Origin of Life: Nature or Miracle?

Once I was listening to an NPR radio station and someone called in on the phone and asked the famous atheist, Richard Dawkins, where did life come from? He glibly replied “It was a happy chemical accident.” Then he and the show host went on as though the person was asking what flavor of jelly he prefers on his toast.

I was aghast at his answer. For years, I was inclined to categorize life’s origin as the furthest from a “chemical accident” as you could possibly get; a literal divine miracle. Honestly, I think that’s a better answer than “happy chemical accident” but, in time, I became dissatisfied with that too.

After the Unbelievable? show posted a discussion between Jeremy England and Paul Davies, they asked me to write a blog describing how I see this issue now as founder of the world’s largest science research award.

These are my thoughts: https://www.premierinsight.org/atheists-creationists-both-wrong-origin-of-life

Perry

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10 Responses

  1. Alexandre Gagnon says:

    Hello Perry,

    I believe the physiological discovery I sent to your heroX inbox might bring insight into a coding behind “chemical accidents” that might reveal more on what is discussed in this thread upon further investigation. Please check the Herox submission & messages when you have the time.

  2. Anatolii Lazarenko says:

    Perry,

    unfortunately, your evo2.org system only gives out your inspirational and inspiring sermons but prevents from discussion by does not allow me to receive answers from you to my questions, for example, which were entered into the others Evo2.0 blog threads with great difficulties:
    1. Did you manage to find time to read the Prigogine and Hayek books?
    2. How do you feel about my formulation of the “Prigogine-Hayek law”, its expansion with periodic influences as a potential life generator https://abiogenesis.mria.top/ and what is your own opinion concerning my application abiogenesis.mria.top/evo2subm.html?
    3. Would you like in any form (joint publication or joint application for a grant, something else…) to take part in the origin of life experiment I propose (microplanet – “svityk” )?

    And without feedback, generation, as we know, is impossible.

    Anatolii

    • Anatolii,

      I apologize it has taken many months to not make much progress. Your frustration is understandable.

      I am going to approve the pending comments that you have posted and, in a sense, ask you to start over.

      I did buy the books you suggested and I have perused them to some extent. Prigogine the most. He is very sharp and I admire his thinking. I still think there is something very fundamental in life that is still eluding him and pretty much everyone else. He is stabbing at the problem but not getting to it.

      That said, it is not realistic for someone to say “Perry can you read these three books and tell me what you think” along with at least a dozen highly detailed questions and various other assertions.

      At this point in Evolution 2.0, much as I relish the discussions, conversations and mysteries, I can’t accept “homework assignments” from readers who ask me to read this or that book, watch this or that video and tell them what I think. I have a long list of projects, personal correspondence, papers to peer review, etc etc.

      What I ask of you today is that you take ONE question or issue, present the necessary background, and ask a question. That is realistically the only way this is going to get done.

  3. Anatolii Lazarenko says:

    Perry,
    Yes, I received it, and initially, I understood the scanty chances for the JURY to support the application as a solution to the CODE problem.
    Now I asked about YOUR PERSONAL opinion about the proposed abiogenesis EXPERIMENT: possible objections or contradictions, usefulness…

    • Anatolii,

      Your comments have been in my queue for many months. Alas I can only give you a brief answer, rather than a thorough one. For thoroughness, the response you received earlier from my VERY capable judging team will have to suffice.

      Here are my general comments:

      I do not believe that any form of the “Miller-Urey” experiment, no matter how sophisticated, is going to solve Origin of Life. Nor do I believe that the generation of simple replicators will solve it. (I don’t buy the RNA hypothesis.) This is because, as Norbert Wiener said, “information is information, neither matter nor energy.”

      The only way I believe OOL will be solved is by discovering a way that matter can exhibit agency or cognition – the ability to make a choice that transcends law.

      If this is true (and my May 2021 paper https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610721000365 proves this is so, mathematically) then this property means that the behavior of matter cannot be reduced to mathematics. Which turns all of science upside down, if true.

      When Prigogine says

      There is a law which compels enough diverse and open systems with sufficiently many degrees of freedom and large enough gradients in a distribution of system’s parameters to self-organization and self-development

      I believe he is correct, but this is not a “law” as normally understood, but a principle of action.

      Whatever this is, it is also a means by which the whole shapes the parts and not just the parts shaping the whole. So once again cause and effect runs in a different direction in life than in non-life.

      I’m sorry I have only given you more riddles; the setup you have described, I admit, reminds me of the Miller-Urey experiment more than anything else. I realize it has many differences. In any case my suspicion is that the answer sits right under our nose, in every cell on earth, and we have not yet noticed it.

      • Perry,

        1. Yes, for the claim for the law “title”, the above wording lacks the quantitative framework for “enough diverse and open”, “sufficiently many” and “large enough”. However, they can be obtained experimentally only. The Miller experiment development that I propose is the simplest and cheapest (especially when carried out in a developing country), in my opinion, way.
        Alas, in the near future, due to the Russian agression, the resources of the Ionic processes laboratory of the Kharkiv National University, shown at my https://abiogenesis.mria.top/2nd-layer.html , will not be able to be used.
        By the way, to be precise, this was not “Prigogine says”, this was my attempt to express the idea of ​​both books in the form of a single “Prigogine-Hayek law”.
        So, complexity, openness, gradients.
        And yes, in order to move towards the OOL, energy flows periodicities affecting the system will still be necessary.
        2. I agree that “the answer sits right under our nose, in every cell on earth”. But I suspect that it is so complicated that it is inaccessible to our understanding from here, “from above”. In the words of Hayek, this is “Fatal Conceit”. Imagine that Matthew evangelist saw moving car abandoned to 35 AD by time-machine a and then stopping, the driver of which for some reason escaped. Will Matthew (or even the team of the best Jerusalem wise men) be able to drive it and, moreover, make something that works like the Benz Patent-Motorwagen (see 3.1.1)?
        3.1. Life is a natural product (property) of the fairly large and diverse (sufficiently) open system development.
        Its evolution laws are based on the laws of chemistry and physics, being ultimately their consequence. Why on earth should they change, manifest or appear at the level of a code creating or a living cell, and not act throughout the entire evolution process, from the very beginning?
        Again – complexity, openness, gradients.
        3.1.1. Evolution most likely tends to accelerate over time (we see this in the social field, and, I suspect, in biology), as we move towards more and more developed structures (organisms). It is quite possible that in order to obtain the nature code or even just stable replication of a sufficiently diverse molecules set, it will be necessary to build “svityks” with a volume of tens of cubic meters, with mean megawatts consumption for many years.
        3.2. Consciousness is a property of fairly complex living organisms, which grows out of “unconscious cognition” in the form of various adaptive processes of evolving life, why not?
        3.3. The ability of matter to make a choice is natural and must also be subject to evolution (development and complication). It begins with simple accidents (for example, transitions of liquid molecules from one closed trajectory to another in Benard cells and between neighboring cells), which, due to the emergence of feedbacks, begin to either be encouraged or suppressed by the evolutionary process.
        And yes, again – complexity, openness, gradients.

  4. Ken Meyer says:

    Perry;
    I have written the direct and thorough answer to your long-standing and earnest question regarding the origins of life, in a 4200 word writing. I would very much be pleased to send it to you for your review, since it is the only such discussion known to me in our entire civilization. I find that it is not of a format that would work with the EVO 2.0 prize though, since I am not a researcher and have no academic credentials. I welcome an interest from you, and am eager to send it in as an email response. Thank you.

    • Ken,

      We only accept official EV2 prize submissions in the format stated on the prize page. If you have an essay you can post it as a comment or link to it in the comments here. My bandwidth for commenting on viewpoints of this type is very limited unfortunately.

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