Re: Life: Turn it upside down!

On 10/04/2024 16:16, JTEM wrote:

  Arkalen wrote:
 

Sorry; your reply of "it's Faith-based" was to the following:
>
"The alkaline hydrothermal vent hypothesis doesn't involve modern alkaline hydrothermal vents

 So, nothing that exists.
 

in fact it relies on the assumption

 Faith based.
 

You're repeating your original reaction to that sentence in a way that makes it clearer that you really are just reacting to the word "assumption" that refers to pretty well-accepted facts about the primordial Earth. 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:

I thought the "faith" you were referring to was "our partial knowledge of the conditions of early Earth" but I take it you just meant the hypothesis overall?

 The faith begins with the belief that abiogenesis even happened.

So it doesn't seem you're applying that word in a very consistent way.

 Panspermia is equally as valid.
 

No, the alkaline hydrothermal vent hypothesis is far and away superior to all others in scope, specificity, evidential support and predictive power. 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.

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.

 It's also possible that abiogenesis did occur, on Mars or even
in another solar system, only for life to be deposited on Earth
via some cross contamination...

Way more likely that it was in alkaline hydrothermal vents.

 It's a variation on Panspermia, I know, but classical Panspermia
has life forming as a consequence of the Big Bang.
 

That seems to assume the only possible abiogenesis experiment is "making a cell from scratch" but that's never how science or experiments work. Experiments are always about testing some testable aspect of a hypothesis. That would be like saying we never tested the theory of relativity until we put GPS satellites into orbit or something.

 A hypothesis explains the evidence/observations AND serves as the
basis of predictions. These predictions, in turn, lend themselves
to scientific testing -- experimentation, observation. This testing,
if failed, falsifies the hypothesis. There was less than
compelling confirmation of an Einstein prediction almost right
away, but it did take a few years before the first solid
scientific test confirmed a prediction.
 However...
 'Tis the nature of "Evidence" to support more than one conclusion.
A positive test result of a prediction IS CONSISTENT WITH a
hypothesis, but in almost all cases is also consistent with other
explanations. So scientifically confirming a prediction of an
abiogenesis hypothesis isn't as convincing as some might believe.
 Ideas are really only good or bad in comparison to other ideas,
not themselves.

Sure, and the alkaline hydrothermal vent hypothesis is really good in comparison to pretty much all of the other ideas on abiogenesis I'm aware of, although I'd love to see that challenged.
In this case though the competing ideas are so different that the experimental results linked in the papers I linked are mostly relevant to this hypothesis. Certainly they can suggest different variants of this hypothesis, in which case scientists can figure out different predictions those variants make and come up with experiments that would distinguish them. But it's hard for, say, an experimental result showing you can fix CO2 into formate in alkaline-hydrothermal-vent conditions to support or not support panspermia, or a hypothesis that abiogenesis happened on land or whatever. What that experimental result does to is increase the specificity and plausibility of the AHV hypothesis, which turns it into a better hypothesis, which if the others *don't* also become better hypotheses via their own experimental results means it becomes better than those others.

 

Oh, dude; I was woafully under performing there!  We're talking
a HUGE spectrum, from the most basic forms of matter to the
most complex examples of non-living structures... onto the very
simplest forms of life...

 

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

 My point from the beginning is that we need this spectrum laid out.
The work has to be done. BECAUSE it hasn't been.
 The spectrum isn't empty, it's ignored.
 

How could we tell the difference ?

I'll give you that I could add some things to your list, most notably dissipative systems like tornadoes. But if you think the spectrum is full then you should have no trouble at all populating it better than you did there.

 My point is that people are approaching this all wrong. That, nobody
has done this basic work.
 Did you know homosexuality was originally classified as a mental
illness, a disorder? Do you know why they stopped? Because someone
got the idea to look for gay men who were NOT being treated for
mental health issues. Turns out that if the only gay men you ever
look at are the ones in therapy, you get the idea that all gay men
suffer from mental health issues!
 What you are NOT looking at is important. Sometimes it's more
important than what you are looking at.
 

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. (I'm being cheeky of course; what's more to the point for your point is that it's definitely and unambiguously an environment which MIGHT'VE resulted in abiogenesis)

 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?

 

But you seem focused on only looking at things that exist now, so.

 That's me, focused on what I can see instead of what doesn't
exist!