Theoretical origin of life; criticism of the usual hype (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, July 04, 2019, 19:51 (1758 days ago) @ David Turell

The new lab work always is touted as solving the problem of origin of life:

https://evolutionnews.org/2019/06/astrobiology-searching-for-the-origin-of-life-in-all-...

"Astrobiologists think they may have found where life came from — cyanide in meteorites! From Live Science:

"Cyanide isn’t just the last resort for the captured spies of Hollywood film. It’s also a crucial component of the early chemistry of life. And now, new research finds that cyanide might have ridden to Earth on meteorites.

"Samples of a particular group of primitive meteorites — including a large one that fell near Murchison, Australia, in 1969 — all contain cyanide, bound in a stable configuration with iron and carbon monoxide. These same sorts of structures are found in enzymes called hydrogenases in modern bacteria and archaea, which could suggest that early life either borrowed from meteorites or that early Earth’s geology formed the same kind of cyanide compounds, said study co-author Michael Callahan, an analytical chemist Boise State University.

"You can predict the rest — breathless excitement in the astrobiology community! Perhaps the mystery of life has finally been unraveled!

"Materialist “astrobiology” is a parody of itself. Imagine a computer scientist trying to understand the origin of — that is, reverse-engineer — a software program of unknown provenance. He would be a fool to chemically analyze the computer’s chip or chassis. The origin of the program is in the information encoded in it. He would study the program as a designed artifact, and only by that approach would the scientist be able to understand its origin.

"The same reasoning applies to origin of life research. Life isn’t characterized by cyanide, or even nucleotides or lipids or proteins or the host of substrates in living things. The essence of life is information — the gigabytes of information in the genetic code in DNA, the astonishingly complex molecular machinery of cellular metabolism, the intricate orchestration of the physiology of higher organisms, and the immaterial power of rational thought and free will in man. The material components of living things are merely the substrate in which this elegant information is stored and expressed. And information always originates in a mind.

“'Astrobiologists” who search for life’s origin in cyanide in meteorites or in any material substrate are fools blinded by materialist ideology.

"The origin of life is intelligence — intelligence from a Mind of astonishing power and beauty. To the extent that “astrobiology” ignores this basic scientific truth, it is a pseudoscience, devoted not to the truth about life, but to the protection of the materialist creation myth."

Comment: this essay from the ID community doesn't require much imagination or extrapolation to understand how they support my approach to the origin of life and to evolution by the intelligence of God. dhw constantly demands that I name names of ID folks. This piece is by Michael Egnor, neurosurgeon.

Now read James Tour, world renowned biochemist who makes organic molecules from scratch:

https://evolutionnews.org/2019/07/on-the-origin-of-life-science-uprising-helps-break-a-...

"Professor Tour is a personality to be reckoned with, pouring steely scorn on his colleagues who study, and mislead, about the origin of life.

“'All of these little pictures of molecules coming together to form the first cell are fallacious, are ridiculous,” says Tour. “The origin of life community has not been honest.” Claims by Craig Venter and others are little more than hype. What about claims that material processes at the dawn of life had time on their side? No, the opposite is true. Claims by researchers of having created “proto-cells” are like saying you’ve created a “proto-turkey” by warming some cold cuts, broth, and a few feathers.

"Dr. Axe and Dr. Meyer clarify both the complexity of the object needing to be explained — the first cell — and the delusion of imagining that the “functional, digital information” in DNA could have been authored with no intelligence having played any part in it."

Comment: Tour, Axe, and Meyer should be enough names to silence dhw's demands for names and it should be clear ID is in full support of my theories.