[Diamond]

When you say it's in the hands of the chemists now, when Yockey says that there are principles of biology that cannot be deduced from the laws of physics and chemistry, there seems to be a disagreement. Do you think he wrong in his claim that there are principles of biology that cannot be deduced from the laws of physics and chemistry, and if so, why?

Cordially,

[js1138]

Do you think he wrong in his claim that there are principles of biology that cannot be deduced from the laws of physics and chemistry.

Basically I agree with this. It appears to be a rule of thumb rather than a law of nature, and it has some interesting implications, if true.

I call it the law of invention (lowercase "law"). It means that there can be new things under the sun, things that cannot be planned, foreseen or designed except by evolutionary algorithms and through incremental, cut and try methods.

Now an omniscient and omnipotent designer could see all posibilities arising from chemistry, but any lesser entity could not. So we can't rule out God as the designer of life. (Of course, you can't rule out anything as being the result of ans all-powerful entity.) But humans, and by extension, space aliens, do not qualify.

There's another implication, and that is humans cannot look at chemistry and declare that object X cannot arise from undirected chemistry. Particularly if you have observed an instance of object X.

Let's see how that implication works. Let's say object X is the cell of a sponge. Right away we can reasonably assert that such a complex object could not have self-assembled through unguided chemistry. The reason for this assertion, however, has less to do with first principles than with experience. We have hundreds of years of observational data and have not seen anything like that happen.

But we observe less complex cells, and even molecules that replicate and participate in living systems without having such fundamental components as cell walls, proteins or metabolism. A reasonable person might ask whether it is possible for a self-replicating molecule to arise from chemistry without intervention.

My "law of invention" says it is not possible to prejudge this case. An omniscient being could declare the answer, but we are not omniscient. The law of invention says there can be properties of assemblies that cannot be deduced from the properties of the component parts. Our investigation must proceed via cut and try. Which is precisely what investigators of abiogenesis are doing.

The law of invention says that really new things can arise only through omniscience or through incremental change followed by feedback. As I started out saying, it's a rule of thumb.