The No More Than Once A Week Hate Mail Post - Why Abiogenesis Is An Obvious Pseudoscience Founded In Ideology, Not Observation

OF THE LECTURES that I've listened to on these subjects and the things I've read, the talk Professor Nick Lane gave a while back in Geneva was probably the least dishonest exposition from, frankly, the most likeable person I've heard on the subject which is more likely to be presented by a dishonest, arrogant ideologue.  Though it was largely a sales job  I don't think even he realized that's what was going on.  

His topic was "How Can We Know Anything About The Origin of Life?" That is, the way in which the theorized first living organism on Earth arose from non-living molecules, assembling, sparked into life somehow, maintaining life and, in perhaps the most inexplicable act of enormous complexity, successfully reproducing the first time resulting in two (who knows, maybe more) living organisms on Earth which continued to live, to maintain their lives and to successfully reproduce, eventually evolving and  eventually leading to life as it is known to human beings, now.  I think the most honest part of his lecture was the very beginning of it.

I'm going to talk about the origin of life.  But you may wonder how it is possible that we can know anything at all about the origin of life.  And  perhaps by the time I'm finished speaking you'll think we really don't know anything about the origin of life.  I'm going to try to persuade you that we can know somethings.  But it's different to other fields of science.  So, in physics, for example, if we want to know the origin of the universe, well, one thing we can do is have a large space telescope like the James Webb telescope and we can look to the furthest side of the universe which is looking back in time because the further away a star is the longer it takes for the light to arrive and so we can look back in time and observe things directly that were happening close to fourteen billion years ago. That's not something we can do on Earth there is no way of knowing directly what  the Earth was like four billion years ago there are some rocks, some fossils and bits and pieces but mostly it's damaged and destroyed and nothing very much to see. And actually, there's a philosophical point as well, if we could make a time machine and go back four billion years and look for the origin of life where would we go?  And what would we actually look for? And how would we know we had found it?

I will stipulate to start with that we both start from the common ground of assuming there was one "first organism" which successfully lived, maintained its life and successfully reproduced others most likely like it (once it had come together) though that isn't a scientific position, it's one based on belief on the basis of plausibility.  That earliest life evolved into other organisms of many forms to produce the life we see today is far more certain though it is, as well, a plausible conclusion based on available evidence, fossil, genetic, etc.  We start from the same assumptions.   I will say that for the argument I am willing to explore the issue on the basis of random chance for all of the events happening as they happened, though only so long as it's admitted that is an ideological position, not one of science or really one that accounts for what we can see of life and how it works, now.

From there he went on to present a number of seemingly plausible components of how life may have arisen, though his desire to be honest made him hedge about the unknowable way in which the mechanisms and the scenarios he presented about them could have fit together and, as he said at the beginning, there is actually no way to know if his plausible seeming scenarios were, actually, how it happened in the one and only way it actually did happen.  About the only thing he said that may have answered one of my questions about the currently fashionable view that life arose in thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean was, if it happened once in the total absence of complex organic molecules that random chance could have had available to make it happen on the early Earth, why it isn't happening over and over again?  It wasn't exactly an answer to the question, it was a speculation that the free oxygen that early life saturated the atmosphere and, so, ocean with hundreds of millions of years after the first organism probably arose, has entered into the geology that gives rise to thermal vents now and, perhaps, that oxygenation prevents it happening on the present earth.  But, of course, all of that is rank speculation, too.  Don't get me wrong, a lot of what he said was interesting on its own terms, just there is no way to know if it has any relevance to his central claim that it is relevant to the assembly of the first organism on Earth.

As I pointed out to a boob with tenure from Harvard a number of years ago, the issue of life arising on the early Earth is a fundamentally different problem from the one some physicists and cosmologists, the Lords of Creation, propose to solve because that earliest theorized organism would not have possibly been accurately described or known through extending physical principles because organisms are too varied and too specific and far, far too complex to theorize.* An organism is as the organism is and to know anything about that particular organism you would have to have highly resolvable evidence of what that specific organism was like to know anything about it.  All through the lecture Lane proposed things about far, far later, most likely far, far evolved organisms which we can see alive now or for which there are somewhat resolvable remains to be had. He would sometimes hedge that by noting the original organism was likely much simpler than the ones he was referencing, though I'll bet a majority of the casual listeners to him didn't understand that as a foundational condition to any of the conclusions he presented.

The theorized original organism on Earth, furthermore, had a daunting uniqueness that would make much of later life irrelevant to how it arose.  

One thing we can know about even the earliest evidence of those "simple" organisms which we have to make wild speculations about is that unlike all of those an organism that arose before there was another organism on Earth didn't come from the reproduction of an organism but arose in a way not a single one of its descendants did and the division of a single-celled organism will not tell you how that original organism came about.  To think it had and used large, complex organic molecules that are of unknowable -I'll go so far as to say quite implausible- availability to that first organism and put to work by it through mechanisms that are not known to exist outside of living organisms is to beg anyone of any reasonableness to conclude that only a super-human intelligence could have made it happen.  For the "machinery" of even the simplest known cell to have arisen whole and complete by random chance chemical and physical interactions is about as incredible as expecting modern mammals to just spontaneously generate out of a vat of chemicals, even one spiked with a perfect concentration of all of the necessary proteins and other molecules which comprise the bodies of one.  

Even if scientists, today, were able to create a totally artificial organism of extreme simplicity it could not be relied on to tell you about how that first organism arose billions of years ago.  To disturb your materialist-atheist faith, as I will always point out such an artificial organism would only prove that so far as science could possibly know for certain, such an organism would need the intelligent design of the scientists who created it and so it would rightly be used by those who support the intelligent design of life to support their point. That certain knowledge of the necessity of intelligent design to its existence is practically infinity more certain than that anything learned from the experiment is knowable relevant to the first organism on Earth.   About the intelligent design that cause it to happen there is 100% certainty,  there is no way to even figure out the improbability that it is relevant to how it happened without human scientists  on the early Earth.

That's true of any science experiment that could possibly be done by abiogenesists to try to prove that God didn't do it, the philosophical problems of the materialist-atheist-scientistic quest for the origin of life on Earth start with that colossal oversight by Oparin, Miller, Urey, et al.  They cannot possibly filter out intelligent design from anything they come up with.  I don't think even that impossible direct observation that Professor Lane admits is not going to be done could have the operation of intelligence removed from whatever such scientists would publish in that high catechism of such materialist-atheist-scientism, Nature, any analysis of any science is saturated with intelligent design even by entirely non-ideological scientists.  It seems to me that the quest to expunge intelligent design from science is a dishonest denial of reality.  We are stuck with that because it is simply how our minds can work, they can't seem to work any other way.  Not even magnifying the intelligence involved to the imagined collectivity of the entire relevant bodies of scientists who could understand the paper can expunge intelligent purpose and design from the product.  Even if it can seem plausible that it works sometimes if you suspend your disbelief as science requires.  

I don't want to be too hard on Professor Lane because he is, I think, the most honest person I've heard on this subject but I think he's still playing a shell game as everyone else who goes into this game of stupendously improbable odds does.  In the life sciences, if you want to present things as the product of random chance, the odds of coming up with what you can observe dwarf those regularly proposed by that other vastly ideologized science, cosmology.  For anyone to think that they can find the right answer to the question of how life arose on Early Earth with any even general accuracy would be like someone with a blind fold floating in weightless conditions, free floating, being given a dart and insisting they hit the exact center of a a bullseye four billion light years away.  Only the bullseye may as well be invisible because, as Professor Lane admitted, there's no way to see what that goal actually looks like.  They might hit something and claim that they've hit it but there's no way to know if they really did.  And, believe me, if there's one thing you can be certain about such grotesquely speculative "science" their claims will be challenged and quickly become unfashionable. When you don't know what you're looking for and now to make it both plausible in terms of a "first organism" and how that relates to life which can actually be observed, you can probably come up with an effective infinity of such "first organisms."  You can't know which one is the right one.

Is this really any way to do science?  If it is, why figure there are any rules to it?

* I'm ever less impressed with statements by cosmologists about the origin of the universe.  I think George Ellis is probably right, at least for now, that they can't get near the actual Big Bang, if that's how it happened, because there is no way to extend what we know as physical law into such apparently unknowable conditions.  I think the Lords of Creation are a waste of funding and employment as opposed to those who are trying to keep us from destroying our planet and, so, preserve us into the future.  But, then, I have a faith that we are supposed to be part of the fulfillment of creation some time into the distant and unreachable future instead of trying impotently to prove that God isn't necessary for the creation of the universe or life. It's certainly a lot more useful to concentrate on the here and now that can be observed, measured and analyzed IN PART and so to find out helpful and reliable information. You know, to save us from our technology and our greed.   What has cosmology done to that end, or abiogenesis?  Or even the genuinely scientific study of early humans and our closest cousins?