Origin of Life: Another dead end (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, April 10, 2014, 06:29 (3882 days ago) @ romansh

Romansh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6QYDdgP9eg-Another lab experiment showing that intelligent design can create life. It is nothing more.-Jack SzostAk himself on defining life:-In fact, a leading research scientist in origin-of-life (OOL) studies, Jack W. Szostak does not even think definitions help. Since the research has been extremely unproductive, his frustration shows in his comments,but they are very reasonable objections: Attempts to define life are irrelevant to scientific efforts to understand the origin of life. Why is this? Simply put, the study of the "origin of life" is an effort to understand the transition from chemistry to biology [organic chemistry]. This fundamental transition was the result of a lengthy pathway consisting of many stages, each of which is the subject of numerous scientific questions. Simple chemistry in diverse environments on the early earth led to the emergence of ever more complex chemistry and ultimately to the synthesis of the critical biological building blocks. [And this is a giant chasm that no research scientist has been able to cross.] At some point, the assembly of these materials into primitive cells enabled the emergence of Darwinian evolutionary behavior, followed by the gradual evolution of more complex life forms leading to modern life. Somewhere in this grand process, this series of transitions from the clearly physical and chemical to the clearly biological, it is tempting to draw a line that divides the non-living from the living. But the location of any such dividing line is arbitrary, and there is no agreement on where it should be drawn. None of this matters, however, in terms of the fundamental scientific questions concerning
the transitions leading from chemistry to biology—the true unknowns and subject of origin-of-life studies. More importantly, such a definition would not further
our understanding of the transitions involved or the nature of the physical and chemical forces driving those transitions. What is important in the origin of life field is understanding the transitions that led from chemistry to biology.
So far, I have not seen that efforts to define life have contributed at all to that understanding (Jack W. Szostak, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Department of Molecular Biology and Center for Computational and
Integrative Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital,(http://www.jbsdonline.com).-from my new book, pg.75-76. What he is saying is that they have no idea how to do it. All frantic theory, no real results.