Replies

"I no longer believe you can't see this. Furthermore, I pity any lurker who is having the difficulty you claim for yourself."

You keep saying it is obvious when it isn't. That is not a logical argument.

"What testing is that, pray tell, and how will it support your ridiculous blanket negative?"

I have told you already. You blame me for repeating myself, then ask me to restate what I have already said. Don't speed read the answer: Any attempt to assemble life in a laboratory can serve as a confirming test. Any attempt to observe spontaneous self organization of life in a laboratory or in the environment will serve as a falsifying example (not a confirming test as you ascribe).

"You cannot test the proposition that there is no way no how never that biochemicals can spontaneously (even over half a billion years) self-assemble to life."

You are mixing metaphors. My statement has little to do with what happened historically and everything to do with observable processes. It is not necessary for a naturally occurring environment to naturally occur. It can be created.

Both tests can utilize human intervention in creating the environment in which life will appear. The distinction between them is one requires self assembly and the other intelligent assembly. Scientists are free to use any naturally occurring evironmentals in any combination they desire. It does not need to be random and should not be.

Temperature, atmospheric pressure, ingredients of whatever might serve as a primordial soup - these are some of the controlled variables.

"You could run tests for ten thousand years and never make a dent in the possibilities still out there untried."

Now who is being disingenuous?

Are you claiming there is some form of matter that is not living but is also not lifeless? If life self assembles or ever has, it will happen in a moment of time whether the conditions took billions of years to become just right. Scientists do not have to allow billions of years to bring about this just right condition. They only need to figure out what the condition is and recreate it.

It seems your arguments are more geared toward saying my tests put abiogenesis at an unfair disadvantage. Perhaps. But that also reinforces my position that directed assembly is more likely than self assembly.

"Just a few posts ago you practically acknowledged the untestability by saying you were only going to assume the premise."

Yes I do assume the hypothesis in order to test it. This is how science works.

"A hypothesis is a statement whose truth is temporarily assumed, whose meaning is beyond all doubt." -- Albert Einstein, excerpted from a letter to Eduard Study, September 25, 1918 within Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, J.J. Stachel and Robert Schulmann, eds. Princeton University Press 1987

Abiogenesis is testable but not falsifiable. Your own rant about billions of years underscores my point.

"You're writing volumes of empty blather here while refusing to address the obvious. You are never going to test your proposition."

My hypothesis will be tested without regard to what I do. Scientists will attempt to create life by both means I have described. Neither method has borne fruition thus far. One or both will in due time.

On the other hand, it is you who are avoiding issues. Particularly, I have asked repeatedly how my hypothesis is fundamentally and logically different from the law of gravity. You have failed to address this. If it is as obvious as you claim, it should be easy for you to vocalize and pinpoint where the deviation in logic occurs. I can only conclude you cannot because the deviation has not occurred.

"Very few of you can admit an error above the typo level in argument with the Heathen Foe. You are not one of those few who can."

I have already demonstrated that I do admit my errors and provided a specific example - speciation. However, in this case I am right. Unless and until it is proved otherwise, I would be a liar to admit I am wrong.

Your premise is an infinite negative. You cannot test it and you are not going to. Your tests do not address your announced premise and never will. As I said already, I no longer believe you don't understand this.

This turns into you preferring to dance along double-talking rather than admit you said something stupid. That makes you stupid and transparently dishonest.

I don't mind explaining this to you again. I'm curious to see just how driven you are.

// Very few of you can admit an error above the typo level in argument with the Heathen Foe. You are not one of those few who can. Do you think no one can see?//

What they call errors the most part are not, in reality what they are is violations of their belief system.

Wolf

Are you claiming there is some form of matter that is not living but is also not lifeless? If life self assembles or ever has, it will happen in a moment of time whether the conditions took billions of years to become just right. Scientists do not have to allow billions of years to bring about this just right condition. They only need to figure out what the condition is and recreate it.

This too is all wrong. Never mind for the moment that you are only spewing words to obfuscate a more basic problem. It shows you don't know how to test your premise even if you had bit off some more manageable chunk.

The all-at-once poof model is called creationism. That's silly, yes. Personally, I don't think even God would make a cell that way, much less a man from dirt in one afternoon. At any rate, there's no poofing in evolutionary models, the very thing you say you're going to discount.

Evolutionary models have features like the following:

Massive parallelism of experiment.
Bootstrapping from simpler models.
Lots of time.
Stable and semi-stable subassemblies building up.

There are probably others I'm forgetting, but that will give you a flavor.

So I'll now restate the two problems I see for you, from inside working out. One, to the extent you're trying to model abiogenesis at all, you're just trying to do a strawman poof model without the poofer.

Then there's the outer problem. If you don't know all the things that can have happened on an early abiotic Earth, you don't know that none of them could lead to some unknown primitive life the exact nature of which you also don't know. You have said you're going to prove there is no scenario and you patently don't have the goods for that.

The outer problem, it's just too late. I don't believe you don't see it. Period.