Calling all critics…
In particular, all critics and debunkers of the probabity arguments used against naturalistic abiogenesis. . . I want your perspective on an argument I’m reading.
As a disclaimer, I do know the general course of the proposed chemical origins of life, and am cognizant of the research being done in that field, so please don’t repeat this particular ‘rebuttal’ :).
In the book Intelligent Universe, Hoyle lays out the following arguments for why it "couldn’t have happend" by a chemical reaction (after some probability calculations on the number of enzymes used in basic life).:
To press the matter further, if there was a basic principle of matter which somehow drove organic systems toward life, it’s existence should easily be demonstrable in the laboratory. On could for instance take a swimming bath to represent the primordial soup. Fill it with any chemicals of a non-biological nautre you please. Pump any gases over it, or through it, you please, and shine any kind of radiation on it that takes your fancy. Let the experiment proceed for a year and see how many of those 2,000 enzymes have appeared in the bath. I will give the answer, and so save the time and trouble and expense of actually doing the experiment. You would find nothing at all, except possibly for a tarry sludge composed of amino acids and other simple organic chemicals. How can I be so confident of this statement? Well, if otherwise, the experiment would long since have been done and would be well-known and famous throughout the world. The cost of it would be trivial compared to the cost of landing a man on the Moon.
I can imagine someone saying: "Wait a minute! The primordial soup in the early history of the Earth was much bigger than a swimming bath. Perhaps it was even as big as the ocean". Very well, let us reduce the amount of chemical complexity to be accumaled in the swimming bath so as to allow for its smaller volume. The odds against producing the 2,000 enzymes is the number we have seen before, the number which occupies about forty pages with its zeros. Reducing this huge array of zeros pro rata to allow for the smaller volume of the swimming bath does improve the odds, but only to the extent of removing about half the last line on the last of the forty pages.
You might also try arguing that the process gathered momenum in the supposed primordial soup. A critic might say: "You have allowed only for a single year in your experiment. Because the process accelerates this is not long enough for anything to show up. You should allow a thousand million years". In answer it is easy to prove that even the most enormous acceleration would not remove more than a fraction of the last of the forty pags, leavin gmore than thiry-nine pages of zeros, still an enormous number. If acceleration were so important, the swimming bath should be found to contain many proteins with amino acid sequences well on the way towards those which appear in biology. It should easily be recognizable as a new biological world– in as little as a minute or two it should have the obvious aspects of such a system, even if one did the experiments in a test tube instead of a swimming bath.
In short there is not a shred of objective evidence to support the hypthesis that life began in an organic soup here on the Earth.
To begin with it is understood that no-one these days wants to suggest beginning with all 2,000 enzymes and the forty pages of zeros that entails; rather, we expect to first go through a number of intermediate step; simple monomers, self-replicating molecules, RNA maybe, and so forth. But my question is, what is wrong with the general form of this argument? If there was this yet-undiscovered chemistry by which molecules self-organzied into life, surely it would be fairly easily discoverable? After all, a billion years isn’t that long…
And then another question: suppose there was this hypotheical organizing force, and then suppose again there wasn’t. What would be the differences between these two scenarios? What different predictions would we expect?
This denies by itself the existence of research in abiogenesis. In other word, the claim that there is not a shred of evidence is one based on ignorance. The problem with this example is that even if we cannot yet replicate abiogenesis in the laboratory, neither can we replicate controlled nuclear fusion. There are so many things which are presently beyond our reach.
Humans have been around for far less than a billion years. Additionally, why should the chemistry be yet to be discovered? We don know of actual self organizing systems, the evidence for an RNA world is quite extensive, the evolution of the genetic code is reasonably well understood, in other words, that science is working its way back to understand something which happened bilions of years ago and which left little direct evidence, is something that should be admired.
Rather than on focusing what science does not know yet, we should focus on what it does know and the truly ingeneous manners in which the information was ‘teased’ out of the data.
Comment by PvM — April 16, 2006 @ 10:23 pm
Thanks PvM. I don’t quite see how the “no shred of evidence” can be construed as “no research into origins of life” — surely you can do research without coming up with evidence? At any rate the fact that it is being worked on is not under dispute; one of my chemistry professors is doing pretty-cutting edge research on it now, and he is actually going to be sharing some of it with the IDEA Club soon.
My question is more whether Hoyle’s relative “likelihoods” as we go from billions of years and primoridal soups to a few years and bathtub are really reasonable, and if (given this chemical principle that pushes toward life) we ought to be seeing something significant even in these relatively tiny experiments.
Comment by Freawaru — April 17, 2006 @ 1:17 am
Freawaru,
Consider me a friendly critic of Hoyle’s work (as I am an IDer). The issue is whether there could be a future discovery in terms of a law of physics and chemistry that could solve the origin of life. Hoyle’s calculations are highly directed in terms of current biology, and thus an criticism of post diction is usually leveled (that is, making probability argumets after the fact). One might argue there are many possible architectures of life, and since Hoyle doesn’t consider those, then his calculations are flawed.
To be extremely nit picky, if life’s salient feature is that it is has a Turing machine (computer), then one
could argue there are infinite ways to make computers, and Hoyle is post dictively fitting his probability arguments. The objection has some merit (even though for the most part I discount it), and thus, it should not be ignored.
Thankfully, the modern ID formulations negate these postdiction objections. I point you to a peer reviewed pro-ID paper that outlines where the probability calculations should be rooted, namely, in the probability of a self-replicating Turing machine in any physical universe given any possible law of physics or chemistry. The paper is very esoteric, but it is exactly the kind of paper that will resist chemical evolution arguments of any known chemical law or any chemical law which could conceivably be discovered:
http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/722
The exact numbers have not been given, but in my discussions with others, I’ve seen numbers as small as 2^200 to 2^5100 to 2^150,000 …. essentially, even the smallest of these numbers is quite substantial. The 2^200 number corresponds to the smallest implementation of a lambda calculus, the 2^5100 to a universal Turing Machine (Penrose), and 2^150,000 corresponds to a von Neumann Automata. I’m sorry that I can’t give a more definitive answer, but as you can see, these difficult theoretical issues are not fully resolved, except to say, life is highly improbable.
Salvador
PS
If PvM visits here often, and you’re club is looking for debate practice, he might be the kind of guy you need. I certainly don’t agree with him, but he generally gives you the kind of argumentation you might find anywhere else.
Also, this blog may amuse you as we have 2 world class OOL researchers at GMU:
http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/825
Comment by Salvador T. Cordova — April 17, 2006 @ 1:43 am
I used some rather thick jargon in my previous post, but to simplify the point I was aiming at let me give an analogy.
If one sees Shakespeare’s writings somewhere, it does not matter what the chemistry of the ink and paper are that it is written on, nor the chemistry of the pixels on a CRT. There is a feature of the information that has independence from the chemical substrate which conveys the information, and that is a very good place to begin the probability arguments.
The architecture of a Turing Machine, like a work of shakespeare leaps out at a computer scientist like a special kind of poetry. Such things don’t happen by chance, and as Dembski’s displacement theorem demonstrates, they are not made any more likely by appeals to some sort of natural selection.
That said, the chemistry arguments in and of themselves are bewildering. How did such molecules, like RNA, even form in abundance in the first place? If there were an RNA world of self replicators, how did DNA and amino acids and a host of other chemistries we find in life come to be? The problems are bewildering. The ID inference is not an arugment from ignorance but rather a proof by contradiction. The physical evidence and theoretical considerations continue to contradict a non-intelligent origin. Computers are not expected to pop into existence via chemistry alone any more than poetry is explained by the chemistry of the ink and paper which conveys it.
Comment by Salvador T. Cordova — April 17, 2006 @ 2:07 am
Very cool paper, Salvador!
Comment by Freawaru — April 17, 2006 @ 2:43 am
To begin with it is understood that no-one these days wants to suggest beginning with all 2,000 enzymes and the forty pages of zeros that entails; rather, we expect to first go through a number of intermediate step; simple monomers, self-replicating molecules, RNA maybe, and so forth. But my question is, what is wrong with the general form of this argument?
It appears to me you have answered your own question.
Another objection is that the conditions under which life (allegedly) began are not known. For example, various geological conditions have been proposed at various times; clay, black smoker vents, pyrrhite chimneys. There is still debate about the constitution of the early atmosphere, and the recent discovery of extremophiles deep udersea and deep underground in all sorts of pressures and temperatures makes it possible that the ‘primordial soup’ may not have been near the surface of a pond.
Comment by ivy privy — April 17, 2006 @ 12:44 pm
The AND-Multiplication Error>
Thomas D. Schneider, Ph.D.
Comment by ivy privy — April 17, 2006 @ 1:20 pm
Ivy Privy– Yes, I realize I answered it part-way, but it’s the bit I didn’t answer that I’d like to know. I’m not at all interested in whether his forty pages of zeros are or are not accurate (I know there are plenty of reasons they might not be) and I had actually thought about the multiple possible paths figuring in and spoiling the nice math. But surely there is a probability still, even if perhaps it is uncaluculatable using the information we have now? The question then becomes whether the reasoning behind this argument works, and is applicable to that event– and under which situations would it be applicable, and under which would it not be? Essentially he is allowing for this step-by-stop progression, as well as a snowballing effect– but you seem to suggest, not sufficiently?
But the paper in Cell Biology seems to address the issue of origins of life a bit more directly… maybe we should start a new thread to discuss that.
Comment by Freawaru — April 17, 2006 @ 2:10 pm
How easy is it to discover the completely unknown? Do we even know what we’re looking for?
How can one calculate the probabilities w/o knowing the conditions? If I were asked to calculate a person’s probability of contracting malaria, I would certainly need to know that person’s location. The odds in equatorial Africa are far different from those in Ithaca, NY.
Comment by ivy privy — April 17, 2006 @ 6:14 pm
How about calculating the probabilities for homochirality?
Comment by Art — April 17, 2006 @ 9:39 pm
How about calculating the likelihood of an intelligent designer doing it instead? After all, a likelihood argument only works if it’s much much more likely than the alternative… (an even then it’s not conclusive…)
Let’s see, first of all we need to identify an intelligent designer who was around 3.5 billion years ago… erm I seem to have hit a small snag already…
Comment by Odd Digit — April 19, 2006 @ 3:21 pm
A good read for anyone who likes probability arguments is Sober’s The Design Argument. It’s a pdf by the way…
Comment by Odd Digit — April 19, 2006 @ 3:22 pm