On the contrary, when someone on an anonymous online message board, rather than posting an argument or citing sources, instead says "I bet you $1000!" it makes them look like an unserious armchair arguer. To suggest that life began through purely naturalistic mechanisms, you need to do three things:
1. Find evidence that it is possible to produce self-assembling reproducing organisms naturally.
2. Find evidence to suggest that an environment conducive to (1) was present on Earth during the requisite time period.
3. Find evidence to suggest that beyond being possible, that's what actually happened.
I think the discovery of incredibly complicated non-living organisms and the laboratory production of amino acids is incredibly important if that's what you're trying to prove, and I find it impossible to believe that you really consider the Miller experiment to be "irrelevant." Exactly what are you arguing?
As for citations -- the literature is incredibly broad. For starters:
Abkevich, V. I., A. M. Gutin, and E. I. Shakhnovich. 1996. How the first biopolymers could have evolved. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America93 (2):83944.
Ibid. 1997. Computer simulations of prebiotic evolution. Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing.
Alberti, S. 1997. The origin of the genetic code and protein synthesis. Journal of Molecular Evolution 45 (4):3528.
Bada, J. L. 1995. Origins of homochirality. Nature 374 (6523):5945.
Baltscheffsky, H., C. Blomberg, H. Liljenstrom, B. I. Lindahl, and P. Arhem. 1997. On the origin and evolution of life: an introduction. Journal of Theoretical Biology 187 (4):4539>
Tell me what else you need, but also do provide the evidence you have. What evidence actually suggests that this DID happen -- rather than being just a reasonable possibility?
[When people run away from an invitation to put some money on the line, it becomes clear to all that the person's original claim was an overstated bluff.]
On the contrary, when someone on an anonymous online message board, rather than posting an argument or citing sources, instead says "I bet you $1000!" it makes them look like an unserious armchair arguer.
I do not issue such challenges *instead* of "posting an argument or citing sources", I post them in *addition* to the mega-amounts of argument and citations which I have posted (to the point of getting close to a dozen whines about the volume).
To suggest that life began through purely naturalistic mechanisms,
EERRNNT!! You are trying to move the goalposts. Fifteen yard penalty. The original point of discussion involved only whether there's evidence that the transition from "nonlife" to "life" involved autocatalytic cycles or not. Here you're suddenly trying to expand it to include the *entire* process, from the very start to the very end, *and* suddenly insisting upon seeing evidence that the process was "purely" naturalistic, something I never touched upon, and which is probably impossible to prove even in theory (in the same sense as the impossibility of proving that Santa Claus doesn't exist, somewhere).
Sorry, I don't play that game. If you want to discuss the original point, fine, but don't try to change it now.
I think the discovery of incredibly complicated non-living organisms and the laboratory production of amino acids is incredibly important if that's what you're trying to prove, and I find it impossible to believe that you really consider the Miller experiment to be "irrelevant."
What I mean is that it doesn't matter where amino acids came from if we're discussing the particular point of how "life" formed from "almost but not quite living" systems -- the existence of organic compounds is a given under that scenario.
Exactly what are you arguing?
What I've always been arguing: 1) Southack's mental image of what the transition from "nonliving" to "living" might have looked like is cartoonishly oversimplistic, and 2) contrary to your repeated claims, there *is* evidence suggesting that autocatalytic processes were predecessors to what we would consider to be "life".
As for citations -- the literature is incredibly broad.
Yes it is, which is why it is quite amazing that you would be able to maintain that there is "absolutely no" evidence in the field.
Tell me what else you need,
I need you to stop making uninformed false claims about the evidence.
but also do provide the evidence you have. What evidence actually suggests that this DID happen -- rather than being just a reasonable possibility?
Seriously, why bother? You've *already* admitted that nothing you could see would change your mind.
Even so, if I had the citations at hand, I'd post them. But I don't -- they're papers I've read over the past five years, and most of them are not available online without a subscription. It would take me well upwards of six hours, at the least, to track them down and write enough introductory material in order to make their relevance clear -- this is a highly technical topic, much more so than evolutionary biology itself. And unlike the time I've spent writing various expositions on evolutionary biology, this one would have very little value to other discussions, or interest many readers even on this one.
As for your question about the nature of the evidence, it includes but is not limited to the manner in which the biochemical and procedural properties of the most basal processes of life match to a striking degree those of the chemical cycles which take place naturally at hydrothermal vents. That doesn't sound like much when written out as a superficial summary like that, but when you look at the actual chemistry, it's incredibly conspicuous.
These aren't among the papers I had read previously, and aren't as conclusive, but they turned up in a quick search just now and indicate the flavor of the research I've been reading:
Universality in intermediary metabolism