exchemist

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.

Haha, all the MAGA suckers will pile in too late, at the peak, and then it will crash and they will all lose money. That will be jolly funny. I wonder if @JohnDBarrow has bought any.

You have offered no reason why we should "look beyond traditional chemical reactions" (whatever you mean by "traditional" - it seems to me to be a meaningless distinction). You offer no example of how the "more" you speak of solves any problem in abiogenesis. You seem to imagine there is some fundamental stumbling block to understanding. There isn't. As @swansont points out, nobody in the world of biochemistry has come to the conclusion life is "more complex than initially anticipated". You have made that up. It is just a very complex issue, involving a lot of subsystems of chemical processes and physical structures. There is no special missing piece. I ask you again: can you cite any specific role, or hypothetical role, in abiogenesis that quantum processes like tunnelling or entanglement can play, which would overcome a difficulty puzzling those working in the field? How can such processes help in the mechanism for forming the first bilipid membrane, for example? Or the process by which the ATP,<-> ADP interconversion became adopted as the energy transport method for cellular processes? Or the process by which chirality in saccharides and proteins became established? You have no idea.

I think you have hit on it, actually. It is the internet, and social media specifically, that have led to the rise of something called the "troll". Casual rudeness and the expression of hatred and facile, childish political opinions have become normal and socially accepted. Trolling has become the language of politics. The USA now has government by troll. The tech bros of course promote a different narrative: one of "democratisation" of opinion - and the establishing of "truth" by what is popularly believed on social media, rather that what can be objectively substantiated. This was the substance of that recent, self-serving article Peter Thiel wrote for the Financial Times. I don't know what it will take to make society realise where this leads. Maybe another world war. Or maybe we can learn to be mature about social media. There are signs in the next generation (people like my son who is 21) that they realise this and can discard the junk factoids and the abuse, in a way that perhaps people of @JohnDBarrow's age bracket often do not, especially if poorly educated.

You are making this up and it is ballocks. There is no dividing line, as you seem to imagine, between chemistry and quantum processes. All of chemistry consists of quantum processes at the "atomic and quantum levels". Tunnelling phenomena have been a part of chemistry for decades, e.g. the inversion spectrum of ammonia. And you have yet to provide any evidence that QM tunnelling or entanglement can shed any light at all on abiogenesis. When you say" Introducing concepts like the holographic principle takes us even further, suggesting that the key to understanding life may lie in the realm of information, beyond the atomic level." this is just quantum woo. It is meaningless. I repeat: show me please a citation, by any of the researchers you mention, that proposes a specific role for quantum biological processes at some stage in the chain of processes involved in abiogenesis. I bet you can't, because you have made it up. You have no understanding of quantum mechanics or biochemistry and because you don't understand either you are trying to make a religion out of them. This is cargo cult stuff.

That could be an important job if the rumours about TFG's lack of bowel control have any substance. Perhaps @JohnDBarrow can tell us more?

This is nonsense. Abiogenesis is simply a term meaning the natural processes by which biochemistry and thus life arose from pre-biotic chemistry. Quantum biology is just one, existing, small subset of the biochemical processes that science already considers, when investigating the chemical processes within cells. Quantum biology is not some magical extra alternative to biochemistry: it's part of it. I can't find evidence that Nicholas Gisin has interests in quantum biology, but I see Jim Al Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden co-authored a book on quantum biology. But this does not, so far as I can see, suggest anything special to do with abiogenesis. It seems to be about recent discoveries of things such as QM tunnelling by protons in certain biochemical processes and the possible presence of QM coherence effects in the process of photosynthesis. This is all just a subset of biochemistry, not some magical extra ingredient that somehow enabled life to form. If you can provide a citation from any of these researchers specifically involving a quantum biology process in abiogenesis I would be interested to read it. But I doubt you will be able to. As far as I can see none of these people has a background or expertise in abiogenesis research. (Michael Terry seems to be either an actor or a serial killer, according to my search engine).

He's a tool all right. 😆 Oh he's just come out of the closet now as a MAGA troll, like the new president. There will be a lot of idiots crowing like this for a while.

Haha, now you are arguing in bad faith - curiously, another common tactic of creationists. It is quite clear from my previous post that the "creationist claptrap" I referred to is the silly notion that just because we have not directly observed life arising from non-life, or reproduced it in the lab, therefore science will be unable to account for how it took place. I also made it clear that quantum biology is an established field of science - and therefore obviously I do not consider that to be creationist claptrap. Is it your normal practice to misrepresent what your interlocutors say in this way? If so, it is going to be hard to have a constructive conversation with you. As for your claim that some have turned to quantum biology as a potential "venue" (whatever that may mean) for life, who are these people? As I say, quantum effects are normal in biochemistry. What is in my admittedly non-expert view unlikely is any significant role for quantum entanglement, given the "warm, wet, noisy" environment of the cell. The only attempt at invoking entanglement I'm aware of is the largely discredited Orch OR hypothesis of Penrose and Hameroff to account for consciousness. Consciousness ≠ life, needless to say. So who are these people you have in mind? Can you give names and provide links to information about their hypotheses?

Yes I had colleagues who learnt some Norwegian while posted to Oslo. But what I was getting at is that, say, potential migrants from former British colonies like Pakistan, India or Nigeria are likely not only to speak English already to some level, but also to have connections with Britain: relatives or friends of family, people who have at least visited, some existing community of people from their country to help them find their feet, and so on. So it's far less of a leap in the dark to go to Britain than trying their luck in Norway. The same goes for France vis-a-vis W African countries or SE Asia. In fact, as an Englishman, the view I take of the migration issue is that it is largely payback for British colonialism - and, like the original colonialism, it is a mixture of good and bad influences on the country.

No one is going to open an unknown file that could contain malware. If you have information about this "energetic array", you need to post it as text and/or pictures, here on the forum rather than expecting readers to click on files of unknown provenance. Andrew Basagio, whose "project" Project Pegasus appears to be, is quite obviously delusional. It is therefore a bit unlikely there is anything of substance in it. But if you can describe this energetic array for us , here on the forum, people can try to evaluate it on its merits in terms of physics and engineering. By the way, where does the term "tesserac" [sic] come from? Is this a name given to it by Basagio? Or by you?

I respond with some trepidation because (i) Tesla is a great favourite of cranks, possibly because some of his ideas were crank ideas, (ii) because you refer to time travel, which is pretty much a crank idea and (iii) because you refer to an unlikely-seeming conspiracy theory about the US government seizing Tesla's inventions. As I understand it, the FBI did take the papers found in his hotel room when he died in 1943, because it was the height of WW2 and it was felt there might be some material of value which should not be allowed to fall into enemy hands. But there wasn't. (Tesla was very eccentric and some of his ideas were pretty crackpot. We had a guy on this forum who was trying to emulate Tesla's quest for a heat engine that would run on ambient heat, in violation of thermodynamics.) I do not recognise this "energetic array" you refer to. Can you describe it? I know that a tesseract, with a final t, is the 4D analogue of a cube. But I have never heard of a “tesserac”. But I've looked up this Andrew Basagio.....and burst out laughing: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Andrew_Basiago. This guy is obviously nuts. He claims to have met Obama on Mars! Perhaps he’d get along with Elon Musk?🤪

No it doesn't at all. This is reminiscent of creationist claptrap. There are many fields of scientific knowledge that are acquired by observation without anything at all being done in a laboratory, and many natural processes that we have understood even through they cannot be observed to take place on a human timescale, for instance star formation, or plate tectonics. It is trivially obvious that our knowledge of abiogenesis is incomplete, so sure, there are key steps to be elucidated, but this is true of any active area of scientific research. There is nothing unique about life in that respect. There is no evidence of a qualitative "gap" that is somehow unique to the understanding of how life arose. It is just a question of the obvious difficulty of piecing together something very complex by extrapolating from present biochemistry back 4bn years and fitting it to what we know of pre-biotic chemistry on the Earth at that time. As for quantum biology, this is nothing special either, really. All chemistry depends on quantum mechanics. Quantum effects are everywhere in biochemistry, though we are finding (or speculating about) new processes in some of which relatively exotic QM phenomena, such as tunnelling, have been invoked. There is no way I can see that considering such QM effects would materially alter the challenge of understanding abiogenesis. Understanding abiogenesis is just a very, very big jigsaw to assemble. I don't understand why you keep harping on about some mystical missing element - unless you are creationist who doesn't want to admit it, of course.😁

It is not clear what you are talking about here. It is perfectly obvious how inanimate matter (e.g. food substances, oxygen) become incorporated into living tissue. Do you really think we don't know how that happens? Or are you saying we don't know how abiogenesis occurred? That is undeniably true, since it is one of the hardest problems in modern science, due to the lack of direct evidence from almost 4bn years ago when it took place. However considerable progress has been made. Contrary to what you seem to be trying to insinuate, there is no reason to think there is some special magic ingredient, beyond the scope of biochemistry, involved. Life is quite evidently a process of biochemical reactions and biophysical processes, occurring within cells. Can you clarify what it is you are suggesting is missing?

I’ll certainly be intrigued to see how this mass deportation is going to work out. In what numbers? Where will they be deported to, and how? Will the receiving countries accept hordes of displaced people plonked on their doorstep? What agency will carry it out and at what cost? What effect will it have on local economies when these people are taken away from the jobs they have been doing? Or will it be like Trump’s “wall”, i.e. do a little bit, declare it done - and quickly try to change the subject? There are Danish neo-Nazis, certainly. And some far right anti-immigration politics in Sweden.

The Nordics seem to have largely escaped this far right surge. I suspect it is because (i) they were not recently colonial powers and (ii) because nobody learns their languages. So they are not an obvious choice for migrants.