"The Origin of Life (OoL) community aspires to discover chemical evolution or abiogenesis. This is the supposed historical, continuous, and naturalistic path from lifeless chemicals to cellular life, encompassing both genetics and metabolism. The gap between their aspirations and their OoL evidence is vast. As a leading OoL chemistry professor summarized in 2010:
Recent evolutionist conferences concerning Open Questions on the Origin of Life (OQOL) were held in Sicily (2006), Spain (2009), Leicester UK (2012), and Japan (2014). These conferences discussed possible scientific and philosophical explanations to dozens of vast gaps in understanding the OoL.
While not extensively discussed at OQOL2014, emergence is a common theme in the OoL community. Emergence is the idea that order, coherence, and complexity (which are not evident at the microscopic level) can arise at a macroscopic level far from equilibrium. The search continues for natural laws governing complex systems that can explain how biochemistry and biology emerge from chemistry and physics.
Emergence guides both top-down and bottom-up OoL research approaches. Top-down OoL research looks for evidence of progressively simpler ancestors of modern cellular life toward the first ‘living’ creature, often called the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA). Bottom-up OoL research strives to understand how lifeless inorganic chemicals formed all the biochemical polymers necessary for life, and how those materials self-organized into the LUCA.
Session 2 at OQOL2014 was “How can we make ordered sequences of amino acids, or mononucleotides by prebiotic means?” Proteins, enzymes, RNA, and DNA are the essential biopolymers of all life. Life requires many identical copies of biopolymers with precisely ordered sequences of hundreds to thousands of amino acids in enzymes, and millions to billions of mononucleotides in DNA. OoL research has not produced any evidence or plausible explanation for abiotic synthesis of ordered polypeptides or polynucleotides of even a few dozen biomonomers in length.
Two sessions at OQOL2014 addressed the dilution problem:
(1) is molecular crowding critical for the beginning of life? and
(2) what are the physical mechanisms underlying the assembly of primitive cell-like structures?
Much OoL research has sought and succeeded in finding abiotic routes to individual organic compounds. Theories on Emergence propose ways that chemicals self-assemble into complex chemical networks and biochemical structures that then self-assemble into living cells. But the details of OoL self-assembly remain largely speculative and controversial.
The final sessions at OQOL2014 addressed
(1) artificial life and
(2) the universal properties of life.
No broadly accepted criteria exist for ‘life’ in the OoL community.
Proposed requirements demarcating life from non-life range from the restrictive to the extensive. The discoveries of extra-solar planets and the advances in synthetic biology challenge preconceived and historical scientific and philosophical definitions of ‘life’. Within even the limited criteria of ‘life’ being capable of metabolism, self-reproduction, and evolvability, many OoL researchers are seeking different forms of ‘life’ from the laboratory to the cosmos.
In mathematics, an ‘indirect proof’ establishes the truth of a proposition by (1) assuming that the proposition is false, and (2) showing a resulting contradiction. World-class 21st century research continues to show how difficult (perhaps impossible) it will be to answer dozens of OQOL with a naturalistic and materialistic worldview." CMI
I got your OoL right here....For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible,... Colossians 1:16
“The origin of life on Earth is still a mystery, one of the greatest mysteries in science today … . Our ignorance about the origin of life is profound—not just some simple missing mechanistic detail … This ignorance stems not only from our experimental difficulties with prebiotic chemistry, but is also conceptual, as we are not yet able to conceive on paper how all these things came about.”
While not extensively discussed at OQOL2014, emergence is a common theme in the OoL community. Emergence is the idea that order, coherence, and complexity (which are not evident at the microscopic level) can arise at a macroscopic level far from equilibrium. The search continues for natural laws governing complex systems that can explain how biochemistry and biology emerge from chemistry and physics.
Emergence guides both top-down and bottom-up OoL research approaches. Top-down OoL research looks for evidence of progressively simpler ancestors of modern cellular life toward the first ‘living’ creature, often called the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA). Bottom-up OoL research strives to understand how lifeless inorganic chemicals formed all the biochemical polymers necessary for life, and how those materials self-organized into the LUCA.
Session 2 at OQOL2014 was “How can we make ordered sequences of amino acids, or mononucleotides by prebiotic means?” Proteins, enzymes, RNA, and DNA are the essential biopolymers of all life. Life requires many identical copies of biopolymers with precisely ordered sequences of hundreds to thousands of amino acids in enzymes, and millions to billions of mononucleotides in DNA. OoL research has not produced any evidence or plausible explanation for abiotic synthesis of ordered polypeptides or polynucleotides of even a few dozen biomonomers in length.
Two sessions at OQOL2014 addressed the dilution problem:
(1) is molecular crowding critical for the beginning of life? and
(2) what are the physical mechanisms underlying the assembly of primitive cell-like structures?
Much OoL research has sought and succeeded in finding abiotic routes to individual organic compounds. Theories on Emergence propose ways that chemicals self-assemble into complex chemical networks and biochemical structures that then self-assemble into living cells. But the details of OoL self-assembly remain largely speculative and controversial.
The final sessions at OQOL2014 addressed
(1) artificial life and
(2) the universal properties of life.
No broadly accepted criteria exist for ‘life’ in the OoL community.
Proposed requirements demarcating life from non-life range from the restrictive to the extensive. The discoveries of extra-solar planets and the advances in synthetic biology challenge preconceived and historical scientific and philosophical definitions of ‘life’. Within even the limited criteria of ‘life’ being capable of metabolism, self-reproduction, and evolvability, many OoL researchers are seeking different forms of ‘life’ from the laboratory to the cosmos.
In mathematics, an ‘indirect proof’ establishes the truth of a proposition by (1) assuming that the proposition is false, and (2) showing a resulting contradiction. World-class 21st century research continues to show how difficult (perhaps impossible) it will be to answer dozens of OQOL with a naturalistic and materialistic worldview." CMI
