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On Plato, the Early Church, and Modern Science: An Eclectic Meditation
November 30, 2004 | Jean F. Drew

Posted on 11/30/2004 6:21:11 PM PST by betty boop

On Plato, the Early Church, and Modern Science: An Eclectic Meditation
By Jean F. Drew

God, purposing to make the universe most nearly like the every way perfect and fairest of intelligible beings, created one visible living being, containing within itself all living beings of the same natural order.

Thus does Plato (d. 347 B.C.) succinctly describe how all that exists is ultimately a single, living organism. At Timaeus20, he goes on to say:

“There exists: first, the unchanging form, uncreated and indestructible, admitting no modification and entering no combination … second, that which bears the same name as the form and resembles it … and third, space which is eternal and indestructible, which provides a position for everything that comes to be.”

And thus we find a description of the universe in which Being and Existence (Becoming) — the one God and the multiplicity of things — are bound together as a single living reality whose extension is mediated by Space (which for us moderns implies Time).

Our aim in this essay is to define these ideas and their relationships, and trace their historical development from the ancient world to the present. Taking a page from the late Eric Voegelin (1901–1985, philosopher of history specializing in the evolution of symbolization), we will follow a history-of-ideas approach to these issues. Along the way we will find that not only philosophy and cosmology, but also theology and even modern science can illuminate these seminal conceptions of Platonic thought. We must begin at the beginning, that is, with God — who is absolute Being in Plato’s speculation, of whom the cosmos itself is but the image (eikon) or reflection.

When Plato speaks of God (or when Aristotle does for that matter, as in e.g., Nicomachean Ethics), he is not referring to the Olympian gods, to Zeus, Hera, Athena, Poseidon, and the rest of the gang of “immortals.” For the Olympians are like man in that they are creatures of a creating God. Not only that, but they are a second generation of gods, the first having reigned in the antediluvian Age of Chronos; which is to say that the Olympians’ rule or law is not everlasting, but contingent. Thus they are not self-subsistent, but dependent (contingent) on a principle outside of themselves. We might say that the central difference between Plato’s God and the Olympians consists in the fact that the latter are “intracosmic” gods, and the former is “extracosmic,” that is, transcending all categories and conditions of space-time reality. In contrast, the intracosmic gods are subject to change, to contingency; and so, though they may truly be said to exist in some fashion, cannot be said to possess true Being. (More on these distinctions in a minute.)

It is clear that for Plato, God is the “Beyond” of the universe, or in other words, utterly transcendent, perfectly self-subsistent Being, the “uncaused cause” of all the multiplicity of existents in the universe. In yet other words we can say that, for Plato, the cosmos is a theophany, a manifestation or “presence” of the divine Idea — in Christian parlance, the Logos if I might draw that association — in the natural world.

As Wolfgang Smith notes, “Christian teaching is based upon the doctrine of the Logos, the Word of God, a term which in itself clearly suggests the idea of theophany. Moreover, what is implicit in the famous Prologue of St. John [“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (John 1:1–5)] is openly affirmed by St. Paul when he declares that “the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world have been clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His power and Godhead” (Rom. 1:20) … The indisputable fact is that at its deepest level Christianity perceives the cosmos as a self-revelation of God.” [Wolfgang Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence, 1984]

Being and Existence (Becoming)
Being is a concept so difficult that it comes close to eluding our grasp altogether. It is utterly beyond space and time; imperishable; entirely self-subsistent, needing nothing from outside itself in order to be complete; essential; immutable; and eternally perduring. Contrast this with the concept of existence, regarding which Plato asks “how can that which is never in the same state be anything?” And this is the clue to the profound difference between being and existence: The existing things of this world are mutable and transient.

We must in my opinion begin by distinguishing between that which always is and never becomes from that which is always becoming but never is. The one is apprehensible by intelligence with the aid of reasoning, being eternally the same, the other is the object of opinion and irrational sensation, coming to be and ceasing to be, but never fully real. In addition, everything that becomes or changes must do so owing to some cause; for nothing can come to be without a cause. [Timaeus, 3:28]

Smith writes of the existing or “becoming” things that

“… they come upon the scene, we know not from whence; they grow, change, and decay; and at last they disappear, to be seen no more. The physical cosmos itself, we are told, is a case in point: it, too, has made its appearance, perhaps some twenty billion years ago, and will eventually cease to exist [i.e., finally succumbing, we are told, to thermodynamic entropy or “heat death”]. What is more, even now, at this very moment, all things are passing away. ‘Dead is the man of yesterday,’ wrote Plutarch, ‘for he dies into the man of today: and the man of today is dying into the man of tomorrow.’ Indeed, ‘to be in time’ is a sure symptom of mortality. It is indicative, not of being, but of becoming, of ceaseless flux.”

All the multiplicity of existents in the universe are in a state of becoming and passing away. But Plato’s great insight is that all things in the state of becoming — that is, all existing things — are whatever they are because they are participations in Being. That is to say, “we perceive the trace of being in all that exists,” writes Smith, “and that is why we say, with reference to any particular thing, that it is.” Existence, in other words, is contingent on Being.

But we wonder: In what way is this possible? And if existents participate in being, what is that Being in which they participate?

In Exodus 3:14 Moses has experienced a theophany: While tending his flock on Mount Horeb, suddenly he hears the voice of God issuing from a burning bush: God is speaking to him! Reverentially, Moses inquires of God what is His name (meaning: what is His nature or character).

And God said unto Moses, I AM WHO AM: and He said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.

God has told Moses: that He is Being (“I AM”). And the strong implication is that there is no “other” being: “I alone AM.” For “I” is plainly singular in form.

Smith draws the crucial point, “God alone IS. But how are we to understand this? ‘It seems to me,’ writes St. Gregory of Nyssa, ‘that at the time the great Moses was instructed in the theophany he came to know that none of those things which are apprehended by sense perception and contemplated by the understanding really subsist, but that the transcendent essence and cause of the universe, on which everything depends, alone subsists.’ But why? Does not the world exist? Are there not myriads of stars and galaxies and particles of dust, each existing in its own right? And yet we are told that the transcendent essence alone subsists. ‘For even if the understanding looks upon any other existing things,’ the great theologian goes on to say, ‘reason observes in absolutely none of them the self-sufficiency by which they could exist without participating in true Being. On the other hand, that which is always the same, neither increasing nor diminishing, immutable to all change whether to better or to worse (for it is far removed from the inferior and has no superior), standing in need of nothing else, alone desirable, participated in by all but not lessened by their participation — this is truly real Being.’”

Smith continues: “In the words of St. Gregory, ‘that which is always the same, neither increasing nor diminishing, immutable to all change … is truly real being.’ As concerns ‘existing things,’ on the other hand, the teaching implies that these entities are always changing, always in a state of flux, so that their very existence is in a way a process of becoming, in which however nothing is actually produced. This has been said time and again, beginning with Heraclitus and the Buddhist philosophers. And there can be little doubt that it is true: even modern physics, as we can see, points to the same conclusion. Only there is another side to the coin which is not always recognized. Existent things — the very flux itself — presuppose what Gregory and the Platonists have termed ‘a participation in Being.’ The point is that relative or contingent existences cannot stand alone. They have not an independent existence, a being of their own. ‘In Him we live, and move, and have our being,’ says St. Paul….”

St. Augustine confirms the Platonic insight this way:

I beheld these others beneath Thee, and saw that they neither altogether are, nor altogether are not. An existence they have, because they are from Thee; and yet no existence, because they are not what Thou art. For only that really is, that remains unchangeably.

Space
Space is the third essential term of the Platonic cosmology: It is the matrix in which living things and all other existents participate in Being. Plato’s creation myth — the Myth of the Demiurge in Timaeus — elucidates the Platonic conception of Space.

For Plato, the God of the Beyond is so “beyond” that, when it came time for creating the Cosmos, he didn’t even do it himself. He sent an agent: the Demiurge, a mythical being endued by God to be in divine likeness of God’s own perfect love, truth, beauty, justice, and goodness. The embodiment of divine perfections, the Demiurge wishes to create creatures just as good and beautiful as himself, according to the standard of the divine Idea — a direct analog, it seems to me, of the Logos theory of the ancient Church. Indeed, Eric Voegelin sees in the Demiurge the symbol of Incarnation [Order and History Vol. 3: Plato and Aristotle, 1957]:

“The Demiurge is the symbol of Incarnation, understood not as the result of the process but as the process itself, as the permanent tension in reality between the taxis of form or idea and the ataxia of formlessness.”

Similarly to the Christian account, the Demiurge in a certain way creates ex nihilo — that is, out of Nothing. At first glance, Plato is seen specifying, not a pre-existing “material” but a universal field of pure possibility called Chora, “Space.” Perhaps we may find in this concept a strong analogy to Isaac Newton’s concept of Absolute Space (see below).

Chora seems to indicate the idea of an eternal, universal field of pure stochastic potentiality that needs to become “activated” in order to bring actual beings into existence. In itself, it is No-thing, i.e., “nothing.” This “activation” the Demiurge may not effect by fiat: He does not, for instance, “command” to “Let there be Light!” The main tool at his disposal is Peitho, “persuasion.”

And if Chora is not so persuaded, it will remain in a state of “nothingness.” It will remain unformed, in the condition of ataxia. Of itself it is “Nothing”; by itself, it can do nothing. It cannot generate anything out of itself, not even matter in primaeval form.

And thus Plato introduces the figure of the Demiurge into his creation myth, symbolizing form or idea — the principle of (formative) taxia that draws (formless) ataxia into existence. We moderns might be tempted to describe the Demiurge as constituting an “information set” together with an “energy source,” who “persuades” the pure stochastic potentiality of formless, absolute, empty space into actualized form, and thus existence. From the cosmic standpoint, he makes unity out of multiplicity, in harmony and geometrical proportion:

“The best bond is the one that effects the closest unity between itself and the terms it is combining; and this is best done by a continued geometrical proportion.” [Timaeus, 4]

Thus the Demiurge is a kind of “divine geometer,” producing the forms (or mathematical ideas) that Chora can be persuaded to conform to, and thus come into existence.

But the Demiurge does more than just get things started: As bearer of the divine Idea — as pure love and beauty and goodness and truth — he continues always persuading Chora to generate creatures as like himself as possible (i.e., reflecting his own divine qualities at whatever generic stage), throughout all eternity. Thus creation is a continuous process in space-time. Moreover, it is the source and driver of evolution as a universal natural process.

Through the ongoing activity of the Demiurge, men and the world are constantly being informed and renewed by the divine Idea; and thus a unified cosmic whole, a “One Cosmos,” a universal order comes into being at the intersection of time and timelessness, of immanent and transcendent reality, in the medium of Space (and Time).

Compare the Platonic creation myth with the philosophy of Dionysius the [Pseudo-]Areopagite, said to be the Greek converted by St. Paul in Acts, 17:34. For Dionyius, the “names of God” — the divine qualities — are goodness, being, life, wisdom, power, and justice. Joseph Stiglmayr writes [Cath. Encycl. at the entry for Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite], that for Dionysius, God is

“… the One Being (to hen), transcending all quality and predication, all affirmation and negation, and all intellectual conception, [Who] by the very force of His love and goodness gives to beings outside Himself their countless gradations, unites them in the closest bonds (proodos), keeps each by His care and direction in its appointed sphere, and draws them again in an ascending order to Himself (epistrophe) … all created things [proceed] from God by the exuberance of being in the Godhead (to hyperpleres), its outpouring and overflowing … and as a flashing forth from the sun of the Deity. Exactly according to their physical nature created things absorb more or less the radiated light, which, however, grows weaker the farther it descends. As the mighty root sends forth a multitude of plants which it sustains and controls, so created things owe their origin and conservation to the All-Ruling Deity…. Patterned upon the original of Divine love, righteousness, and peace, is the harmony that pervades the universe…. All things tend to God, and in Him are merged and completed, just as the circle returns into itself, as the radii are joined at the centre, or as the numbers are contained in unity.”

The Platonic resonances seem unmistakeable in these lines. It appears that both Platonic speculation and the Logos doctrine of the ancient Church as articulated by Dionysius are in agreement that Creator must be “beyond” Creation in order to resonate with it — which resonance is what makes the universe to be alive — i.e., a living universe.

C. A. Dubrey points out [Cath. Encycl. at the entry “Teleology”], that the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas makes it clear that, “Intrinsic finality [we are to think of this as a blend or merger of efficient and final causes in the Aristotelian sense] consists in the fact that every being has within itself a natural tendency whereby its activity is directed towards the perfection of its own nature…. St. Thomas does not hesitate to speak of ‘natural appetite,’ ‘natural inclination,’ and even ‘intention of nature,’ [we moderns might be tempted to add ‘instinct’ to this list] to mean that every being has within itself a directive principle of activity. Accordingly, God does not direct creatures to their ends from outside, but through their own nature…. The Divine plan of creation is carried out by the various beings themselves acting in conformity with their nature.

When, however, this finality is called immanent, this expression must not be understood in a pantheistic sense, as if the intelligence which the world manifests were to be identified with the world itself, but in the sense that the immediate principle of finality is immanent in every being…. Thus the unconscious finality in the world leads to the conclusion that there must be an intelligent cause of the world.” [Emphasis added.]

Aquinas’ insight, and also Plato’s, evokes a reconsideration of Isaac Newton’s concept of Absolute Space. Possibly this may be understood in the following terms. First, Absolute Space is “empty” space. Second, it is not a property of God, but an effect of His Presence; i.e., we advert to theophany again. The question then arises, in what “where” or “when” does this theophany take place? Perhaps Newton’s answer would be: In the beginning, and continuously thereafter. Second, it has been suggested that Newton intends us to understand Absolute Space as the sensorium Dei: “God constitutes space and time through his eternity and omnipresence” [ existendo semper et ubique, durationem et spatium consitutit: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 3d ed., 1726]. Wolfhart Pannenberg writes,

“Now there are a number of good reasons — suggested by both philosophical and scientific thought — to consider time and space as inseparable. Einstein’s field concept comprises space, time, and energy. It takes the form of a geometrical description, and this seems to amount to a spatialization of time. The totality of space, time, and energy or force are all properties of a cosmic field.

“Long before our own age a theological interpretation of this subject matter had been proposed, and it was Isaac Newton who offered this proposal. It too referred everything to space or, more precisely, to the correlation of force as in the case of a force like gravitation acting at a distance. Newton’s well-known conception of space as sensory of God (sensorium Dei) did not intend to ascribe to God an organ of sense perception, the like of which God does not need, according to Newton, because of divine omnipresence. Rather, Newton took space as the medium of God’s creative presence at the finite place of his creatures in creating them.” [Wolfhart Pannenberg, Toward a Theology of Nature, 1993]

Thus the infinite takes priority over every finite experience, including intellectual experience — a position decisively argued by Descartes, as Pannenberg avers, “in his thesis that the idea of God is a prior condition in the human mind for the possibility of any other idea, even that of the ego itself.”

* * * * * *

The Influence of Platonic Speculation on the Early History of the Church
D. Edmund Joaquin, an insightful and gracious Christian friend, writes, “We understand that the universe is created and sustained by the Word [the Logos], and not only that, but by the Word sounding. God sustains the universe consciously and actively. He has not gone away and left us. In fact, He reveals Himself to us, and His final revelation is in the person of Christ [the Logos]. Christ is not an abstract aspect of God, like wisdom. He is God. He is God incarnating in the world that He himself has made.”

Joaquin further observes that “[the Gospel of] John is written to the Greeks and put into words that they could understand.” It seems there’s a mystery buried in here somewhere. Consider: Socrates was the teacher of Plato, who was the teacher of Aristotle, who was the teacher of Alexander — and Alexander spread Greek culture throughout Eurasia, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. Add to this the fact that the great evangelist, St. Paul, had some difficulty converting the Jews to the Christian faith; but he converted the Greeks in droves. Not only St. John, but also St. Paul speaks in terms the Greek mind could readily grasp, as when he says God is He “in Whom we live and move and have our being.” These historical connections do not appear to be accidental, coincidental, nor incidental to the spread of the early Christian Church.

According to The Catholic Encyclopedia, the Greeks strongly responded to Christianity for its moral beauty as well as its truth. A case in point is St. Justin Martyr. He was a man of Greek culture, born in Palestinian Syria about the year 100 A.D, who converted to the faith around 130 A.D. Justin became one of Christianity’s earliest and most powerful apologists, and ended up condemned by the Roman authority for refusing to sacrifice to the pagan gods, for which offense he was summarily executed by the Imperium, along with several other of his “refusnik” co-religionists. The official record of their martyrdom is extant:

“The Prefect Rusticus says: Approach and sacrifice, all of you, to the gods. Justin says: No one in his right mind gives up piety for impiety. The Prefect Rusticus says: If you do not obey, you will be tortured without mercy. Justin replies: That is our desire, to be tortured for Our Lord Jesus, and so to be saved, for that will give us salvation and firm confidence at the more terrible universal tribunal of Our Lord and Saviour. And all the martyrs said: Do as you wish; for we are Christians, and we do not sacrifice to idols. The Prefect Rusticus read the sentence: Those who do not wish to sacrifice to the gods and to obey the emperor will be scourged and beheaded according to the laws. The holy martyrs glorifying God betook themselves to the customary place, where they were beheaded and consummated their martyrdom confessing their Saviour.”

Jules Lebreton writes (at the entry for St. Justin Martyr in Cath. Encycl.) “Justin tries to trace a real bond between philosophy and Christianity: according to him, both one and the other have a part in the Logos, partially disseminated among men and wholly manifest in Jesus Christ.”

Yet for all their apparent similarities and resemblances in many respects, there is a profound difference between Platonic insight and the Christian one: and this pertains to the relations between God and man.

Both Plato and Justin proclaim the transcendent God. Yet for Plato, God is so “beyond” as to be almost impossible of human grasp. Yet Plato felt the “divine pulls” in his own nature. These Plato thought could be accounted for and articulated by an act of pure unaided intellect, that is by nous, in a state of intense contemplation.

Contrast this position with Justin Martyr’s, who insisted that human wisdom was impossible without the testimony of the Prophets (whom God himself had informed and instructed) and the action of the Holy Spirit. For Plato, man’s relations with God consist of operations of the mind. For Justin, they are operations of the heart, of the Spirit. For Justin, God is not a mental abstraction: He is real Personality with whom one can have direct personal relations, in the Spirit.

A later writer, John Scotus Eriugina (ninth century) elaborates the Justinian position, in the process noting that there is a “downward tendency” of the soul towards the conditions of animal existence, and that this has only one remedy: Divine grace, the free gift of the Holy Spirit. “By means of this heavenly gift,” writes William Turner [at the entry for Scotus in the Catholic Encyclopedia], “man is enabled to rise superior to the needs of the sensuous body, to place the demands of reason above those of bodily appetite, and from reason to ascend through contemplation to ideas, and thence by intuition to God Himself.”

The pull of animal nature is an idea we also find in Plato, and also the countervailing pull from the divine Beyond. Man lives in the metaxy, in the “in-between reality” constituted by the two. Man’s task is to resolve this tension, and establish the proper balance that expresses the highest and best development of his human nature. But man must do this entirely by himself by means of nous or reason. There is no spiritual help “extra” to the human psyche available to facilitate this process.

In contrast, as Lebreton points out, Justin Martyr

“…admits that the soul can naturally comprehend what God is, just as it understands that virtue is beautiful … but he denies that the soul without the assistance of the Holy Ghost [Spirit] can see God or contemplate him directly through ecstasy, as the Platonic philosophers contended. And yet this knowledge of God is necessary for us: ‘We cannot know God as we know music, arithmetic, or astronomy’; it is necessary for us to know God not with an abstract knowledge but as we know any person with whom we have relations. The problem which it seems impossible to solve is settled by revelation; God has spoken directly to the Prophets, who in their turn have made Him known to us…. It is the first time in Christian theology that we find so concise an explanation of the difference that separates Christian revelation from human speculation.” [Emphasis added]

* * * * * *

Natural Law, Contingency, and the Scientific Method
The Platonic model encourages us to recognize that the universe is zoon empsychon ennoun, a living creature endowed with soul and intelligence. The myth of the Demiurge describes the world process as a type of incarnation, a dynamic relation of absolute being and contingent becoming evolving in space and time in a manner expressing a perduring taxia–ataxia relation. The Cosmos itself — the totality of all existing things — like its constituents, for example man and even the stars, is an eikon of being-in-becoming, a reflection or image of the divine Idea. Time itself is but a “moving image of eternity.” The life of the cosmos is wholly dependent, contingent on the Idea from which it manifests.

It is a lawful, orderly universe, yet one in which new occurrences are always arising. These new events are coming from, as it were, a “sea of contingency” analogous to Plato’s conception of Space, that is Chora — the infinite field of unformed, pure potentiality.

The immediately foregoing ideas, of course, are not scientific ones strictly speaking. Still, there are elements here that perhaps science would do well to consider, in order to maintain the integrity of its own method. For one thing, it seems science itself, in its disclosure of the regularities of nature, seems to have an in-built tendency to overlook contingency. We may define an event as contingent if a description of it is neither self-evident nor necessary, “if it could have happened differently,” as Ted Peters puts it in his Preface to Pannenberg’s Towards a Theology of Nature.

C. A. Dubray writes [“Teleology,” Cath. Encycl.], “The fact that the world is governed by laws, far from giving any support to the mechanistic conception, is rather opposed to it. A law is not a cause, but the expression of the constant manner in which causes produce their effects.” In other words, natural laws are expressions of observable regularities that occur in the world of existent phenomena in ordinary space-time reality. Thus, the laws themselves have no force as “causes”: they are descriptions.

Yet the focus on regularity inevitably masks the particularity and contingency of unique events. As Ted Peters notes, it is here that “we run into a problem of focus in the scientific community, because virtually all the theoretical attention is given to the regularity of nature’s laws, while the contingency of natural events slips into the nearly invisible background.” Peters continues:

“What researchers concentrate on are the uniformities that can be expressed in timeless equations. A dictionary of equations describing these uniformities allegedly constitutes scientific knowledge…. A closer examination, however, reveals that the applicability of these equations to concrete cases of natural processes requires certain initial and marginal conditions, conditions that in every case are contingent. Only when contingent conditions permit can we expect a natural law to operate as expected.”

To the extent that the scientific method of inquiry is premised on an “If/Then” logical construction — which seems ever to be the case — the method itself is an exercise in contingency, yet nonetheless one in which “Determinacy gets thematized, whereas contingency gets ignored.” Arguably this is a serious bias having epistemological implications; for e.g., “if the laws of classical dynamics are in principle temporally reversible, the actual course of natural events from which those laws have been abstracted is not. The reality of nature is first and foremost a historical reality.”

Pannenberg suggests a corrective for this “bias,” acknowledging: “That modern science so easily lends itself to abuse cannot be prevented in principle. It is one of the risks involved in the abstract study of regularities that either are inherent in nature itself or can be imposed on natural processes [e.g., as in ideological, technical, or engineering solutions]. This risk cannot be met on the level of scientific description itself but must be met first on the level of philosophical reflection on the work of science. It is on this level that the abstract form of scientific description must be considered with special attention to what it is “abstracted from” and what is methodically disregarded in the abstract formulas of science.”

And so contingent conditions — i.e, initial and boundary conditions — must be restored to their proper place in our deliberations, for they “are required for any formula of natural law to be applied. They are contingent at least in that they cannot be derived from the particular formula of law under consideration.… The mathematical formula of a natural law may be valid without regard to time. The physical regularity that is described by such a formula is not independent of time and temporal sequence. But it is only that physical regularity which makes the mathematical formula a law of nature. This suggests that the laws of nature are not eternal or atemporal because the fields of their application, the regularities of natural processes, originate in the course of time. Thus it also becomes understandable that new patterns of regularity emerging in the sequence of time constitute a field of application for a new set of natural laws….”

We may recognize that the total process of natural events presents itself to observation as a mesh of contingency and regularities. It is the task of science to pursue thematically the aspect of regularity. But, asks Pannenberg, can science “ever succeed in bringing into view the entirety of nature as determined in all details by a number of laws that are in any case not infinitely complex? This would mean at the same time that a stage of research is conceivable from which nothing more could be discovered. Many natural scientists have had this nightmare because of the successes of their own research. Fortunately it probably is not a truthful dream.”

For, says Pannenberg, “laws always uncover what is necessary superimposed on what is contingent. Given the undeniable contingency of occurrences in natural events, can we recognize in their special character as occurrences … [that] regularity as their own element in such a way that the presence of regularity can be thought together with the contingency of occurrences, not only under abstraction from the contingency of occurrences?” [Emphasis added]

Which is why Pannenberg advocates an opening up of new viewpoints in scientific research, “not because physical hypotheses or insights can be derived from them but because they open up and enlarge the intellectual space on which the formation of physical hypotheses depends…. In physics also, horizons of questioning have to be opened up first of all in order that hypotheses that arise in them can be examined by experiment and classified theoretically.”

Perhaps we need a greater appreciation of the “fitness” of the scientific method to engage the truly great questions of life, which ever seem to involve the relations of law and contingency. Leibniz propounds two great questions of perennial interest to the human mind: (1) Why are things the way they are and not some other way? (2) Why does anything exist at all?

Such questions, scientists will readily tell you, are beyond the purview of the scientific method. But does that mean such questions have no force or meaning such that they should not be asked at all?

Perhaps the incapability of the scientific method to answer such questions owes to the fact that all the great physical laws are acknowledged to be time-reversible; but we know that existence in space and time is not a time-reversible process. As Pannenberg states, it is a historical process. We might even say it is an evolutionary process.

Which suggests an analogy that might enlighten these questions, sharpen their meanings, and suggest additional questions: an analogy to direct human experience. Pannenberg writes of human beings, who do seem to live in a “time-irreversible,” that is “historical” process:

“Human beings never live only in the now. Rather, they experience their present as heirs of the past and as its active change. They anticipate the future in fear, hope, and planning; and in the light of such anticipation of the future they return to their present and the heritage of their past. The fact that we know of historical continuity is at least also conditioned by this peculiarity of human experience with time. If there is a new event, then it modifies the context of our consciousness of time which is already found present. It throws light back on earlier occurrences which have become a part of our experience already. In the same way, ideas that occur to us throw light on our previous expectations and plans in justifying, fulfilling, modifying, or disappointing and thwarting them. Thus the contingent event always enters already into a context of experience or tradition…. The future, beginning in the present happenings, is thus the origin of the perspective in which the past occurrences are put by every new experience.”

Worldviews and Paradigm Shifts
It is perhaps a truism that we tend to find what we’re looking for by screening out any and all potential elements which do not fit the pattern of our expectation. Arguably, the scientific method may be said inherently to suffer exposure to potential danger from this side, as suggested in the above remarks. Indeed, Schröedinger’s theory of wavefunction seems to predict this. Consider these remarks from Stephen M. Barr [Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, 2003]:

“In quantum theory, as traditionally formulated, there are ‘systems’ and ‘observers.’ Or rather, in any particular case, there is the system and the observer. The observer makes measurements of the system. As long as the system is undisturbed by external influences (that is, as long as it is ‘isolated’), its wavefunction — which is to say its probability amplitudes — will evolve in time by the Schröedinger equation…. However, when a measurement is made of the system the observer must obtain a definite outcome. Suddenly, the probability for the outcome that is actually obtained is no longer what the mathematics said it was just before the measurement, but jumps to 100 percent. And the probabilities for all the alternative outcomes, the ones that did not occur, fall to 0 percent.”

Thus we might say that the “reality” we humans experience ever involves “a moving goal-post.” And as the mover of this goal-post, the human agent is most indispensably involved in this process.

Faced with such “indeterminacy” regarding the foundations of experience, it is not surprising that people usually have recourse to mediating worldviews, or organized frames of ideational reality that constitute the conceptual space in which active experience is engaged and accordingly analyzed and interpreted. Certainly Plato has offered such a model. And so has Nobel laureate Jacques Monod [in Chance and Necessity, 1971]:

“Chance alone is the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, is at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution. The central concept of biology … is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one compatible with observed and tested fact. All forms of life are the product of chance….”

Needless to say, these two models are polar opposite conceptualizations. Yet having received each on “good authority,” which do we choose?

Such are not idle considerations; for as James Hannam points out [“The Development of Scientific and Religious Ideas,” 2003], “grand theories … often suffer death by detail where it is found that up close the situation is too complicated for the theory to handle…. [Yet] in the end, after it has changed the course of the river of enquiry, the theory can end up as a mortlake cut off from the general flow….”

Hannam cites historian Thomas Kuhn, who documents an historical process he terms “paradigm shift,” describing a situation in which the findings of authoritative science move “out of science and into practically every other field of human endeavor.” Once a given, albeit partial or even defective theory becomes “dominant,” writes Hannam, “far from being thrown out, a falsified theory is enhanced to deal with new information until such time as it finally collapses under the weight of anomalous results. Then, after a chaotic period, a new theory emerges that can deal with the anomalies and normal service resumes…. A paradigm refers to but one field, say classical mechanics or health policy whereas the ideology/worldview is the general background that underpins all the paradigms.”

The worldview (or ideology, if you prefer), for better or worse, implicitly shapes the background knowledge of thinking agents to which new experiences constantly are being conformed. Hannam says that worldview “is often so deeply embedded in the psyche that it is very rarely considered explicitly except by specialists,” but that nonetheless, “the worldview is seen as [a] self-confirming fact of life and hence it is not strictly rational…. The existence of a dominant worldview does not mean that a particular individual is unable to think outside the box but rather that his ideas are unlikely to fall on fertile ground. Unless new ideas can be stated in a language that makes them comprehensible to his peers, his intention in writing will not be met.”

Which is the not-too-subtle way to put the fact that every man has a worldview, without exception, whether articulate or inarticulate; and that somehow, for the “intention of writing to be met” — that is, for accurate and meaningful (i.e., successful) communication of ideas to take place — some deeper, common ground of shared truth must first be accessed, for the purpose of providing a more capacious intellectual space in which the human pursuit of knowledge and wisdom might unfold or evolve from its present point of attainment.

But where today in our modern world is such a common ground or field to be found? Hannam proposes the examination of the history of ideas as a possibly useful method in the search for common ground. He writes,

“To examine the history of ideas the only fair way to proceed would seem to place before ourselves the evidence and authority that the historical agents had before them and assume they acted rationally on that basis. Otherwise, there is no hope of ever tracing intellectual development because ‘cause and effect’ assumes some sort of logical causality that is impossible with non-rational agents. The best that could be hoped for would be a catalog of mental positions, with no way to say how one led to another except by being pushed by blind exterior forces. This might be precisely what determinists are advocating but they would have to give up any hope of finding causes and restrict themselves to explanations.”

Perhaps we moderns would do well to reconsider the common assumption that people living before our own time were somehow inferior in knowledge, experience, and observational powers as compared with our own status as enlightened individuals. Arguably, the ancient world produced some of the most powerful thinkers in the history of mankind, formulating ideas that were, in the words of Hannam, “the fruits of unfettered metaphysical speculation that inevitably hits on the right answer occasionally.”

Democritus, for example, proposed a theory predicting the atom as the ultimate constituent of matter, more than two-thousand years before the technical means existed to isolate atoms experimentally or, as Hannam notes, any “useful applications for them” could be found. Then it was discovered that the atom itself is an ordered constellation of even finer parts. There seems to be an historical progression of ideas here, the new building up on a framework originally laid up in the past, modifying it, improving on it in light of new insights and technical capabilities.

Hannam gives another example of more recent vintage: “Copernicus needed Nicole Oresme’s solution as to why we do not feel the movement of the Earth even though in Oresme’s time it was just a curiosity as no one thought the Earth actually was moving … each new idea, once accepted, shifts the boundaries of the worldview and makes it possible for further new ideas to be accepted into the pale.”

We can extend the examples even further. Reimann constructed a geometry, apparently because his mind could grasp the logic and beauty it revealed for its own sake. But at the time, it had no apparent “external referent” in the field of nature. It was a beautiful and glorious abstraction — until Einstein came along, and picked it up “off the shelf” as it were, to become the very language of relativity theory.

Thus it might be said that the evolution or “progress” of science depends on successive enlargements of the conceptual space it requires to do its work. In other words, science inherently is a participation in the historicity of the world.

Whatever our personal worldview, perhaps it would be well to recall that science is an historical process. Perhaps this understanding could open up additional, needed conceptual space that science itself requires in order to advance.


TOPICS: Philosophy
KEYWORDS: aquinas; augustine; christianity; churchhistory; contingency; cosmology; epistemology; justinmartyr; metaphysics; newton; ontology; plato; quantumfieldtheory; relativitytheory; schroedinger; spacetime; theology
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To: PatrickHenry; Alamo-Girl; Doctor Stochastic; marron; tortoise; StJacques
...natural laws are inherent in the very fact of existence (a photon is a photon and thus behaves as a photon behaves), then things are merely doing what they do, and not as some external Determiner directs that they should do.

I think you're not seeing the issue I raise, PH: What is the reason for the photon to behave as a photon, and not as an electron? Far be it from me to allege that a great Determiner is pulling on the strings in order to make things happen. But if a photon is a photon and not an electron, this is due to its having the nature of a photon, and not the nature of an electron. Moreover, if nature works towards an end or goal in the production of things living and non-living, then it seems exceedingly important that the photon should act like a photon and not like an electron, and vice versa. I guess my question boils down to: What is the reason these particles have the nature they have? They must be different natures, or we wouldn't need both.

Or to put the matter still another way, if there is no goal in view, the question of whether we need both photons and electrons, etc., wouldn't matter. Absent a purpose to be achieved, anything could be just anything at all.

321 posted on 12/16/2004 12:17:12 PM PST by betty boop
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To: betty boop
What is the reason for the photon to behave as a photon, and not as an electron?

Ah ... the Great Differentiator makes his debut in our discussions.

(Just kidding, BB. My real answer is: I don't know. Nobody does.)

322 posted on 12/16/2004 12:23:47 PM PST by PatrickHenry (The List-O-Links for evolution threads is at my freeper homepage.)
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To: Doctor Stochastic

Excellent post!!
Worth a bookmark ;^)


323 posted on 12/16/2004 1:33:30 PM PST by BMCDA
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To: PatrickHenry
My real answer is: I don't know. Nobody does.

And yet logic lets us see the problem involved with this "unknowable." An infinite chain of (accidental) causes produces nothing but a piling up of accidents; therefore, in order for anything to exist -- to be the way it is and not some other way -- there must be a first cause. And if there is a first cause, it seems clear that it is acting towards a final cause, a goal or a purpose. Otherwise, why bother to do anything at all?

Of course, it can be said that this is an example of anthropocentric reasoning. Which raises another question: Is logic "anthropocentric?" Does it depend on the human mind, or rather, is it an independent something that the human mind just "naturally" resonates to? If the latter, and if everything that we see in nature is a purely "natural" product of nature's "laws," what in nature generates these laws, or the principles of logic?

324 posted on 12/16/2004 1:38:13 PM PST by betty boop
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To: Alamo-Girl; PatrickHenry; marron; Doctor Stochastic; StJacques; tortoise
Dialectical materialists are atheists. Their belief in a primeval soup without evidence puts them in bed with theologians. In science the "Absence of evidence IS evidence of absence."

I think your guess is right, A-G. I doubt that Yockey has a hidden agenda of some sort. It seems plain from his statement that what he's pointing out to us is that Marxism actually takes the form of a religion, a religion that is premised on metaphysical naturalism, which is the ultimate core and touchstone of its faith. The faith is consciously and deliberately intended to be a-theist. It is an attempt to explain the universe from purely natural causes. To the extent that proponents of abiogenesis tend to share this particular faith, they have something strongly in common with Marxists.

When you come right down to it, it seems that abiogenesis invokes the miraculous every bit as much as divine creation ex nihilo. Yockey's point may be that science isn't supposed to be in the miracle business....

325 posted on 12/16/2004 2:00:14 PM PST by betty boop
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To: betty boop
An infinite chain of (accidental) causes produces nothing but a piling up of accidents ...

Not "accidental." That word introduces a bit of bias into the situation. The events are a chain of causes and effects which are "determined" by natural laws. And one of those piled up "accidents" is something as wonderous as you.

... therefore, in order for anything to exist -- to be the way it is and not some other way -- there must be a first cause.

Well, there cartainly needs to be a universe, however it came to be. First Cause is a possibility, I agree. I'm not certain it's a necessity. Could be. This is something I'm still thinking about. Again, we're talking science here, not religion.

And if there is a first cause, it seems clear that it is acting towards a final cause, a goal or a purpose. Otherwise, why bother to do anything at all?

It's not clear to me. As I said earlier (and here I shall quote myself, post 320): "Sometimes, when we look back on a long sequence of natural cause-and-effect events, teleology may seem to have been involved, but this may be an illusion of the retrospective viewpoint."

Finally, as to "why bother to do anything at all?" that's what our free will is all about. It's our decision. Ain't life grand?

326 posted on 12/16/2004 2:13:52 PM PST by PatrickHenry (The List-O-Links for evolution threads is at my freeper homepage.)
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To: PatrickHenry; Alamo-Girl; StJacques; Doctor Stochastic; tortoise; marron
The events are a chain of causes and effects which are "determined" by natural laws. And one of those piled up "accidents" is something as wonderous as you.... as to "why bother to do anything at all?" that's what our free will is all about. It's our decision. Ain't life grand?

Yes it certainly is, PH! But I think you need to explain to me how "something as wondrous" as me reduces to a pile-up of "a chain of causes and effects," and yet this wondrous "me" at the very same time is said to have free will; that is, is capable of making free decisions and implementing them. What wondrous Maxwell's Demon intervened to reconcile these two mutually inconsistent claims, and when (figuratively speaking, of course)?

Plus remember, we exercise our free will in pursuit and furtherance of our own goals and purposes. If your theory is true, this would mean that human beings chronically suffer from baseless illusions; e.g., that we can actually control anything by deciding, making choices. (Notwithstanding, if I am not mistaken, this sort of thing is fundamental to scientific experimentation generally speaking.)

For if everything that is, is constituted from "a chain of causes and effects which are 'determined' by natural laws," then surely, willing anything other than the inevitable set-up being shaped by nature (which we cannot know in advance in any case) is an exercise in futility. Life is futility. Knowledge, science itself, is impossible. And we are delusionary to think otherwise.

Somehow, this doesn't make any sense to me. But just show me the source of the error in my thinking, and you might persuade me yet.

Patrick, you wrote: "Sometimes, when we look back on a long sequence of natural cause-and-effect events, teleology may seem to have been involved, but this may be an illusion of the retrospective viewpoint."

I know that, Patrick. But it's a different problem from the one we're discussing here -- the teleology implicit in [Aristotelian] logic itself, not what events look like to me in restrospect, once I've had the chance to "filter them" through my normal set of expectations, desires, and prejudices.

Thank you so much for writing, dear Patrick.

327 posted on 12/16/2004 3:56:23 PM PST by betty boop
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To: betty boop; Alamo-Girl; StJacques; Doctor Stochastic
But I think you need to explain to me how "something as wondrous" as me reduces to a pile-up of "a chain of causes and effects," and yet this wondrous "me" at the very same time is said to have free will; that is, is capable of making free decisions and implementing them.

I really can't explain free will. It may be an attribute of our big brains. We had a thread more than a year ago in which the concept of "emergent characteristic" was considered. It's an attribute of complex systems that gives the whole certain features that the component parts alone don't possess. Some people around here are knowledgable about such things. I'm not. Free will may be that, or it may be more than that. It's difficult to make any kind of scientific test, either way. All we can demonstrate is that when a person's brain dies, we have no more indication that the dead person has any free will. This is, to me, inconclusive, except to demonstrate that the brain is necessary. It it all there is? I don't know. Nor do I know of any way to find out, to anyone's scientific satisfaction

Plus remember, we exercise our free will in pursuit and furtherance of our own goals and purposes.

Yes, we do.

If your theory is true, this would mean that human beings chronically suffer from baseless illusions; e.g., that we can actually control anything by deciding, making choices.

I don't think that's a "baseless illusion." We can excercise a great deal of control over things, and we can certainly make choices. (Example: the American Revolution.) We're not omnipotent, so our free will is limited. Yet it's real. Otherwise, we're just characters in an old movie, the end of which is already determined. Life would be pretty much the same from one generation to the next. For a long time, life was like that. But it isn't like that now, so there's evidence of free will in action. We can't literally prove that we have free will, but I certainly live as if I do. I suspect we all do.

For if everything that is, is constituted from "a chain of causes and effects which are 'determined' by natural laws," then surely, willing anything other than the inevitable set-up being shaped by nature (which we cannot know in advance in any case) is an exercise in futility. Life is futility. Knowledge, science itself, is impossible. And we are delusionary to think otherwise. Somehow, this doesn't make any sense to me. But just show me the source of the error in my thinking, and you might persuade me yet.

But BB ... knowledge certainly is possible; and we do have free will. I've suggested that after the event of creation, everything unfolded naturally -- stars, planets, life itself. If the universe had produced nothing but worlds, rocks, and tundra, then I'd agree with you. Futility. Lotta stuff, no pizzaz. But as part of that process, we came along. Whatever we are is consistent with the laws of the universe. But ...

But we're special because -- perhaps alone in the universe, yet in accordance with natural law -- we have the capacity of free will. That means our lives are the exact opposite of futile! Here we are, at the tail end of an enormously long, perhaps improbable, never-to-be-repeated chain of events, and we've got intelligence and free will. (Consider a sequence of Brownian Motions, to give you the idea I have in mind of a perfectly natural, yet probably unrepeatable sequence.) We're probably unique. Even if we're not the only intelligent life in the universe, we're certainly rare. That means, to me, that we're precious. We're the icing on the cake. We're irreplaceable in the whole cosmos! [Pause, as my hand-waving, red-faced rant cools down.]

How could anyone ponder that and even think about futility? I literally tingle with awe at the magnificence of it all. I can't understand how someone could find it depressing.

328 posted on 12/16/2004 5:00:27 PM PST by PatrickHenry (The List-O-Links for evolution threads is at my freeper homepage.)
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To: betty boop
". . . But as Denton indicates, there's a problem regarding the lower-order life, which on the one hand, needs a reducing environment in order to arise, but on the other, needs an oxygen-rich environment in order to survive (i.e., preeminently oxygen's role as constituent of the ozone layer, which protects organisms against the fatal effects of ultraviolet radiation) -- the "Catch-22" of abiogenesis. In other words, absent oxygen -- the presence of which (it is argued) would preclude abiogenesis -- the life rising by means of a methane-rich reducing environment would be wiped out almost immediately after coming into existence, presumably before it had the chance to replicate. . . ."

Denton's so-called "Catch-22 of Abiogenesis" only works if you make four assumptions:

1. That there was no oxygen whatsoever in the early earth's atmosphere.

2. That the origins of an oxygen-rich atmosphere are not related to the presence of life forms acting to enrich the atmosphere with oxygen.

3. That the earliest forms of life required an oxygen rich atmosphere.

4. That the presence of ultraviolet radiation prevented all forms of life from surviving and propagating.

All four of the above assumptions are false.

Regarding No. 1: "Free oxygen" or O2, was present in the early reducing earth's atmosphere in what geologists refer to as "oxygen sinks" or reservoirs of oxygen, primarily present as a result of the cooling of both rocks within the mantle and surface igneous rocks, as well as some that may have been produced as a result of "hydrogen escape" from photodecomposition of methane and ammonia. There were also oxygen-containing compounds, especially carbon dioxide and sulfates produced by vulcanism. And water was also present in the early Archaean Age as well. And these propositions are argued from geologic evidence. I recommend you read the following article:

Kump, Kasting, & Barley: Rise of Atmospheric Oxygen and the "Upside Down" Archaean Mantle

See also the MIT article cited below, page 5, for evidence from Uraninite (UO2) which establishes the presence of oxygen, it's in the composition of the mineral itself, within an "anoxic environment" (no free oxygen) since the elements become unstable in the presence of "free oxygen."

Regarding No. 2: The Geologic evidence that the development of our oxygen-rich atmosphere was created by a combination of photosynthesis and hydrogen escape is extremely large. I refer you to the following two sources, the first of which I cited earlier:

MIT Article - Photosynthesis and the Rise of Atmospheric Oxygen

Catling, Zahnle, & McKay: Biogenic Methane, Hydrogen Escape, and the Irreversible Oxidation of Early Earth

3. The proposition that the earliest forms of life required an oxygen-rich atmosphere is defeated at two levels. The first is that there are numerous life forms, such as cyanobacteria and eukaryotes that do not require an oxygen-rich environment and which both produce oxygen as a result of their metabolic processes. See the MIT article for more on this. Second; there may have been bacteria that used very low amounts of oxygen extracted from sulphates. The following quote is from Norman H. Sleep's "Oxygenating the Atmosphere" article on the Nature web site:

". . . But it is possible that these bacteria were part of a global microbial ecology that used sulphate as the main oxygen carrier and so would consume only trace amounts of oxygen . . ."

You can read more about sulfurous environments and microbial ecology in the article "Biochemical Keys to the Emergence Of Complex Life" by Kenneth M. Towe of the Smithsonian Institution, especially within paragraphs eleven and twelve. And in addition to all of this there is more I could find on how CO2 environments may not be defeating of life as well, but I'll skip that for now.

Regarding No. 4 there are at least three direct points to make about ultraviolet light. The first is that higher emissions of ultraviolet rays enhance the catalyzation of RNA solutions and break down inorganic molecules, which makes UV rays an important agent in explaining a possible RNA world transition to life within that particular model of abiogenesis. Two; not all life dies in the presence of ultraviolet radiation, whether you speak of today -- GFP strains of e. coli bacteria need UV ray emissions to survive in fact -- much less in the Archaean Age. Three; the "Faint Sun Paradox," which is the most important. There is solid astronomical evidence that 3.5 Billion Years ago the Sun was not as luminescent as it is now. Carl Sagan and Christopher Chyba jointly developed the so-called "paradox" of the faint sun and its impact on the origins of life because one of the real objections raised by scientists against abiogenesis was that the sun was not warm enough to sustain life at the period when we date its origin, not that ultraviolet rays were an insurmountable problem preventing it because there is evidence in the geological record of life existing before the oxygen-rich atmosphere developed which has always restricted scientific inquiry to explaining how and why life existed under higher levels of UV photolysis (see the references under explanations for #s 2 and 3 above), not whether or not it was possible. But as Chyba pointed out in a response to a critique of the theory by Stanley Miller:

". . . a high-altitude organic aerosol on early Earth would make the persistence of a reducing atmosphere more likely, and that such an atmosphere favors organic synthesis, making the origin of life easier to envision. As we stated, atmospheres rich in CO2 have been considered more likely candidates for early terrestrial atmospheres for two reasons. One is the rapid UV photodissociation of methane and ammonia. Our article suggests that a reducing "Miller-Urey" atmosphere, when treated self-consistently, avoids this difficulty because such an atmosphere would become self-shielding against UV photolysis. . . ."

And to add to my earlier statement that "I question [Overman's] credentials to describe the state of scientific opinion on the early earth's atmosphere" I must now add that "I question whether Overman has done any adequate reading in scientific scholarship useful to explaining the origins of life on this planet."

The mesh on Overman's "Catch-22" net is so large that it catches nothing at all.
329 posted on 12/16/2004 5:28:14 PM PST by StJacques
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To: PatrickHenry; Alamo-Girl
Patrick and Alamo-Girl, I meant to ping both of you on my preceding post #329 but I forgot. Sorry.

PING!!!!
330 posted on 12/16/2004 5:32:11 PM PST by StJacques
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To: StJacques

Don't worry. I'm following the thread. Ping or no ping, I'll comment when I can make a contribution.


331 posted on 12/16/2004 5:41:17 PM PST by PatrickHenry (The List-O-Links for evolution threads is at my freeper homepage.)
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To: PatrickHenry
Don't worry. I'm following the thread. Ping or no ping, I'll comment when I can make a contribution.

Same here. Good discussion.

332 posted on 12/16/2004 6:14:07 PM PST by cornelis
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To: betty boop; cornelis; PatrickHenry
This is a followup to my post #329 above. I think there is something I need to add.

This is a portion of the quote from betty's description of Denton's "Catch 22":

". . . In other words, absent oxygen -- the presence of which (it is argued) would preclude abiogenesis -- . . ."

It occurs to me that I left something out, since it is mentioned that the presence of oxygen would "preclude abiogenesis." This means that I must now add a fifth assumption to the four I listed in my post #329:

5. That the process of abiogenesis requires either the simultaneous absence and presence of oxygen to be completed successfully or the absence of oxygen initially quickly followed by the presence of oxygen.

This is also false.

Let me repost the image I displayed in my post #281 on the previous page:





Now first of all, there is more than one theory of abiogenesis which fits the overall model described in the above image, but I believe that Denton may have been following the Miller-Urey model in which amino acids are produced from inorganic materials within an environment in which free oxygen was absent and, by the laws of chemistry, in which the presence of free oxygen would prevent the formation of those amino acids. That is step 1, the transition from "simple chemicals" to "polymers." For anyone who needs to brush up on their chemistry, proteins are "polymers" of numerous amino acids. The Miller-Urey model will not work if oxygen is present, in fact, if you replicate the Miller experiment in the lab and add free oxygen you get an explosion. In some models free oxygen is not necessary at all throughout this process, but in others it may only be desirable or necessary only in the later stages.

What is important here is that the model is not:

simple chemicals -> bacteria

which is what would be required for Denton's model to make any sense. There could in fact be millions of years between the realization of a transition between some of the steps outlined in the image posted above.
333 posted on 12/16/2004 8:35:46 PM PST by StJacques
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To: betty boop; cornelis; PatrickHenry
I need to make a quick edit to something I just posted in number 323 above.

I wrote:

". . . That is step 1, the transition from 'simple chemicals' to 'polymers.' . . . "

That should have been written, with my edit underlined for emphasis:

". . . That is part of step 1, the transition from 'simple chemicals' to 'polymers.' . . . "

Sorry about that.
334 posted on 12/16/2004 8:45:14 PM PST by StJacques
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To: betty boop; cornelis; PatrickHenry
DARN!

I meant post number "333" not "323."

I think I need a break. Or maybe better yet, a beer.
335 posted on 12/16/2004 8:47:11 PM PST by StJacques
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To: StJacques; betty boop; PatrickHenry
Thank you so much for all of these interesting links!

From the first two or three links it became apparent that the date for free oxygen in the environment was settled to be between 2.4 and 2.2 gya – with photosynthesis hacontributions from 3.5-2.7 gya. The NASA link was particularly informative (Biochemical keys to the emergence of complex life). An important excerpt:

If the first 2.5 billion years of Earth history were dominated by an environment in which free oxygen was generally unavailable to the biosphere because of primitive reduced inorganic acceptors or "sinks," then one of the principal strategies of life would have been to adapt to this environment Neither collagen nor extensin would have been possible in the absence of free oxygen, and the fossil record shows that during this period few significant increases in body size were made. After the exhaustion of most primordial inorganic oxygen sinks about 2 billion years ago (Cloud, 1976; Schopf, 1978) and the development of the eucaryotic cell and oxygenic photosynthesis, the major environments of the world began to turn from predominantly reducing to predominantly oxidizing conditions. Multicellularity would have been a priority development and collagen one of its certain prerequisites. The geologic evidence shows that the transition to an oxygenic world did not take place rapidly; if it had, there would be major deposits of reduced carbon in the sediments of the period, and none is found. The buildup of free oxygen is more likely to have been rather slow. With some limited free oxygen present in the environment, limited collagen (and extensin) could have evolved in some organisms where the wide-open ecological niches available and the adaptive advantages being conveyed outweighed the complexities and expense involved in its manufacture. I have already discussed how this may have affected the fossil record (Towe, 1970), but it is worth repeating that in this initially low-oxygen environment, the competition for the low levels of free oxygen by oxidative metabolisms would have restricted most collagen use to small, thin, diffusion-limited organisms unlikely to be found preserved as fossils. As Boaden (1977) has emphasized, the world at this time may have been like the modern thiobios-a sulfide-rich habitat dominated by mostly microscopic, interstitial meiofaunal elements.

The biochemistry of collagens from modern near-anaerobic nematodes is instructive in making further comparisons with the Late Precambrian fossil record. Both the cuticle and body wall of Ascaris lumbricoides contain collagen. The body-wall collagen has large amounts of hydroxyproline and hydroxylysine. Adapted to low oxygen tensions, their formation through the [301] hydroxylating enzymes is actually inhibited by too much oxygen (>1%) in the environment (Fujimoto and Prockop, 1969). The cuticle collagen lacks hydroxylysine, contains little hydroxyproline, and appears to be strengthened by disulfide crosslinks (McBride and Harrington, 1967), another adaptation to low-oxygen tensions.

Given this information, one can speculate that the early use of collagen in Late Precambrian low-oxygen environments may have eventually produced "worms" with similarly adapted collagen metabolism, which permitted some of them to attain much larger sizes than the remaining interstitial faunal elements. Perhaps the enigmatic coiled fossils from the billion-year-old Greyson Shale (Walter et al., 1976) or from the Little Dal Group (Hofmann and Aitken, 1979) are rare body fossils of such worms. Or perhaps some of the Late Precambrian burrows were produced by similar worms who had become adapted to the low-oxygen environment and were, like their modern thiobiotic descendants, burrowing to avoid the increasing oxygen tensions that must inevitably have taken place. Burrowing to avoid oxygen at the sediment-water interface in this very early stage of metazoan history seems more likely than burrowing to avoid predators, the types of which are unknown and the fossil evidence for which is otherwise nonexistent.

Ultimately, the further increase in availability of free oxygen as the result of increasing oxygenic photosynthesis would have brought an end to such adaptations, and therefore any experiments toward developing collagens completely free of an oxygen requirement were terminated. At the same time, the high competitive priority of respiratory events for oxygen would have been moderated, allowing many more morphological experiments with collagen to take place in other previously limited metazoan phyla. Even the sclerotization of the arthropod cuticle, which is also inhibited by lack of atmospheric oxygen (Richards, 1951), would have been improved All this would have caused a dramatic worldwide increase in the size and hence ready preservability of numerous organisms. The Late Precambrian-Early Cambrian fossil record can then be interpreted as an explosion of fossils rather than as a sudden eruption of metazoan phylogenesis with highly evolved, diverse, and morphogenetically advanced forms appearing suddenly side by side around the world, few of which have any plausible immediate ancestors as fossils.

All of the above “goes to” the likelihood that the complexity of biological life was due to self-organizing complexity and not happenstance. Also from another link:

Armen Y Mulkidjanian, Dmitry A Cherepanov, and Michael Y Galperin (emphasis mine)

In modern concepts of the origin of life, there is an glaring gap between the abiogenic formation of the first building blocks and the origin of the "RNA world" i.e. of the first RNA-like polynucleotides that could undergo a Darwinian-type evolution. Indeed, there is a wealth of experimental evidence for the abiogenic formation of amino acids, nitrogenous bases and carbohydrates from inorganic compounds like cyanide, thiocyanate, and carbon monoxide under reducing and/or neutral conditions (reviewed in ref.). On the other hand, the documented catalytic activity of RNA molecules allows to suggest that primordial ribonucleotides could have initially evolved on their own, without assistance from proteins. What is missing is a physically plausible mechanism for the thermodynamically unfeasible event of formation and accumulation of long oligonucleotide-like polymers.

This problem can be focused even further. Aluminosilicate clays have been shown to catalyze the formation of oligonucleotides of up to 50 units long, when supplied by preformed and pre-activated mononucleotides under optimized laboratory conditions. However, no oligonucleotide formation from pentose phosphates and nitrogenous bases has been reported so far under the supposedly primordial conditions where the formation of amino acids, nitrogenous bases and carbohydrates took place. Furthermore, the current understanding implies that the environmental conditions on the primeval Earth were unfavorable for the survival of oligonucleotide-like polymers. A particularly important factor is that, due to the absence of the ozone layer, the UV flux at the Earth surface must have been approximately 100 times larger than it is now, causing deterioration of most organic molecules. The existing theories consider the high UV level as a major obstacle and offer several different strategies for hiding the first life forms from it (see e.g. ref.). Here we invoke an alternative possibility, i.e. that the UV irradiation played a positive role in the origin of life by serving as a principal selective factor in the formation of pre-biological structures. Moreover, the influx of energy into the system in the form of the UV irradiation could be seen as the driving force required for the gradual complication of the system. These considerations prompted us to analyze the possible effects of the UV irradiation on oligonucleotide formation in primordial conditions.

continuing in the discussion…

Thus, the results of our Monte-Carlo simulation indicate that a mechanism of natural selection, similar to the one that has driven the subsequent biological evolution, could have been responsible for the primordial polymerization. It seems quite unlikely that the extremely effective UV-quenching by all five major nucleobases is just incidental. Accordingly, one can assume that these bases had been selected to perform the UV-protecting function before they became involved in the maintenance and transfer of genetic information. This assumption provides a physically plausible rationale for the primordial enrichment in oligonucleotide-like compounds and also sheds new light on the earliest steps of evolution….

The suggested mechanism turns the high UV levels on primordial Earth from a perceived obstacle to the origin of life (see e.g. ref. [19]) into the selective factor that, in fact, might drive the whole process. Indeed, biochemical condensation reactions proceed with release of water, so that the presence of latter favors hydrolysis of biological polymers. Because of this feature, Bernal [27] and many researchers after him (as reviewed in ref. [10]) advanced the view that life has begun in tidal regions, so that condensation of primordial monomers proceeded under "fluctuating" conditions where the wet periods, enabling the exchange of reagents, alternated with dry ones, favoring the condensation reactions. The awareness of the potential danger of the UV damage, however, prompted other scientists to invoke a UV-protecting water layer (see e.g. ref. [19]), which apparently would impede the condensation reactions. More recently, several authors even moved the point of the life origin to the bottom of the ocean, where the reducing power of minerals and/or of hydrothermal vents was considered to be the energy source for the first condensation events [28,29]. It remained unexplained, though, how inorganic reductants could drive primordial condensation reactions in water in the absence of enzymes (see the discussion in refs. [30,31]).

In a sense, the absence of a consensus on a plausible mechanism for the origin and accumulation of the first RNA-like molecules has significantly hurt the development in the whole field and stimulated proliferation of the Panspermia hypothesis, not to mention various kinds of creationist ideas. It appears that our consideration of the UV irradiation as a positive, selective factor in primordial evolution may suggest a way out of the dead end. This view allows to place the cradle of life onto the sun-illuminated (semi) dry surface of the ancient Earth, as originally considered by Bernal [27]. Indeed, no other known energy source could compete with the UV component of the solar irradiation either in ability to serve simultaneously as both selective and driving force, or in continuity, strength, and access to the whole surface of Earth...

IOW - here, the investigators are turning the UV objection into a positive and suggesting that it is the energy source which (vaguely) drives biological complexity. However, they also indicate that the UV protection “function” must have existed before the UV irradiation actually occurred to protect some. This is what I would call a "just so" story until it is backed up with some empirical investigation.

Here are a few more for the discussion: Abiogenesis

[speaking of the Urey-Miller experiments being repeated with success] But the Earth's early atmosphere is nowadays thought to be neutral, consisting mostly of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, instead of hydrogen, ammonia, and methane (reducing), as had been suggested from cosmochemical grounds. Urey-Miller experiments performed with a neutral mixture are much less successful than those with a reducing mixture; however, the early Earth could easily have had reducing microenvironments, like hot springs and hydrothermal vents.

There is also the conundrum that bodies of water are poor places for the formation of biomolecules like proteins and nucleic acids, since the "primordial soup" is inevitably very dilute, making it difficult for molecules to "find" each other. This conundrum has led to the "primordial pizza" hypothesis of the origin of life on mineral surfaces like clay surfaces, which organic molecules can easily stick to, and which have catalytic properties that can easily assist in the formation of complex molecules. Günter Wächtershäuser has proposed that the Krebs Cycle (a.k.a. citric acid cycle, tricarboxylic acid cycle) had originated on such mineral surfaces, powered by iron-sulfur chemistry.

And while some biological molecules, like the smaller amino acids and nucleic-acid bases, are readily produced in Urey-Miller experiments, others, like sugars, are not. This means that nucleic acids are difficult to produce, since they contain the sugar ribose and its derivatives; this is a major difficulty with the otherwise-very-attractive "RNA world" hypothesis.

Thus, how to get from there to a complete self-reproducing system is still an unsolved problem, but this question is being actively researched.

Concerning the “primordial pizza” on such mineral surfaces, here’s more on Wächtershäuser. BTW, Intelligent Design theorists ought to get a kick out of this after all the abuse they have taken over lawyers (LOL!)

Günter Wächtershäuser

Günter Wächtershäuser, a chemist turned patent lawyer, is mainly known for his groundbreaking and influential work on the origin of life, and in particular his "iron-sulphur world theory", a theory that life on Earth had hydrothermal origins. The theory is consistent with the hypothesis that life originated near submerged hydrothermal vents.

Dr Wächtershäuser, a chemist by training, has been an international patent lawer in Munich since 1970. He has published numerous articles in organic chemistry, genetic engineering and patent law, and has made at least two significant contributions to evolutionary theory: the origins of perception and cognition, and the origin of life.

One of the key ideas advanced by Wächtershäuser is that an early form of metabolism predated genetics. Metabolism here means a cycle of chemical reactions that produce energy in a form that can be harnessed by other processes. The idea is that once a primitive metabolic cycle was established, it began to produce ever more complex compounds.

Wächtershäuser has hypothesized a special role for acetic acid, a simple combination of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen found in vinegar. Acetic acid is part of the citric acid cycle that is fundamental to metabolism in cells.

And here’s the model for Wächtershäuser’s theory et al (emphasis mine):

Multi-Phase Artificial Chemistry

Phase equilibria and the segregation of molecules into different phases probably were of utmost importance in prebiotic evolution. The presence of different phases allows certain species to concentrate to a level necessary for reaction, of which the products can subsequently switch phases to encounter reaction partners which would have before rendered impossible its synthesis. Concentration gradients, in particular pH gradients, between different phases might also have provided the driving force for chemical reactions. Hydrogen cyanide, for example, has been proposed to have polymerized first in an ice phase before its polymerization products continued to react further under warmer conditions [14]. This would avoid the problem possed by its tendency to react with formaldehyde [2]. Allamandola et al. [1] and Trinks et al [15] have also proposed models including different ice mantels in comets or ice phases in the sea.

The most accepted model for the origin of life has been proposed by [13,17] with the primordial ‘soup’. Hot deep sea vents as the birth place of life (the primordial ‘pizza’) were discussed as an interesting alternative [26. However, all these models need a prebiotic chemistry with complicated synthesis. As described in [20] and [21], they cannot occur in single, unpartitioned environment. A sequence of different environments would be important for the orgin of life, just as in the traditional organic synthesis. During such a synthesis a reaction mixture is subjected to certain conditions, then some products are extracted, purified, and/or crystallized, new reagents might be added, and the next step with new conditions begins. We can imagine an analogous situation in prebiotic chemistry, where the different conditions and steps are mimicked by different environments, i.e. phases like hot vents, the atmosphere, and ice, and intermittent evaporation, phase change, crystallization or filtration. This might mitigate the problems of complicated synthesis in prebiotic chemistry.

IMHO, this brings us right back to Luis Rocha

The idea that life may have originated from pure RNA world has been around for a while. In this scenario the first life forms relied on RNA molecules as both symbolic carriers of genetic information, and functional, catalytic molecules. The neutralist hypothesis for the function of RNA editing assumes such a RNA world origin of life. It posits that RNA editing could offer a process by which the dual role of RNA molecules as information carriers and catalysts could more easily co-exist. The key problem for the RNA world origin of life hypothesis is precisely the separation between these two functions of RNA. On the one hand RNA molecules should be stable (non-reactive) to carry information, and on the other hand they should be reactive to perform their catalytic function. RNA editing, could be seen as means to fragment genetic information into several non-reactive molecules, that are later, through RNA editing processes, integrated into reactive molecules. This way, the understanding of this process of mediation between the role of RNA molecules as information carriers and catalytic molecules based on RNA editing, can also offer many clues to the problem of origin of a semiotic code from s dynamic (catalytic) substrate.

IOW, even if one were able to account for the phases necessary to accomplish autonomy and bootstrap a replicating RNA world, in all of this there is not yet proposed a natural origin for the communication (information, Shannon) itself or the semiosis necessary for self-organizing complexity (for those models which eschew happenstance).

Where do we go next?

336 posted on 12/16/2004 9:33:02 PM PST by Alamo-Girl
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To: Alamo-Girl
I will have to digest some of the earlier information you posted, so I'll hold off, I especially want to think about Wächtershäuser. I've heard of the theory, but never examined it.

I do want to get right to the end of your post. You wrote:

". . . even if one were able to account for the phases necessary to accomplish autonomy and bootstrap a replicating RNA world, in all of this there is not yet proposed a natural origin for the communication (information, Shannon) itself or the semiosis necessary for self-organizing complexity (for those models which eschew happenstance). . . ."

I think I have an answer, maybe I should say "a link," for this one.

Stuart A. Kauffman: The Nature of Autonomous Agents and the Worlds They Mutually Create

The answer, I believe, is that autonomous agents "created" the information.
337 posted on 12/16/2004 10:15:36 PM PST by StJacques
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To: Alamo-Girl
Let me add a supplementary comment to my previous post on "autonomous agents" and the creation of information, calling attention to Luis Rocha, whose quote you posted.

I will want to think a bit more about what Luis Rocha had to say about "Disabled Syntactic Autonomy" and "Enabled Syntactic Autonomy" with respect to your question on the "origins" of information. I believe that the two types of autonomy may be what he is leading up to in the quote you posted, I'm not sure about that but I'll want to review. It may be that something along the lines of information contained in "synthesized or catalyzed RNA," such as Ferris has created and which contains at least some "information," though I doubt very much, can be regarded as the type of information sent within "Disabled Syntax" and more complex types of information, such as that from "fully autonomous agents" along the lines of which Kauffman discusses, are sent by "Enabled Syntax." Maybe, I'm just thinking in print here.

I'll have to think about all of this a bit, which means I will have to reread Rocha.
338 posted on 12/16/2004 10:47:42 PM PST by StJacques
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To: StJacques; betty boop; PatrickHenry; Doctor Stochastic; tortoise; All
This is a superb article. Thank you! Kauffman goes the extra mile to make the concept of autonomy and its importance to abiogenesis very clear Kudos!

betty boop, I suspect the seventh chapter will be of particular interest to you. For Lurkers, here are some of what I see as key points in the article:

The Nature of Autonomous Agents and the Worlds they mutually create

…What properties must a physical system have such that it can be said to be able to "act on its own behalf." A bacterium swimming upstream in a glucose gradient is acting on its own behalf, seeking dinner. Yet the bacterium is "just" a physical system. In attempting to answer this question, I have been led to a tentative definition of an "autonomous agent" making a living in an environment. By this definition, an autonomous agent is a collectively autocatalytic system that performs one or more thermodynamic work cycles.

Outside of an autonomous agent, or a coevolving community of autonomous agents, the chance occurrence of intricate "Rube Goldberg" machines channeling the constrained release of energy are vastly improbable spontaneously. Nor would such linked systems be likely to sustain themselves. While channeling energy flows, the general Rube Goldberg does not construct itself. Thus, the cyclic life cycles of Autonomous agents coevolving with one another to create ecosystems and finding and incorporating new functionalities in the adjacent possible begin to appear to be the major way that organization arises and proliferates in the Universe. If building order requires degradation of free energy, then autonomous agents ratchetting themselves far from equilibrium, thereby storing energy and "recorded embodied know how" in structure and flow to control their own constrained release of energy, construction of themselves, and exploration of the adjacent possible, appear the paramount way to build up complexity.

Indeed, once such autonomous agents exist and create a world in which they proliferate, the Darwinian categories of "function" come into play. A given molecule is "food" or "poison" to a situated agent. Hence, once Agents exist, a genuine semantics, with a physical interpretation, appears to arise. A coevolving community of non-equilibrium Maxwell Demons is a union of matter-energy-information into an organization that proliferates and constructs hierarchical complexity...

But lecture four emphasizes very puzzling questions partially noted and developed in lecture three, concerning constraints and propagating work in Agents. We appear to have, as yet, no physical theory that comfortably unites matter, energy and information in a single dynamical framework. Yet Maxwell's Demon is one place in physics where matter, energy and information come into intimate contact. A collectively autocatalytic, autonomous Agent performing linked propagating work, however, is characterized by a new and objective property: It is a physical system that achieves a collectively self-consistent functional "closure" in a space of catalytic and work tasks. An autonomous agent, a non-equilibrium Maxwell Demon, coevolving in its community has embodied know-how. It knows how to make a living in the context in which it lives and carries out real construction work in doing so. Its self consistent structure and dynamical logic constitute the embodied "record" of its environment, its reproduction and proliferation carries out linked work cycles and simultaneously, via mutation and selection, updates its record. A growing microbial community constitutes something like "propagating coconstructing organization of propagating constraints - work - record."

...More broadly, they suggest that the biosphere is non-ergodic, as is the Universe as a whole. The three component laws claim that any biosphere will self-organize to three phase transitions: The dynamical "edge of chaos" among a community of agents; a self-organized critical state among those agents considered as a coevolutionarily constructable ever changing system; a system poised on a subcritical-supracritical boundary at which the total chemical and perhaps functional diversity of the biosphere expands, on average, as fast as it can.

Kauffman’s hypotheses are quite engaging, but so far I haven’t read where he has specifically addressed how information itself (communication) and the required symbolization emerge within the autonomous agents – which are the two issues central to Rocha, Yockey, et al. But he does a great job laying out the environment which would be required for such to emerge autonomously.

There is another huge stumbling block to his hypotheses, Maxwell’s demon.

Tom Schneider’s article in Nanotechnology explains on page 14 why Maxwell’s demon is dead. Elsewhere, Peter Corning, Institute for Study of Complex Systems, specifically disputes Kauffman’s appeal to Maxwell’s demon.


339 posted on 12/17/2004 9:29:05 AM PST by Alamo-Girl
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To: Alamo-Girl
". . . Kauffman’s hypotheses are quite engaging, but so far I haven’t read where he has specifically addressed how information itself (communication) and the required symbolization emerge within the autonomous agents – which are the two issues central to Rocha, Yockey, et al. But he does a great job laying out the environment which would be required for such to emerge autonomously. . . ."

This goes back to my previous post, #338, in which I raised the issue of "what Luis Rocha had to say about 'Disabled Syntactic Autonomy' and 'Enabled Syntactic Autonomy'" and whether this may be related to differing levels of complexity in information. I've now reread portions of that paper and, though I have not come to a final conclusion on this yet, I am leaning towards the conclusion that I am right. The title of the section within Rocha's paper from which you quoted is "RNA Editing: the Origin of Syntactic Autonomy in Biology?," which I am using as a question to keep in mind when looking at Kauffman's work, in which he discusses a "hierarchy of combinatorially complex entities." That hierarchy is preceded by the flow of "matter-energy-information" from the "'Actual' to the 'Adjacent Possible'" in the transition from a mere "agent" in "a fitness landscape" to a point in which that agent "achieves a specific self-organized critical state." Like Rocha, Kauffman appears to see a connection between the way(s) information is transferred and the development of "autonomy" in a biological system, i.e. an "organism."

Now, I repeat, if RNA has been catalyzed in mineral clays (Ferris) then we have a scenario for the origins of at least some degree of information, since by definition RNA is composed of nucleotide sequences and those sequences in and of themselves are information. But that degree of information -- and I am just guessing here, though I doubt you will disagree -- cannot be of such a "complex" nature that it explains how information originates and functions within an "autonomous agent," a term that is still far removed from RNA that was produced by mere chemical reaction, such as occurred within the experiment Ferris conducted. With that in mind I think the real question that must be asked is not "what is the origin of information in biological systems?" but rather "what is the origin of complex information?" or perhaps even "what is the process of complexification by which information rises to a level necessary for the functioning of autnomous agents?"

These are still just thoughts on my part, but I'm putting them up for discussion.
340 posted on 12/17/2004 11:34:33 AM PST by StJacques
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