How so………….
Are you are arguing that the Bible supports spontaneous generation and therefore spontaneous generation is true?
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The Origin of Life was a one-off event that still hasn’t been fully explained. The origin of species (speciation) is well understood through evolutionary processes, which are still ongoing to this day.
Of course he isn’t. The Bible supports spontaneous combustion. Video evidence:
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Not quite. I am arguing that Owen was inspired by the Bible to construct his understanding of spontaneous generation.
If the consensus position is that Charles Darwin’s framework is the superior explanation, then it’s reasonable to ask why abiogenesis and evolution should be treated as sharply distinct categories in the first place—especially when Richard Owen’s framework approached them as aspects of a unified structural process rather than separate explanatory domains.
At minimum, this raises the question of whether the modern separation reflects a necessary distinction grounded in the evidence itself, or whether it partly reflects assumptions built into the Darwinian framework from the outset. In that context, principles such as Occam’s Razor become relevant: if two frameworks can account for the same broad patterns, the question becomes whether dividing abiogenesis and evolution into fundamentally separate explanatory categories introduces additional assumptions that are actually required by the evidence.
Neither Darwin nor Owen offered a theory of the origin of life. You know this. Why are we still talking about it? Oh, right, I forgot. You’re just bumping the thread so it doesn’t die a natural death. Sorry I rose to the bait.
Occam’s Razor. Okay. Let’s play that game.
- Life arose once and diversified into the various forms and species we see today.
- Every form and species of life was the equivalent of the origin of life.
Option 1 is straightforward and possibly needed divine intervention to get the ball rolling. Option 2 requires divine intervention, or spontaneous combustion, at every step along the way.
My final word:
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You need to provide some evidence that Owen had some different view of spontaneous generation than the generally accepted view. A view he expressly supported in his own writings.
What’s the argument that proves they are two different things because Owen never distinguish between the origin of life and species. So why would he have a separate formal theory of it? He assumed right from the outset that they were one of the same things before Darwin came along and tried to separate the two phenomena.
Speaking of Darwin…….He did in fact offer a formal theory of the origin of life as Bill’s source suggests………….
It is certainly amusing to see that Darwin did not refrain, both in private and in public, from
the use of irony, as shown by the extensive letter he sent to the Athenæum. He clearly kept
in the back of his mind his assumption that life could evolve from a «…reeking atmosphere
was charged with carbonic acid, nitrogenized compounds, phosphorus, &c.». Eight years
later he mailed to Hooker the famous letter in which the idea of a “warm little pond” was
included. Darwin’s “big if”, however, is a cautious reminder that he was keenly aware of
the lack of evidence for this possibility. The now famous letter was mailed to Hooker on
February 1st, 1871,
………………..It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now
present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh what a big if) we couldconceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts,—light,
heat, electricity &c. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to
undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter wd be instantly
devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were
formed.
……….His son Francis Darwin included part of this now famous letter as a footnote in the 3rd
volume of Life and Letters (Darwin 1887, Vol 3:168–169). In 1969 Melvin Calvin included
the letter (both the transcription and the facsimile) in his book on chemical evolution
(Calvin 1969), calling it to the attention of the origins-of-life community.
Darwin’s letter summarizes in a nutshell his ideas on the emergence of life, and provides
insights on the views on the chemical nature of the basic biological processes that were
becoming prevalent in scientific circles. Although Friedrich Miescher had discovered
nucleic acids (he called them nuclein) in 1869 (Dahm 2005), the deciphering of their central
role in genetic processes would remain unknown for almost another century. In contrast, the
roles played by proteins in manifold biological processes had been established.
……………..Although Darwin had developed a strong interest in chemistry as a youngster, it is not
known if he was aware of the synthesis of alanine achieved by Adolf Strecker in 1850. In
the absence of any real corroborative evidence, it is impossible to guess what Darwin
thought about the nature of the first living beings. In any case, Darwin’s remarks should not
be read to imply that he was thinking in terms of prebiotic chemistry, but rather that he
recognized that the chemical gap separating organisms from the non-living was not
insurmountable.
I don’t think the article is proposing repeated divine intervention at every stage. The framework being discussed is closer to constrained self-organization operating under lawful physical and informational constraints, which is different from invoking continual miraculous insertion events.
As the article states, the origin-of-life model is framed in terms of coherence stabilization, tunneling-enabled transitions, thermodynamic selection, and constrained chemical self-organization prior to any hypothesized collapse-like dynamics. In that sense, the proposal is closer to a providentially structured order within nature rather than repeated suspension of natural law.………..
This coherence-biased origin model provides the earliest instantiation of the constraint dynamics we extend to biological contexts. The same classes of physical effects—namely, coherence stabilization, tunneling-enabled transitions, environmentally induced decoherence, with collapse-like resolution treated as a later, conditional possibility—structure the emergence of viral modules, retrotransposon activation patterns, developmental architectures, and even cognitive dynamics. In this light, the earliest stages of chemical evolution anticipate the recurring coherence–tunneling–decoherence hierarchy. We do not propose that collapse-like transitions played a causal role in abiogenesis itself; origin-of-life processes are treated here as arising from constrained chemical self-organization and thermodynamic selection, prior to any hypothesized collapse-like dynamics.
R. Owen, On parthenogenesis, or the successive production of procreating individuals from a single ovum (John Van Voorst, 1849).
@moderators Is there anything new in this soapbox thread that has not been Owen blah blah blah a dozen times earlier?
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I’m perfectly willing to take your word that the answer is … probably not!
Having just watched an enthralling video from 3blue1brown about Escher’s work and logarithmic mapping (warping), I’m now imagining threads like these being something like a crude text equivalent of a subject forever returning to itself (like monks walking up an endless stair case.) Will happily let these monks make an exit through a final terminal doorway, though!
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