Origin of life in hot water? Scalding water?

Discovery Institute advises,

Is the Origin of Life in Hot Water?
Is origin of life chemistry in hot water? So it seems according to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors address the conundrum of origin of life chemists between the rate of (un-catalyzed) organic reactions and the lack of time available for these reactions to occur. From the article (note: an enzyme is a biological catalyst):

Whereas enzyme reactions ordinarily occur in a matter of milliseconds, the same reactions proceed with half-lives of hundreds, thousands, or millions of years in the absence of a catalyst. Yet life is believed to have taken hold within the first 25% of Earth's history. How could cellular chemistry and the enzymes that make life possible, have arisen so quickly?" [Internal citations omitted]

Indeed this is one of the problems with origin of life scenarios, particularly those scenarios that presume a metabolism-first world (as opposed to an RNA-first world). The half-life of certain reactions without a catalyst can be millions of years, but studies show that the emergence of early bacteria could be dated as far back as 3.5 billion years (see ENV post on a cold origin of life and Schopf, J. William, "The First Billion Years: When Did Life Emerge?" Elements vol 2:229 (2006) for more on this). This means there was a limited amount of time for fundamental biological reactions to occur. Reaction kinetics can be prohibitive. However, the authors of this paper have a theory to solve the reaction kinetics problem.

Do they? I bet you are going to go right ahead and spoil my illusions again,
Evil Discos. And to think I am just getting over the disappointments created by the primordial soup, the primordial pizza, and the chemical minestrone.

The trouble with all these "food fight" origin scenarios is the assumption that if a big enough mess gets made, order and information will happen naturally. As if.

From the "Now what?" Department: How the fish grew its legs?

Must have been a slow news day in Ottawa.

This is a tough one to understand. How could a fish just grow legs? It mystifies us, and so this part of evolutionary theory is a common target for cheap attacks from creationists. Therefore, it's extremely valuable that a scientist has now found a way in which a genetic tweaking makes a zebrafish embryo stop growing fins, and start growing an appendage that looks like a leg. If she can tweak a gene in the lab, maybe one of the many mutations that pop up in nature could do the same.

- Tom Spears, "How the tetrapod got its legs" (June 27, 2010)

Read more here.

Priceless. You can't make this stuff up.

In fairness to journalist Spears, he is properly uncertain about just what has been discovered here, for good reason. "An appendage that looks like a leg" is what, exactly?

It only counts if it acts like a leg. Ask an amputee.

And it better act soon, too, because otherwise the fish is a cripple. What happens when predator fish arrive, as would happen in nature, if not in a lab?

Oh, we did remember to install quills among the gills, didn't we? And a system for making them stand up ...

Obviously, fish moved onto land some time (and do today), but legs are not the point. (If they were, snakes and legless lizards would not exist.) The critical issue is breathing apparatus.

Origin of life theory: Complexity theorist Kauffman moving on

Stuart Kauffman, a big name in complexity theory, is leaving the University of Calgary for the University of Vermont . He used to be at the Santa Fe Institute.

I'm not clear on what he actually did at the University of Calgary, Canada, that attracted much attention but you can read more about him at Edge.

He wrote a book called Reinventing the Sacred, but he could have written it in Death Valley or Alaska. I am told it is the usual science-religion Templeton style book.

The press release informs me that Kauffman is ''one of the world's most eminent scientists" and that the MacArthur foundation has officially labelled him a "genius," stuff I could never have imagined from reading his first book, At Home in the Universe. But then I had no idea that Richard Dawkins (a guy who can't even find his own computer code) is, by his own admission, "the most formidable intellect in public discourse" either.

Obviously, these people take the concept of humility much more seriously than most people I run into.

An interesting coincidence is that Kauffman shared the 2005 Trotter Prize at Texas A&M with our own Bill Dembski, often sighted here. Does that make Bill a genius too?

I hope not. Co-blogging with a genius, I might feel intimidated (something you sure don't need in this business) or else start to give myself airs ("the most formidable intellect in raccoon riddance on Latimer Avenue in Toronto"). Hey, I want a more fashionable hairdresser already.

Details: Right now

Kauffman is director for biocomplexity and informatics at the University of Calgary. Over the past year, he has been a visiting scholar at the Harvard Divinity School and will concurrently hold the title of "Finnish Distinguished Professor" with the Tempere University of Technology in Finland during part of his tenure at UVM.

But

Kauffman will join UVM's Complex Systems Center with a joint faculty appointment in the university's College of Medicine and College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences. Funding secured by Senator Patrick Leahy in the NASA budget for 2009 launched the Complex Systems Center.

"I couldn't be more pleased that Dr. Kauffman, a world-renowned scholar, author, and entrepreneur in complex systems, has chosen the University of Vermont to continue his transformational work," said vice president for research and dean of the Graduate College, Domenico Grasso. "Stuart is tackling some of the most difficult and important issues of our time, from the behavior of cells in cancer treatment to the origin of life. His work adds new strength to the University of Vermont's growing reputation as a national center for excellence in high-value, multidisciplinary, and relevant research for our 21st century society."

In case you wondered,

Complex systems science focuses on the emergent and adaptive behaviors between multiple systems and their interactions  environmental, social, economic, technological  and has been identified as a strategic focus area for both federal government and private industry research investments in the next ten years. Over the past four years, and in advance of these national trends, UVM has successfully recruited world-class young faculty in complex systems  faculty with interests in adaptive robotics, social networks, infectious disease transmission, chaotic systems and climate change, "smart" energy systems, and evolutionary biology, to name a few.

Uncommon Descent Contest Question 9: Is accidental origin of life a doctrine that holds back science?

For a free copy of Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009), help me understand the following:

Accidental origin of life is the basic thesis of origin of life researchers. Life all just somehow sort of happened one day, billions of years ago, under the right conditions - which we may be able to recreate. But there is a constant, ongoing dispute about just what those conditions were.

Here is the problem I have always had with accidental origin of life: It amounts to spontaneous generation. However, banishing the doctrine of spontaneous generation played a key role in modern medicine's success. If we assume that life forms (for medical purposes, we focus on pathogens) cannot start spontaneously, then they must have been introduced. Hence, we can develop procedures for a sterile operating room or lab.

If life can be spontaneously generated, why isn't it happening now? Conditions for life today are probably as good as they have ever been, and maybe better. For over 500 million years they have obviously been good for complex life forms, and for billions of years they have been good for simple ones.

Go here to enter.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Podcast in the intelligent design controversy: Origin of life: Continuing failure of theories

At http://www.idthefuture.com/, sponsored by the Discovery Institute*:

The New Spontaneous Generationists

Click here to listen.

On this episode of ID the Future, Anika Smith interviews writer Robert Deyes on The New Spontaneous Generationists, who argue that "matter and energy somehow self-originated into complex forms without outside intelligence." While we may have moved beyond expecting rats to materialize from garbage heaps and maggots from decaying meat, materialists today are trying to simulate the origin of first life without intelligent agency -- and they're failing. Listen in to learn why, and read Deyes' article at ARN's ID Report for more.

(*whom I have often called the "evil Discos" , ironically, precisely because of the libels I have heard against them. I have met them and know no good reason for the libels.

And I could not quote on this blog the libels that have been uttered against me.

This is a "family" blog. Kids do not need to know how such totally messed up
guys regard traditional grannies. The kids have a future, even if those guys do not.)

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Could life on Earth be much older than supposed?

A team of researchers based at the Curtin University of Technology near Perth, Australia, believe they have evidence that life may have begun 700 million years earlier than traditionally assumed. According to their July 3, 2008 announcement,

The 4.2 billion year old diamonds found trapped inside the Jack Hills zircon crystals are the oldest-known samples of Earth’s carbon. The Curtin led team’s discovery of very high concentrations of carbon 12, or “light carbon” within these crystals is remarkable as it is a feature usually associated with organic life.

[ ... ]

Evidence for ancient life stretches back in time to at least 3.5 billion years ago, in the form of single-celled organisms that did not require oxygen. The discovery of light carbon in the Jack Hills crystals raises the question – did a simple life form exist on Earth 700 million years earlier than previously thought?

According to geologist team leader Alexander Nemchin,

The discovery challenges our fundamental understanding of processes active in the early history of the Earth. It suggests that life may well have appeared on Earth long before the period of heavy-meteorite bombardment believed by some to have initiated the emergence of life on Earth.

Alternatively, light carbon doesn't necessarily signal life.

If life really appeared on Earth long before heavy meteor bombardment, theories that involve any kind of gradual Darwinian process for the origin of life are pretty much dead.

We are then left with either an extraterrestrial origin of life or an origin coded into the formation of Earth itself - an intelligent design hypothesis.

Sci-fi writer reminds us that life from outer space is not life from Roswell

In "Gods, Earthlings, and Intelligent Design," sci-fi writer Jerry Pournelle reminds us that the idea that life might have begun in outer space has always been a respectable hypothesis. It did not originate among alien conspiracy theorists at Roswell but among serious scientists who recognized how difficult the origin of life problem really is:

This was in fact an hypothesis put forth by the late Sir Fred Hoyle in his book Evolution from Space ; and let me assure you that far from being a fundamentalist creationist, Sir Fred had a pretty sophisticated theory of how evolution might be influenced by extra terrestrials who were neither gods nor superbeings. Sir Fred’s theories would and did horrify fundamentalists.

They were also theories. By theory I mean statements sufficiently precise to generate falsifiable hypotheses. Sir Fred’s book gives a number of assertions about Darwinism and natural selection, and gives his reasons for believing in the high improbability to impossibility that certain known conditions were the result of random factors. His arguments are complex and I don’t intend to reproduce them here; but they are available in his book. Whether or not Sir Fred makes his case I leave to others; but I at least have not seen a definitive refutation of what he said. Mostly Sir Fred has been ignored.

Hoyle was ignored because most people preferred to believe in the Shazzam! origin of life in a warm little test tube somewhere. Most people believe in miracles.

And they are still looking for that warm little tube.

Pournelle adds,

The panspermia hypothesis, which asserts that life originated on a planet other than Earth and was brought here by either natural or intelligently directed actions, is hardly ludicrous, has at least some unexplained evidence in its favor, and holding it as an hypothesis is hardly evidence of buffoonery. The late Robert Bussard was well known to believe in panspermia. Several of my science fiction novels make use of this hypothesis, and I have yet to see any definitive refutation.

Pournelle is sympathetic to the intelligent design theorists, noting that computer simulations that claim to "prove" Darwinian evolution require favourable assumptions and other tinkering ("adjustments") to make them work.

In other words, they require intelligent design.

Hat tip: Dave Scot at Uncommon Descent.

Expelled! Time Magazine recipe for life on Earth: Stir and cook real slow

In "Ben Stein Dukes it out with Darwin," Time's Jeffrey Kluger provides yet
another reason for thinking that the legacy mainstream media are, well, toast. He announces,

The man made famous by Ferris Bueller, however, quickly wades into waters far too deep for him. He makes all the usual mistakes nonscientists make whenever they try to take down evolution, asking, for example, how something as complex as a living cell could have
possibly arisen whole from the earth's primordial soup. The answer is it couldn't--and it didn't. Organic chemicals needed eons of stirring and slow cooking before they could produce compounds that could begin to lead to a living thing.

Huh? Stirring and slow cooking? Look, I am not making this up.

Every serious origin of life (OOL) researcher finds OOL an excruciatingly difficult problem. Genome mapper and Nobelist Francis Crick, a staunch atheist, suggested that life must have been brought here by intelligent aliens, and Richard Dawkins is willing to entertain that idea too. But science writer Jeffrey Kluger somehow knows the "answer" that eludes all those guys?

Toward the end, Kluger concedes

In fairness to Stein, his opponents have hardly covered themselves in glory. Evolutionary biologists and social commentators have lately taken to answering the claims of intelligent-design boosters not with clear-eyed scientific empiricism but with sneering, finger-in-the-eye atheism,

an approach Kluger deplores.

And Jeffrey, why do you suppose they have lately taken to that? Why would they prefer "sneering, finger-in-the-eye atheism" to clear-eyed scientific empiricism - for example, providing convincing evidence that natural selection produces a vast quantity of new information in life forms?

Could it be because they don't have the evidence but they do have the atheism? Jathink?

Anyway, given recent wholesale attempts to suppress discussion of the problems with Darwinism and materialist theories in general, the ID guys are well past concern about the atheist circus. Kluger probably didn't notice the drive to restore intellectual freedom. Just as well, because you only need that if you have new ideas.

Another Toronto journalist takes swat at Darwinists (or Darwinoids)

One of the most interesting journalists in Toronto is a friend of mine, David Warren, who - as if he did not have enough troubles - has gotten sick of bloviating Darwinists and decided to take them on. At least I am not alone. Far from it.

Writing to friends, Warren notes, "I have been remiss. I have allowed several months to do by without taking another kick at the Darwinoids. I endeavour to correct this oversight in my column for Sunday," whereupon he directs us to his recent column for The Spectator:

I get such apoplectic letters, whenever I write about "evolutionism," that I really can't resist writing about it again. This is not, of course, because I have any desire to tease such correspondents. Perish the thought. Rather, when a writer finds he has hit such a nerve, he can also know that he is approaching a great truth.

In this case, we must ask ourselves why so many people get so excited about an area of science that should not concern them. For most of these correspondents know precious little science, and haven't the stamina to engage in detailed argument. They are simply shocked and appalled that anyone would dream of challenging what they believe to be the consensus of "qualified experts," whom they assume are a closed camp of hard-bitten materialists, with no time for religious or poetical flights.

The answer to this question is clear enough. People without a stake in a controversy pay little or no attention to it. They will hardly be vexed by assertions of one party or another, when the result of the controversy cannot touch their lives. It is rather when a person does have a stake, that he begins to care.

It follows that my most apoplectic correspondents have a stake in evolutionary controversies. They imagine themselves to have an impersonal interest in defending science against "religious superstition," and the dangers to society that the latter might present. They in fact have strong and uncompromising religious beliefs of their own, which they are loath to have questioned.

Much of the "star chamber" atmosphere, that has accompanied the public invigilation of microbiologists such as Michael J. Behe, and other very qualified scientists working on questions of design in organisms and natural systems, can only be explained in this way. The establishment wants such research to be stopped, because it challenges the received religious order, of atheist materialism. Any attempt, or suspected attempt, to acknowledge God in scientific proceedings, must be exposed and punished to the limit of the law; or by other ruthless means where the law does not suffice.

Not to be missed.

An author friend asked Warren recently,

Suppose Lemaitre had offered his Big Bang idea in our current intellectual climate, rather than in 1931. Would he be denounced as a crypto-creationist, trying to dress up the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo in scientific garb? After all, a universe that has always existed does not need a God to create it; that is why the eternality of the world has been a cardinal tenet of those who do not need the hypothesis of God. Once the eternality of the world is no longer accepted, then we are right back to Leibniz' question, "Why is there something rather than nothing," and this question has dangerous theological implications.

and he replied,

For sure, Lemaître would have died an ignominious intellectual death in our time. But then, he never tried to call attention to himself, & even now, everyone has heard about Einstein & Hubble, & no one about the man who went "behind & beyond" them.

When I asked Warren if he realized that he would be vilified, as neurosurgeon Mike Egnor has been vilified, he merely replied,

Well, as someone says on your blog (maybe it was you), the way the news on ID gets out, is by all these Darwinoid idiots drawing attention to it. Pravda used to make the same mistake. Nobody realized there'd been a riot in Gorki, until Pravda denied anything had happened.

Yes, that was me, David. I said that the Darwinists have done far more to promote the intelligent design guys' theories than the evil Discos could ever have done. In fact, I remember listening to a Toronto Darwinist announcing to a media person that the Discovery Institute was very well funded. When I pointed out to him that Discovery's Center for Science and Culture (the ID think tank) is actually quite small - and that it relies largely on converting the negative energy generated by people like himself into positive energy - it was obvious that he didn't believe me.

How about that! There he was, actually demonstrating the phenomenon, and he still did not believe me. David, I am afraid there's no help for people like that.

Oh, and, Warren also writes,

Meanwhile, entirely unrelated, my time is taken up answering in detail the most ridiculous allegations against me, against Prof Michael Behe, & against God, by correspondents to the Tottawa Zit [Ottawa Citizen].

Let me give you JUST one example of the sort of sh*t I'm dealing with.

There was a show trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, two years ago, in which a local school board was prosecuted by the Darwinoids for having permitted the teaching of "Intelligent Design." This was publicized by the gliberal media as, "Another Scopes trial in America!" The defence called Michael Behe, so the plaintiffs brought very high-powered attorneys, to lure him into traps. One of them, a certain Eric Rothschild, made tendentious points on the definition of "science." Prof Behe wouldn't play, & noted only, & rather dryly, that if the official definition of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences were used, almost every major advance in modern science would have to be ruled illegal. Rothschild then paraphrased Behe's position as, "So you believe astrology is valid science." Needless to say, Behe does not.

This was reported, in e.g. the New Scientist, as, "Behe forced to admit that astrology is valid science according to his definition."

And now, in letter after letter to the Zit, the Darwinoids have simplified this to, "Behe also believes in astrology."

Note: If you are looking for the story about the major film about the ID guys, starring Ben Stein, go here.

Origin of life research: A perfect circularity

Here is neuroscientist Michael Egnor, who has said such kind things about The Spiritual Brain on on origin of life research:

The National Research Council’s report — The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems — is a must read. Not for the science — what there is of it can be summed up simply: we have no clue how life began. No, the report is a must read for the insight it offers into the current state of origin of life research:

For generations the definition of life has eluded scientists and philosophers. (Many have come to recognize that the concept of “definition” itself is difficult to define)… Indeed, because the chemical structures of terran biomolecular systems all appear to have arisen through Darwinian processes, it is hardly surprising that some of the more thoughtful definitions of life hold that it is a “chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.” [emphasis mine]

Aside from jargon that would make Derrida squirm— “the concept of definition is itself difficult to define”— the Council claims to see, through post-modern haze, a more thoughtful definition of life: life is defined as “a chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution”! This more thoughtful definition of life is an even grander tautology than 'survivors survive': Darwin’s theory must explain life because life is defined as ‘what Darwin’s theory explains.’ You've got to admire the audacity.

Here's a backgrounder on why origin of life is such a difficult problem. Oh, and here is a $1 million dollar prize if you can figure out how the genetic code arose spontaneously.

And the theory that life began in outer space has fallen on hard times, according to recent reports:

For the first time, there are solid data to refute a popular theory that life came to the Earth aboard a comet, Rutgers researchers said Monday.
Deteriorated DNA from microbes, frozen for millions of years in the Antarctic ice, shows that organisms could not have survived the bombardment of cosmic radiation during deep space travel from outside the solar system, said Paul Falkowski, a Rutgers biologist and oceanographer.

Toronto journalist David Warren comments,

Like every other pointy-head Darwinoid theory, the idea behind "Panspermianism" is to transfer the problem of life's origin on earth, out of the finite space & time of the earth's own geological history, & into some abstract place where the laws of chance have an infinite amount of time to do whatever is necessary. But the game is up. We can now roughly date the origin of our universe, & 15 billion years is WAY too short a time for random processes to produce a non-random result. Verily, 15 billion times 15 billion years is still not nearly enough time.

There are some miracles that just cannot be explained away.

Note: If you are looking for the story about the major film about the ID guys, starring Ben Stein, go here.

Genome mapping: Oldest animals "more complex than thought"

In The Scientist, Melissa Lee Phillips writes:

The genome of the sea anemone, one of the oldest living animal species on Earth, shares a surprising degree of similarity with the genome of vertebrates, researchers report in this week's Science.

The study also found that these similarities were absent from fruit fly and nematode genomes, contradicting the widely held belief that organisms become more complex through evolution. The findings suggest that the ancestral animal genome was quite complex, and fly and worm genomes lost some of that intricacy as they evolved.

One really interesting example of the pervasiveness of Darwinism in academic culture is the inability (due to fear mainly, I should think) to spell out the implications of such findings except in a veiled way (the "more complex than thought" schtick).

Let's go over the argument: The Gospel according to Charles Darwin teaches that life originated and complexified by natural selection acting on random mutations over vast eons. In other words, there was a slow increase in complexity. As the item in The Scientist clearly spells out, in this case we actually see here huge complexity near the beginning of life, with losses among complex diversified species such as fruit flies. In other words, evolution meant reduced complexity. And the original complexity came from where, exactly?

No wonder there is an intelligent design controversy! It would actually be dangerous to a scientist's career to discuss these matters openly.

If you are interested in why there is an intelligent design controversy, and why it can't just go away, check out my book, By Design or by Chance?

Origin of life: Tangled skein continues to tangle

Here is a report from Ed Pelter on the current state - actually statelessness - of origin of life research. Here's a summary of some of the issues, by the way.

Personally, I am fascinated by the speculation around origin of life, just as I love listening to discussions of why Rome fell. But one thing especially intrigues me: Materialists both deny that intelligence is necessary for the universe to exist, yet insist that they will somehow find out how life accidentally originated. This is a really interesting disconnect because if the universe is indeed a great thought rather than a great machine, the great mind might leave clues for little minds. But if it is just the materialist's cosmic void, maybe nada.

Who believes what about origins?:

Here's a .pdf of an article article by Marcus Ross in the Journal of Geosciences Education, attempting to sort out who believes what about origins. Ross writres to say,

The goal of the paper is to show how the different teleological (purpose/design) positions relate to one another, and why painting IDers as creationists (and vice versa) just doesn’t work.

Yes, yes, it's that Marcus Ross, who got a PhD even though the New York Times disapproves of his religious beliefs, who also offered some interesting insights into the Kent Hovind scandal.
(Note: It's a .pdf, so if you open it, you might not get back here using the back browser button. )

Harvard's origin of life project: Taking intelligent design seriously - but what follows?

Gareth Cook's article on the new Harvard origin of life project in the Boston Globe, reads like a press release (except for the very end where he actually quotes Michael Behe). Bill Dembski blogged on it, wondering how seriously they would take any evidence of intelligent design.

Starting with $1 million a year, we are told, Harvard will

bring together scientists from fields as disparate as astronomy and biology, to understand how life emerged from the chemical soup of early Earth, and how this might have happened on distant planets.

On the whole, this "Origins of Life in the Universe Initiative" is good news for the ID guys, first because the Harvard project seems to acknowledge what everyone who looks into the question soon finds out - that origin of life studies have been at an impasse for decades.

Like intelligent design, the Harvard project begins with awe at the nature of life, and with an admission that, almost 150 years after Charles Darwin outlined his theory of evolution in the Origin of Species, scientists cannot explain how the process began.

Many science textbooks fudge this issue, so don't be surprised if comes as news to you. It might come as news to your old biology teacher too.

Why is origin of life difficult to determine?

To understand the nature of the origin of life researchers' difficulties, we must see what Harvard's precise goal is. Chemist David Liu puts it as follows: "... my expectation is that we will be able to reduce this to a very simple series of logical events that could have taken place with no divine intervention."

Or, translating from the theistic idiom, Harvard's proposition is that intelligence is not necessary, that the universe is bottom up, not top down, and that order may be had for free.

Indeed, that has always been the key difficulty in origin of life (OoL) research. Understanding the OoL is not difficult in principle, because our universe appears to be fine tuned for just such a thing to happen.

Put another way, if all the odds were against life, we should indeed wonder that it exists! But the odds are for it. So in principle, the origin is eminently researchable, just as fine-tuning is.

BUT if your project, like Harvard's, is to rule out an intelligence behind the odds, you have a big job ahead, maybe an impossible one.

I don't think Harvard yard will succeed, but here's the difficulty: They will easily persuade themselves that they have succeeded. That is usually the way with such projects.

Taking intelligent design seriously

Why so? Well, in the first place, as reporter Cook's story makes clear, the background to the project is alarm over the idea of intelligent design. Indeed, the story unobtrusively demonstrates how seriously intelligent design has come to be taken. Just as NASA spent billions trying to disconfirm the Big Bang, Harvard will spent at least millions trying to disconfirm ID, where origin of life is concerned. Actually, Harvard has no alternative.

Remember that when some boffo pundit assures you that ID is not taken seriously by scientists.

Why you will be told the project is succeeding even if it isn't

Apart from the taxpayer funding that the Harvard project will inevitably attract, it resembles certain fundamentalist efforts to find Noah's Ark. SETI searches come swiftly to mind as well. That is, the seekers have already determined that what they are looking for is really there - whether it is a bottom up origin of life, the good ship Ark, or intergalactic civilizations. Failure to find the prize cannot - by the very nature of the project - serve as a disconfirmation. It can prompt only the most limited reevaluations.

When a project is framed in this way, one outcome is that some findings must not be made and some conclusions must not be drawn, irrespective of evidence.

In an analogous situation, Larry Summers, a key project backer, lost his own presidency last year for nothing more than pointing out that women are not as well adapted to the hard sciences as men.

That fact is massively overdetermined by evidence, but what does evidence matter in the face of a demand to demonstrate a politically correct proposition rather than a factually based one?

Indeed, one phase of Summers' difficulties over his remarks on women in science provides a sobering lesson as to what to expect from the Harvard OoL project.

Biology prof Nancy Hopkins walked out of Summers' talk, proclaiming that his remarks made her sick. Specifically, she told The Globe ,that if she hadn't left, she "would've either blacked out or thrown up."

Now, ... what if a hard science guy announced that challenges from his colleagues cause him to nearly black out or throw up unless he can just walk out on them? Should he be given a demanding chair? For that matter, which of the ID theorists is having a nervous breakdown because of remarks made by the adult toddlers over at the Thumb? People do not have to be tough in order to survive (it often pays better to be nice, actually), but they do have to be tough in order to survive certain types of positions.

In fact, Hopkins was unintentionally providing good evidence for Summer's observations that the requisite types of personality and mental development are more often found in men than women, as several perceptive women columnists (all of them tough as nails, just like me) have pointed out - but (and this is my point) her behaviour was not generally regarded as evidence. You see it had been agreed in advance that no actual evidence for Summers' original position could ever be admitted. So it will be with intelligence and the origin of life.

However, the article is interesting in several other ways: Yes, it actually does quote Michael Behe. After the intrusive sign-up screen (which means few will see Behe's comment unless they think of asking for the printer-friendly screen instead), Cook quotes Behe as saying,

Michael Behe, a biologist at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and one of the leading proponents of intelligent design, said he was glad that Harvard was going to try to address the issue.

''If, as I suspect will happen," Behe said, ''they fail to find a plausible answer without invoking intelligence, then maybe science will be less hostile to folks who see intelligent direction in the history of life," he said.

Fat chance, actually, Mike. As I have noted above, in the atmosphere such a project generates, boosters easily silence questioners, simply by quoting dogma and questioning loyalty. Remember, the boosters know that bottom up order for free is real, and anyone who cannot so convince himself is a failure.

What we can expect is press releases every so often claiming major breakthroughs that turn out to depend on the acceptance of speculative propositions. Such releases justify the current funding and attract more funding - and very few will have an interest in pointing out the problems.

Well, it's an ill wind that blows nobody good. Press releases are bread and butter for me.

Thinkquote of the day: Origin of life researcher on key difficulties

I may be converted in the course of the meeting, but when writing this paper, I am by no means attracted by the theory of a period of many million years of biochemical evolution preceding the origin of life. It seems to me that any half-live systems - for example, catalysts releasing the energy of metastable molecules such as pyrophosphate or sugar - would merely have made conditions less favorable for the first living organisms, by which I mean the first system capable of reproduction. A protein capable of catalyzing such reactions would not multiply in consequence, any more than an enzyme does.
- JBS Haldane, from The Origins of Prebiological Systems ed. Sidney Fox, p 15).

See also my comments on why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Are you looking for one of the following stories?

My U of Toronto talk on why there is an intelligent design controversy, or my talk on media coverage of the controversy att he University of Minnesota.

A summary of tech guru George Gilder's arguments for ID and against Darwinism

A critical look at why March of the Penguins was thought to be an ID film.

A summary of recent opinion columns on the ID controversy

A summary of recent polls of US public opinion on the ID controversy

A summary of the Catholic Church's entry into the controversy, essentially on the side of ID.

O'Leary's intro to non-Darwinian agnostic philosopher David Stove’s critique of Darwinism.

An ID Timeline: The ID folk seem always to win when they lose.

O’Leary’s comments on Francis Beckwith, a Dembski associate, being granted tenure at Baylor after a long struggle - even after helping in a small way to destroy the Baylor Bears' ancient glory - in the opinion of a hyper sportswriter.

Why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

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Thinkquote of the day 1: Key origin of life researcher doubts that there was a single common ancestor

In 1998, Woese wrote: “No consistent organismal phylogeny has emerged from the many individual protein phylogenies so far produced.” He concluded that primitive organisms acquired many of their genes and proteins, not by Darwinian descent with modification, but by “lateral gene transfer” from other organisms. “The universal ancestor,”
he wrote,” is not an entity, a thing,” but a community of complex molecules—a sort of primordial soup—from which different kinds of cells emerged independently.

- from Jonathan Wells' The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design , p. 44, (Carl Woese quoted from "The universal ancestor," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 95 (1998): 6854-59.)

That, of course, creates an interesting question: If the origin of life is as immensely improbable as Fred Hoyle and Francis Crick thought, how would it happen more than once, as Woese's comments imply?

The minimal cell: No response so far?

Various persons have demanded that I demonstrate that there are indeed problems with Darwinian evolution. I am currently co-writing a book about something else, but have begun to try to post useful links on problems with Darwinism.

Meanwhile, I notice that Australian biologist Stephen E. Jones has posted Part 2 of his survey of the problems of the minimal cell, using Darwinian evolution as a model for how life originally came into existence. Part 1 is here.

Surprisingly, Jones has received no comments since his first post on Monday, July 18. I e-mailed him to enquire whether, for some reason, he had had to delete or delay comments. But he said no.

So, none of the Internet evolutionists wishes to contest Jones’s statement of the facts? Well, then, the grim fate of origin of life studies becomes an argument in favour of looking for intelligent design.

(Note: If this is not the story you were looking for, see the Blog service note below or the stories listed in the middle sidebar. )

( Background: Darwin himself did not attempt to explain the origin of life, but many modern Darwinian evolutionists have attempted feats of this kind, sometimes using origin of life ideas such as chemical evolution prebiological evolution” or prebiological evolution.

The reason these hypotheses don’t go very far is the massive complexity of even the minimal cells (the smallest cell that could possibly exist and replicate). Generally, the simplest cells that exist today are parasites, which complicates the problem because parasites depend on other organisms, usually more complex organisms than themselves, to survive. So they don’t really help us understand how life can get started without a host. But study of these simpler, single cell parasites can help determine which of the many components are truly necessary for life.

In "Part 1, Jones points out that

... M. genitalium [the parasite under study] has 580,070 nucleotide base pairs with
each gene being an average of 1,040 base pairs.5 Even assuming the lower minimum of 256 genes necessary for life, and an average of 1,000 base pairs per gene, that is a requirement that no less than 256,000 nucleotide base pairs would have to spontaneously self-assemble.

So that is the order of difficulties for a spontaneous, unguided origin of life (as in, “life just happens, okay?”).

In Part 2, he goes on to talk about the problem of self-assembly. It is not enough that the parts of the cell merely come into being somehow. They must assemble themselves in a coherent working order:

A free-living single celled organism, such as a bacterium, is a Von Neumann machine, named after the mathematician Johann Von Neumann, who before the cell's self-replication machinery was known, worked out the minimum level of complexity for any self-replicating system.[2] Von Neumann found his minimum self-replicating automaton was enormously complex, with 200,000 components, totalling 3 kilometres across and requiring 200 pages just to describe it![3] But even then, unlike a living cell, no provision was made for the automaton obtaining its energy direct from the environment.[4] While simpler Von Neumann machines have since been proposed, they are not fully self-replicating and yet are still enormously complex.[5] Indeed no machine that can fully replicate itself from simple basic components[6] has ever been built.[7] Yet uncountable trillions of living cells replicate themselves every day, from simple basic components, according to the principles Von Neumann worked out.[8] Not surprisingly, Von Neumann himself found the origin of life to be utterly perplexing.[9]

Now, the origin of life is only perplexing if we assume that it must all happen by chance, in accord with laws of physics and chemistry. However, if we assume that design is a normal feature of the universe, it is not perplexing. It simply identifies a point at which a design was imposed on the system in order to achieve a given result.

Perhaps it is somewhat like coming across a series of stones on the beach that spells out

Thanks for letting us stay at your cottage. We left the key with Fran.

Even if the message were written entirely in Chinese ideograms, a non-reader of Chinese could likely identify it as a message, of unknown purport. On the other hand, a person could spend a lot of time trying to figure out how all those stones had got positioned in that particular way entirely by random movements of wind and water ...

In the face of the current evidence base, whether design or no-design seems more productive for understanding the origin of life depends on one’s prior philosophical commitments.

Methodological naturalism?

While I am on this topic, one reader seems anxious to get me to consider the claims of methodological naturalism in science. Methodological naturalism means assuming that there is no design, and therefore no evidence for design is even possible. The reader assures me that only metaphysical naturalism (= we absolutely believe, as a matter of faith that there is no design!) is wrong.

Sorry, no. Methodological naturalism is only a completely reliable guide if we actually know that metaphysical naturalism is true. If we are not certain that there is no design, we must remain open to the possibility and go with the evidence. Otherwise, we will face mounting difficulties with situations like the one Jones outlines - but no one seems to want to comment on them.

That is why I usually describe the intelligent design controversy as a conflict at the heart of science between naturalism (we must assume that brute nature is all there is) and empiricism (but what does the evidence point to?).

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Blog service note: Did you come here looking for any of the following stories?

- The op-ed by Catholic Cardinal Schonborn in the New York Times? Note also the Times's story on the subject, some interesting quotes from major Darwinists to compare with the Catholic Church's view, as expressed by the Cardinal, and an example of the kind of problem with Darwinian philosophy that the Cardinal is talking about.

- the Privileged Planet film shown at the Smithsonian, go here for an extended review. Please do not raise cain about an "anti-evolution" film without seeing it. If your doctor forbids you to see the film, in case you get too excited, at least read my detailed log of the actual subjects of the film. If you were one of the people who raised cain, ask yourself why you should continue to believe the people who so misled you about the film's actual content ...

- the showing of Privileged Planet at the Smithsonian, go here and here to start, and then this one and this one will bring you up to date.

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