The Big Bang (Origins)

by dhw, Sunday, May 16, 2010, 09:45 (5086 days ago) @ xeno6696

Matt is against the assumption that life "as it exists today is functionally AND structurally identical to life at the time of origins." He goes on to argue that it's "time to stop reasoning this way. We won't find the origin of life by studying life. We'll only find it by trying to build life."-No doubt David will answer for himself, but in the meantime I have a slight problem with this. It seems to me that our approach has to depend on our prime interest, and for me the leading question is: How did we get here? As a self-centred human, I want to know what were the processes that led to my thinking, feeling, imagining, inventing, reasoning species inhabiting this lump of rock. Darwin's theory is that we go back to one or a few very simple forms of life that over a long period of time evolved into us. Those are the forms that interest me most, and it is their origin I would like to know. If scientists were to build a different form of life, or to find a different form on another planet, it would be of enormous interest, and we would no doubt learn a great deal from it. I'm all in favour of such research. But if, for argument's sake, the different form was capable only of reproducing itself, and was unable to adapt, to innovate, to evolve, then there would still be aspects of our own life on Earth that remained unexplained. Building life won't tell us whether or not there were different structures at the time of origin, and I'm not even sure that it matters. What matters, at least to me, is how we came to have OUR structures. I don't think the study of these is irrelevant to the search for their origin. Nor of course is the search for extraterrestrial life or for the means to create life ourselves. We should explore every avenue, and although you say that life as it exists today "has its place" and you have qualified your stance at the end of your post ("life is only functionally similar today. Not necessarily structurally"), I don't see why building life constitutes the only possible approach. But perhaps the origin of life as it exists today, which after all is the only form we know, is not your main focus of attention. -As for the question of design v. poor design v. accident, I suspect that the same argument will be going on long after all of us have disappeared into...whatever we disappear into.