A containing membrane would have been necessary for the molecules necessary for the first organism to have made a second one to have been gathered and been kept and concentrated within that first organism to make the necessary components of the second one, at least two or twice as many as would be required to make and maintain the first one. None of the act of reproduction would happen outside of that first organism. And, especially in the materialistic view of that event, whatever specific molecules that would have initiated and carried out what must have been a complex operation of reproduction would have had to be present in a sufficient concentration to have done that. I can think of no way for that to have happened without a containing membrane and almost certainly for some of those component molecules to have been made by the first organism, itself. Some molecular mechanism would have had to trigger that first, totally unprecedented reproductive act in the history of life on Earth.
If you want to propose that all happened outside of a containing membrane, it is unlikely in the extreme that it happened once by chance, just the right chemicals drifting or wafting into each other at just the right time and,or in the right sequence. For it to have happened a second time is ridiculously unlikely. I'd say that it would have probably been even more in need of divine intervention than if it happened within a membrane, especially as the scenario would have to have it happening, by chance, again and again and again, . . .
Remember, there's no trial and error about it because the first error would be the last for incipient life on Earth. You can't get past that fact that two living organisms would have had to be the result of the first and the majority of subsequent reproductions in order for their numbers to have increased.
And once you accept that scenario, first the construction of the membrane containing the first organism would have had to have happened by random, chance events before there was a living organism whose body chemistry could control it, That, in itself, would be astonishingly unlikely.
And then consider, that randomly assembled membrane, by chance surrounding just the right combination of molecules or structures, would have had to have the potential to reproduce to have the potential to split apart, surround both the "parent" organism and the offspring (you really can't determine which was which, by the way) and to reseal itself around both instead of the act killing both, which makes makes the idea that happened without intelligent design a ridiculously improbable series of extremely improbable events and, so unlikely.
No, abiogenesis is an absurd hypothesis if you believe in the conventional idea that there was one original organism that assembled without divine will behind it, to think it happened more than once only multiplies the unlikelihood, not to mention the idea that two entirely independent lines of life would have combined or been able to. Anytime I think about these things the more obvious it becomes that intelligent design is more probable than the random chance events of assembly of life scheme. Intelligent design of that, at least, makes entirely more sense.
Louis Pasteur disproved abiogenesis aka spontaneous generation,long ago, and so it joins phlogiston, the ether, anod the geocentric universe on the ash heap of falsified scientific theories
ReplyDeleteThat's what they say but what he demonstrated was that the kind of spontaneous generation which was currently conceived of at his time didn't happen. The problem of the first organism arising is an entirely different thing because whatever else we can assume about the first organism that arose more than three billion years ago, it was not like present day life which is all the product of biological reproduction, it had to arise from non-living molecules forming structures which couldn't be the product of biology because biology didn't exist on Earth until it began to metabolize and live and, in the act which I've thought about above, performed the first reproductive act in the history of Earth.
DeleteIt's possible that nothing we know about present day life is relevant to that original organism but we can't possibly know that because we don't have the remains of that first organism to see what it was like - and the idea that we ever will have those remains in enough detail to discern or deduce or intuit how it was made or how it assembled by chance, random events is in the running as the most optimistic idea in the history of optimistic ideas.
Abiogenesists started their alleged study of that event out of baldly ideological reasons, to inconfirm materialist-atheist orthdoxy, we know that from the scientists themselves, Oparin, Urey, Miller, etc. In tryng to do that the grotestquely underestimated the challenge of doing that and the impossibility of doing that without what any biologist should have understood would be required to do it, the actual remains of that organism. You can't intuit the extremely complex phenomena of even one life of a living organism in the way you can intuit what electrons and atoms and even molecules in the ancient universe were like. Life really is a far more complex thing, as my sister-in-law, a working research biologist likes to say, It's not rocket science, it's a hell of a lot more complicated than rocket science.
Everything we can say about the issue is contingent and to claim that it will ever be anything but contingent is as optimistic as the idea we're ever going to find and identify and study the details of that original organism. That being the case, whatever seems to be the most logical case based on what we know about life, now, is a defensible idea.
Didn't read it, did ya? Just grabbed hold of a word and clung to it like flotsam in a maelstrom, right?
DeleteBesides, everybody knows it's turtles all the way down!