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It would not be realistic to expect an abiotic but chemically organic soup to form in a world where cellular life has adapted to seemingly every possible niche and condition, including extreme temperatures and the eating of oil spills, nylon, etc.

What stipulates, or governs, the "seemingly every possible niche and condition," VadeRetro? You seem to indicate on these grounds that some things aren't "possible." By what criterion (or criteria) do you discriminate between the possible and the impossible?

At the very least, it seems you admit there may be a problem of impossible vs. possible here.

Plus you are leaving out the time problem. And evolution itself -- in order to BE evolution -- needs not just time, but a direction for time. After all, evolution is not temporally reversible.

Such are the problems that interest me.

Just wondering what you really think.

Thanks for writing!

Plus you are leaving out the time problem. And evolution itself -- in order to BE evolution -- needs not just time, but a direction for time. After all, evolution is not temporally reversible.

Specifically, what part of evolution is not reversible, and why?

The question regarding niches is rather easy. You just have to realize that regardless of where or how or how many times life came from non-life (even if one or more miracles) there would be a dominant microbe culture for the simple reason that bacteria eat each other. We are talking about an era of single celled organisms that lasted six times as long as the "modern" era of multi-celled organisms.

We often cite elements of DNA as a demonstration of common descent, but your pal Yocky has an even more interesting argument for common descent. The cellular machinery is reproduced intact from one generation to another, even in microbes. It is the "boot sector" of life, to borrow a phrase from computerise.

The cellular machinery is nearly identical in all living things. Microbes are nearly as complex as humans, except for a few parameters in their DNA. But their cellular machinery is the same.

By the way, you advised me to "take it up with Yockey," and this is what I found. (boldface mine)

DATE: 13 Nov 2000

From:
Hubert P. Yockey

Subject: Your Review of Information Theory and Molecular Biology
Dear Gert:
Thank for your review of my book Information Theory and Molecular Biology. This book is now out of print but I am working on the second edition.
You seem puzzled by my quotations of the Bible. Please note that I also quote Robert Frost, Homer's Iliad, the Mikado, Charles Darwin, Machiavelli''s The Prince, Plato, The Rubaiyat and other sources. When something was said 2000 years ago, it is plagiarism to say it again without quotation.
It is a viscous circle indeed! (*) But that is what we find by experiment. We are the product of nature not its judge. As Hamlet said to his friend: "There are many things, Horatio, between Heaven and Earth unknown in your philosophy."
See Gregory Chaitin's books "The Limits of Mathematics",1998 and "The Unknowable",1999 both Springer-Verlag. See also my comments on unknowability in Epilogue. We will never know what caused the Big Bang and we will never know what caused life.
By the way, I am indeed an anti-creationist becaue I believe that the origin of life is, like the Big Bang, a part of nature but is unknowable to man.
Taken all in all, especially for those who finished reading the review, it is very favorable.
Here is a list of my recent publications. If you send me your postal address I shall send you the Computers & Chemistry paper. That will explain why the recent data on the genomes of human and other organisms provide a mathematical proof of "Darwinism" beyond a reasonable doubt. (**) I suggest you read the paper in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. Perhaps you would then like to read some of Walther Löb's papers. Stanley Miller was not the first to find amino acids in the silent electrical discharge.
Yours very sincerely, Hubert P. Yockey

I'm pretty sure there are place on Earth that are really, really, too hot to contain any sort of life at all. There may even be conditions which are in one way or another too toxic, although I'm guessing here. Thus, I hedge my language a little, trying to be as accurate as possible. It doesn't mean I'm not saying what I'm saying, or that it doesn't need to be addressed.

At the very least, it seems you admit there may be a problem of impossible vs. possible here.

If I have made an admission that undercuts my point, I don't see it myself. (Not that I wouldn't as I said make every effort to be strictly accurate.)

Plus you are leaving out the time problem.

I was making a specific point. I wasn't anticipating every objection ever thought up on the spur of a moment to abiogenesis.

And evolution itself -- in order to BE evolution -- needs not just time, but a direction for time. After all, evolution is not temporally reversible.

If time ever backed up, how would we know, and why does the process of evolution depend more than any other on it not happening? When I reverse a VCR tape or CD, the characters in the movie don't realize I'm doing it. Furthermore, the movie still ends the same way when I let it go forward. OK, the characters aren't really present on my recorded media, just some visual and auditory impressions. Doesn't matter. We are trapped in time the way those movie events are trapped on the media. Backing up just results in replaying the same old history the same way again and again.

However, all this is utterly off point from what I said. The abiotic soup can only happen once. You have life and it's a different world. Anybody can understand that who isn't militantly trying not to. It doesn't take a genius. It just takes not having certain very specific fish to fry. When a question like that is being discussed, anyone who doesn't have those particular fish to fry can see the people who behaving bizarrely.