Yes and the need to be sure there is no contamination by more evolved biological chemistry. Otherwise new forms could never get a toe hold.
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Anyone who has experience with RNA expression experiments knows all about those pesky RNases that are always looking to ruin your day.
I have always thought about this in terms of contaminating other planets/moons with Earth life, something that NASA is also very aware of. If we do find life on other planets/moons in our own solar system and it differs drastically from life on Earth, that would be the find of the millennia and could tell us a lot about the probability of abiogenesis. The last thing we would want to do is contaminate those ecosystems.
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Unless I can turn more of a short-term profit by doing so!
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My imagination took off trying to think up any other way to do it!
My favorite example is still the bacterium a ranger took from a stream with arsenic and by stages slowly increased the arsenic concentration, dividing the population at each step (and keeping the ones from every stage alive) â first he got a population that could tolerate high levels of arsenic, and then at some point they started metabolizing the stuff. I presume that means that some new structure occurred; it was definitely new information!
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One of my biology profs once asked, âHow many tide pools on the planet?â in connection with a paper that argued that tides were essential for life to arise.
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My astronomy professor maintained that life on Mars would be related to Earth life because spores and even some bacteria could get transferred from one to the other via meteors or even solar wind.
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Thank you; I donât see any scientific papers cited in this article related to de novo origins experiments, however.
Sure! As I understand it w.r.t origins â and of course there will be nuances on each side â TE proponents acknowledge God as Creator and Sustainer, however they believe that the origin and development of life can be explained through purely naturalistic mechanisms. ID believes that an intelligent force is necessary for origin of life or de novo creation of the functional units I mentioned.
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Thatâs actually quite helpful. As a CA (cosmological argument) person, I never took an interest in ID arguments. Itâs probably also that I have such a poor grasp of biology, but that is slowly changing for me.
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Thank you very much! I will read and follow up with questions if needed.
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Would you mind citing these studies for me-- specifically if they are functional biopolymers with the correct chirality?
Great topic and discussion. I would interject that for most EC folks, there is not really a big dividing line between ânaturalistic mechanismsâ and Godâs providence. It seems the division is something of a modern worldview, ironically.
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Is it fair to summarize that there isnât in vitro evidence for de novo unguided origin of single cell or functional biopolymer, but that the request for such evidence is deemed unreasonable by the scientific community because it is hard to recapitulate the original microenvironment?
I think it is fair to state that the evidence for abiogenesis is very weak at the moment. In fact, I would say that we have very little hope of ever understanding how life arose on Earth. We may find some mechanisms that make abiogenesis possible, but I donât think we will ever know the specific pathways that led to life on Earth. That isnât that surprising since we wouldnât expect chemical pathways to fossilize.
I think we could also ask what kind of evidence we would expect to see if abiogenesis did occur on Earth. The most obvious is that we would expect to see only simple life in the earliest fossil bearing strata. Well, thatâs exactly what we see. In fact, we see billions of years of Earthâs history where there was only single celled life. We would also expect some sort of genetic unity amongst the life that now exists, and that is exactly what we see.
I would also heed the advice of many Christians here who are wary of the God of the Gaps argument. Perhaps God did create the first simple cells some 3.5 billion years ago, or perhaps God created a universe where life could emerge all on its own. However, if you base your faith on the impossibility of abiogenesis, what happens when it is shown to be possible?
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As a complication, ID is a self-acknowledged âbig tentâ and does not inherently require intervention-style creation of biochemical systems or particular aspects of life. While the popular version of ID is big on anti-evolutionism, the overall movement is more complex.
A quick search turns up https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2210505119, Symmetry | Free Full-Text | Chirality and the Origin of Life, https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20220000060/downloads/Lee_symmetry_2022_text_revisions_submitted.pdf , and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519318302285?via%3Dihub as examples of papers that discuss ideas relating to the origin of chirality in biological molecules, with citations of some of the experiments so far.
I do not know of any instance yet where an experimental setup has gone from simple abiotic chemicals all the way to a complex homochiral polymer. But chemistry works. The individual reactions involved are not miraculous; the challenge is merely getting enough of the right reactions to occur, not a setting aside of natural laws. Thus, it seems imprudent to me to claim that a particular step in the process definitely required miraculous intervention. Yet it is also true that, as of yet, there is a sizeable gap between the simplest living cell and the most complex systems that have been built up molecularly under reasonably natural conditions. (A complete bacterial genomeâs worth of DNA has been built artificially and successfully inserted in place of the natural DNA, but that involved plenty of lab processes not plausible on the early earth.)
As some of the articles I cited discuss, it is not clear whether there is one âcorrectâ chirality, rather than advantages from fairly consistently using whichever chirality happened to prevail on a particular planet.
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I would distinguish between a request for such evidence, to which the answer is âIf we have the support for doing the research, weâll try, but itâs likely to be very challenging or maybe impossible to find itâ and a demand for such evidence, which is characteristically unreasonable because it is hypocritical, always demanding more while never applying similar rigor to the favored alternative.
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It might be worth the effort of relating why I am skeptical of the standard use of the term âintelligent designâ: In my university days we had an informal intelligent design club but it had little to do with what the term indicates today, rather it was a group of students who had been atheists or agnostics who due to their studies in science had conclude there must be a Designer. Discussions tended to revolve around what criteria should be applied to answering the question of where communication from the Designer might be found (no one thought that Deism was to be taken seriously, on the grounds that if a Designer designed â and then made â a universe that contained intelligent creatures then it was to be expected that the Designer would engage in some sort of venture at communicating with those creatures; one of the first criteria was that the consensus agreed that a Designer would provide written communication).
This was obviously nearly the opposite of todayâs ID groups who attempt to find evidence of design in order to hopeully persuade others; these were âothersâ who had encountered design and pursued where that led.
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If the astronomers and planetary scientists would just make up their minds about the origins of the EarthâŚ!
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The story I like to tell is of a child who belongs to an advanced civilization. They are advanced enough that they have discovered how to create new universes. As a school assignment, the child is tasked with creating a universe that can produce multicolored nebulae and at least 100 elements, but NO life. The child works on the project and hands it in. The teacher looks it over and gives it a B+. The nebulae are multicolored and it almost got to the 100 elements. However, one of those planets had life so it got knocked down to a B+.
IMHO, todayâs ID groups are interested more in apologetics than in science.
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And more interested in the already-converted than in evangelism.