I DO STILL CURRENTLY believe that there was probably an original organism in the line of currently known life on Earth perhaps as long as three and a half billion years ago which, since it would have the unique characteristic of NOT HAVING BEEN BORN OF A LIVING ORGANISM, would have had to have been assembled out of non-living molecules.
Though there may have been other starts at lines of life, those are not in evidence as of now. Frankly, unless intelligent design was involved, I think the improbability of any of those theorized lines of life by random chance even once makes the proposed multiplicity of other such line of life and the one that survived renders that situation of vanishingly improbable probability.
In the popular, ideologues' and abiogentic scientists' imagination, that act is a simple one that could be accounted for by a still remarkable but short series of coincidences, but you have to cut so many corners and leave out so much in any such scheme of explanation - or, I'd imagine any grant proposal to fund your research into the "origin of life" - that the whole thing purported to be science becomes absurd.
This first point that they propose to reconstruct an entirely unique organism that violates the modern biological principle that life comes from life is certainly not insignificant in the assertion that there was one original organism in the line of life which gave rise through evolution has that unique character because it having been assembled out of non-living molecules is not something which has ever been observed by science in nature. Coming up with plausible scenarios of how that would have happened is the entire effort of any scientists making speculations about that and designing and carrying out experiments alleged to show how that could have happened.
I haven't looked at a grade school or high school level science textbook currently in use for decades so I don't know if such lore as a popular level description of the early scientific debunking of the belief in spontaneous generation still features in it. As I remember much was made of Louis Pasteur's various experiments of boiling nutrient rich liquids and isolating them from the ambient air to prevent air-borne microorganisms getting to it to show that life would not spontaneously arise from even such rich organic materials. From what I see in a quick online search, it is still touted as dispelling the superstitious belief that things like maggots arising from decaying flesh. Interesting from my point of view is the observation at this site that spontaneous generation is otherwise known as "abiogenesis."
Just as Terrence McKenna noted that modern materialist-atheist-scientistic cosmologists say "Give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest," the materialist-atheist-scientistic scientist who engages in the quest for the abiogenetic origin of life wants one free instance of spontaneous generation and then they will explain the rest. (Explaining the rest is not possible but I'll let that go for now.) Though what they really want is to be exempted from the requirements of science for that one free instance to match what happened in reality on the Early Earth because they can't know that. But it's far worse than just that.
What we can know is that there is no form of life known which is of the simplicity that would make any of their claims about THAT living organism actually living work. Even in the total absence of other organisms that might attack it - something which may have been a factor as soon as a few other organisms were born of it in close proximity to it in the primordial soup where they came into being* - it would have faced what can rationally be presumed to be chemical and physical dangers to its existence and living and reproducing.
Just accumulating the molecules it would need to carry on its life function as soon as it started living would have been a huge problem. It would not live in the present day conditions in which life had left huge numbers of complex organic molecules in the environment for it to come across by chance. It would not have cells to occupy and use as viruses do to make their "living".
By the way, I believe viruses evolved well after living cells had accumulated in enormous numbers, I reject them as a plausible example of that original organism. As I do such other things such as prions. A britatheist at Eschaton once alluded to those as a model of how life arose through spontaneous action during one of my brawls there. I think those are likely, as well, a product of abundant life already being present.
I cannot see how science at any time will be able to overcome the long chain of explanations that the spontaneously, random-chance constructing an organism which could carry out all of the vital life functions that comprise the lives of the "simplest" or organisms could "just happen." I don't think it could be a result of "trial and error" because such errors would be most credibly imagined to have resulted in its quick death.
In the past I brought up that it would seem to be almost a certain requirement of that original organism to have an extremely complicated containing membrane in which the molecules to concentrate and form that would start the processes of metabolism - an essential though hardly complete part of the definition of what makes a living being alive - to be present to kick off life.
That, of course, leads one to think of the fact that if such a containing membrane was present in that original organism, its first reproduction would have had to include the rupture and almost instantaneous healing of that original membrane producing another such membrane which would contain ALL OF THE MOLECULES AND STRUCTURES WHICH ALLOWED ITS "DAUGHTER" ORGANISM TO LIVE AS IT WOULD CONTINUE TO.
That act of reproduction would have been entirely unprecedented and of no knowable motivation. The act of crystalization of minerals might be proposed as an analogy but that is certainly no explanation of the reproduction of a living organism. But the inapt crystallization analogy that brings up the real problem of random chance variations and "errors" in any complex crystallization. As Denis Nobel has said about that analogy being made in the case of knowable DNA "replication" in living organisms, if there were no cellular mechanisms for correcting "misspellings" in DNA those would quickly accumulate in a fatal way for the organism and whatever "daughter" organism that it would need to pass its DNA on to. The same would almost certainly be true for any theorized molecule of comparable complexity in that earliest organism either in its reproduction during its life process but especially in the act of reproduction. Otherwise, I don't see how you could possibly explain its life functions and reproduction.
But even before that, any act of metabolism, the use of molecules in chemical reaction to power the life of that original organism, would produce by-products which were either superfluous, in which their accumulation within the cell would almost certainly be problematic, or which would be poisonous to the organism. Such an organism would have to almost immediately have means of getting rid of such waste products, which would certainly have to be expelled from a containing membrane while retaining what needed to be kept inside it.
I have, elsewhere, early on this blog made fun of P.Z. Myers, one of the stars of the new-atheist fad of the OO's who proposed that the spontaneous, random-chance, construction of the containing membrane of that original organism was analogous to driftwood and other detritus accumulating on a beach. Listening to it then, I was stunned that someone who held a faculty position in science at an accredited American university could make such an inapt analogy of a living, metabolizing . . . . reproducing cell to a non-functioning non-structure (one piece of driftwood has no functional relationship with any other piece of driftwood, their presence an artifact of gravity and no outside force to keep it moving, the same cannot be said about the components of a living cell wall or the rest of the living cell within it) using their status as a professor of biology to make about as inapt an analogy as I've ever seen made. And I've listened to a lot of Republicans at Senate and House and Legislative hearings.
As an aside, that Greg Laden I got into the brawl about the origin of life with thinks very highly of Meyer's writing and thinking. Just as another example of the decadence that materialist-atheist-scientism brings to the culture of science and the general culture.** At the Harvard pay scale, too.
You will note, if you bothered to listen to Myers pooh-poohing the issue of complexity in relation to the atheist unholy grail of explaining the origin of life on Earth without God by making his inapt analogy, that it is recognized by such as him as a problem for his ideology. Their answer is to pooh-pooh it. But that is the very real stumbling block - actually miles and miles of them - for that ideological quest to explain away the origin of life in materialist terms. AND THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING UNCALLED FOR, DISALLOWED OR WRONG WITH ANYONE BRINGING UP THOSE STUMBLING BLOCKS. They don't get to go round them or to remove them. That's allegedly against the rules of science and philosophical discourse. Though it's rampant in the current academic environment, especially in the "soft" sciences and in our degraded academic and college-credentialed culture.
They have been trying to reduce that problem by simply ignoring it from the start of their quest. But that problem has not decreased since the time of Haeckel and Huxley. With every passing decade the complexity of the problem has increased as science has discovered what is necessary for "simple" life in a single cell organism and even a cell in a eukaryotic organism to live, survive dangers it encounters and successfully make modifications to its structures and molecules and to reproduce have grown.
The original organism would have had to have analogous functions and structures to survive and reproduce almost as soon as it was formed. To pretend it would not have is to rig the discourse to make believe it would only have had to meet the challenges of non-living objects and pretend to have solved the problem.
Anyone else wanting to argue this might make believe that's the case but I'm not under any obligation to pretend that. I think the most rational conclusion was that wherever and however life arose, it could NOT have happened without design. That's not a scientific conclusion - the humanly constructed rules of science exclude such ideas as the rules of games exclude many issues that might be relevant to their conduct - but it's actually a higher level of conclusion which contains very real information that isn't allowed within science. Science is a subset of real life, real life is far broader and far more vitally important than just science is. Life existed for about three and a half billion years without the human invention of science being a necessity to it.
And this science is hardly important except as an ideological quest - it's not like climate change and environmental science WHICH WE WILL EITHER TAKE DEAD SERIOUSLY OR LIFE ON EARTH, CERTAINLY HUMAN LIFE WILL END. Though that costs the billionaires and millionaires and you need morality to overcome that. Something materialism, atheism and scientism or even science, cannot provide us with. This is the most important paragraph in this line of posts.
* You have to wonder how those earliest organisms would have known that they were like and not to be attacked, or why that might not have been a necessity if they were all living in presumably close proximity to each other in the theorized primordial ooze their mother organism arose in. And such a sense would constitute knowledge. Or how they would have early on had to deal with whatever waste products they had to expel as soon as that accumulated sufficiently in close proximity. The time limits within which such things would have had to develop is a real and hardly ever mentioned aspect of the problem.
** I will note that, though with major disagreements, Myers and I share a large number of political opinions, though I doubt he's as far to the real left as I am. I think his ideology which he shares with Laden and their allies has been a real and politically damaging problem for our political orientation. As is the puerile ways in which he and they are at express their ideology. I think the left would have done a lot better if we'd got shut of them a long time ago.
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