Jeepers, but the author is a devoted acolyte of Darwin - beginning the second essay with his profession of faith that the theory of evolution is a physical law above the physical "laws" of Newton, i.e. that gravity is merely an "agent" of evolution. Talk about a horse/cart error and zero consideration of geometric physics - though he could be excused because relativity may not have been in currency in his day.
He is quite the story teller - then again historical sciences are story telling, e.g. archeology, anthropology, Egyptology. Indeed, scientific theories are stories - ditto for political ideology, etc.
Sir Karl Popper famously criticized Marx and Freud because their theories were unfalsifiable. And I suspect the same should be said of many if not most story tellers. But one day science, technology and reality (both physical and most importantly, Spiritual) will catch up with their spin.
In this case for instance, Osborn bets the abiogenesis farm on energy. And in the 1950's Urey/Miller went down that path simulating lightning strikes. They had some success in creating amino acids that way but their experiments went no further.
About the same time, Crick/Watson discovered DNA - the message of living biological organisms - but neither they nor Urey/Miller understood the full import to molecular biology of information theory, founded on Claude Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communications (1948.)
Although "information theory and molecular biology" has been used successfully in both cancer and pharmaceutical research - it wasn't evidenced until the Wimmer experiment in approximately 2002 (bootstrapping polio from a message, e.g. off the internet) the relevance of information (successful communication) to any theory of abiogenesis.
And on this thread, Szostak is touted as being on the leading edge of abiogenesis experiments. And what is his focus but the same "information theory and molecular biology."
We are interested in applying directed evolution to nonstandard nucleic acids, as a way of asking whether life could have evolved using genetic polymers other than RNA. TNA (threose nucleic acid) is a particularly interesting nucleic acid synthesized by Albert Eschenmoser's group (Scripps Research Institute) in a search for possible progenitors of RNA. The sugar-phosphate backbone of TNA uses the four-carbon sugar threose, which might have been easier to come by prebiotically than the ribose of RNA. Despite the one-atom-shorter sugar-phosphate backbone repeat unit, TNA oligonucleotides can base-pair with themselves and with RNA and DNA. We have recently devised an approach to the enzymatic synthesis of TNA libraries, and experiments aimed at the in vitro evolution of TNA aptamers and catalysts are in progress.
And of course the origin of (biological) life is directly hinged to that question - and requires an origin for autonomy and semiosis (language) as well because the message in information theory requires both sender and receiver as well as encoding and decoding. And in the theoretical prebiotic "soup" without autonomy, the message is a broadcast and the soup remains a soup.
Evidently, Szostak is aware of this and trying to address these points at once in his experiments:
Szostak's model will eventually have to come to terms with this need to gather (non-autonomous) messages while not losing the ability to toggle back to being autonomous.
And here:
Obviously, Osborn's story is obsolete. And Szostak's story may end up becoming obsolete as well.
But that's what science does: a theory is a story which only has value to the extent it is falsifiable (Popper.)
The more a theory (e.g. relativity) survives attempts to falsify it, the more confidence we can have in the theory. But to the author of the articles you linked, the theory rarely is elevated to the status of a physical law (e.g. the second law of thermodynamics.) Though indeed, in some disciplines - particularly historical disciplines like evolution biology - the theory is elevated (wrongly in my view) to the status of a paradigm. For them, it may as well be "holy writ."
[[Here he is trying to simulate the spontaneous rise of an undirected, meaningless pre-cursor “message” in lieu of a coherent message fragment, i.e. the RNA. And to affect the message, Szostak proposes the spontaneous rise of autonomy in montmorillonite clay.]]
This is al lwell and good, but once this low level informaiton arises- He is not going to be able to demonstrate higher level metainformation arising in the clay- he can’t. There simply is not a source for the higher level metainfo available to the lower level in nature- He’ll have to make hte arguement that htis higher level metainfo is somehow capable of arising from this lower level info over billions of years as it supposedly progressed via mistakes and as this lower level somehow managed to beat all the odds and impossibilities and law breaking processes while it was locked away in it’s clay coccoon.
Here again is just another attempt to take pre-existing ID/IC already established, and deconstructing it, and inventing intelligently designed ‘natural processes’ that defy natural, biological, mathematical and chemical laws, and claiming that since ‘lower levels of assembly exist, then higher levels can’t be argued as IC’. Of course they won’t be able to show that any of hteir intelligently designed, carefully controlled, and carefully directed ‘natural processes’ ever occured in nature, but they’ll be quick to attack IC in this manner when they invent their intelligently designed, natural law violating process of simple construciton of lower level info assembly.
Cannot we see that here Szostak is "begging the question?" If the natural world conducted itself according to Szostak's own personal will, then surely his statement would be correct. The point is, the statement is incorrect, because the natural world is not subject to Szostak's personal will. It is what it is, independently of Szostak's desires for it. He wants the universe to be intelligible on his terms. Evidently he has yet to consider that it may not be intelligible on his terms. In which case, he has a choice: He can be either a scientist or an ideologue.
You wrote: "Szostak's model will eventually have to come to terms with this need to gather (non-autonomous) messages while not losing the ability to toggle back to being autonomous." You can't rely on "smart chemistry" forever. But if you could, you'd first have to explain how the chemistry "got smart" in the first place.
Thank you so very much, dearest sister in Christ, for your excellent essay/post!
He gets this attitude from Monism. We hear similar rhetoric today from evolutionists. They are also selling Monism. The difference is that Osborn and Loeb knew they were selling Monism. The evolutionists of today are mostly clueless about the origin of the ideologies that they so vehemently insist must be taught to unsuspecting people.
The Mechanistic Conception of Life, Jacques LoebSir Karl Popper famously criticized Marx and Freud because their theories were unfalsifiable. And I suspect the same should be said of many if not most story tellers.
Yes, but Popper was himself a crackpot and his philosophy of science has done incalculable damage to people's brains, in my opinion. Here's some anti-Popper:
Four Modern Irrationalists, David Stove.Obviously, Osborn's story is obsolete. And Szostak's story may end up becoming obsolete as well.
Well, the "stories" are probably ultimately the same, but as time goes on, they get more complex and more deeply buried under technical mumbo-jumbo. As soon as one story is trashed or refuted, a new one forms which is more difficult to analyze. So it gives more "life" to the fairytales, perhaps a few years worth or a decade worth. And when that one dies, another one comes along. In all of this, it is interesting to note that evolutionists seem not to remember the history of any of it. Whoever talks about the great evolutionists of yore? Does anyone mention Romanes and his biology of consciousness and the human soul? Or Huxley and his Bathybius? Or Haeckel and his life-from-crystals? It's like these guys never existed, in a sense. Who quotes Julian Huxley, except to ridicule and expose him as the totalitarian charlatan that he was? The old generation of Darwinians die off and nobody really gives a damn what they said. We have to listen to the new generation exclusively. They have the real truth, so we are told. Bah, where in science do you see the great scientists of the past (supposedly great, in this case) stricken from the obelisk this way?
There's a reason why. It's because evolutionists don't want people to know anything about the history of evolution or the history of evolution scientists. It's better forgotten, so that the old Monist fairytales can be recycled, along with other evils. Here look at this:
Creation by EvolutionRead the one on the evolution of amoebas: Can We See Evolution Occurring? How come all that proof of evolution right-before-your-eyes was forgotten? And does it not sound exactly like the more modern incarnation of the same fairytale, e.g., evolution of fruit-flies, bacteria, ring species, and so on?