Definitions (Evolution)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Sunday, June 28, 2009, 12:37 (5625 days ago) @ George Jelliss

In dhw's most recent post in the James Le Fanu thread the terms "materialism" and "abiogenesis" come up, and it occurs to me that they need some reexamining. So I thought it might be as well to revisit this old thread. - Materialism. - First it is necessary to realise that this term is often used in the pejorative sense of "consumerism", or living a life without "higher values" such as are described as "ethical" or "spiritual". This is not the sense used here, but it is liable to colour people's thinking with emotive tinges. - Second, people who describe atheists as "materialists" generally mean that they have a picture of the universe as comprised of material objects like atoms and molecules, and suppose that attributes such as mind and consciousness are phenomena of the motion and interconnection of these material particles. - This is sound enough as far as it goes, but modern physics makes the distinction between material and immaterial more difficult to maintain in this nineteenth century sense. If the Higgs Boson is discovered at CERN then it will provide an explanation for the phenomenon of mass, which is the measurable quantity by which we determine whether something is material. - However much of nature as now understood by physics and cosmology is expressed in immaterial terms such as energy and information. So how does modern "materialism" differ from other more metaphysical ideas? I think it is less clear. This is not however to equate the immaterial with the spiritual. - 
Abiogenesis - In the sense used by dhw "a-bio-genesis" is taken to mean the supposed genesis (first appearance) of life (bio) from non-life (a-bio). I looked the word up in Chambers Dictionary and see that it ascribes the origin of the term to T. H. Huxley in 1870, who also coined "agnostic". The same dictionary defines "biogenesis" as "the generation of living things from living things only". So it seems that there is an inbuilt bias to both these terms. - I would prefer to have a term for "the origin of life" that was scientifically neutral, not presuming that it's origin is purely material, or purely organic or involved some other scenario, such as involving divine, spiritual or metaphysical input. From etymological consideration, "biogenesis" would seem to be the correct neutral term. The theory of "origin of life from life" would seem to be a contradiction in terms, since it supposes that life has always existed and had no origin in time. Creationism should I suppose be called something like "theobiogenisis".

--
GPJ