exchemist

John John is gone gone, as of 18 Aug last year:

It is nonsense for you to say any of these points is a "challenge to abiogenesis". I have already told you abiogenesis is simply a term for whatever the processes were that led to the appearance of life. It is a perfectly general term, involving no assumptions or preconceptions as to how it took place. It's like the formation of the solar system. We know that happened or we would not be here. So it would be mad to describe some issue as a challenge to the formation of the solar system. In the same way, we know abiogenesis occurred, or we would not be here. This misconception that "abiogenesis" denotes some kind of theory, that can be challenged, is one I have come across before. From creationists. The first item on your list betrays ignorance about how science works. Firstly, it is in my experience only creationists that demand "proof" from science. They do so because they argue disingenuously, wanting to be able to say, "Aha, gotcha, you can't prove it!" Anyone who understands science knows it does not deal in proof where theories are concerned. Science deals in models, supported by observational evidence. Not proof. Secondly, whatever makes you imagine there had to be an "exact transition" from non-life to life? This again betrays a (creationist-style) mindset of expecting magic poofing, at some precise instant of history, to confer life - shazzam! - on previously inanimate matter. But we have today examples of things that cannot be unambiguously classified as alive or non alive. The definition of "life" is notoriously hard to pin down. My son learned that at school, when he was 14. It seems likely the transition was gradual, as various elements of biochemistry came together. Both the demand for "proof" and the demand for an "exact transition" indicate the mode of argument of somebody who is not interested in the science of abiogenesis. Creationists need abiogenesis to be an insoluble mystery, in order to make room for magic poofing by their God. You seem to be the same. If you were interested in the subject, we could have a fascinating discussion about RNA world, bi-lipid membranes, the possibility that chirality is due to adsorption of substances on chirally selective faces of mineral crystals, the discovery of precursors to DNA and RNA bases (heterocyclic aromatic rings) on carbonaceous meteorites and so on. But no. You want it to be an insoluble mystery, don't you? This is obscurantism: the opposite of the scientific attitude.

One of the best-informed and most reliable sources is the International Energy Agency (IEA) but it may not be parochial enough for someone like you.

You are now on my Ignore list.

People like you, because it enables you to hop up and down with comical glee that Trump is socking it to the libtard scientists who warn the world about the need for action to arrest climate change. But it won’t make your oh-so-important gasol-een prices lower.😁

As there is no “theory of abiogenesis”, it is a nonsense to list “challenges” to something that does not exist. All your list does is enumerate some of the issues any theory will have to account for, plus adding in a few ignorant statements showing a lack of understanding of science. Once again, it reads just like a set of creationist talking points. You really are a cracked record, aren’t you? You are in no position to give anybody here lectures about good science. Your ignorance is stunning.

Yawn. Haven’t you already done this, Mr. Sealion?

Passed, not past.

What has this to do with epigenetics?

This is a silly troll thread you have started. Post about something sensible, can’t you? We’ve got better things to do than go over well-worn topics to do with TFG’s personality.

Yep, exactly. it’s to annoy people into reacting - as we are doing by responding to this thread, er…….

It seems that -ve mass has been explored: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_mass. It leads to some curious predicted behaviour.

Per forum rules you need to explain it here on the forum without requiring readers to go off-site by clicking links. Can you summarise the idea in a couple of paras?

I wonder what @JohnDBarrow thinks about the Bishop of Washington's sermon to Trump, extolling the virtues of traditional Christian compassion towards immigrants and people of differing sexual orientations. Seems Trump is hopping mad about being reminded of what the New Testament has to say. Is Christianity part of the "culture and traditions" of America, or not, I wonder?

When you have something concrete to contribute to the understanding of abiogenesis, I and others here will be delighted to discuss it with you. So far all you have put forward is misrepresentation and meaningless waffle. It is not overconfidence in science that makes me criticise you for this, it is merely the ability to think straight and not be bamboozled with buzzwords.

This reads like yet another lousy undergraduate essay from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

This is absurd. Science has been brilliantly successful at understanding life. Just take a course in biology, biochemistry or even medicine and you will see how much we know. Consciousness is another story altogether, as there is no consensus as to what "consciousness" means in a scientific sense. There is a good article about the issue here, by Massimo Pigliucci, whom I have found to be an exceptionally clear thinker who has no time for bullshit: https://aeon.co/essays/consciousness-is-neither-a-spooky-mystery-nor-an-illusory-belief . We could have a discussion about that, but it would need a separate thread. So let's not muddy the waters by bundling that together with life. They are distinct topics. What science has not yet succeeded in doing is to produce a model for the origin of life. That is not, to anyone who understands a bit of biology or biochemistry, remotely a surprise. It is very complicated and the sequence of events involved took place over 3 billion years ago, leaving no fossil trace. So all we have to go on is what we can presume about the conditions on the prebiotic Earth and what we can see are the common biochemical features of all life today, from which we can make inferences about ancestral biochemistry. You have no basis for believing there is some fundamental difficulty in principle for science in understanding this. It is simply a hard problem, for the reasons I have just outlined. So it will take time. In fact there may never be a definitive resolution, just a set of alternative possible models. It is clear you have some kind of metaphysical bee in your bonnet about the limitations of science in understanding the world. I would quite agree there seems to be more to human experience than the physical world. This is the realm of the arts, religion and (parts of) philosophy and I do not dismiss their value. But you make a huge error in arbitrarily picking out one feature of the physical world, life, to claim it is uniquely impossible to explain through science. There is just no basis for such a belief. This error is identical to the one creationists make - and to the deliberately deceptive arguments that intelligent cdesign proponentsists promote. I think it was Cardinal Newman who, in the c.19th, pointed out that the Christian who bases his faith on things in the physical world that science cannot explain is doomed to have it shattered as science progresses. Whether you are a Christian or not I do not know, but the argument applies. Do not look to features of the physical world to justify a belief in impenetrable mysteries beyond science. (P.S. To be strictly fair I should acknowledge that the reason, if any, why there is order in the cosmos, which we express through our "laws of nature", does seem destined to remain a mystery to science.)

Yes, the similarity to you know who had not escaped me.A feature they seem to have in common is this cargo cult attitude of elevating things they don’t understand into mysteries to justify some sort of obscurantist, cod-metaphysical construction, instead of putting in the hard yards of actually learning about the topic and applying an analytical, scientific approach to it. Fair point, though it is notable that the mischaracterisation of abiogenesis research is almost identical to the way the creationists do it. I was wondering if this quantum woo approach might be a Trojan Horse for ID, actually. Part of the ID shtick is to pretend it’s not about God, just something “intelligent”. This stuff about the holographic principle encoding information from the universe seemed to be edging in that direction.

I actually printed off and read the entire judgement in the Dover School (Kitzmiller) trial, when it happened in 2005. It was well-written and surprisingly interesting. I felt that the judge must have enjoyed the case immensely.

Well recognising the problem is half the battle. Let’s hope.

Then why do you say things like "Despite these efforts, we’ve yet to successfully generate life from non-living matter"? Eh? You are now simply stating the obvious- that the problem is not solved - and insinuating that is evidence that a new approach, of some ill-defined sort, is needed. That does not follow at all. It is just a complex problem that will probably, I suspect, take another half century or so before we have a coherent model, or models. That is not a surprise to anyone with relevant biochemical knowledge. Obviously the full resources of the sciences will continue to be brought to bear on the topic, no doubt including quantum biology if and when appropriate. By the way, you have, I now notice, quite a track record on this forum of using creationist-style talking points as arguments. I am by no means the first to criticise you for it, it turns out. I find that interesting.

Oh for sure it will go to court. For that is the American way. Then we can all enjoy the courtroom spectacle, with rival teams of snarling American lawyers, lots of gavel-banging: "Objection!" "Objection sustained! "Objection overruled!" etc, as seen on TV. And all at vast expense, to the benefit of said snarling lawyers. (I'm sorry but for my own sanity I've decided to view this new presidency through the lens of the "goat rodeo". If I took it all seriously it would do my head in.)

No you certainly are not! And the accusations will keep coming unless you raise your game and stop misrepresenting abiogenesis research - see below for the many ways in which you are doing that. You list these ideas as if they are alternative attempts that have all failed in some way, to be discarded in favour of some other approach. This is an absurd misreading of how the science is done. Lipid membranes are one part of the puzzle. RNA, or some other replication system, is another, different one. The Miller Urey "primordial soup" experiment was done in the 1950s, 70 years ago now, and it was very informative at the time. These are not failed alternatives but different pieces of the jigsaw, being pursued concurrently, or which (like the Miller Urey experiment) served a purpose in advancing knowledge many years ago, to be followed up by newer approaches built on those foundations. And none of this research has the goal of generating life artificially. That is a complete red herring. So for you to say "despite these efforts" we have not succeeded in generating artificial life is a ridiculously false characterisation of what abiogenesis research is about. Of course we haven't: that has never been the goal. At every stage in this discussion you sound more and more like a creationist. This is the sort of nonsense I have become used to from them. "Quantum entanglement could play a role in information transfer during chemical reactions" is just meaningless waffle unless you specify what information transfer you are referring to and in what chemical reactions. Chemical reactions do not as a rule result in "information transfer" at all. What are you talking about? Do you even know? "The holographic principle might offer insight into how complexity emerges from information encoded in the universe" is even worse. That is utter, question-begging gibberish. What do you mean by "information" being "encoded in the universe"? Who says it is? And what relevance does this woolly notion have to abiogenesis? As for complexity, that emerges all the time in nature and there is no mystery at all about how that happens. So there is no problem of principle to solve there. You are completely misrepresenting the science, and then offering pseudo-mystical woolly nonsense as a solution to problems you cannot even define.

Well OK my son is at uni in Scotland and may not be typical of American young people but he and his peers are getting a bit chary of social media and of spending too much time online. Some of the mental health epidemic among this cohort during lockdown etc seems to be linked to excessive consumption of social media, doomscrolling etc. He has deleted a number of apps and last autumn did a "disconnection" exercise, walking from Glasgow to Fort William with a tent and backpack and his phone off. It took him 6 days and he said was very restorative - and beautiful, apart from a rainy trudge across Rannoch Moor. I get the feeling his generation is learning that social media can be addictive and needs to be handled like alcohol, with monitoring of consumption and taking positive steps to take breaks from it. But that is speculating about the next generation. Meanwhile we have todays trolls and idiots........

Yes I wondered about that. But this nuttiness about time travel suggests something different, presumably some whizzo thing Tesla dreamt up that had to be suppressed (why?) by the US government. Or not. My bet is this loony Adios or whatever he's called saw the word tesseract and thought he would chop a letter off and use that, as it sounded to him suitably techie and Tesla-like. But let's see what @James Nekon is able to come up with.