Er, if I might ask, how can you not see that there is a sharp dividing line between life and non-life? If that makes it tough to defend abiogenesis, well that’s too bad. A thing is either alive or it is not. Any life-capable system is either alive or dead (unless it is Schroedinger's cat who "explained" quantum superposition...).
There is no “continuum” involved with the question, simply the question of whether a thing lives or not. Life departs abruptly, suddenly, “all at once,” as it were. A cancer patient may suffer for years, but his death needs only an instant to occur. That being the case, the inception of life (which I imagine precedes the physical occurrence of birth) may well also be quite sudden and abrupt.
And what does Darwin’s theory of evolution have to do with it? Darwin avoided the question of life altogether: He just assumed that “God made it” (like most people in his time), and then went on to look at the evolution of the forms living systems could take. He never, ever dealt with the phenomenon of life per se, nor did he spend much time speculating about how life “got started.”
To put it crudely, Darwin dealt with the outer forms or “husks” of living organisms, the rise of species, their transitions, etc., etc. So why are we having an Evo food fight over this issue of life vs. non-life? If you think that evolution = life -- or even that biology per se = life, for that matter -- then I think you’re very, very confused....
To repeat a statement you made: "...abiogenesis would be the *gradual* emergence of life-as-we-know it by the slow one-at-a-time accumulation of the *many* processes which, all together, make up the complex system that we are familiar with under the label of 'life'."
How do you know that abiogenesis is a "gradualist" process,"as opposed to assuming it "must be" a gradualist process?
And why do you say that "life is a complex process?" It could be the simplest thing in the world. The complexity enters in with how biological forms "wire into it." But again, that's not the same thing as what is life? That is only the how of life.
But life is what we were discussing over on the other thread, what observed characteristics it has in living forms and other matters, when a ginned-up "fallacy," "quantizing the continuum" so-called, popped up. It was a non sequitur from its first appearance, as its author almost certainly is aware.
If it was to be wielded as a weapon in an assortment of arguments, then I felt I needed to make it very clear there was more poison in the handle than in the point. And "evolution" was the biggest target at the moment.
It strikes me that this "activating force" covers far more ground than those two words might indicate. For example, we could say that life is "electricity" which is some kind of activating force. However, when I put electricity to my toaster, I have not really changed the nature of that toaster in the way that the "activating force" changes a living system that it inhabits.
Here we can speak of a continuum. There appears to be effects of the "activating force" that stretches from providing a "core" that innervates the entire "occupied" object all the way to a "self-aware identity" that occupies the object.
This is all speculation and since this "force" seems to occupy and cease occupation, it appears that as a mechanistic process it "could" have (perhaps, 'must have') developed other than simultaneous with the object it occupies and then leaves.
Imagine a something developing while steeped in a "radio-active" environment that permeates the entire something. Imagine that "radio-activity" have a short half-life such that 50 years later it is half, then 25%, etc., until it is gone.
Life draining/evaporating/halving/subsiding/preparing/readying to the point of being "out" of the formerly "steeped" object.
Someone call the mental squad...X is wildly speculating! :>)
What is that sharp dividing line? (It's not obvious to everybody.)
Part of the problem is the assumption that simple, single-cell life forms are simple. In actual fact, they are not so simple. They have moving parts, they have a control system that directs the operation of those parts, and a basic logic blueprint that directs how they are formed, how they operate, and how they fit themselves into their environment.
What distinguishes "life" from "non-life" seems to be a philosophical problem when we don't have a powerful enough microscope, and we can't see the moving parts. But our very basic lifeform has a built in logic that guides how it does what it does. When the signals that trigger its actions are no longer interpreted correctly, it starts to fail. When the signals are no longer generated at all, we would say that it is dead.
The signals, be they chemical or electrochemical in nature, and its response to those signals are the indicator that it is alive. As others have pointed out, the DNA (which is presumably where the logical blueprint exists) is still there even after it is dead, but the signals that keep the little mechanism working have stopped.
I realize that I am treading in way over my head. Cars are mysterious to me, but they are not magic. They have moving parts and a logic that controls their sequence of operation. There is a continuum I suppose between an engine and a raw block of iron ore, but the relationship between the two should not obfuscate the fact that an engine is not ore. But cut the cord from the ignition coil and it stops dead in its tracks.
Exactly so, which explains the continuing absurd struggle to separate abiogenesis from evolution.