Lewontin And The Perils of Everyday Ideology Within Evolutionary Biology And The Alleged Study of Abiogenesis

I am posting Richard Lewontin's entire lecture, again, because it contains so much information that is of the highest relevance to the question of not only the allegedly scientific study of the origin of life on Earth, but also relevant to what the actual original organism(s) of life on Earth must have been like to fit into the definition of life as opposed to not-life and inevitably on the probabilistic contemplation of the divine origin as opposed to random-chance origin of life on Earth.  I post Lewontin because he combines the kind of lucid explanation that comes only from a scientific and philosophical mastery of the known issues with him not sharing my conclusions about the issue.  While I think many of the things he honestly presents is more useful to coming to the conclusion against random-chance as an explanation, he has said his disdain for the philosophical-ideological consequences of being open to the belief that God created life as well as everything else, leads to his conscious choice to reject that as an explanation.  His honesty in that as well as his scientific and philosophical honesty and mastery of the topic are why I respect him.  That many of his political and social conclusions, many of which I share,  are, as I come ever more convinced,  incompatible with his ideological choice is overcome by my respect for his honesty and rigor and good will.

His discussion of the faulty concept of adaptation, including the experiments to look for life on Mars, especially his observation that in order to know anything about any possible organism depends on looking at the organism and studying its structure, its behavior, its life within its environment is absolutely crucial to any proposed study of the origin of life on the Early Earth.

And it is crucial in understanding why without that observation and knowledge, looking at other, known organisms, either in the very partial knowledge you can have from even the barely resolvable fossils of organisms that came many hundreds of millions of years and untold billions of organisms of presumably evolving life or modern organisms, even those taken as "primitive" but which are the product of even more hundreds of millions and billions of years of evolution from the origin of life, even as we ourselves are, can actually tell us nothing much if anything about what that origin of life was like.  We are exactly as evolved as those "primitive" organisms living with us in the present time.  Our assumptions about the lives of organisms from the earliest period of resolvable fossils based on our knowledge of modern organisms that have an apparent likeness to them must be no better than highly speculative, even with that evidence.  And all of that is life that arose from other living organisms, the original organism on Earth that arose out of unliving matter has that crucial difference from all subsequent life.    Under the most common scientific assumption, which I share, that original organism is entirely unlike all of the subsequent life that came after it in that crucial regard.  You cannot intuit how that happened by the assumptions we make about the first act of reproduction and the only model we have for thinking about that original act of reproduction of necessity has to be based on our logical assessment of what would have to have resulted in two like organisms produced from the first organism (it would take two of everything vital for the original organism to have lived plus whatever induced it to reproduce) and our only scientific knowledge of organisms reproducing based on later organisms.

Last April, I dealt with an example of a highly sophisticated scientist and a very experience staff of a very good radio science program not even being able to understand how that scientist wasn't answering a very sensible question dealing with life theoretically arising in ocean vents billions of years ago.  The question was, "Why doesn't life continue to spontaneously occur around such vents?"   The question was as clear as possible, an obviously valid question,  the answer that was found acceptable by the scientist and the staff of Quirks And Quarks didn't even respond to it and they didn't understand that it didn't address the entirely reasonable question.

The extent to which ideological holdings by scientists and, especially those widely held in their profession blinds them to such obvious failures in their thinking and claims is a question that really needs to be asked.  I think that Richard Lewontin's kind of sophisticated understanding of philosophy is what leads him to understand the importance of being able to address such questions and issues.   I think that failure to understand it is rampant within science, especially in some of the biological sciences, especially those around questions of evolution and the alleged scientific study of the origin of life on Earth.

I don't think I'm going to continue on with this, just now.