New Miscellany: more on fine-tuning (General)

by David Turell , Friday, February 21, 2025, 20:54 (12 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: The discussion has nothing to do with origin of life. […]

dhw: This is the daftest of all your arguments. How can you possibly say that everywhere in the universe is fine-tuned for life if our planet is the only place we know that has produced life?

Because the 20+ necessary factors make this universe exist! That is the level of this discussion, not the appearance of life. Your view is absolutely wrong.

DAVID: It is you who are illogical. Fine-tuning allows life to appear anywhere, nothing more. Fine tuning factors do not make life.

dhw: How can you tell that a place is fine-tuned for life if there is no life? One moment you say “life can pop up”, and the next moment, it’s so complex that only your God could create and combine all the necessary factors. If “fine-tuning” for life is not the combination of all the necessary factors that results in life, what is it? And if “fine-tuning” has nothing to do with the origin of life, what function can it possibly have?

Still wrong. It is the makeup of this universe that allows life to appear. That is the primary concept you miss.

Biological complexity

QUOTE: We hope that one day we will be able to unlock the secret of how nature produces all the oxygen molecules that surround us and that we breathe every day," says Ablyasova."

DAVID: it took highly sophisticated lab work to do it. How do natural mutations achieve such a complex enzyme? Not by chance.

dhw: So it’s all part of the “fine-tuning”, and you think the whole universe combines all of these highly sophisticated factors, and life can pop up anywhere. Once more: you can only know that a place is fine-tuned for life if it harbours or has harboured life! What other proof can you possibly have?

The real history of fine-tuning: Life is here and physicists have worked backward to define the requirements. Amazingly they are precisely fine-tuned!

Bird brains

DAVID: Cells are not intelligent enough to design a new type of organism.

dhw: Yes, I know you prefer your theory of ad hoc divine dabbles or the first cells being provided with 3.8000,000,000 years’ worth of instructions.

DAVID: And you have your brilliant cell committees.

dhw: So your God provided the first cells with programmes for every species, every strategy, every response to every new threat/opportunity, to be passed on through billions of years even into our present and future. I get it. I just don’t believe it.

Immunity proves it. One system makes antibodies for everything!

DAVID: LUCA indicates it:

dhw: LUCA has nothing to do with it!

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26535311-100-when-did-life-begin-on-earth-new-ev...

QUOTE: "...genetics points to an early origin. In a study published in July 2024, Donoghue and his colleagues attempted to date the last universal common ancestor (LUCA): the organism that is the ancestor of all life today. They did so by identifying genes found in all living organisms, which probably date back to LUCA. Their best estimate was that LUCA lived 4.2 billion years ago. That’s just 300 million years after Earth formed. And things would have got started far earlier than that. “LUCA isn’t the origin of life by any stretch of the imagination,” says Donoghue. It seems to have been a fairly advanced microorganism, the product of a long period of evolution and growing complexity."

DAVID: All we can predict is complexity al the way back.

dhw: I agree. The very first cells would have been complex. How does that come to mean that they contained instructions for the whole of evolution etc.?

The immune system proves it. See above.