest,” (ii) re-label it to mean “stability,” (iii) apply this concept of “stability” to molecular systems and label it “kinetic stability,” and (iv) argue that because these systems are “stable” the law of thermodynamics is overcome and not violated in the case of replicating living systems.
This is interesting. Not interesting in a scientific sense, mind you, but interesting in the sense of a couple of friends throwing out ideas over drinks at the pub after work. We’ll perhaps hear some more about this “kinetic” idea of life in the future and I wish Pross well in his efforts. Just don’t hold your breath waiting for anything meaningful to come of it.
—–
For the Onlookers:
This has been an interesting experience the past day or two, and one that has been replicated numerous times in the past on this site and others. Specifically, some very cogent and serious issues have been raised with respect to many aspects of evolutionary theory, perhaps particularly in the origin of life area. One of the most time-worn (and annoying) tactics of evolutionary proponents in responding to these cogent criticisms is to (i) accuse critics of being “out of touch with the literature” and then (ii) throw out a literature bluff – a citation or several citations of papers that allegedly address the issue.
This literature bluff tactic is a particular favorite of Nick Matzke, who has regularly employed it on this site. He generally sees a post, does a quick PubMed or similar search, finds a couple of articles that include the relevant terms in the abstract (in this case “evolution” “thermodynamics”, etc.), and then throws the articles over the transom to see what will stick, with the obligatory sniff-and-stick-the-nose-in-the-air accusation that people aren’t up on the latest literature.
In the present case, the abstract Nick quoted from Pross and the more up-to-date article I reviewed above, turned out to be yet another literature bluff. Pross’ idea is interesting in some minor facets, but doesn’t even come close to addressing the issues Abel raises. Nick would have known that if he had read Pross’ work. Or perhaps he does know, but just likes to pull our chain, as has been done so many times in the past.
The reality is that the issues raised by ID proponents (and many critics of evolutionary theory who don’t hold to ID) relating to information content, digital coding, translation mechanisms, cybernetic controls and the like are so critical and so fundamental that if there were good materialistic answers to them you can be sure the answers would be shouted from the rooftops with Nobel prizes showering down far and wide, not contained in an old paper in some obscure journal archive.
Natural Selection Is Ubiquitous
Higgs Particle? Dark Energy/Matter? Epigenetics?
These Are YOK!
Update Concepts-Comprehension…
http://universe-life.com/2011/.....d-whither/
Evolution Is The Quantum Mechanics Of Natural Selection.
The quantum mechanics of every process is its evolution.
Quantum mechanics are mechanisms, possible or probable or actual mechanisms of natural selection.
=================
Universe-Energy-Mass-Life Compilation
http://universe-life.com/2012/.....mpilation/
A. The Universe
From the Big-Bang it is a rationally commonsensical conjecture that the gravitons, the smallest base primal particles of the universe, must be both mass and energy, i.e. inert mass yet in motion even at the briefest fraction of a second of the pre Big Bang singularity. This is rationally commonsensical since otherwise the Big would not have Banged, the superposition of mass and energy would not have been resolved.
The universe originates, derives and evolves from this energy-mass dualism which is possible and probable due to the small size of the gravitons.
Since gravitation Is the propensity of energy reconversion to mass and energy is mass in motion, gravity is the force exerted between mass formats.
All the matter of the universe is a progeny of the gravitons evolutions, of the natural selection of mass, of some of the mass formats attaining temporary augmented energy constraint in their successive generations, with energy drained from other mass formats, to temporarily postpone, survive, the reversion of their own constitutional mass to the pool of cosmic energy fueling the galactic clusters expansion set in motion by the Big Bang.
B. Earth Life
Earth Life is just another mass format. A self-replicating mass format. Self-replication is its mode of evolution, natural selection. Its smallest base primal units are the RNAs genes.
The genesis of RNAs genes, life’s primal organisms, is rationally commonsensical thus highly probable, the “naturally-selected” RNA nucleotides. Life began/evolved on Earth with the natural selection of inanimate RNA, then of some RNA nucleotides, then arriving at the ultimate mode of natural selection, self-replication.
C. Know Thyself. Life Is Simpler Than We Are Told
The origin-reason and the purpose-fate of life are mechanistic, ethically and practically valueless. Life is the cheapest commodity on Earth.
As Life is just another mass format, due to the oneness of the universe it is commonsensical that natural selection is ubiquitous for ALL mass formats and that life, self-replication, is its extension. And it is commonsensical, too, that evolutions, broken symmetry scenarios, are ubiquitous in all processes in all disciplines and that these evolutions are the “quantum mechanics” of the processes.
Human life is just one of many nature’s routes for the natural survival of RNAs, the base primal Earth organisms.
Life’s evolution, self-replication:
Genes (organisms) to genomes (organisms) to mono-cellular to multicellular organisms:
Individual mono-cells to cooperative mono-cells communities, “cultures”.
Mono-cells cultures to neural systems, then to nerved multicellular organisms.
Human life is just one of many nature’s routes for the natural survival of RNAs, the base Earth organism.
It is up to humans themselves to elect the purpose and format of their life as individuals and as group-members.
Dov Henis (comments from 22nd century)
An Embarrassingly Obvious Theory Of Everything
http://universe-life.com/2011/.....verything/