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Thank you for your reply and challenge!

How would you go about demonstrating that there can be no physical explanation for a phenomenon? Can you give me an example where this has been demonstrated?

Certainly! pi for one, Riemannian geometry for another and so on. Mathematical structures are not physical (not spatial/temporal, not corporeal ) - and often, surprisingly, after they have been discovered are evidenced by phenomenon in the physical, corporeal, realm.

Einstein for instance was able to pull Riemannian geometry off-the-shelf to describe relativity. Ditto for mirror symmetries and dualities. (Vafa) And what are we to make of an extra temporal dimension "unifying" alternative string theories? (also Vafa)

This is what Wigner called the "unreasonable effectiveness of math".

Such structures are forms according to Plato, i.e. universals. And in the view of Max Tegmark (and others such as Barrow, Rucker, Nozick) they are the true reality of the physical realm. In other words, the corporeals we perceive in four dimensions are actually mathematical structures in higher dimensionality.

This is the big tension between biology and chemistry on the one hand – and the mathematicians and physicists on the other hand. According to Pattee, the biologists are not interested in such questions as “what is life?” – but that is of extreme importance to mathematicians who have been invited to the table by the likes of Dawkins. Information theory, btw, is a discipline of mathematics.

The mathematicians speak of self-organizing complexity (von Neumann challenge) or functional complexity or Kolmogorov complexity. They look at randomness differently. They are interested in autonomy and semiosis. Understanding the information (communications) in biological life is crucial to them.

Not necessarily so with the biologists and chemists who center so often on the empirical laboratory experiments or observations.

I’m very fond of Marcel-Paul Schützenberger’s metaphor for what is happening. I’ve modified it somewhat, as follows. The biologists and chemists stand at the door fumbling with their keys absolutely convinced that one of them will fit the lock all the while the mathematicians and physicists are trying to point out that it is a combination lock.

Of a truth, it may take both a key and a combination.

But one thing for sure is that Darwin never asked or answered what life “is” or the origin of it. And even though it is the general domain of biology, the question is seldom asked much less answered by that discipline (with the notable exception of Bauer). But now the mathematicians have arrived on the scene – Pattee, Rocha, Kauffman, Wolfram, Yockey, Schneider, Adami, etc. – the haze is starting to clear so maybe, just maybe, they will jointly be able to open that door after all.

But with the mathematicians on the scene, the demonstration will reach well beyond the corporeal.