IT CAME UP EARLY in the websearch for whatever current line of ideological tripe the biology unit of the Lords Of Creation are saying these days, so this is from the University of Chicago
The origin of life on Earth stands as one of the great mysteries of science. Various answers have been proposed, all of which remain unverified. To find out if we are alone in the galaxy, we will need to better understand what geochemical conditions nurtured the first life forms. What water, chemistry and temperature cycles fostered the chemical reactions that allowed life to emerge on our planet? Because life arose in the largely unknown surface conditions of Earth’s early history, answering these and other questions remains a challenge.
" Answering these and other questions remains a challenge." Ya think? Not that many a claim in the form of answers to that is not made in the rest of the pop-science level article.
Note the title of the article in light of that, "The origin of life on Earth, explained," apparently one in a series called "UChicago explainer series." It explains nothing of the sort, it is a false claim.
Note that there are truths told in this paragraph, "one of the great mysteries of science," "all of which remain unverified," "life arose in largely unknown surface conditions of Earth's early history," . . . but the rest of it blithely ignores that just those three alone makes whatever follows of no knowable relevance to the actual origin of life on Earth. And there are more problems with it.
If any science done about any of this claims they are getting closer to answers about that on the basis of science, they are lying, But on such lies several, world-wide research programs are founded. And note that he impinges on the other such evidence-free scientific program I mentioned in my post a few days back, the pseudo-science of "exobiology." "To find out if we are alone in the galaxy, we will need to better understand what geochemical conditions nurtured the first life forms."
If there are other "life forms" in other places in the galaxy or universe, for that matter, you would have to have resolvable physical evidence of those life forms in order to know if anything or everything or nothing whatsoever such a speculative study could show you was relevant to it. And even having the almost certainly never to be had example of one line of life on some other planet, you would have no basis on which to make any judgments about any other life anywhere which you had not sampled yet. There could be trillions of entirely separate and different life lines all over the universe, there is no basis apart from materialist ideology on which to make a claim about it. Certainly not as of this morning.
The fact is, you cannot study biology without physical evidence or documentary evidence of whatever aspect of life you want to study being available to you. You can not theorize or, worse, generalize "life." Living beings are whatever they are in whatever conditions they LIVE in and if there's something we can guess from the one and only line of life we have available to us can tell us, the variation in living beings, even related ones, is enormous and extremely specific to the organisms, themselves. They aren't like inorganic molecules under the study of chemists or atoms and subatomic particles and forces under the study of physicists. As one of my biologist relatives liked to say, "It's not rocket science, it's a hell of a lot harder than rocket science."
I have fond memories of a blog brawl I got into with Greg Laden a Harvard anthropologist when he tried to refute my bald statement that we can't know anything about the origin of life on Earth BECAUSE WE WOULD NEED TO HAVE A RESOLVABLE EXAMPLE OF THAT ORIGINAL ORGANISM to just begin to know what we would need to know in order to determine what that origin was. And such an unambiguous identification of such a fossil will never be made.
If we even had that, specific, organism, the first in the theorized line of life from which all subsequent life came and evolved from, it might tell us nothing whatsoever about how it formed or was formed from non-living matter. The meat-head (for such is the ideology of materialist-atheist-scientism) though he held a faculty position at Harvard couldn't argue with that point despite him coming up with dozens of papers (most of which I'm sure he hadn't read) on the topic. Or, that is, allegedly on the topic. He kept trying to dodge and change the subject but I wouldn't let him or his fan boys and gals dodge the question. They couldn't get past the point of my original statement that he was trying to refute. Without that specific organisms' remains being had science was entirely impotent to touch the subject.
I will note in passing, I was more polite then to mock Laden's field as pseudo-science, though any anthropology done under the guise of science is pseudo-science. There have been a few anthropologists who have admitted that their field is not, in fact, done under the methods of science but not that many have been that honest.
As it is, I wish back then I had developed my thinking to include what I did last week, what we know about the "simplest" of life on Earth. Even if you want to include viruses as "life" which I have to say, I'm skeptical of, the actual science dealing with just what they need to do to stay alive and flourish is incredibly complex in exactly the ways that the biological Lords Of Creation refuse to consider.
Those very real organisms that scientists have available and do study are enormously complex AND THOSE COMPLEXITIES AND THE CLEARLY EFFECTIVE MOLECULAR AND CELLULAR MODIFICATIONS THEY MAKE JUST TO MAINTAIN THEIR MOLECULAR INTEGRITY AGAINST THE EFFECTS OF RANDOM MUTATIONS AND MISTAKES IN CODING OF MOLECULES, couldn't possibly be included in the abiogentic-exobiological amino-acid manufacturing experiments in labs and in closed vessels under heat and with electrical sparks.
And apart from the means by which cells correct misspellings in their complex molecules against that is more than matched by the means of modification they make in order to protect themselves against changes in their chemical, biological, and physical conditions. I would like an explanation of why that wouldn't involve some level of extremely sophisticated consciousness. And how materialism could possibly make that happen without that. And that doesn't get into changes made which have every appearance of being made to achieve some life advantage. Even viruses make such modifications in order to survive drugs.
Some say that Darwin and his earliest colleagues considered cells to be little more than tiny sacks full of simple guck. Though I believe they knew that cells had nuclei by that period. They had no idea of how incredibly complex their ideas of "simple" life were, the kinds of organisms that they imagined could have formed by spontaneous, random interactions of molecules would likely have had to be just in order to carry on life functions, staying alive, eating, regulating, and the massively complex and entirely unprecedented and - I'd guess in their imaginations motivated and accomplished through random chance events all through it - reproducing successfully the first and each subsequent time. And you have to ask yourself, how many of those earliest reproductions was the result of random chance, it's absurd to assume that random chance bestowed the same random-chance structures that led to that first reproduction just happening, through random chance, to have been present in the second generation. By random chance.
Considering just what they did know, though, their idea that "simple life" was simple may be an instance of ideology winning out over scientific observation.
That last description of what I assume would have to be assumed by the materialist-atheist-scientistic "abiologists" and "exobiologists" to have just happened by random chance leads to a question that I haven't, to my best recollection, brought up yet.
Just how long did the original organism that had to do all of these things have to live in order for it to have, by random chance or even something requiring consciousness being involved, "trial and error" (another resort of the MAS true believe) to have gotten it to the point where all of these things had to have worked, the first time and every subsequent time that survived? The conditions on the Early Earth are not asserted to be life favoring but I'd guess such an organism would have had to survive them for a considerable time for such random events to have modified them before those things just happened to happen.
And even if you insert "trial and error" into it, the chances are that the first error of such an organism would have been its last - especially if reproduction included the rupture and resealing of a cellular membrane in which those chemicals and structures would have been protected and the concentrations of molecules and structures would have had to be contained lest they be washed away in the primordial soup to be destroyed by desiccation or oxidation, or sunlight or volcanic heat or corrosive chemicals. I haven't considered what the currently theorized iron-green oceans and water of that period - there is believed to have been very little in the way of "dry land" present - would have done to such an organism as can be dreamed up.
Get back to me when they have and have credibly identified that first fossilized organism, then we might get somewhere. Before then, nothing can be known about it. And we still might have no idea how it formed, even then.
And you still haven't told me how intelligently designed experiments can prove that intelligent design isn't needed to produce the resulting chemicals, etc. that they created.
Though I can verify that unintelligence is fully on display when they claim that their experiments have demonstrated their ideological goal.
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