Friday, April 25, 2014

Evolution and Abiogenesis

I find a continuing mental journey away from both religious thought and standard evolutionary synthesis.
I am not happy about religion because what they say about origins is not based on observable facts.
I am not happy about science because what they say about origins is not based on observable facts.

The presumption of abiogenesis is the assumption that there was a time that there was no life. The philosophical necessity for random unguided processes to move from non life to life does not exist in my brain. Neither does the philosophical necessity of an omnipotent deity exist just to defy the other necessity.

My current theory is that life as we don't know it is an emergent property of the Big Bang, and that life as we do know it has been designed on the fly in a multi stage process. The only stage of the process that is accessible to humans observations is the last one - Life as we don't even perceive as life designing life as we know it.

Of course this theory suffers for the same reasons as why I am not happy with religion and science. 

Predicting new facts is the gold standard here - What new facts does religion, abiogenesis or standard evolutionary synthesis predict about what we will find on other planets, asteroids and comets? Not really anything, but we can be pretty sure to be able to fit them into our theories for the moment.

I don't think predicting new facts is given enough weight in science of origins. We keep our overall theories vague enough and keep strictly to a nearly social need for a democratic concensus between scientists who spend most of their time studying these things. This instead of the need for a myriad of competing ideas which will predict different facts when we eplore the far reaches of our World and universe.

2 comments:

Chris Fellows said...

Just in case you didn't notice... I made my origin of life blogpost into a Youtube fillum.

Marco Parigi said...

I guess my views are closest to panspermia, but only in the philosophical sense. This means that there is no *leap* from non-life to life, but considerably interesting transformation from "life" as we don't yet know it, to life as we know it. We will miss the point if we look for "precursors" or even in ways that rely on natural "non-living" chemical processes such as you do. We are looking for the life type as we don't know it that is just one step removed from the life as we do know it. We don't know what kind of leap it is, so we need a multitude of ideas like panspermia, but not panspermia necessarily, and that we need to look outside Earth, for the most part.