Re: Life: Turn it upside down!

On 10/04/2024 22:50, JTEM wrote:

  Arkalen wrote:
 

<snip>

 There are working assumptions. Abiogenesis is a working assumption
and it's wrong it assume that it's a fact, much less a well
accepted fact.

I'm not talking about abiogenesis in that (snipped) sentence, I'm talking about the conditions on early Earth, which is what you continue to seem to claim you were referring to when you talked about "faith". Can you clarify for me which if any of these claims you'd be willing to grant as plausible enough to draw inferences from in this conversation?
1) Earth existed as a planet 4 billion years ago
2) Earth did not exist as a planet 6 billion years ago
3) Earth formed by accretion around the same time the rest of the Solar System did
4) Photosynthetic life did not exist in the earliest stages of Earth's existence
5) in the lade Hadean/Archean period Earth had a solid crust and oceans
6) alkaline hydrothermal vents exist today
7) alkaline hydrothermal vents are created by the reaction of serpentinization between mantle minerals like olivine and water
8) the conditions for the existence of hydrothermal vents were as or more common in the lade Hadean/Archean vs today
9) the atmosphere in the late Hadean/Archean was reducing, with low-to-negligible levels of oxygen and higher-than-today levels of carbon dioxide and methane

 There are other ideas out there, including other scientific ideas.
 There's a lot of interesting things, published online, on the
topic of a-priori assumptions. I know you're plenty familiar
with the concept and the pitfalls but maybe a reminder?
 

I would take it as a confirmation that you think things like "there wasn't free oxygen in the atmosphere in that Hadean" are faith, but then you say this:

 If abiotic oxygen is a myth, life has already been discovered
on Mars. Ganymede. Europa.

Sure, very low free oxygen then. In terms of the reason I originally brought it up (the chemistry of alkaline hydrothermal vents) it works out the same.
<snip>

the alkaline hydrothermal vent hypothesis is far and away superior to all others in scope, specificity, evidential support and predictive power.

 Lol!  Nothing is useful unless and until life is spontaneously
formed under laboratory conditions. AND THEN that's when the
debate begins!  Because it won't "Prove" that it ever happened
in nature, only that it is not excluded.

I didn't say "useful", I said "superior to all others in scope, specificity, evidential support and predictive power". I'm happy to justify each of those claims, is there one you have particular objections to or that you want me to start with?

 

It's especially superior to panspermia which isn't even so much a
hypothesis as a vague notion that doesn't actually explain the origin of life.

 Science is about stepping outside of yourself. That is literally
why it exists. Humans are so biased that we need a specific
set of rules, a process we must follow to keep up from latching
onto whatever our knee-jerk tells us.
 Science was created to remove the human element.
 You're insisting that the human element is what validates the
work.

I wasn't aware I was doing that, could you clarify? The criteria I listed are actual rules science uses to evaluate hypotheses, they're very much a part of the "stepping outside of yourself" and "removing the human element" that you describe.

 

There's also creationism, yes.

>
Sure. I figured that since you were talking about a spectrum of complexity in things that actually exist from life to nonlife that the context of this thread was naturalistic explanations.

 The problem with Creationism is that abiogenesis, in a lab, would
be an example of same. So you're not escaping Creationism with
such goals, you're trying to validate it with an actual example!
 Ironic, I know.

Not really; the lab is a controlled environment that allows one to narrow down the causes of any given phenomenon. This includes natural or nonsentient causes.
Take for example the Todd Willingham case and the debunking of the forensic science used to convict him. Forensic scientists had some ideas on how human-caused fires differ from accidental ones and based on those they argued that various patterns were evidence that Todd Willingham had committed arson. Then a guy called Gerald Hurst discredited all this evidence based in part on experiments where he re-created those patterns in ways that showed that they can occur in non-human-caused fires.
Now I can see there is a fun little conceptual paradox there that I'd be happy to work through, but just for a start: do you think what Gerald Hurst did was inherently impossible or invalid?
<snip>

Sure, and the alkaline hydrothermal vent hypothesis is really good in comparison to pretty much all of the other ideas on abiogenesis

 Rather circular, that. And anyone proposing a different answer
would be definition be disagreeing with you.

It's not circular, it's a positive claim that I gave a number of justifications for earlier and am happy to give more (but I already proposed that higher up so we can keep it there). And of course anybody making a contradictory claim is disagreeing with me, that's the nature of positive claims. The next step is for me to defend my claim, those that disagree to make counter-arguments, etc.

 What do you have in common with all of them? That's a start.
 

And I'm telling you most of that spectrum is empty, shows a huge gulf.

>
That would be more convincing if either one of us could point to
such a spectrum -- mapped out, scientifically. But we can't. So
you are arguing... what?

 

Here's me pointing->:
...water&lower -> Tornadoes, crystals, abiotic autocatalytic reactions, alcohol -> polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, long alkanes -> [huge gap] -> most viruses -> giant viruses, intracellular parasites? -> prokaryotic cells -> eukaryotic cells & higher...

 This is usenet. The internet. I just read a claim that the exact same
scientists who worked out the date, time & location of the eclipse
are the people who have determined that Gwobull Warbling is REEL!
 Matter exists along a spectrum. All matter. Map it out. Speaking
rhetorically. Not saying you should do it but I am saying that it
needs to be done. >

Shouldn't be too hard for you to fill that gap if what you're saying is true.

 And yet we both know that it's never been done.
 

The spectrum isn't empty, it's ignored.

 

How could we tell the difference ?

 Someone could attempt to map out all life and non life:  Matter.
 The claim is that the very same nature which produced diamonds
and forms lithium can also produce life. This life is not a
separate and distinct form of matter, it lies along a spectrum.
 This much is a fact.
 To claim anything else is to argue divine intervention!
 So if we understand that spectrum we understand life, and an
understanding of that spectrum begins with actually mapping
it out.
 

I assume you're proposing something that you think is possible to do, even somewhat practical given you think it's a better approach than all other ones, so for example it wouldn't involve mapping every individual particle of matter including those contained in the paper or computers this map would be published in. Some categorization would be involved. What level of category do you have in mind? Like, what might a typical entry in the database look like? What size database do you think would be possible or reasonable?
I'm also a bit curious what mechanism in your mind would cause such a map to help use understand the origins of life. By which I mean there's some intuitive reasons it seems obvious it would help, but ISTM those same reasons say that instantiating elements of that spectrum in the lab would help us understand just as much, and you seem to think it wouldn't help at all.

I mean, obviously every element of that spectrum has to have been realized at some point, or abiogenesis couldn't have happened.

>
We're back to being faith-based. Abiogenesis is not the only
game in town. And even if it did happen somewhere on the
surface of a planet, this may not have been that planet! It
may literally be impossible to identify any environment that
had ever existed on this Earth which might've resulted in
abiogenesis... if it ever happened anywhere.

 

Nah it's not impossible, several perfectly cromulent candidates were identified including the one it actually happened in which is alkaline hydrothermal vents.

 Nah, you're trolling.

I'm sad you snipped the parenthetical right after that where I confessed to cheekiness but added the actual serious answer, which was that alkaline hydrothermal vents are definitely, indubitably an environment that ever existed on this Earth which MIGHT've resulted in abiogenesis. That's a pretty low bar you set with the "might", maybe lower than you indended. If you disagree that the AHV hypothesis flies right over it you'd need to show some reason abiogenesis couldn't have occurred there. Do you have any in mind?
Honestly the biggest weakness of the hypothesis so far IMO is that it's hardly been challenged at all. So I am being dead serious when I say I'd love it if you did have some in mind.

 

So switch the focus. Study things that are real, that actually
exist.

 

I'm extremely confused. Are you saying there are tons of entities that exist today that are intermediate steps between life and non-life such that no complexity gap between the two exist, but also life didn't start from non-life? Or all the entities are somewhere other than Earth?

 Is that how you see the Electromagnetic Spectrum? As a series of
intermediate steps?
 

It's continuous and has no endpoints for there to be intermediates to, but in a context that introduces endpoints and discretization (like for example an argument over "can we measure any wavelengths between red and blue") it can be described that way can't it? I can't tell if we actually disagree on this paragraph or if there's a phrasing issue.