On Fri, 22 Dec 2023 01:08:00 -0800 (PST), MarkE <me22over7@gmail.com>
wrote:

>On Friday, December 22, 2023 at 2:27:16?PM UTC+11, Mark Isaak wrote:
>> On 12/20/23 1:43 PM, MarkE wrote:
>> > To sum up:
>> >
>> > 1. Don’t prematurely insert God in a gap; don’t refuse to see the possibility of God in a gulf; we each must decide if/when a gap becomes a gulf.
>> "Each"? You sound like you're saying the existence or nonexistence of
>> God -- not just belief thereof, but the reality of the situation --
>> comes down to subjective opinion.
>> > 2. There is a difference between an “unsolved problem” and an unsolvable problem. Again, we each must decide which is which. Dark matter would currently be in the “unsolved” category for most people. I’m arguing that OoL is approaching “unsolvable” based on my interpretation of the science (a provisional determination, without the certainty of a mathematical proof, but with sufficient evidence to make this a reasonable judgment).
>> I wonder what it take to move OoL into even a provisionally unsolvable
>> category. I would say minimum requirements would be, first, advances in
>> paleogeology to tell us exactly what conditions on Earth were like for
>> the ten million or so years before the origin of life; and second,
>> advances in computing power (and hardware architecture) to allow rapid
>> simulation of gazillions of potential chemical and substrate conditions,
>> with the ability to follow all possible outcomes and their outcomes and
>> their outcomes, ... x 20 or more, including events that have only a 1 in
>> a 10^10 chance of occurring. We're nowhere close to calling OoL
>> unsolvable yet.
>>
>> And I wonder what your argument implies if humans did not exist. Even
>> for dolphins, bonobos, elephants, octopuses, and crows, figuring out
>> what causes tides would probably be an unsolvable problem. Can you say
>> for sure that, for a sufficiently advanced species, Mr. Tour
>> contemplating the origin of life would be like an octopus watching the
>> tides?
>> > I acknowledge that you not only disagree with my choice, but have adopted a position that forever excludes a determination of “unsolvable” with respect to a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life. Your chosen options are limited to “this hypothesis/hypotheses” or “we don’t know”.
>> You have same two options. You simply choose to include "magic" as a
>> hypothesis and, for reasons I don't understand, refuse to consider "we
>> don't know" as having any value.
>> > But to be clear: we both must make subjective, personal choices here. We can argue about the validity and reasonableness of our different choices, but neither is inherently, demonstrably, objectively, logically wrong.
>> There are worse things than being wrong, and I believe your approach is
>> one of them. It discourages research, encourages useless ideas, and,
>> arguably, promotes bad morals (hubris) and bad theology.
>>
>
>And yet, the OoL gulf grows with the march of science:
>https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/pE9F4Lkuumw/m/WzdQ2WhvAwAJ

OoL research will break wide open when and if we identify another
planet with evidence of life or past life.

--
To know less than we don't know is the nature of most knowledge

On 12/22/23 1:08 AM, MarkE wrote:
> On Friday, December 22, 2023 at 2:27:16 PM UTC+11, Mark Isaak wrote:
>> On 12/20/23 1:43 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>> To sum up:
>>>
>>> 1. Don’t prematurely insert God in a gap; don’t refuse to see the possibility of God in a gulf; we each must decide if/when a gap becomes a gulf.
>> "Each"? You sound like you're saying the existence or nonexistence of
>> God -- not just belief thereof, but the reality of the situation --
>> comes down to subjective opinion.
>>> 2. There is a difference between an “unsolved problem” and an unsolvable problem. Again, we each must decide which is which. Dark matter would currently be in the “unsolved” category for most people. I’m arguing that OoL is approaching “unsolvable” based on my interpretation of the science (a provisional determination, without the certainty of a mathematical proof, but with sufficient evidence to make this a reasonable judgment).
>> I wonder what it take to move OoL into even a provisionally unsolvable
>> category. I would say minimum requirements would be, first, advances in
>> paleogeology to tell us exactly what conditions on Earth were like for
>> the ten million or so years before the origin of life; and second,
>> advances in computing power (and hardware architecture) to allow rapid
>> simulation of gazillions of potential chemical and substrate conditions,
>> with the ability to follow all possible outcomes and their outcomes and
>> their outcomes, ... x 20 or more, including events that have only a 1 in
>> a 10^10 chance of occurring. We're nowhere close to calling OoL
>> unsolvable yet.
>>
>> And I wonder what your argument implies if humans did not exist. Even
>> for dolphins, bonobos, elephants, octopuses, and crows, figuring out
>> what causes tides would probably be an unsolvable problem. Can you say
>> for sure that, for a sufficiently advanced species, Mr. Tour
>> contemplating the origin of life would be like an octopus watching the
>> tides?
>>> I acknowledge that you not only disagree with my choice, but have adopted a position that forever excludes a determination of “unsolvable” with respect to a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life. Your chosen options are limited to “this hypothesis/hypotheses” or “we don’t know”.
>> You have same two options. You simply choose to include "magic" as a
>> hypothesis and, for reasons I don't understand, refuse to consider "we
>> don't know" as having any value.
>>> But to be clear: we both must make subjective, personal choices here. We can argue about the validity and reasonableness of our different choices, but neither is inherently, demonstrably, objectively, logically wrong.
>> There are worse things than being wrong, and I believe your approach is
>> one of them. It discourages research, encourages useless ideas, and,
>> arguably, promotes bad morals (hubris) and bad theology.
>>
>
> And yet, the OoL gulf grows with the march of science:
> https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/pE9F4Lkuumw/m/WzdQ2WhvAwAJ

That's true of all good science. As we learn more, new questions arise
even faster.

--
Mark Isaak
"Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell

On Tue, 19 Dec 2023 20:49:17 -0800 (PST), MarkE <me22over7@gmail.com>
wrote:

[ snip for focus]

>Given that God has either option equally available, if we detect significant override of natural laws, we infer that God may be intentionally revealing himself.
>
>Either way, spacetime, the world and us are understood by many to be a revelation of God (within the limits of natural theology).

Mark, how do you get from God fiddling with molecules 3+ billion years
ago to a personal God with whom humans (apparently exclusively) can
interact?

On Friday, December 22, 2023 at 11:02:16 PM UTC+11, broger...@gmail..com wrote:
> On Friday, December 22, 2023 at 4:12:16 AM UTC-5, MarkE wrote:
> > On Friday, December 22, 2023 at 2:27:16 PM UTC+11, Mark Isaak wrote:
> > > On 12/20/23 1:43 PM, MarkE wrote:
> > > > To sum up:
> > > >
> > > > 1. Don’t prematurely insert God in a gap; don’t refuse to see the possibility of God in a gulf; we each must decide if/when a gap becomes a gulf.
> > > "Each"? You sound like you're saying the existence or nonexistence of
> > > God -- not just belief thereof, but the reality of the situation --
> > > comes down to subjective opinion.
> > > > 2. There is a difference between an “unsolved problem” and an unsolvable problem. Again, we each must decide which is which. Dark matter would currently be in the “unsolved” category for most people. I’m arguing that OoL is approaching “unsolvable” based on my interpretation of the science (a provisional determination, without the certainty of a mathematical proof, but with sufficient evidence to make this a reasonable judgment).
> > > I wonder what it take to move OoL into even a provisionally unsolvable
> > > category. I would say minimum requirements would be, first, advances in
> > > paleogeology to tell us exactly what conditions on Earth were like for
> > > the ten million or so years before the origin of life; and second,
> > > advances in computing power (and hardware architecture) to allow rapid
> > > simulation of gazillions of potential chemical and substrate conditions,
> > > with the ability to follow all possible outcomes and their outcomes and
> > > their outcomes, ... x 20 or more, including events that have only a 1 in
> > > a 10^10 chance of occurring. We're nowhere close to calling OoL
> > > unsolvable yet.
> > >
> > > And I wonder what your argument implies if humans did not exist. Even
> > > for dolphins, bonobos, elephants, octopuses, and crows, figuring out
> > > what causes tides would probably be an unsolvable problem. Can you say
> > > for sure that, for a sufficiently advanced species, Mr. Tour
> > > contemplating the origin of life would be like an octopus watching the
> > > tides?
> > > > I acknowledge that you not only disagree with my choice, but have adopted a position that forever excludes a determination of “unsolvable” with respect to a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life. Your chosen options are limited to “this hypothesis/hypotheses” or “we don’t know”.
> > > You have same two options. You simply choose to include "magic" as a
> > > hypothesis and, for reasons I don't understand, refuse to consider "we
> > > don't know" as having any value.
> > > > But to be clear: we both must make subjective, personal choices here. We can argue about the validity and reasonableness of our different choices, but neither is inherently, demonstrably, objectively, logically wrong.
> > > There are worse things than being wrong, and I believe your approach is
> > > one of them. It discourages research, encourages useless ideas, and,
> > > arguably, promotes bad morals (hubris) and bad theology.
> > >
> > And yet, the OoL gulf grows with the march of science:
> > https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/pE9F4Lkuumw/m/WzdQ2WhvAwAJ
> You can say that the gulf is growing all you like, but it's simply not. What happens all the time when there is an open question in science is that progress involves clarifying the problem, testing hypotheses that turn out to be wrong (and thus give you new information about constraints on the model), opening up new questions. If you look away from polemical blogs, youtube videos, and snippets of text from the introduction or conclusion section of papers taken out of context, and just look at the experiments described in primary research papers, OoL looks like any other open area where a lot of conflicting ideas are being tested and gradual progress is being made. The people working in the field are neither claiming the problem is solved nor coming to some growing realization that there is no solution.
>
> If you are really interested in the science of OoL, you've got plenty of time. Spend a couple of years taking on-line course on organic chemistry, biochemistry, geochemistry, cell biology, etc. By the time you're done, it's likely that the field will have progressed a little but not changed drastically, and you'll be far better placed to "engage with the science." There's no hurry, since as you've agreed, I think, the issue of OoL really has no bearing on the question of whether or not to have faith in a personal God.

Ironically, you previously urged me to consider the work of OoL leader David Deamer, which I did. To my surprise, this revealed surprising shortcomings in the OoL program, which David Deamer and Bruce Damer politely sum up as: "[OoL research has] been mainly focused on individual solution chemistry experiments where they want to show polymerization over here, or they want to show metabolism over here, and Dave and I believe that it's time for the field to go from incremental progress to substantial progress. So, these are the four points we've come up with to make substantial progress in the origin of life..."

Translation: James Tour is vindicated - it is all a lot of "individual solution chemistry experiments" and "the ethereal world of pure reactants and things like that".

Their own proposed way forward? I've not seen anything noteworthy from D&D adding to this since 5+ years ago.

What of your suggestion that I "Spend a couple of years taking on-line course on organic chemistry [etc]"? Demonstrably, no need. A layperson like myself can fairly easily put together substantial challenges like this: https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/pE9F4Lkuumw/m/WzdQ2WhvAwAJ

In my analysis, I see that D&D are saying you can't have Darwinian evolution until you have a viable protocell, which must have somehow previously integrated several polymers totaling at least hundreds of units! Seriously.

The RNA world is deeply flawed if not dead. Eigen's paradox is unresolved, along with the water paradox, the ribosome paradox, the tar paradox, etc. In my opinion these are logically unresolvable with anything less than series of events so improbable that increasingly an appeal is made to the multiverse. I find God to be the best hypothesis for the data. YMMV.

> > > --
> > > Mark Isaak
> > > "Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
> > > doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell

On Saturday, December 23, 2023 at 4:42:16 AM UTC+11, Martin Harran wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Dec 2023 20:49:17 -0800 (PST), MarkE <me22...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> [ snip for focus]
> >Given that God has either option equally available, if we detect significant override of natural laws, we infer that God may be intentionally revealing himself.
> >
> >Either way, spacetime, the world and us are understood by many to be a revelation of God (within the limits of natural theology).
> Mark, how do you get from God fiddling with molecules 3+ billion years
> ago to a personal God with whom humans (apparently exclusively) can
> interact?

I don't. I get to that directly from the special revelation of the Word and Spirit of Christ.

On Sunday, December 24, 2023 at 7:12:18 AM UTC-5, MarkE wrote:
> On Friday, December 22, 2023 at 11:02:16 PM UTC+11, broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Friday, December 22, 2023 at 4:12:16 AM UTC-5, MarkE wrote:
> > > On Friday, December 22, 2023 at 2:27:16 PM UTC+11, Mark Isaak wrote:
> > > > On 12/20/23 1:43 PM, MarkE wrote:
> > > > > To sum up:
> > > > >
> > > > > 1. Don’t prematurely insert God in a gap; don’t refuse to see the possibility of God in a gulf; we each must decide if/when a gap becomes a gulf.
> > > > "Each"? You sound like you're saying the existence or nonexistence of
> > > > God -- not just belief thereof, but the reality of the situation --
> > > > comes down to subjective opinion.
> > > > > 2. There is a difference between an “unsolved problem” and an unsolvable problem. Again, we each must decide which is which.. Dark matter would currently be in the “unsolved” category for most people. I’m arguing that OoL is approaching “unsolvable” based on my interpretation of the science (a provisional determination, without the certainty of a mathematical proof, but with sufficient evidence to make this a reasonable judgment).
> > > > I wonder what it take to move OoL into even a provisionally unsolvable
> > > > category. I would say minimum requirements would be, first, advances in
> > > > paleogeology to tell us exactly what conditions on Earth were like for
> > > > the ten million or so years before the origin of life; and second,
> > > > advances in computing power (and hardware architecture) to allow rapid
> > > > simulation of gazillions of potential chemical and substrate conditions,
> > > > with the ability to follow all possible outcomes and their outcomes and
> > > > their outcomes, ... x 20 or more, including events that have only a 1 in
> > > > a 10^10 chance of occurring. We're nowhere close to calling OoL
> > > > unsolvable yet.
> > > >
> > > > And I wonder what your argument implies if humans did not exist. Even
> > > > for dolphins, bonobos, elephants, octopuses, and crows, figuring out
> > > > what causes tides would probably be an unsolvable problem. Can you say
> > > > for sure that, for a sufficiently advanced species, Mr. Tour
> > > > contemplating the origin of life would be like an octopus watching the
> > > > tides?
> > > > > I acknowledge that you not only disagree with my choice, but have adopted a position that forever excludes a determination of “unsolvable” with respect to a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life. Your chosen options are limited to “this hypothesis/hypotheses” or “we don’t know”.
> > > > You have same two options. You simply choose to include "magic" as a
> > > > hypothesis and, for reasons I don't understand, refuse to consider "we
> > > > don't know" as having any value.
> > > > > But to be clear: we both must make subjective, personal choices here. We can argue about the validity and reasonableness of our different choices, but neither is inherently, demonstrably, objectively, logically wrong.
> > > > There are worse things than being wrong, and I believe your approach is
> > > > one of them. It discourages research, encourages useless ideas, and,
> > > > arguably, promotes bad morals (hubris) and bad theology.
> > > >
> > > And yet, the OoL gulf grows with the march of science:
> > > https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/pE9F4Lkuumw/m/WzdQ2WhvAwAJ
> > You can say that the gulf is growing all you like, but it's simply not. What happens all the time when there is an open question in science is that progress involves clarifying the problem, testing hypotheses that turn out to be wrong (and thus give you new information about constraints on the model), opening up new questions. If you look away from polemical blogs, youtube videos, and snippets of text from the introduction or conclusion section of papers taken out of context, and just look at the experiments described in primary research papers, OoL looks like any other open area where a lot of conflicting ideas are being tested and gradual progress is being made.. The people working in the field are neither claiming the problem is solved nor coming to some growing realization that there is no solution.
> >
> > If you are really interested in the science of OoL, you've got plenty of time. Spend a couple of years taking on-line course on organic chemistry, biochemistry, geochemistry, cell biology, etc. By the time you're done, it's likely that the field will have progressed a little but not changed drastically, and you'll be far better placed to "engage with the science." There's no hurry, since as you've agreed, I think, the issue of OoL really has no bearing on the question of whether or not to have faith in a personal God.
>
> Ironically, you previously urged me to consider the work of OoL leader David Deamer, which I did. To my surprise, this revealed surprising shortcomings in the OoL program, which David Deamer and Bruce Damer politely sum up as: "[OoL research has] been mainly focused on individual solution chemistry experiments where they want to show polymerization over here, or they want to show metabolism over here, and Dave and I believe that it's time for the field to go from incremental progress to substantial progress. So, these are the four points we've come up with to make substantial progress in the origin of life..."
>
> Translation: James Tour is vindicated - it is all a lot of "individual solution chemistry experiments" and "the ethereal world of pure reactants and things like that".

I'm not sure I'd say he's vindicated. Only that it shows that people in the field have been pretty transparent about the limits of their experiments all along.

> Their own proposed way forward? I've not seen anything noteworthy from D&D adding to this since 5+ years ago.
>
> What of your suggestion that I "Spend a couple of years taking on-line course on organic chemistry [etc]"? Demonstrably, no need. A layperson like myself can fairly easily put together substantial challenges like this: https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/pE9F4Lkuumw/m/WzdQ2WhvAwAJ
>
> In my analysis, I see that D&D are saying you can't have Darwinian evolution until you have a viable protocell, which must have somehow previously integrated several polymers totaling at least hundreds of units! Seriously.
>
> The RNA world is deeply flawed if not dead. Eigen's paradox is unresolved, along with the water paradox, the ribosome paradox, the tar paradox, etc. In my opinion these are logically unresolvable with anything less than series of events so improbable that increasingly an appeal is made to the multiverse. I find God to be the best hypothesis for the data. YMMV.

My mileage definitely varies. I am not impressed that those paradoxes are unresolvable or that the RNA world is dead (of course that depends on what exactly one means by the RNA world - I mean a world in which a much higher proportion of enzymatic activities resided in ribozymes than in proteins). Remember that the sources you are relying on told you there was a great overselling and wishing away of the difficulties in OoL research by its practitioners, and yet all the difficulties your sources tell about are those described by OoL researchers themselves quite openly in their research papers. The problem is very hard and it's definitely not solved. But you seem in quite the hurry to conclude it's impossible.

Your own hypothesis is "something unknown from outside space and time caused life to get started." I'd say it lacks a certain amount of specificity and testability.
> > > > --
> > > > Mark Isaak
> > > > "Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
> > > > doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell

On Sunday, December 24, 2023 at 7:12:18 AM UTC-5, MarkE wrote:
> On Saturday, December 23, 2023 at 4:42:16 AM UTC+11, Martin Harran wrote:
> > On Tue, 19 Dec 2023 20:49:17 -0800 (PST), MarkE <me22...@gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > [ snip for focus]
> > >Given that God has either option equally available, if we detect significant override of natural laws, we infer that God may be intentionally revealing himself.
> > >
> > >Either way, spacetime, the world and us are understood by many to be a revelation of God (within the limits of natural theology).
> > Mark, how do you get from God fiddling with molecules 3+ billion years
> > ago to a personal God with whom humans (apparently exclusively) can
> > interact?
> I don't. I get to that directly from the special revelation of the Word and Spirit of Christ.

And that special revelation in no way depends on there being no naturalistic pathway for the origin of life.

broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Thursday, December 7, 2023 at 5:37:02 PM UTC-5, MarkE wrote:
>> On Friday, December 8, 2023 at 3:17:02 AM UTC+11, Mark Isaak wrote:
>>> On 12/6/23 2:57 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>>> On Monday, December 4, 2023 at 12:01:58 PM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
>>>>> On 12/3/2023 6:10 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>> On Monday, December 4, 2023 at 1:31:58 AM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
>>>>>>> On 12/3/2023 6:55 AM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>>>> On Sunday, December 3, 2023 at 4:21:58 AM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
>>>>>>>>> On 12/1/2023 10:50 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>>>>>> Here's a new LSS video primer on DNA repair and the error threshold problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQm8vmtM8CI (12:22)
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> In relation to recent discussion of "junk DNA", this is another cost to maintaining junk DNA -- the energy and recourses needed for constant repair, though not sure how much this amounts to in practice.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> Incidentally, Wikipedia makes this statement about Eigen's paradox: "Eigen's paradox is one of the most intractable puzzles in the study of the origins of life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_threshold_(evolution)#Eigen's_paradox
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> Manfred Eigen himself proposes hypercyles to overcome the error threshold problem:
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfOtzjdR_A0 (1:47)
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> TRANSCRIPT:
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> QUESTION: What was the necessity of your theory for hypercycles? There were experiments or facts which made it necessary that you make a theory which has got the name hypercycles?
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> RESPONSE: As I said genotype/phenotype dichotomy. I said first of all a theory without this translation, and that would get stuck with the error threshold. In order to overcome the error threshold you have to make good proteins. But in order to make proteins you need more information. So you got stuck somehow. So you needed something to overcome this. And the other is the fact that once you do translation you have to test your translation products, your phenotypes, but you have to store your information in the genotype and you have to make sure that you don't lose that, because otherwise everything is gone. So there was a necessity to... and there could well have been a different model. For instance, one model which we later on found and combined with the hypercycle, was that you have to make compartmentation. In other words, you know that all life is not in homogeneous solution, it's always in cells or in organism and so forth. So you'd have to compartmentalise your system of nucleic acids and proteins, but you might immediately ask: isn't it sufficient to compartment them, why then a hypercycle, now you keep protein and nucleic acids together in your compartment? Well, if you only would put them into a compartment, the nucleic acids would start to compete with one another, so you must fit them into a reaction network and that has to be cyclic.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> My take is that this isn't an issue. RNA gene replication was already
>>>>>>>>> something that was consistently happening in the first RNA systems.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> You're begging the question with the assertion that "RNA gene replication was already something that was consistently happening in the first RNA systems". The paradox disallows such assumptions:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> "Without error correction enzymes, the maximum size of a replicating molecule is about 100 base pairs. For a replicating molecule to encode error correction enzymes, it must be substantially larger than 100 bases."
>>>>>>> RNA replication likely evolved after there were simple self replicators,
>>>>>>> and we have no pretty much no idea of what they were made of. Just look
>>>>>>> at the literature, they are proposing that the first macromolecules were
>>>>>>> using mineral surfaces to catalyze the reactions needed to put the
>>>>>>> subunits together.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> What "simple replicators"?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> "RNA replication likely evolved after these". So you're saying that some unspecified non-RNA replicators were somehow replaced by RNA replicators?
>>>>> RNA polymers are probably pretty unlikely to occur on their own, but
>>>>> they do not have to have occurred on their own. The initial speculation
>>>>> is that simple self replicators evolved. They may have required a
>>>>> mineral surface or the speculation is a clay matrix to catalyze their
>>>>> synthesis.
>>>>>
>>>>> No one has figured out what these first self replicators were. We do
>>>>> not know what they could have been made from, but their replication was
>>>>> likely not perfect, and as they made more copies of themselves those
>>>>> self replicators would have been able to evolve. They probably were
>>>>> some type of macromolecule of some kind. Proteins have been the obvious
>>>>> choice, but glycosylation of proteins (adding sugars to the peptides) is
>>>>> something that still occurs today, so my guess is that they were some
>>>>> type of mix, so such a self replicator would have a peptidase to form
>>>>> peptide bonds and glycosylation activity to tack on carbohydrates. If
>>>>> it initially relied on a mineral surface for the initial enzymatic
>>>>> activity the initial products could have just made further reactions
>>>>> more frequent. They could have just stabilized the catalytic activity
>>>>> of the mineral surface. In catalyzing imperfect copies of themselves
>>>>> replacing the mineral surface would be selected for.
>>>>>
>>>>> No one has figured it out, yet, but RNA polymers would not need to come
>>>>> first. We know that they eventually came because we have the vestiges
>>>>> of the RNA world that still exists in lifeforms today.
>>>>
>>>> This is a key issue I think. An unspecified "replicating molecule" is just assumed. Case in point - that's what you've done. It's assumed because naturalism requires it. And if you have decided a priori that naturalism is the only allowable explanation, you not only must assume it, you will also resist challenges to it.
>>> False. Naturalism is not presented as the only allowable explanation,
>>> but the only pragmatically useful one. Supernaturalism has two problem.
>>> First, it has an perfect record of failure in the past. Second, it is
>>> worse than useless, since it does not point to anything else to look
>>> more closely at; it instead tells you to stop looking and hide your head
>>> in the sand.
>> How many times have we all been around the block on this fundamental question? A common position here is functionally ontological/metaphysical naturalism. No matter how wide the "gap" may become, non-natural explanations will not be considered. From "The Stairway To Life: An Origin-Of-Life Reality Check" (pp. 187-189):
>>
>> Objection: Your argument is a plea to the “God of the gaps.” Just because science doesn’t have all the answers doesn’t mean that we have to invoke God to fill the gaps.
>>
>> Response: The entirety of this book seeks to provide a proper scope to the “gap.” The Stairway to Life clarifies that the gap is not simply a missing puzzle piece or a set of unclear details. The gap is, in fact, the entirety of the origin of life. And the gap is growing over time as we learn more about the complexity of cells and as efforts to produce components of life via realistic prebiotic approaches fail. As we have mentioned, additional steps will be added to the Stairway to Life over time. These steps will come from previously unexplored processes that are required for life. For example, we mentioned in Chapter 17 that the current best approximation of a minimal cell that can reproduce autonomously includes 493 genes [201]. This same report specifies that 91 of the 493 genes perform unknown functions. Therefore, about 20% of the minimal genome codes for functions that we have not yet explored. Further, the genome is not the only information contained in life. We are just beginning to explore other forms of information found in living organisms, such as the sugar code that encapsulates cells [226]. Future exploration in these areas will result in new steps in the Stairway to Life and an ever-increasing “gap.” The emperor is not simply missing a lapel pin; the emperor has no clothes. Our conclusion that creative intelligence was essential to start life is based on what we do know, not on what we don’t know. The arguments in this book do not take the following form: “No one knows how life began; therefore, God did it.” Rather, the inference to the need for intelligence in the origin of life follows directly from what we do know about the requirements for life and what we do know about chemistry, physics, thermodynamics, and biology. Turning this objection around, choosing to maintain a belief in abiogenesis despite the absence of a reasonable approach to the Stairway to Life is a “materialism-of-the-gaps” approach—i.e., “we don’t know how life began, but we know that only natural processes were involved.”
>>>> However, physics and chemistry present an awkward reality. A replicating molecule requires:
>>>> - a substantial amount of information
>>>> - replicate that with sufficiently high fidelity
>>>> - over many replications have a sustainable supply of sufficiently pure and concentrated substrate
>>>> - have energy and mechanical/thermal agitation maintained by its environment
>>>> - be resilient to interfering reactions
>>>> - preserve thermal chemical physical stability
>>>> - etc
>>> See my .sig.
>>>> Show me a demonstration of such a localised, entropy-reversing, sustained, information-increasing prebiotically plausible process.
>>>>
>>>> Until then, it is hand waving and story telling. It is the scam.
>>> A scam is pointing at one thing and calling it something else.
>>> Scientific researchers on abiogenesis don't say they have the answer;
>>> they say (and show) that they have *possible* explanations for *part* of
>>> the answer.
>>>
>>> Intelligent design proponents, on the other hand, say, first, that the
>>> scientists have nothing, and second, that magic is a likely (some say
>>> certain) alternative. Sure looks to me like the ID proponents are the
>>> scammers.
>>>
>>> And that's before you get into the theological issues, which ID
>>> proponents, for good (selfish) reasons, work studiously to avoid.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Mark Isaak
>>> "Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
>>> doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell
> A real "materialism-of-the-gaps", in order to be parallel to "god-of-the-gaps" would have to run something like this......
>
> "Religious people have been trying to explain the origin of life for millennia, and yet they are no closer to doing so than when they began. They cannot even agree among themselves about how did it, how and when it happened, and why it happened. They have provided no evidence for any actual "designer" of life, no design plans, no proposed and empirically supported models of what actually happened when life was created. Nothing whatsoever. Given the utter failure of supernaturalists to explain the origin of life, or even to provide a detailed, testable model of what happened, the only conclusion is that naturalism created life. DOn't ask how or why, no need to do any research on possible mechanisms or biochemistries. The failure of the religious to provide a detailed model of what actually happened means that the only alternative is naturalism. Therefore, there's no further work to be done. All those guys in the labs can go on sabbatical."
>
> But that's not what naturalists actually say. They say OoL is a tough problem, and they keep working on it, getting more and more constraints on possible models over time. It's not remotely like the God-of-the Gaps argument. [In your specific case the argument is "Well, a difficult, open problem in science may not prove the existence of God, but a very difficult one does.]
>
One can neither prove nor disprove (falsify) the existence of God by
restrictive, naturalistic scientific methods. It's a matter of belief or
disbelief: not of scientific evidence.
>

Burkhard wrote:
> On Thursday, December 7, 2023 at 11:37:02 PM UTC+1, MarkE wrote:
>> On Friday, December 8, 2023 at 3:17:02 AM UTC+11, Mark Isaak wrote:
>>> On 12/6/23 2:57 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>>> On Monday, December 4, 2023 at 12:01:58 PM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
>>>>> On 12/3/2023 6:10 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>> On Monday, December 4, 2023 at 1:31:58 AM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
>>>>>>> On 12/3/2023 6:55 AM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>>>> On Sunday, December 3, 2023 at 4:21:58 AM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
>>>>>>>>> On 12/1/2023 10:50 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>>>>>> Here's a new LSS video primer on DNA repair and the error threshold problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQm8vmtM8CI (12:22)
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> In relation to recent discussion of "junk DNA", this is another cost to maintaining junk DNA -- the energy and recourses needed for constant repair, though not sure how much this amounts to in practice.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> Incidentally, Wikipedia makes this statement about Eigen's paradox: "Eigen's paradox is one of the most intractable puzzles in the study of the origins of life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_threshold_(evolution)#Eigen's_paradox
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> Manfred Eigen himself proposes hypercyles to overcome the error threshold problem:
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfOtzjdR_A0 (1:47)
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> TRANSCRIPT:
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> QUESTION: What was the necessity of your theory for hypercycles? There were experiments or facts which made it necessary that you make a theory which has got the name hypercycles?
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> RESPONSE: As I said genotype/phenotype dichotomy. I said first of all a theory without this translation, and that would get stuck with the error threshold. In order to overcome the error threshold you have to make good proteins. But in order to make proteins you need more information. So you got stuck somehow. So you needed something to overcome this. And the other is the fact that once you do translation you have to test your translation products, your phenotypes, but you have to store your information in the genotype and you have to make sure that you don't lose that, because otherwise everything is gone. So there was a necessity to... and there could well have been a different model. For instance, one model which we later on found and combined with the hypercycle, was that you have to make compartmentation. In other words, you know that all life is not in homogeneous solution, it's always in cells or in organism and so forth. So you'd have to compartmentalise your system of nucleic acids and proteins, but you might immediately ask: isn't it sufficient to compartment them, why then a hypercycle, now you keep protein and nucleic acids together in your compartment? Well, if you only would put them into a compartment, the nucleic acids would start to compete with one another, so you must fit them into a reaction network and that has to be cyclic.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> My take is that this isn't an issue. RNA gene replication was already
>>>>>>>>> something that was consistently happening in the first RNA systems.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> You're begging the question with the assertion that "RNA gene replication was already something that was consistently happening in the first RNA systems". The paradox disallows such assumptions:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> "Without error correction enzymes, the maximum size of a replicating molecule is about 100 base pairs. For a replicating molecule to encode error correction enzymes, it must be substantially larger than 100 bases."
>>>>>>> RNA replication likely evolved after there were simple self replicators,
>>>>>>> and we have no pretty much no idea of what they were made of. Just look
>>>>>>> at the literature, they are proposing that the first macromolecules were
>>>>>>> using mineral surfaces to catalyze the reactions needed to put the
>>>>>>> subunits together.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> What "simple replicators"?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> "RNA replication likely evolved after these". So you're saying that some unspecified non-RNA replicators were somehow replaced by RNA replicators?
>>>>> RNA polymers are probably pretty unlikely to occur on their own, but
>>>>> they do not have to have occurred on their own. The initial speculation
>>>>> is that simple self replicators evolved. They may have required a
>>>>> mineral surface or the speculation is a clay matrix to catalyze their
>>>>> synthesis.
>>>>>
>>>>> No one has figured out what these first self replicators were. We do
>>>>> not know what they could have been made from, but their replication was
>>>>> likely not perfect, and as they made more copies of themselves those
>>>>> self replicators would have been able to evolve. They probably were
>>>>> some type of macromolecule of some kind. Proteins have been the obvious
>>>>> choice, but glycosylation of proteins (adding sugars to the peptides) is
>>>>> something that still occurs today, so my guess is that they were some
>>>>> type of mix, so such a self replicator would have a peptidase to form
>>>>> peptide bonds and glycosylation activity to tack on carbohydrates. If
>>>>> it initially relied on a mineral surface for the initial enzymatic
>>>>> activity the initial products could have just made further reactions
>>>>> more frequent. They could have just stabilized the catalytic activity
>>>>> of the mineral surface. In catalyzing imperfect copies of themselves
>>>>> replacing the mineral surface would be selected for.
>>>>>
>>>>> No one has figured it out, yet, but RNA polymers would not need to come
>>>>> first. We know that they eventually came because we have the vestiges
>>>>> of the RNA world that still exists in lifeforms today.
>>>>
>>>> This is a key issue I think. An unspecified "replicating molecule" is just assumed. Case in point - that's what you've done. It's assumed because naturalism requires it. And if you have decided a priori that naturalism is the only allowable explanation, you not only must assume it, you will also resist challenges to it.
>>> False. Naturalism is not presented as the only allowable explanation,
>>> but the only pragmatically useful one. Supernaturalism has two problem.
>>> First, it has an perfect record of failure in the past. Second, it is
>>> worse than useless, since it does not point to anything else to look
>>> more closely at; it instead tells you to stop looking and hide your head
>>> in the sand.
>> How many times have we all been around the block on this fundamental question? A common position here is functionally ontological/metaphysical naturalism. No matter how wide the "gap" may become, non-natural explanations will not be considered. From "The Stairway To Life: An Origin-Of-Life Reality Check" (pp. 187-189):
>>
>> Objection: Your argument is a plea to the “God of the gaps.” Just because science doesn’t have all the answers doesn’t mean that we have to invoke God to fill the gaps.
>>
>> Response: The entirety of this book seeks to provide a proper scope to the “gap.”
>
> Or, with other words, it makes no attempt at actually filling the gap - so it remains, by
> it's own words, a mere "of the gaps" argument, and therefore sterile and uninteresting
> when understood as a scientific theory, borerline blasphemous when read as a
> theological position.
>
>> The Stairway to Life clarifies that the gap is not simply a missing puzzle piece or a set of unclear details. The gap is, in fact, the entirety of the origin of life. And the gap is growing over time as we learn more about the complexity of cells and as efforts to produce components of life via realistic prebiotic approaches fail.
>
> That is pretty much what one would expect of any scientific progress, in any field. Research starts with the relatively low
> hanging fruits, while the "big picture' remains under-defined. As science progresses, a clearer picture of the complexities
> emerges, which will pose tougher and tougher challenges to address (and as a result more and more elaborate
> theories, often with more and more bootstrapping assumptions. And because there is at least a kernel of truth in
> "falsifiability" as an ingedient of scientific practice, of course we should expect also an increase in
> the number of theories that have failed - and a failed scientific theory is not worthless, it typically increases
> our knowledge and understanding even if it fails its ultimate objective.
>
To know what does not work, is a step closer to knowing what does work.
Or is it? After all conceivable theories have been tested and everything
is researched and no explanation is found, where then, or to what then
do we turn? Ool in question!
>
>> As we have mentioned, additional steps will be added to the Stairway to Life over time. These steps will come from previously unexplored processes that are required for life. For example, we mentioned in Chapter 17 that the current best approximation of a minimal cell that can reproduce autonomously includes 493 genes [201]. This same report specifies that 91 of the 493 genes perform unknown functions. Therefore, about 20% of the minimal genome codes for functions that we have not yet explored. Further, the genome is not the only information contained in life. We are just beginning to explore other forms of information found in living organisms, such as the sugar code that encapsulates cells [226]. Future exploration in these areas will result in new steps in the Stairway to Life and an ever-increasing “gap.” The emperor is not simply missing a lapel pin; the emperor has no clothes. Our conclusion that creative intelligence was essential to start life is based on what we do know, not on what we don’t know. The arguments in this book do not take the following form: “No one knows how life began; therefore, God did it.” Rather, the inference to the need for intelligence in the origin of life follows directly from what we do know about the requirements for life and what we do know about chemistry, physics, thermodynamics, and biology.
>
> That is still a mere gap argument, however much he stomps his foot on the ground and
> yells "it ain't so".
>
> It would stop being a gap argument only if he now started to fill the gap with testable claims
> about the designer that are at least as testable, and productive (in the sense of leading to new
> observations and insights) as those OOL theories that he rejects
>
>
>> Turning this objection around, choosing to maintain a belief in abiogenesis despite the absence of a reasonable approach to the Stairway to Life is a “materialism-of-the-gaps” approach—i.e., “we don’t know how life began, but we know that only natural processes were involved.”
>
> Even if this were true and OOL had nothing more to say than this,
> , it would score at least as high as the "designer did it" inference.
> But with the crucial difference that of course, people do not
> stop at this level. Rather, they do form theories, and test them, which
> leads to new insights. All the hard work and experiments that he
> references, and on which his entire work is parasitic upon.
>
>>>> However, physics and chemistry present an awkward reality. A replicating molecule requires:
>>>> - a substantial amount of information
>>>> - replicate that with sufficiently high fidelity
>>>> - over many replications have a sustainable supply of sufficiently pure and concentrated substrate
>>>> - have energy and mechanical/thermal agitation maintained by its environment
>>>> - be resilient to interfering reactions
>>>> - preserve thermal chemical physical stability
>>>> - etc
>>> See my .sig.
>>>> Show me a demonstration of such a localised, entropy-reversing, sustained, information-increasing prebiotically plausible process.
>>>>
>>>> Until then, it is hand waving and story telling. It is the scam.
>>> A scam is pointing at one thing and calling it something else.
>>> Scientific researchers on abiogenesis don't say they have the answer;
>>> they say (and show) that they have *possible* explanations for *part* of
>>> the answer.
>>>
>>> Intelligent design proponents, on the other hand, say, first, that the
>>> scientists have nothing, and second, that magic is a likely (some say
>>> certain) alternative. Sure looks to me like the ID proponents are the
>>> scammers.
>>>
>>> And that's before you get into the theological issues, which ID
>>> proponents, for good (selfish) reasons, work studiously to avoid.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Mark Isaak
>>> "Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
>>> doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell
>

MarkE wrote:
> On Saturday, December 9, 2023 at 2:47:03 AM UTC+11, Mark Isaak wrote:
>> On 12/7/23 2:32 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>> On Friday, December 8, 2023 at 3:17:02 AM UTC+11, Mark Isaak wrote:
>>>> On 12/6/23 2:57 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>> On Monday, December 4, 2023 at 12:01:58 PM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
>>>>>> On 12/3/2023 6:10 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>>> On Monday, December 4, 2023 at 1:31:58 AM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
>>>>>>>> On 12/3/2023 6:55 AM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>>>>> On Sunday, December 3, 2023 at 4:21:58 AM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
>>>>>>>>>> On 12/1/2023 10:50 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>> Here's a new LSS video primer on DNA repair and the error threshold problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQm8vmtM8CI (12:22)
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> In relation to recent discussion of "junk DNA", this is another cost to maintaining junk DNA -- the energy and recourses needed for constant repair, though not sure how much this amounts to in practice.
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> Incidentally, Wikipedia makes this statement about Eigen's paradox: "Eigen's paradox is one of the most intractable puzzles in the study of the origins of life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_threshold_(evolution)#Eigen's_paradox
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> Manfred Eigen himself proposes hypercyles to overcome the error threshold problem:
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfOtzjdR_A0 (1:47)
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> TRANSCRIPT:
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> QUESTION: What was the necessity of your theory for hypercycles? There were experiments or facts which made it necessary that you make a theory which has got the name hypercycles?
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> RESPONSE: As I said genotype/phenotype dichotomy. I said first of all a theory without this translation, and that would get stuck with the error threshold. In order to overcome the error threshold you have to make good proteins. But in order to make proteins you need more information. So you got stuck somehow. So you needed something to overcome this. And the other is the fact that once you do translation you have to test your translation products, your phenotypes, but you have to store your information in the genotype and you have to make sure that you don't lose that, because otherwise everything is gone. So there was a necessity to... and there could well have been a different model. For instance, one model which we later on found and combined with the hypercycle, was that you have to make compartmentation. In other words, you know that all life is not in homogeneous solution, it's always in cells or in organism and so forth. So you'd have to compartmentalise your system of nucleic acids and proteins, but you might immediately ask: isn't it sufficient to compartment them, why then a hypercycle, now you keep protein and nucleic acids together in your compartment? Well, if you only would put them into a compartment, the nucleic acids would start to compete with one another, so you must fit them into a reaction network and that has to be cyclic.
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> My take is that this isn't an issue. RNA gene replication was already
>>>>>>>>>> something that was consistently happening in the first RNA systems.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> You're begging the question with the assertion that "RNA gene replication was already something that was consistently happening in the first RNA systems". The paradox disallows such assumptions:
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> "Without error correction enzymes, the maximum size of a replicating molecule is about 100 base pairs. For a replicating molecule to encode error correction enzymes, it must be substantially larger than 100 bases."
>>>>>>>> RNA replication likely evolved after there were simple self replicators,
>>>>>>>> and we have no pretty much no idea of what they were made of. Just look
>>>>>>>> at the literature, they are proposing that the first macromolecules were
>>>>>>>> using mineral surfaces to catalyze the reactions needed to put the
>>>>>>>> subunits together.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> What "simple replicators"?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> "RNA replication likely evolved after these". So you're saying that some unspecified non-RNA replicators were somehow replaced by RNA replicators?
>>>>>> RNA polymers are probably pretty unlikely to occur on their own, but
>>>>>> they do not have to have occurred on their own. The initial speculation
>>>>>> is that simple self replicators evolved. They may have required a
>>>>>> mineral surface or the speculation is a clay matrix to catalyze their
>>>>>> synthesis.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> No one has figured out what these first self replicators were. We do
>>>>>> not know what they could have been made from, but their replication was
>>>>>> likely not perfect, and as they made more copies of themselves those
>>>>>> self replicators would have been able to evolve. They probably were
>>>>>> some type of macromolecule of some kind. Proteins have been the obvious
>>>>>> choice, but glycosylation of proteins (adding sugars to the peptides) is
>>>>>> something that still occurs today, so my guess is that they were some
>>>>>> type of mix, so such a self replicator would have a peptidase to form
>>>>>> peptide bonds and glycosylation activity to tack on carbohydrates. If
>>>>>> it initially relied on a mineral surface for the initial enzymatic
>>>>>> activity the initial products could have just made further reactions
>>>>>> more frequent. They could have just stabilized the catalytic activity
>>>>>> of the mineral surface. In catalyzing imperfect copies of themselves
>>>>>> replacing the mineral surface would be selected for.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> No one has figured it out, yet, but RNA polymers would not need to come
>>>>>> first. We know that they eventually came because we have the vestiges
>>>>>> of the RNA world that still exists in lifeforms today.
>>>>>
>>>>> This is a key issue I think. An unspecified "replicating molecule" is just assumed. Case in point - that's what you've done. It's assumed because naturalism requires it. And if you have decided a priori that naturalism is the only allowable explanation, you not only must assume it, you will also resist challenges to it.
>>>> False. Naturalism is not presented as the only allowable explanation,
>>>> but the only pragmatically useful one. Supernaturalism has two problem.
>>>> First, it has an perfect record of failure in the past. Second, it is
>>>> worse than useless, since it does not point to anything else to look
>>>> more closely at; it instead tells you to stop looking and hide your head
>>>> in the sand.
>>>
>>> How many times have we all been around the block on this fundamental question? A common position here is functionally ontological/metaphysical naturalism. No matter how wide the "gap" may become, non-natural explanations will not be considered.
>> Good question. I note that you ignored the points I just brought up.
>
> Let's deal with the fundamental issue first. If we have no agreement on the terms of engagement, meaningful discussion is not possible.
>
> Would you describe your own position as ontological/metaphysical naturalism or similar?
>
> "Metaphysical naturalism (also called ontological naturalism, philosophical naturalism and antisupernaturalism) is a philosophical worldview which holds that there is nothing but natural elements, principles, and relations of the kind studied by the natural sciences." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_naturalism#:~:text=Metaphysical%20naturalism%20(also%20called%20ontological,studied%20by%20the%20natural%20sciences.
>
Considering what has been discovered after the invention of the
microscope, one can only wonder if this invention had not become a
reality, would the existence of the bacterial flagella microbe been
accepted by scientific naturalism, described by Dr. Behe..x
>> I'll add one more: To consider non-natural explanations, one must first
>> have some non-natural explanations to consider. Simply saying "a
>> miracle occurred" explains nothing. An explanation has to say *why*
>> something is one way rather than another way. ID actively avoids having
>> explanations, natural *or* non-natural.
>
> ID's explanation: an intelligent agent brought space and time into existence, and created information and embodied it in organisms by some combination of direct "supernatural" intervention (e.g. OoL) and indirect "natural" processes (e.g. microevolution).
>
>>> From "The Stairway To Life: An Origin-Of-Life Reality Check" (pp. 187-189):
>>>
>>> Objection: Your argument is a plea to the “God of the gaps.” Just because science doesn’t have all the answers doesn’t mean that we have to invoke God to fill the gaps.
>>>
>>> Response: The entirety of this book seeks to provide a proper scope to the “gap.” The Stairway to Life clarifies that the gap is not simply a missing puzzle piece or a set of unclear details. The gap is, in fact, the entirety of the origin of life. And the gap is growing over time as we learn more about the complexity of cells and as efforts to produce components of life via realistic prebiotic approaches fail. As we have mentioned, additional steps will be added to the Stairway to Life over time. These steps will come from previously unexplored processes that are required for life. For example, we mentioned in Chapter 17 that the current best approximation of a minimal cell that can reproduce autonomously includes 493 genes [201]. This same report specifies that 91 of the 493 genes perform unknown functions. Therefore, about 20% of the minimal genome codes for functions that we have not yet explored. Further, the genome is not the only information contained in life. We are just beginning to explore other forms of information found in living organisms, such as the sugar code that encapsulates cells [226]. Future exploration in these areas will result in new steps in the Stairway to Life and an ever-increasing “gap.” The emperor is not simply missing a lapel pin; the emperor has no clothes. Our conclusion that creative intelligence was essential to start life is based on what we do know, not on what we don’t know. The arguments in this book do not take the following form: “No one knows how life began; therefore, God did it.” Rather, the inference to the need for intelligence in the origin of life follows directly from what we do know about the requirements for life and what we do know about chemistry, physics, thermodynamics, and biology. Turning this objection around, choosing to maintain a belief in abiogenesis despite the absence of a reasonable approach to the Stairway to Life is a “materialism-of-the-gaps” approach—i.e., “we don’t know how life began, but we know that only natural processes were involved.”
>> I responded to this once before. The authors of this passage think that
>> it is justifiable to take "I don't know" and infer from it that their
>> God performed magic as they expect their God to act.
>>
>> Never mind the logic or lack of it in such reasoning. How can that be
>> considered acceptable theology?
>> --
>> Mark Isaak
>> "Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
>> doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell
>

On Monday, December 25, 2023 at 2:22:19 AM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:
> Burkhard wrote:
> > On Thursday, December 7, 2023 at 11:37:02 PM UTC+1, MarkE wrote:
> >> On Friday, December 8, 2023 at 3:17:02 AM UTC+11, Mark Isaak wrote:
> >>> On 12/6/23 2:57 PM, MarkE wrote:
> >>>> On Monday, December 4, 2023 at 12:01:58 PM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
> >>>>> On 12/3/2023 6:10 PM, MarkE wrote:
> >>>>>> On Monday, December 4, 2023 at 1:31:58 AM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
> >>>>>>> On 12/3/2023 6:55 AM, MarkE wrote:
> >>>>>>>> On Sunday, December 3, 2023 at 4:21:58 AM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
> >>>>>>>>> On 12/1/2023 10:50 PM, MarkE wrote:
> >>>>>>>>>> Here's a new LSS video primer on DNA repair and the error threshold problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQm8vmtM8CI (12:22)
> >>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>> In relation to recent discussion of "junk DNA", this is another cost to maintaining junk DNA -- the energy and recourses needed for constant repair, though not sure how much this amounts to in practice.
> >>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>> Incidentally, Wikipedia makes this statement about Eigen's paradox: "Eigen's paradox is one of the most intractable puzzles in the study of the origins of life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_threshold_(evolution)#Eigen's_paradox
> >>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>> Manfred Eigen himself proposes hypercyles to overcome the error threshold problem:
> >>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfOtzjdR_A0 (1:47)
> >>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>> TRANSCRIPT:
> >>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>> QUESTION: What was the necessity of your theory for hypercycles? There were experiments or facts which made it necessary that you make a theory which has got the name hypercycles?
> >>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>> RESPONSE: As I said genotype/phenotype dichotomy. I said first of all a theory without this translation, and that would get stuck with the error threshold. In order to overcome the error threshold you have to make good proteins. But in order to make proteins you need more information. So you got stuck somehow. So you needed something to overcome this. And the other is the fact that once you do translation you have to test your translation products, your phenotypes, but you have to store your information in the genotype and you have to make sure that you don't lose that, because otherwise everything is gone. So there was a necessity to... and there could well have been a different model. For instance, one model which we later on found and combined with the hypercycle, was that you have to make compartmentation. In other words, you know that all life is not in homogeneous solution, it's always in cells or in organism and so forth. So you'd have to compartmentalise your system of nucleic acids and proteins, but you might immediately ask: isn't it sufficient to compartment them, why then a hypercycle, now you keep protein and nucleic acids together in your compartment? Well, if you only would put them into a compartment, the nucleic acids would start to compete with one another, so you must fit them into a reaction network and that has to be cyclic.
> >>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>> My take is that this isn't an issue. RNA gene replication was already
> >>>>>>>>> something that was consistently happening in the first RNA systems.
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> You're begging the question with the assertion that "RNA gene replication was already something that was consistently happening in the first RNA systems". The paradox disallows such assumptions:
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> "Without error correction enzymes, the maximum size of a replicating molecule is about 100 base pairs. For a replicating molecule to encode error correction enzymes, it must be substantially larger than 100 bases."
> >>>>>>> RNA replication likely evolved after there were simple self replicators,
> >>>>>>> and we have no pretty much no idea of what they were made of. Just look
> >>>>>>> at the literature, they are proposing that the first macromolecules were
> >>>>>>> using mineral surfaces to catalyze the reactions needed to put the
> >>>>>>> subunits together.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> What "simple replicators"?
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> "RNA replication likely evolved after these". So you're saying that some unspecified non-RNA replicators were somehow replaced by RNA replicators?
> >>>>> RNA polymers are probably pretty unlikely to occur on their own, but
> >>>>> they do not have to have occurred on their own. The initial speculation
> >>>>> is that simple self replicators evolved. They may have required a
> >>>>> mineral surface or the speculation is a clay matrix to catalyze their
> >>>>> synthesis.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> No one has figured out what these first self replicators were. We do
> >>>>> not know what they could have been made from, but their replication was
> >>>>> likely not perfect, and as they made more copies of themselves those
> >>>>> self replicators would have been able to evolve. They probably were
> >>>>> some type of macromolecule of some kind. Proteins have been the obvious
> >>>>> choice, but glycosylation of proteins (adding sugars to the peptides) is
> >>>>> something that still occurs today, so my guess is that they were some
> >>>>> type of mix, so such a self replicator would have a peptidase to form
> >>>>> peptide bonds and glycosylation activity to tack on carbohydrates. If
> >>>>> it initially relied on a mineral surface for the initial enzymatic
> >>>>> activity the initial products could have just made further reactions
> >>>>> more frequent. They could have just stabilized the catalytic activity
> >>>>> of the mineral surface. In catalyzing imperfect copies of themselves
> >>>>> replacing the mineral surface would be selected for.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> No one has figured it out, yet, but RNA polymers would not need to come
> >>>>> first. We know that they eventually came because we have the vestiges
> >>>>> of the RNA world that still exists in lifeforms today.
> >>>>
> >>>> This is a key issue I think. An unspecified "replicating molecule" is just assumed. Case in point - that's what you've done. It's assumed because naturalism requires it. And if you have decided a priori that naturalism is the only allowable explanation, you not only must assume it, you will also resist challenges to it.
> >>> False. Naturalism is not presented as the only allowable explanation,
> >>> but the only pragmatically useful one. Supernaturalism has two problem.
> >>> First, it has an perfect record of failure in the past. Second, it is
> >>> worse than useless, since it does not point to anything else to look
> >>> more closely at; it instead tells you to stop looking and hide your head
> >>> in the sand.
> >> How many times have we all been around the block on this fundamental question? A common position here is functionally ontological/metaphysical naturalism. No matter how wide the "gap" may become, non-natural explanations will not be considered. From "The Stairway To Life: An Origin-Of-Life Reality Check" (pp. 187-189):
> >>
> >> Objection: Your argument is a plea to the “God of the gaps.” Just because science doesn’t have all the answers doesn’t mean that we have to invoke God to fill the gaps.
> >>
> >> Response: The entirety of this book seeks to provide a proper scope to the “gap.”
> >
> > Or, with other words, it makes no attempt at actually filling the gap - so it remains, by
> > it's own words, a mere "of the gaps" argument, and therefore sterile and uninteresting
> > when understood as a scientific theory, borerline blasphemous when read as a
> > theological position.
> >
> >> The Stairway to Life clarifies that the gap is not simply a missing puzzle piece or a set of unclear details. The gap is, in fact, the entirety of the origin of life. And the gap is growing over time as we learn more about the complexity of cells and as efforts to produce components of life via realistic prebiotic approaches fail.
> >
> > That is pretty much what one would expect of any scientific progress, in any field. Research starts with the relatively low
> > hanging fruits, while the "big picture' remains under-defined. As science progresses, a clearer picture of the complexities
> > emerges, which will pose tougher and tougher challenges to address (and as a result more and more elaborate
> > theories, often with more and more bootstrapping assumptions. And because there is at least a kernel of truth in
> > "falsifiability" as an ingedient of scientific practice, of course we should expect also an increase in
> > the number of theories that have failed - and a failed scientific theory is not worthless, it typically increases
> > our knowledge and understanding even if it fails its ultimate objective..
> >
> To know what does not work, is a step closer to knowing what does work.
> Or is it? After all conceivable theories have been tested and everything
> is researched and no explanation is found, where then, or to what then
> do we turn? Ool in question!

On Sun, 24 Dec 2023 04:10:26 -0800 (PST), MarkE <me22over7@gmail.com>
wrote:

>On Saturday, December 23, 2023 at 4:42:16?AM UTC+11, Martin Harran wrote:
>> On Tue, 19 Dec 2023 20:49:17 -0800 (PST), MarkE <me22...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> [ snip for focus]
>> >Given that God has either option equally available, if we detect significant override of natural laws, we infer that God may be intentionally revealing himself.
>> >
>> >Either way, spacetime, the world and us are understood by many to be a revelation of God (within the limits of natural theology).
>> Mark, how do you get from God fiddling with molecules 3+ billion years
>> ago to a personal God with whom humans (apparently exclusively) can
>> interact?
>
>I don't. I get to that directly from the special revelation of the Word and Spirit of Christ.

Sorry Mark, but I find out answer not at all helpful. You seem to
believe in two different Gods.

The first one is the God that you get from the special revelation of
the Word and Spirit of Christ; that is essentially the same God that I
believe in.

The second one is a God you find through Intelligent Design, a God who
created molecules and then fiddled about with them to create life and,
over the last 3+ billion years, has gone on to intervene at sporadic
intervals to further tweak those molecules to modify existing life
forms or create new ones.

I see absolutely no relationship between those two Gods and no
proponent of intelligent design has ever been able to explain one for
me.

broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Monday, December 25, 2023 at 2:22:19 AM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:
>> Burkhard wrote:
>>> On Thursday, December 7, 2023 at 11:37:02 PM UTC+1, MarkE wrote:
>>>> On Friday, December 8, 2023 at 3:17:02 AM UTC+11, Mark Isaak wrote:
>>>>> On 12/6/23 2:57 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>> On Monday, December 4, 2023 at 12:01:58 PM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
>>>>>>> On 12/3/2023 6:10 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>>>> On Monday, December 4, 2023 at 1:31:58 AM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
>>>>>>>>> On 12/3/2023 6:55 AM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>>>>>> On Sunday, December 3, 2023 at 4:21:58 AM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>> On 12/1/2023 10:50 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>> Here's a new LSS video primer on DNA repair and the error threshold problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQm8vmtM8CI (12:22)
>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>> In relation to recent discussion of "junk DNA", this is another cost to maintaining junk DNA -- the energy and recourses needed for constant repair, though not sure how much this amounts to in practice.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>> Incidentally, Wikipedia makes this statement about Eigen's paradox: "Eigen's paradox is one of the most intractable puzzles in the study of the origins of life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_threshold_(evolution)#Eigen's_paradox
>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>> Manfred Eigen himself proposes hypercyles to overcome the error threshold problem:
>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfOtzjdR_A0 (1:47)
>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>> TRANSCRIPT:
>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>> QUESTION: What was the necessity of your theory for hypercycles? There were experiments or facts which made it necessary that you make a theory which has got the name hypercycles?
>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>> RESPONSE: As I said genotype/phenotype dichotomy. I said first of all a theory without this translation, and that would get stuck with the error threshold. In order to overcome the error threshold you have to make good proteins. But in order to make proteins you need more information. So you got stuck somehow. So you needed something to overcome this. And the other is the fact that once you do translation you have to test your translation products, your phenotypes, but you have to store your information in the genotype and you have to make sure that you don't lose that, because otherwise everything is gone. So there was a necessity to... and there could well have been a different model. For instance, one model which we later on found and combined with the hypercycle, was that you have to make compartmentation. In other words, you know that all life is not in homogeneous solution, it's always in cells or in organism and so forth. So you'd have to compartmentalise your system of nucleic acids and proteins, but you might immediately ask: isn't it sufficient to compartment them, why then a hypercycle, now you keep protein and nucleic acids together in your compartment? Well, if you only would put them into a compartment, the nucleic acids would start to compete with one another, so you must fit them into a reaction network and that has to be cyclic.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> My take is that this isn't an issue. RNA gene replication was already
>>>>>>>>>>> something that was consistently happening in the first RNA systems.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> You're begging the question with the assertion that "RNA gene replication was already something that was consistently happening in the first RNA systems". The paradox disallows such assumptions:
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> "Without error correction enzymes, the maximum size of a replicating molecule is about 100 base pairs. For a replicating molecule to encode error correction enzymes, it must be substantially larger than 100 bases."
>>>>>>>>> RNA replication likely evolved after there were simple self replicators,
>>>>>>>>> and we have no pretty much no idea of what they were made of. Just look
>>>>>>>>> at the literature, they are proposing that the first macromolecules were
>>>>>>>>> using mineral surfaces to catalyze the reactions needed to put the
>>>>>>>>> subunits together.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> What "simple replicators"?
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> "RNA replication likely evolved after these". So you're saying that some unspecified non-RNA replicators were somehow replaced by RNA replicators?
>>>>>>> RNA polymers are probably pretty unlikely to occur on their own, but
>>>>>>> they do not have to have occurred on their own. The initial speculation
>>>>>>> is that simple self replicators evolved. They may have required a
>>>>>>> mineral surface or the speculation is a clay matrix to catalyze their
>>>>>>> synthesis.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> No one has figured out what these first self replicators were. We do
>>>>>>> not know what they could have been made from, but their replication was
>>>>>>> likely not perfect, and as they made more copies of themselves those
>>>>>>> self replicators would have been able to evolve. They probably were
>>>>>>> some type of macromolecule of some kind. Proteins have been the obvious
>>>>>>> choice, but glycosylation of proteins (adding sugars to the peptides) is
>>>>>>> something that still occurs today, so my guess is that they were some
>>>>>>> type of mix, so such a self replicator would have a peptidase to form
>>>>>>> peptide bonds and glycosylation activity to tack on carbohydrates. If
>>>>>>> it initially relied on a mineral surface for the initial enzymatic
>>>>>>> activity the initial products could have just made further reactions
>>>>>>> more frequent. They could have just stabilized the catalytic activity
>>>>>>> of the mineral surface. In catalyzing imperfect copies of themselves
>>>>>>> replacing the mineral surface would be selected for.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> No one has figured it out, yet, but RNA polymers would not need to come
>>>>>>> first. We know that they eventually came because we have the vestiges
>>>>>>> of the RNA world that still exists in lifeforms today.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> This is a key issue I think. An unspecified "replicating molecule" is just assumed. Case in point - that's what you've done. It's assumed because naturalism requires it. And if you have decided a priori that naturalism is the only allowable explanation, you not only must assume it, you will also resist challenges to it.
>>>>> False. Naturalism is not presented as the only allowable explanation,
>>>>> but the only pragmatically useful one. Supernaturalism has two problem.
>>>>> First, it has an perfect record of failure in the past. Second, it is
>>>>> worse than useless, since it does not point to anything else to look
>>>>> more closely at; it instead tells you to stop looking and hide your head
>>>>> in the sand.
>>>> How many times have we all been around the block on this fundamental question? A common position here is functionally ontological/metaphysical naturalism. No matter how wide the "gap" may become, non-natural explanations will not be considered. From "The Stairway To Life: An Origin-Of-Life Reality Check" (pp. 187-189):
>>>>
>>>> Objection: Your argument is a plea to the “God of the gaps.” Just because science doesn’t have all the answers doesn’t mean that we have to invoke God to fill the gaps.
>>>>
>>>> Response: The entirety of this book seeks to provide a proper scope to the “gap.”
>>>
>>> Or, with other words, it makes no attempt at actually filling the gap - so it remains, by
>>> it's own words, a mere "of the gaps" argument, and therefore sterile and uninteresting
>>> when understood as a scientific theory, borerline blasphemous when read as a
>>> theological position.
>>>
>>>> The Stairway to Life clarifies that the gap is not simply a missing puzzle piece or a set of unclear details. The gap is, in fact, the entirety of the origin of life. And the gap is growing over time as we learn more about the complexity of cells and as efforts to produce components of life via realistic prebiotic approaches fail.
>>>
>>> That is pretty much what one would expect of any scientific progress, in any field. Research starts with the relatively low
>>> hanging fruits, while the "big picture' remains under-defined. As science progresses, a clearer picture of the complexities
>>> emerges, which will pose tougher and tougher challenges to address (and as a result more and more elaborate
>>> theories, often with more and more bootstrapping assumptions. And because there is at least a kernel of truth in
>>> "falsifiability" as an ingedient of scientific practice, of course we should expect also an increase in
>>> the number of theories that have failed - and a failed scientific theory is not worthless, it typically increases
>>> our knowledge and understanding even if it fails its ultimate objective.
>>>
>> To know what does not work, is a step closer to knowing what does work.
>> Or is it? After all conceivable theories have been tested and everything
>> is researched and no explanation is found, where then, or to what then
>> do we turn? Ool in question!
>
> "all conceivable theories" is the problem. If people could conceive of all possible theories, then every problem would be soluble.
>
But we might be barking up the wrong tree. Perhaps, there _is_ no
_natural_ explanation, again referring to Ool. Here I think philosophy
comes into play, which takes precdence over everything.
>
>>>> As we have mentioned, additional steps will be added to the Stairway to Life over time. These steps will come from previously unexplored processes that are required for life. For example, we mentioned in Chapter 17 that the current best approximation of a minimal cell that can reproduce autonomously includes 493 genes [201]. This same report specifies that 91 of the 493 genes perform unknown functions. Therefore, about 20% of the minimal genome codes for functions that we have not yet explored. Further, the genome is not the only information contained in life. We are just beginning to explore other forms of information found in living organisms, such as the sugar code that encapsulates cells [226]. Future exploration in these areas will result in new steps in the Stairway to Life and an ever-increasing “gap.” The emperor is not simply missing a lapel pin; the emperor has no clothes. Our conclusion that creative intelligence was essential to start life is based on what we do know, not on what we don’t know. The arguments in this book do not take the following form: “No one knows how life began; therefore, God did it.” Rather, the inference to the need for intelligence in the origin of life follows directly from what we do know about the requirements for life and what we do know about chemistry, physics, thermodynamics, and biology.
>>>
>>> That is still a mere gap argument, however much he stomps his foot on the ground and
>>> yells "it ain't so".
>>>
>>> It would stop being a gap argument only if he now started to fill the gap with testable claims
>>> about the designer that are at least as testable, and productive (in the sense of leading to new
>>> observations and insights) as those OOL theories that he rejects
>>>
>>>
>>>> Turning this objection around, choosing to maintain a belief in abiogenesis despite the absence of a reasonable approach to the Stairway to Life is a “materialism-of-the-gaps” approach—i.e., “we don’t know how life began, but we know that only natural processes were involved.”
>>>
>>> Even if this were true and OOL had nothing more to say than this,
>>> , it would score at least as high as the "designer did it" inference.
>>> But with the crucial difference that of course, people do not
>>> stop at this level. Rather, they do form theories, and test them, which
>>> leads to new insights. All the hard work and experiments that he
>>> references, and on which his entire work is parasitic upon.
>>>
>>>>>> However, physics and chemistry present an awkward reality. A replicating molecule requires:
>>>>>> - a substantial amount of information
>>>>>> - replicate that with sufficiently high fidelity
>>>>>> - over many replications have a sustainable supply of sufficiently pure and concentrated substrate
>>>>>> - have energy and mechanical/thermal agitation maintained by its environment
>>>>>> - be resilient to interfering reactions
>>>>>> - preserve thermal chemical physical stability
>>>>>> - etc
>>>>> See my .sig.
>>>>>> Show me a demonstration of such a localised, entropy-reversing, sustained, information-increasing prebiotically plausible process.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Until then, it is hand waving and story telling. It is the scam.
>>>>> A scam is pointing at one thing and calling it something else.
>>>>> Scientific researchers on abiogenesis don't say they have the answer;
>>>>> they say (and show) that they have *possible* explanations for *part* of
>>>>> the answer.
>>>>>
>>>>> Intelligent design proponents, on the other hand, say, first, that the
>>>>> scientists have nothing, and second, that magic is a likely (some say
>>>>> certain) alternative. Sure looks to me like the ID proponents are the
>>>>> scammers.
>>>>>
>>>>> And that's before you get into the theological issues, which ID
>>>>> proponents, for good (selfish) reasons, work studiously to avoid.
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> Mark Isaak
>>>>> "Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
>>>>> doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell
>>>
>

On Tuesday, December 26, 2023 at 1:27:20 PM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:
> broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Monday, December 25, 2023 at 2:22:19 AM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:
> >> Burkhard wrote:
> >>> On Thursday, December 7, 2023 at 11:37:02 PM UTC+1, MarkE wrote:
> >>>> On Friday, December 8, 2023 at 3:17:02 AM UTC+11, Mark Isaak wrote:
> >>>>> On 12/6/23 2:57 PM, MarkE wrote:
> >>>>>> On Monday, December 4, 2023 at 12:01:58 PM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
> >>>>>>> On 12/3/2023 6:10 PM, MarkE wrote:
> >>>>>>>> On Monday, December 4, 2023 at 1:31:58 AM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
> >>>>>>>>> On 12/3/2023 6:55 AM, MarkE wrote:
> >>>>>>>>>> On Sunday, December 3, 2023 at 4:21:58 AM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
> >>>>>>>>>>> On 12/1/2023 10:50 PM, MarkE wrote:
> >>>>>>>>>>>> Here's a new LSS video primer on DNA repair and the error threshold problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQm8vmtM8CI (12:22)
> >>>>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>>>> In relation to recent discussion of "junk DNA", this is another cost to maintaining junk DNA -- the energy and recourses needed for constant repair, though not sure how much this amounts to in practice.
> >>>>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>>>> Incidentally, Wikipedia makes this statement about Eigen's paradox: "Eigen's paradox is one of the most intractable puzzles in the study of the origins of life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_threshold_(evolution)#Eigen's_paradox
> >>>>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>>>> Manfred Eigen himself proposes hypercyles to overcome the error threshold problem:
> >>>>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfOtzjdR_A0 (1:47)
> >>>>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>>>> TRANSCRIPT:
> >>>>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>>>> QUESTION: What was the necessity of your theory for hypercycles? There were experiments or facts which made it necessary that you make a theory which has got the name hypercycles?
> >>>>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>>>> RESPONSE: As I said genotype/phenotype dichotomy. I said first of all a theory without this translation, and that would get stuck with the error threshold. In order to overcome the error threshold you have to make good proteins. But in order to make proteins you need more information. So you got stuck somehow. So you needed something to overcome this. And the other is the fact that once you do translation you have to test your translation products, your phenotypes, but you have to store your information in the genotype and you have to make sure that you don't lose that, because otherwise everything is gone. So there was a necessity to... and there could well have been a different model. For instance, one model which we later on found and combined with the hypercycle, was that you have to make compartmentation. In other words, you know that all life is not in homogeneous solution, it's always in cells or in organism and so forth. So you'd have to compartmentalise your system of nucleic acids and proteins, but you might immediately ask: isn't it sufficient to compartment them, why then a hypercycle, now you keep protein and nucleic acids together in your compartment? Well, if you only would put them into a compartment, the nucleic acids would start to compete with one another, so you must fit them into a reaction network and that has to be cyclic.
> >>>>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>>> My take is that this isn't an issue. RNA gene replication was already
> >>>>>>>>>>> something that was consistently happening in the first RNA systems.
> >>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>> You're begging the question with the assertion that "RNA gene replication was already something that was consistently happening in the first RNA systems". The paradox disallows such assumptions:
> >>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>> "Without error correction enzymes, the maximum size of a replicating molecule is about 100 base pairs. For a replicating molecule to encode error correction enzymes, it must be substantially larger than 100 bases.."
> >>>>>>>>> RNA replication likely evolved after there were simple self replicators,
> >>>>>>>>> and we have no pretty much no idea of what they were made of. Just look
> >>>>>>>>> at the literature, they are proposing that the first macromolecules were
> >>>>>>>>> using mineral surfaces to catalyze the reactions needed to put the
> >>>>>>>>> subunits together.
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> What "simple replicators"?
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> "RNA replication likely evolved after these". So you're saying that some unspecified non-RNA replicators were somehow replaced by RNA replicators?
> >>>>>>> RNA polymers are probably pretty unlikely to occur on their own, but
> >>>>>>> they do not have to have occurred on their own. The initial speculation
> >>>>>>> is that simple self replicators evolved. They may have required a
> >>>>>>> mineral surface or the speculation is a clay matrix to catalyze their
> >>>>>>> synthesis.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> No one has figured out what these first self replicators were. We do
> >>>>>>> not know what they could have been made from, but their replication was
> >>>>>>> likely not perfect, and as they made more copies of themselves those
> >>>>>>> self replicators would have been able to evolve. They probably were
> >>>>>>> some type of macromolecule of some kind. Proteins have been the obvious
> >>>>>>> choice, but glycosylation of proteins (adding sugars to the peptides) is
> >>>>>>> something that still occurs today, so my guess is that they were some
> >>>>>>> type of mix, so such a self replicator would have a peptidase to form
> >>>>>>> peptide bonds and glycosylation activity to tack on carbohydrates.. If
> >>>>>>> it initially relied on a mineral surface for the initial enzymatic
> >>>>>>> activity the initial products could have just made further reactions
> >>>>>>> more frequent. They could have just stabilized the catalytic activity
> >>>>>>> of the mineral surface. In catalyzing imperfect copies of themselves
> >>>>>>> replacing the mineral surface would be selected for.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> No one has figured it out, yet, but RNA polymers would not need to come
> >>>>>>> first. We know that they eventually came because we have the vestiges
> >>>>>>> of the RNA world that still exists in lifeforms today.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> This is a key issue I think. An unspecified "replicating molecule" is just assumed. Case in point - that's what you've done. It's assumed because naturalism requires it. And if you have decided a priori that naturalism is the only allowable explanation, you not only must assume it, you will also resist challenges to it.
> >>>>> False. Naturalism is not presented as the only allowable explanation,
> >>>>> but the only pragmatically useful one. Supernaturalism has two problem.
> >>>>> First, it has an perfect record of failure in the past. Second, it is
> >>>>> worse than useless, since it does not point to anything else to look
> >>>>> more closely at; it instead tells you to stop looking and hide your head
> >>>>> in the sand.
> >>>> How many times have we all been around the block on this fundamental question? A common position here is functionally ontological/metaphysical naturalism. No matter how wide the "gap" may become, non-natural explanations will not be considered. From "The Stairway To Life: An Origin-Of-Life Reality Check" (pp. 187-189):
> >>>>
> >>>> Objection: Your argument is a plea to the “God of the gaps.” Just because science doesn’t have all the answers doesn’t mean that we have to invoke God to fill the gaps.
> >>>>
> >>>> Response: The entirety of this book seeks to provide a proper scope to the “gap.”
> >>>
> >>> Or, with other words, it makes no attempt at actually filling the gap - so it remains, by
> >>> it's own words, a mere "of the gaps" argument, and therefore sterile and uninteresting
> >>> when understood as a scientific theory, borerline blasphemous when read as a
> >>> theological position.
> >>>
> >>>> The Stairway to Life clarifies that the gap is not simply a missing puzzle piece or a set of unclear details. The gap is, in fact, the entirety of the origin of life. And the gap is growing over time as we learn more about the complexity of cells and as efforts to produce components of life via realistic prebiotic approaches fail.
> >>>
> >>> That is pretty much what one would expect of any scientific progress, in any field. Research starts with the relatively low
> >>> hanging fruits, while the "big picture' remains under-defined. As science progresses, a clearer picture of the complexities
> >>> emerges, which will pose tougher and tougher challenges to address (and as a result more and more elaborate
> >>> theories, often with more and more bootstrapping assumptions. And because there is at least a kernel of truth in
> >>> "falsifiability" as an ingedient of scientific practice, of course we should expect also an increase in
> >>> the number of theories that have failed - and a failed scientific theory is not worthless, it typically increases
> >>> our knowledge and understanding even if it fails its ultimate objective.
> >>>
> >> To know what does not work, is a step closer to knowing what does work..
> >> Or is it? After all conceivable theories have been tested and everything
> >> is researched and no explanation is found, where then, or to what then
> >> do we turn? Ool in question!
> >
> > "all conceivable theories" is the problem. If people could conceive of all possible theories, then every problem would be soluble.
> >
> But we might be barking up the wrong tree. Perhaps, there _is_ no
> _natural_ explanation, again referring to Ool. Here I think philosophy
> comes into play, which takes precdence over everything.

On Tuesday, December 26, 2023 at 4:07:20 AM UTC-5, Martin Harran wrote:
> On Sun, 24 Dec 2023 04:10:26 -0800 (PST), MarkE <me22...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >On Saturday, December 23, 2023 at 4:42:16?AM UTC+11, Martin Harran wrote:
> >> On Tue, 19 Dec 2023 20:49:17 -0800 (PST), MarkE <me22...@gmail.com>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >> [ snip for focus]
> >> >Given that God has either option equally available, if we detect significant override of natural laws, we infer that God may be intentionally revealing himself.
> >> >
> >> >Either way, spacetime, the world and us are understood by many to be a revelation of God (within the limits of natural theology).
> >> Mark, how do you get from God fiddling with molecules 3+ billion years
> >> ago to a personal God with whom humans (apparently exclusively) can
> >> interact?
> >
> >I don't. I get to that directly from the special revelation of the Word and Spirit of Christ.
> Sorry Mark, but I find out answer not at all helpful. You seem to
> believe in two different Gods.
>
> The first one is the God that you get from the special revelation of
> the Word and Spirit of Christ; that is essentially the same God that I
> believe in.
>
> The second one is a God you find through Intelligent Design, a God who
> created molecules and then fiddled about with them to create life and,
> over the last 3+ billion years, has gone on to intervene at sporadic
> intervals to further tweak those molecules to modify existing life
> forms or create new ones.
>
> I see absolutely no relationship between those two Gods and no
> proponent of intelligent design has ever been able to explain one for
> me.
I don't think that he sees the God of Intelligent Design as being anything well defined or important in itself. He knows you need a leap of faith to get from an unspecified cause of the OoL to a Christian God; and he knows that you could make that same leap of faith, even if the OoL had a perfectly clear, empirically supported scientific explanation. The point of ID, for him, as far as I can tell, is simply the negative one. It takes science down a notch, so that if anyone out there is refusing to consider a revealed religion because they think science explains all that exists, well, then if you could definitively show that OoL could not have a naturalistic explanation, then you'd refute that objection and open the door to someone's being receptive to revealed religion.

There may be people out there like that, who see no point to religion because they think science already explains whatever needs explaining. I don't know. I still think that, even for them, a much better evangelical approach is to sell them on the personality and message of Jesus, rather than to have them listen to James Tour shout about how random processes could never assemble a car and how everything turns to tar if left to its own devices. And I think that most people who reject Christianity do not reject it for scientific reasons anyway - theodicy, poor behavior of some religious leaders, politicization of religion, any number of reasons completely unrelated to science.

broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 26, 2023 at 1:27:20 PM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:
>> broger...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> On Monday, December 25, 2023 at 2:22:19 AM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:
>>>> Burkhard wrote:
>>>>> On Thursday, December 7, 2023 at 11:37:02 PM UTC+1, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>> On Friday, December 8, 2023 at 3:17:02 AM UTC+11, Mark Isaak wrote:
>>>>>>> On 12/6/23 2:57 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>>>> On Monday, December 4, 2023 at 12:01:58 PM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
>>>>>>>>> On 12/3/2023 6:10 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>>>>>> On Monday, December 4, 2023 at 1:31:58 AM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>> On 12/3/2023 6:55 AM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>> On Sunday, December 3, 2023 at 4:21:58 AM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>>> On 12/1/2023 10:50 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Here's a new LSS video primer on DNA repair and the error threshold problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQm8vmtM8CI (12:22)
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> In relation to recent discussion of "junk DNA", this is another cost to maintaining junk DNA -- the energy and recourses needed for constant repair, though not sure how much this amounts to in practice.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Incidentally, Wikipedia makes this statement about Eigen's paradox: "Eigen's paradox is one of the most intractable puzzles in the study of the origins of life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_threshold_(evolution)#Eigen's_paradox
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Manfred Eigen himself proposes hypercyles to overcome the error threshold problem:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfOtzjdR_A0 (1:47)
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> TRANSCRIPT:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> QUESTION: What was the necessity of your theory for hypercycles? There were experiments or facts which made it necessary that you make a theory which has got the name hypercycles?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> RESPONSE: As I said genotype/phenotype dichotomy. I said first of all a theory without this translation, and that would get stuck with the error threshold. In order to overcome the error threshold you have to make good proteins. But in order to make proteins you need more information. So you got stuck somehow. So you needed something to overcome this. And the other is the fact that once you do translation you have to test your translation products, your phenotypes, but you have to store your information in the genotype and you have to make sure that you don't lose that, because otherwise everything is gone. So there was a necessity to... and there could well have been a different model. For instance, one model which we later on found and combined with the hypercycle, was that you have to make compartmentation. In other words, you know that all life is not in homogeneous solution, it's always in cells or in organism and so forth. So you'd have to compartmentalise your system of nucleic acids and proteins, but you might immediately ask: isn't it sufficient to compartment them, why then a hypercycle, now you keep protein and nucleic acids together in your compartment? Well, if you only would put them into a compartment, the nucleic acids would start to compete with one another, so you must fit them into a reaction network and that has to be cyclic.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>> My take is that this isn't an issue. RNA gene replication was already
>>>>>>>>>>>>> something that was consistently happening in the first RNA systems.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>> You're begging the question with the assertion that "RNA gene replication was already something that was consistently happening in the first RNA systems". The paradox disallows such assumptions:
>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>> "Without error correction enzymes, the maximum size of a replicating molecule is about 100 base pairs. For a replicating molecule to encode error correction enzymes, it must be substantially larger than 100 bases."
>>>>>>>>>>> RNA replication likely evolved after there were simple self replicators,
>>>>>>>>>>> and we have no pretty much no idea of what they were made of. Just look
>>>>>>>>>>> at the literature, they are proposing that the first macromolecules were
>>>>>>>>>>> using mineral surfaces to catalyze the reactions needed to put the
>>>>>>>>>>> subunits together.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> What "simple replicators"?
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> "RNA replication likely evolved after these". So you're saying that some unspecified non-RNA replicators were somehow replaced by RNA replicators?
>>>>>>>>> RNA polymers are probably pretty unlikely to occur on their own, but
>>>>>>>>> they do not have to have occurred on their own. The initial speculation
>>>>>>>>> is that simple self replicators evolved. They may have required a
>>>>>>>>> mineral surface or the speculation is a clay matrix to catalyze their
>>>>>>>>> synthesis.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> No one has figured out what these first self replicators were. We do
>>>>>>>>> not know what they could have been made from, but their replication was
>>>>>>>>> likely not perfect, and as they made more copies of themselves those
>>>>>>>>> self replicators would have been able to evolve. They probably were
>>>>>>>>> some type of macromolecule of some kind. Proteins have been the obvious
>>>>>>>>> choice, but glycosylation of proteins (adding sugars to the peptides) is
>>>>>>>>> something that still occurs today, so my guess is that they were some
>>>>>>>>> type of mix, so such a self replicator would have a peptidase to form
>>>>>>>>> peptide bonds and glycosylation activity to tack on carbohydrates. If
>>>>>>>>> it initially relied on a mineral surface for the initial enzymatic
>>>>>>>>> activity the initial products could have just made further reactions
>>>>>>>>> more frequent. They could have just stabilized the catalytic activity
>>>>>>>>> of the mineral surface. In catalyzing imperfect copies of themselves
>>>>>>>>> replacing the mineral surface would be selected for.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> No one has figured it out, yet, but RNA polymers would not need to come
>>>>>>>>> first. We know that they eventually came because we have the vestiges
>>>>>>>>> of the RNA world that still exists in lifeforms today.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> This is a key issue I think. An unspecified "replicating molecule" is just assumed. Case in point - that's what you've done. It's assumed because naturalism requires it. And if you have decided a priori that naturalism is the only allowable explanation, you not only must assume it, you will also resist challenges to it.
>>>>>>> False. Naturalism is not presented as the only allowable explanation,
>>>>>>> but the only pragmatically useful one. Supernaturalism has two problem.
>>>>>>> First, it has an perfect record of failure in the past. Second, it is
>>>>>>> worse than useless, since it does not point to anything else to look
>>>>>>> more closely at; it instead tells you to stop looking and hide your head
>>>>>>> in the sand.
>>>>>> How many times have we all been around the block on this fundamental question? A common position here is functionally ontological/metaphysical naturalism. No matter how wide the "gap" may become, non-natural explanations will not be considered. From "The Stairway To Life: An Origin-Of-Life Reality Check" (pp. 187-189):
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Objection: Your argument is a plea to the “God of the gaps.” Just because science doesn’t have all the answers doesn’t mean that we have to invoke God to fill the gaps.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Response: The entirety of this book seeks to provide a proper scope to the “gap.”
>>>>>
>>>>> Or, with other words, it makes no attempt at actually filling the gap - so it remains, by
>>>>> it's own words, a mere "of the gaps" argument, and therefore sterile and uninteresting
>>>>> when understood as a scientific theory, borerline blasphemous when read as a
>>>>> theological position.
>>>>>
>>>>>> The Stairway to Life clarifies that the gap is not simply a missing puzzle piece or a set of unclear details. The gap is, in fact, the entirety of the origin of life. And the gap is growing over time as we learn more about the complexity of cells and as efforts to produce components of life via realistic prebiotic approaches fail.
>>>>>
>>>>> That is pretty much what one would expect of any scientific progress, in any field. Research starts with the relatively low
>>>>> hanging fruits, while the "big picture' remains under-defined. As science progresses, a clearer picture of the complexities
>>>>> emerges, which will pose tougher and tougher challenges to address (and as a result more and more elaborate
>>>>> theories, often with more and more bootstrapping assumptions. And because there is at least a kernel of truth in
>>>>> "falsifiability" as an ingedient of scientific practice, of course we should expect also an increase in
>>>>> the number of theories that have failed - and a failed scientific theory is not worthless, it typically increases
>>>>> our knowledge and understanding even if it fails its ultimate objective.
>>>>>
>>>> To know what does not work, is a step closer to knowing what does work.
>>>> Or is it? After all conceivable theories have been tested and everything
>>>> is researched and no explanation is found, where then, or to what then
>>>> do we turn? Ool in question!
>>>
>>> "all conceivable theories" is the problem. If people could conceive of all possible theories, then every problem would be soluble.
>>>
>> But we might be barking up the wrong tree. Perhaps, there _is_ no
>> _natural_ explanation, again referring to Ool. Here I think philosophy
>> comes into play, which takes precdence over everything.
>
> I'm happy to wait and see. In the meanwhile "I don't know" is a perfectly good answer.
. I
I sincerely hope you live that long, with good health.
>>>
>>>>>> As we have mentioned, additional steps will be added to the Stairway to Life over time. These steps will come from previously unexplored processes that are required for life. For example, we mentioned in Chapter 17 that the current best approximation of a minimal cell that can reproduce autonomously includes 493 genes [201]. This same report specifies that 91 of the 493 genes perform unknown functions. Therefore, about 20% of the minimal genome codes for functions that we have not yet explored. Further, the genome is not the only information contained in life. We are just beginning to explore other forms of information found in living organisms, such as the sugar code that encapsulates cells [226]. Future exploration in these areas will result in new steps in the Stairway to Life and an ever-increasing “gap.” The emperor is not simply missing a lapel pin; the emperor has no clothes. Our conclusion that creative intelligence was essential to start life is based on what we do know, not on what we don’t know. The arguments in this book do not take the following form: “No one knows how life began; therefore, God did it.” Rather, the inference to the need for intelligence in the origin of life follows directly from what we do know about the requirements for life and what we do know about chemistry, physics, thermodynamics, and biology.
>>>>>
>>>>> That is still a mere gap argument, however much he stomps his foot on the ground and
>>>>> yells "it ain't so".
>>>>>
>>>>> It would stop being a gap argument only if he now started to fill the gap with testable claims
>>>>> about the designer that are at least as testable, and productive (in the sense of leading to new
>>>>> observations and insights) as those OOL theories that he rejects
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>> Turning this objection around, choosing to maintain a belief in abiogenesis despite the absence of a reasonable approach to the Stairway to Life is a “materialism-of-the-gaps” approach—i.e., “we don’t know how life began, but we know that only natural processes were involved.”
>>>>>
>>>>> Even if this were true and OOL had nothing more to say than this,
>>>>> , it would score at least as high as the "designer did it" inference.
>>>>> But with the crucial difference that of course, people do not
>>>>> stop at this level. Rather, they do form theories, and test them, which
>>>>> leads to new insights. All the hard work and experiments that he
>>>>> references, and on which his entire work is parasitic upon.
>>>>>
>>>>>>>> However, physics and chemistry present an awkward reality. A replicating molecule requires:
>>>>>>>> - a substantial amount of information
>>>>>>>> - replicate that with sufficiently high fidelity
>>>>>>>> - over many replications have a sustainable supply of sufficiently pure and concentrated substrate
>>>>>>>> - have energy and mechanical/thermal agitation maintained by its environment
>>>>>>>> - be resilient to interfering reactions
>>>>>>>> - preserve thermal chemical physical stability
>>>>>>>> - etc
>>>>>>> See my .sig.
>>>>>>>> Show me a demonstration of such a localised, entropy-reversing, sustained, information-increasing prebiotically plausible process.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Until then, it is hand waving and story telling. It is the scam.
>>>>>>> A scam is pointing at one thing and calling it something else.
>>>>>>> Scientific researchers on abiogenesis don't say they have the answer;
>>>>>>> they say (and show) that they have *possible* explanations for *part* of
>>>>>>> the answer.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Intelligent design proponents, on the other hand, say, first, that the
>>>>>>> scientists have nothing, and second, that magic is a likely (some say
>>>>>>> certain) alternative. Sure looks to me like the ID proponents are the
>>>>>>> scammers.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> And that's before you get into the theological issues, which ID
>>>>>>> proponents, for good (selfish) reasons, work studiously to avoid.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>> Mark Isaak
>>>>>>> "Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
>>>>>>> doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell
>>>>>
>>>
>

On Tuesday, December 26, 2023 at 6:12:20 PM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:
> broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Tuesday, December 26, 2023 at 1:27:20 PM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:
> >> broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> >>> On Monday, December 25, 2023 at 2:22:19 AM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:
> >>>> Burkhard wrote:
> >>>>> On Thursday, December 7, 2023 at 11:37:02 PM UTC+1, MarkE wrote:
> >>>>>> On Friday, December 8, 2023 at 3:17:02 AM UTC+11, Mark Isaak wrote:
> >>>>>>> On 12/6/23 2:57 PM, MarkE wrote:
> >>>>>>>> On Monday, December 4, 2023 at 12:01:58 PM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
> >>>>>>>>> On 12/3/2023 6:10 PM, MarkE wrote:
> >>>>>>>>>> On Monday, December 4, 2023 at 1:31:58 AM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
> >>>>>>>>>>> On 12/3/2023 6:55 AM, MarkE wrote:
> >>>>>>>>>>>> On Sunday, December 3, 2023 at 4:21:58 AM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
> >>>>>>>>>>>>> On 12/1/2023 10:50 PM, MarkE wrote:
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>> Here's a new LSS video primer on DNA repair and the error threshold problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQm8vmtM8CI (12:22)
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>> In relation to recent discussion of "junk DNA", this is another cost to maintaining junk DNA -- the energy and recourses needed for constant repair, though not sure how much this amounts to in practice.
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>> Incidentally, Wikipedia makes this statement about Eigen's paradox: "Eigen's paradox is one of the most intractable puzzles in the study of the origins of life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_threshold_(evolution)#Eigen's_paradox
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>> Manfred Eigen himself proposes hypercyles to overcome the error threshold problem:
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfOtzjdR_A0 (1:47)
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>> TRANSCRIPT:
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>> QUESTION: What was the necessity of your theory for hypercycles? There were experiments or facts which made it necessary that you make a theory which has got the name hypercycles?
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>> RESPONSE: As I said genotype/phenotype dichotomy. I said first of all a theory without this translation, and that would get stuck with the error threshold. In order to overcome the error threshold you have to make good proteins. But in order to make proteins you need more information. So you got stuck somehow. So you needed something to overcome this. And the other is the fact that once you do translation you have to test your translation products, your phenotypes, but you have to store your information in the genotype and you have to make sure that you don't lose that, because otherwise everything is gone. So there was a necessity to... and there could well have been a different model. For instance, one model which we later on found and combined with the hypercycle, was that you have to make compartmentation. In other words, you know that all life is not in homogeneous solution, it's always in cells or in organism and so forth. So you'd have to compartmentalise your system of nucleic acids and proteins, but you might immediately ask: isn't it sufficient to compartment them, why then a hypercycle, now you keep protein and nucleic acids together in your compartment? Well, if you only would put them into a compartment, the nucleic acids would start to compete with one another, so you must fit them into a reaction network and that has to be cyclic.
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>>>>> My take is that this isn't an issue. RNA gene replication was already
> >>>>>>>>>>>>> something that was consistently happening in the first RNA systems.
> >>>>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>>>> You're begging the question with the assertion that "RNA gene replication was already something that was consistently happening in the first RNA systems". The paradox disallows such assumptions:
> >>>>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>>>> "Without error correction enzymes, the maximum size of a replicating molecule is about 100 base pairs. For a replicating molecule to encode error correction enzymes, it must be substantially larger than 100 bases."
> >>>>>>>>>>> RNA replication likely evolved after there were simple self replicators,
> >>>>>>>>>>> and we have no pretty much no idea of what they were made of. Just look
> >>>>>>>>>>> at the literature, they are proposing that the first macromolecules were
> >>>>>>>>>>> using mineral surfaces to catalyze the reactions needed to put the
> >>>>>>>>>>> subunits together.
> >>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>> What "simple replicators"?
> >>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>> "RNA replication likely evolved after these". So you're saying that some unspecified non-RNA replicators were somehow replaced by RNA replicators?
> >>>>>>>>> RNA polymers are probably pretty unlikely to occur on their own, but
> >>>>>>>>> they do not have to have occurred on their own. The initial speculation
> >>>>>>>>> is that simple self replicators evolved. They may have required a
> >>>>>>>>> mineral surface or the speculation is a clay matrix to catalyze their
> >>>>>>>>> synthesis.
> >>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>> No one has figured out what these first self replicators were. We do
> >>>>>>>>> not know what they could have been made from, but their replication was
> >>>>>>>>> likely not perfect, and as they made more copies of themselves those
> >>>>>>>>> self replicators would have been able to evolve. They probably were
> >>>>>>>>> some type of macromolecule of some kind. Proteins have been the obvious
> >>>>>>>>> choice, but glycosylation of proteins (adding sugars to the peptides) is
> >>>>>>>>> something that still occurs today, so my guess is that they were some
> >>>>>>>>> type of mix, so such a self replicator would have a peptidase to form
> >>>>>>>>> peptide bonds and glycosylation activity to tack on carbohydrates. If
> >>>>>>>>> it initially relied on a mineral surface for the initial enzymatic
> >>>>>>>>> activity the initial products could have just made further reactions
> >>>>>>>>> more frequent. They could have just stabilized the catalytic activity
> >>>>>>>>> of the mineral surface. In catalyzing imperfect copies of themselves
> >>>>>>>>> replacing the mineral surface would be selected for.
> >>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>> No one has figured it out, yet, but RNA polymers would not need to come
> >>>>>>>>> first. We know that they eventually came because we have the vestiges
> >>>>>>>>> of the RNA world that still exists in lifeforms today.
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> This is a key issue I think. An unspecified "replicating molecule" is just assumed. Case in point - that's what you've done. It's assumed because naturalism requires it. And if you have decided a priori that naturalism is the only allowable explanation, you not only must assume it, you will also resist challenges to it.
> >>>>>>> False. Naturalism is not presented as the only allowable explanation,
> >>>>>>> but the only pragmatically useful one. Supernaturalism has two problem.
> >>>>>>> First, it has an perfect record of failure in the past. Second, it is
> >>>>>>> worse than useless, since it does not point to anything else to look
> >>>>>>> more closely at; it instead tells you to stop looking and hide your head
> >>>>>>> in the sand.
> >>>>>> How many times have we all been around the block on this fundamental question? A common position here is functionally ontological/metaphysical naturalism. No matter how wide the "gap" may become, non-natural explanations will not be considered. From "The Stairway To Life: An Origin-Of-Life Reality Check" (pp. 187-189):
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Objection: Your argument is a plea to the “God of the gaps..” Just because science doesn’t have all the answers doesn’t mean that we have to invoke God to fill the gaps.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Response: The entirety of this book seeks to provide a proper scope to the “gap.”
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Or, with other words, it makes no attempt at actually filling the gap - so it remains, by
> >>>>> it's own words, a mere "of the gaps" argument, and therefore sterile and uninteresting
> >>>>> when understood as a scientific theory, borerline blasphemous when read as a
> >>>>> theological position.
> >>>>>
> >>>>>> The Stairway to Life clarifies that the gap is not simply a missing puzzle piece or a set of unclear details. The gap is, in fact, the entirety of the origin of life. And the gap is growing over time as we learn more about the complexity of cells and as efforts to produce components of life via realistic prebiotic approaches fail.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> That is pretty much what one would expect of any scientific progress, in any field. Research starts with the relatively low
> >>>>> hanging fruits, while the "big picture' remains under-defined. As science progresses, a clearer picture of the complexities
> >>>>> emerges, which will pose tougher and tougher challenges to address (and as a result more and more elaborate
> >>>>> theories, often with more and more bootstrapping assumptions. And because there is at least a kernel of truth in
> >>>>> "falsifiability" as an ingedient of scientific practice, of course we should expect also an increase in
> >>>>> the number of theories that have failed - and a failed scientific theory is not worthless, it typically increases
> >>>>> our knowledge and understanding even if it fails its ultimate objective.
> >>>>>
> >>>> To know what does not work, is a step closer to knowing what does work.
> >>>> Or is it? After all conceivable theories have been tested and everything
> >>>> is researched and no explanation is found, where then, or to what then
> >>>> do we turn? Ool in question!
> >>>
> >>> "all conceivable theories" is the problem. If people could conceive of all possible theories, then every problem would be soluble.
> >>>
> >> But we might be barking up the wrong tree. Perhaps, there _is_ no
> >> _natural_ explanation, again referring to Ool. Here I think philosophy
> >> comes into play, which takes precdence over everything.
> >
> > I'm happy to wait and see. In the meanwhile "I don't know" is a perfectly good answer.
> . I
> I sincerely hope you live that long, with good health.

broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 26, 2023 at 6:12:20 PM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:
>> broger...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, December 26, 2023 at 1:27:20 PM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:
>>>> broger...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>>> On Monday, December 25, 2023 at 2:22:19 AM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:
>>>>>> Burkhard wrote:
>>>>>>> On Thursday, December 7, 2023 at 11:37:02 PM UTC+1, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>>>> On Friday, December 8, 2023 at 3:17:02 AM UTC+11, Mark Isaak wrote:
>>>>>>>>> On 12/6/23 2:57 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>>>>>> On Monday, December 4, 2023 at 12:01:58 PM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>> On 12/3/2023 6:10 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>> On Monday, December 4, 2023 at 1:31:58 AM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>>> On 12/3/2023 6:55 AM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> On Sunday, December 3, 2023 at 4:21:58 AM UTC+11, RonO wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> On 12/1/2023 10:50 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Here's a new LSS video primer on DNA repair and the error threshold problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQm8vmtM8CI (12:22)
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> In relation to recent discussion of "junk DNA", this is another cost to maintaining junk DNA -- the energy and recourses needed for constant repair, though not sure how much this amounts to in practice.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Incidentally, Wikipedia makes this statement about Eigen's paradox: "Eigen's paradox is one of the most intractable puzzles in the study of the origins of life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_threshold_(evolution)#Eigen's_paradox
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Manfred Eigen himself proposes hypercyles to overcome the error threshold problem:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfOtzjdR_A0 (1:47)
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> TRANSCRIPT:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> QUESTION: What was the necessity of your theory for hypercycles? There were experiments or facts which made it necessary that you make a theory which has got the name hypercycles?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> RESPONSE: As I said genotype/phenotype dichotomy. I said first of all a theory without this translation, and that would get stuck with the error threshold. In order to overcome the error threshold you have to make good proteins. But in order to make proteins you need more information. So you got stuck somehow. So you needed something to overcome this. And the other is the fact that once you do translation you have to test your translation products, your phenotypes, but you have to store your information in the genotype and you have to make sure that you don't lose that, because otherwise everything is gone. So there was a necessity to... and there could well have been a different model. For instance, one model which we later on found and combined with the hypercycle, was that you have to make compartmentation. In other words, you know that all life is not in homogeneous solution, it's always in cells or in organism and so forth. So you'd have to compartmentalise your system of nucleic acids and proteins, but you might immediately ask: isn't it sufficient to compartment them, why then a hypercycle, now you keep protein and nucleic acids together in your compartment? Well, if you only would put them into a compartment, the nucleic acids would start to compete with one another, so you must fit them into a reaction network and that has to be cyclic.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> My take is that this isn't an issue. RNA gene replication was already
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> something that was consistently happening in the first RNA systems.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> You're begging the question with the assertion that "RNA gene replication was already something that was consistently happening in the first RNA systems". The paradox disallows such assumptions:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> "Without error correction enzymes, the maximum size of a replicating molecule is about 100 base pairs. For a replicating molecule to encode error correction enzymes, it must be substantially larger than 100 bases."
>>>>>>>>>>>>> RNA replication likely evolved after there were simple self replicators,
>>>>>>>>>>>>> and we have no pretty much no idea of what they were made of. Just look
>>>>>>>>>>>>> at the literature, they are proposing that the first macromolecules were
>>>>>>>>>>>>> using mineral surfaces to catalyze the reactions needed to put the
>>>>>>>>>>>>> subunits together.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>> What "simple replicators"?
>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>> "RNA replication likely evolved after these". So you're saying that some unspecified non-RNA replicators were somehow replaced by RNA replicators?
>>>>>>>>>>> RNA polymers are probably pretty unlikely to occur on their own, but
>>>>>>>>>>> they do not have to have occurred on their own. The initial speculation
>>>>>>>>>>> is that simple self replicators evolved. They may have required a
>>>>>>>>>>> mineral surface or the speculation is a clay matrix to catalyze their
>>>>>>>>>>> synthesis.
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> No one has figured out what these first self replicators were. We do
>>>>>>>>>>> not know what they could have been made from, but their replication was
>>>>>>>>>>> likely not perfect, and as they made more copies of themselves those
>>>>>>>>>>> self replicators would have been able to evolve. They probably were
>>>>>>>>>>> some type of macromolecule of some kind. Proteins have been the obvious
>>>>>>>>>>> choice, but glycosylation of proteins (adding sugars to the peptides) is
>>>>>>>>>>> something that still occurs today, so my guess is that they were some
>>>>>>>>>>> type of mix, so such a self replicator would have a peptidase to form
>>>>>>>>>>> peptide bonds and glycosylation activity to tack on carbohydrates. If
>>>>>>>>>>> it initially relied on a mineral surface for the initial enzymatic
>>>>>>>>>>> activity the initial products could have just made further reactions
>>>>>>>>>>> more frequent. They could have just stabilized the catalytic activity
>>>>>>>>>>> of the mineral surface. In catalyzing imperfect copies of themselves
>>>>>>>>>>> replacing the mineral surface would be selected for.
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> No one has figured it out, yet, but RNA polymers would not need to come
>>>>>>>>>>> first. We know that they eventually came because we have the vestiges
>>>>>>>>>>> of the RNA world that still exists in lifeforms today.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> This is a key issue I think. An unspecified "replicating molecule" is just assumed. Case in point - that's what you've done. It's assumed because naturalism requires it. And if you have decided a priori that naturalism is the only allowable explanation, you not only must assume it, you will also resist challenges to it.
>>>>>>>>> False. Naturalism is not presented as the only allowable explanation,
>>>>>>>>> but the only pragmatically useful one. Supernaturalism has two problem.
>>>>>>>>> First, it has an perfect record of failure in the past. Second, it is
>>>>>>>>> worse than useless, since it does not point to anything else to look
>>>>>>>>> more closely at; it instead tells you to stop looking and hide your head
>>>>>>>>> in the sand.
>>>>>>>> How many times have we all been around the block on this fundamental question? A common position here is functionally ontological/metaphysical naturalism. No matter how wide the "gap" may become, non-natural explanations will not be considered. From "The Stairway To Life: An Origin-Of-Life Reality Check" (pp. 187-189):
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Objection: Your argument is a plea to the “God of the gaps.” Just because science doesn’t have all the answers doesn’t mean that we have to invoke God to fill the gaps.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Response: The entirety of this book seeks to provide a proper scope to the “gap.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Or, with other words, it makes no attempt at actually filling the gap - so it remains, by
>>>>>>> it's own words, a mere "of the gaps" argument, and therefore sterile and uninteresting
>>>>>>> when understood as a scientific theory, borerline blasphemous when read as a
>>>>>>> theological position.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> The Stairway to Life clarifies that the gap is not simply a missing puzzle piece or a set of unclear details. The gap is, in fact, the entirety of the origin of life. And the gap is growing over time as we learn more about the complexity of cells and as efforts to produce components of life via realistic prebiotic approaches fail.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> That is pretty much what one would expect of any scientific progress, in any field. Research starts with the relatively low
>>>>>>> hanging fruits, while the "big picture' remains under-defined. As science progresses, a clearer picture of the complexities
>>>>>>> emerges, which will pose tougher and tougher challenges to address (and as a result more and more elaborate
>>>>>>> theories, often with more and more bootstrapping assumptions. And because there is at least a kernel of truth in
>>>>>>> "falsifiability" as an ingedient of scientific practice, of course we should expect also an increase in
>>>>>>> the number of theories that have failed - and a failed scientific theory is not worthless, it typically increases
>>>>>>> our knowledge and understanding even if it fails its ultimate objective.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>> To know what does not work, is a step closer to knowing what does work.
>>>>>> Or is it? After all conceivable theories have been tested and everything
>>>>>> is researched and no explanation is found, where then, or to what then
>>>>>> do we turn? Ool in question!
>>>>>
>>>>> "all conceivable theories" is the problem. If people could conceive of all possible theories, then every problem would be soluble.
>>>>>
>>>> But we might be barking up the wrong tree. Perhaps, there _is_ no
>>>> _natural_ explanation, again referring to Ool. Here I think philosophy
>>>> comes into play, which takes precdence over everything.
>>>
>>> I'm happy to wait and see. In the meanwhile "I don't know" is a perfectly good answer.
>> . I
>> I sincerely hope you live that long, with good health.
>
> I suspect that whatever happens about OoL, when I die there will still be plenty of interesting, open scientific questions for which I would wish I could have been around to learn the answer.
>
Again, I wish for you a long happy life.
>>>>>
>>>>>>>> As we have mentioned, additional steps will be added to the Stairway to Life over time. These steps will come from previously unexplored processes that are required for life. For example, we mentioned in Chapter 17 that the current best approximation of a minimal cell that can reproduce autonomously includes 493 genes [201]. This same report specifies that 91 of the 493 genes perform unknown functions. Therefore, about 20% of the minimal genome codes for functions that we have not yet explored. Further, the genome is not the only information contained in life. We are just beginning to explore other forms of information found in living organisms, such as the sugar code that encapsulates cells [226]. Future exploration in these areas will result in new steps in the Stairway to Life and an ever-increasing “gap.” The emperor is not simply missing a lapel pin; the emperor has no clothes. Our conclusion that creative intelligence was essential to start life is based on what we do know, not on what we don’t know. The arguments in this book do not take the following form: “No one knows how life began; therefore, God did it.” Rather, the inference to the need for intelligence in the origin of life follows directly from what we do know about the requirements for life and what we do know about chemistry, physics, thermodynamics, and biology.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> That is still a mere gap argument, however much he stomps his foot on the ground and
>>>>>>> yells "it ain't so".
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> It would stop being a gap argument only if he now started to fill the gap with testable claims
>>>>>>> about the designer that are at least as testable, and productive (in the sense of leading to new
>>>>>>> observations and insights) as those OOL theories that he rejects
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Turning this objection around, choosing to maintain a belief in abiogenesis despite the absence of a reasonable approach to the Stairway to Life is a “materialism-of-the-gaps” approach—i.e., “we don’t know how life began, but we know that only natural processes were involved.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Even if this were true and OOL had nothing more to say than this,
>>>>>>> , it would score at least as high as the "designer did it" inference.
>>>>>>> But with the crucial difference that of course, people do not
>>>>>>> stop at this level. Rather, they do form theories, and test them, which
>>>>>>> leads to new insights. All the hard work and experiments that he
>>>>>>> references, and on which his entire work is parasitic upon.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> However, physics and chemistry present an awkward reality. A replicating molecule requires:
>>>>>>>>>> - a substantial amount of information
>>>>>>>>>> - replicate that with sufficiently high fidelity
>>>>>>>>>> - over many replications have a sustainable supply of sufficiently pure and concentrated substrate
>>>>>>>>>> - have energy and mechanical/thermal agitation maintained by its environment
>>>>>>>>>> - be resilient to interfering reactions
>>>>>>>>>> - preserve thermal chemical physical stability
>>>>>>>>>> - etc
>>>>>>>>> See my .sig.
>>>>>>>>>> Show me a demonstration of such a localised, entropy-reversing, sustained, information-increasing prebiotically plausible process.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> Until then, it is hand waving and story telling. It is the scam.
>>>>>>>>> A scam is pointing at one thing and calling it something else.
>>>>>>>>> Scientific researchers on abiogenesis don't say they have the answer;
>>>>>>>>> they say (and show) that they have *possible* explanations for *part* of
>>>>>>>>> the answer.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Intelligent design proponents, on the other hand, say, first, that the
>>>>>>>>> scientists have nothing, and second, that magic is a likely (some say
>>>>>>>>> certain) alternative. Sure looks to me like the ID proponents are the
>>>>>>>>> scammers.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> And that's before you get into the theological issues, which ID
>>>>>>>>> proponents, for good (selfish) reasons, work studiously to avoid.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>>>> Mark Isaak
>>>>>>>>> "Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
>>>>>>>>> doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell
>>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>
>

On Tue, 26 Dec 2023 13:12:53 -0800 (PST), "broger...@gmail.com"
<brogers31751@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Tuesday, December 26, 2023 at 4:07:20?AM UTC-5, Martin Harran wrote:
>> On Sun, 24 Dec 2023 04:10:26 -0800 (PST), MarkE <me22...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >On Saturday, December 23, 2023 at 4:42:16?AM UTC+11, Martin Harran wrote:
>> >> On Tue, 19 Dec 2023 20:49:17 -0800 (PST), MarkE <me22...@gmail.com>
>> >> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> [ snip for focus]
>> >> >Given that God has either option equally available, if we detect significant override of natural laws, we infer that God may be intentionally revealing himself.
>> >> >
>> >> >Either way, spacetime, the world and us are understood by many to be a revelation of God (within the limits of natural theology).
>> >> Mark, how do you get from God fiddling with molecules 3+ billion years
>> >> ago to a personal God with whom humans (apparently exclusively) can
>> >> interact?
>> >
>> >I don't. I get to that directly from the special revelation of the Word and Spirit of Christ.
>> Sorry Mark, but I find out answer not at all helpful. You seem to
>> believe in two different Gods.
>>
>> The first one is the God that you get from the special revelation of
>> the Word and Spirit of Christ; that is essentially the same God that I
>> believe in.
>>
>> The second one is a God you find through Intelligent Design, a God who
>> created molecules and then fiddled about with them to create life and,
>> over the last 3+ billion years, has gone on to intervene at sporadic
>> intervals to further tweak those molecules to modify existing life
>> forms or create new ones.
>>
>> I see absolutely no relationship between those two Gods and no
>> proponent of intelligent design has ever been able to explain one for
>> me.
> I don't think that he sees the God of Intelligent Design as being anything well defined or important in itself. He knows you need a leap of faith to get from an unspecified cause of the OoL to a Christian God; and he knows that you could make that same leap of faith, even if the OoL had a perfectly clear, empirically supported scientific explanation. The point of ID, for him, as far as I can tell, is simply the negative one. It takes science down a notch, so that if anyone out there is refusing to consider a revealed religion because they think science explains all that exists, well, then if you could definitively show that OoL could not have a naturalistic explanation, then you'd refute that objection and open the door to someone's being receptive to revealed religion.
>
>There may be people out there like that, who see no point to religion because they think science already explains whatever needs explaining. I don't know. I still think that, even for them, a much better evangelical approach is to sell them on the personality and message of Jesus, rather than to have them listen to James Tour shout about how random processes could never assemble a car and how everything turns to tar if left to its own devices. And I think that most people who reject Christianity do not reject it for scientific reasons anyway - theodicy, poor behavior of some religious leaders, politicization of religion, any number of reasons completely unrelated to science.

There are many things Ron Dean *should* know, because many people have
told him many things many times, only for him to either repeatedly
ignore them, repeatedly and falsely accuse them of attacking him
personally, or to repeatedly play the pity card. These are three
strategies common among those who have no positive line of reasoning
and/or evidence to support their opinions, and instead repeatedly
cycle through the same tired and tiresome PRATTs.

--
To know less than we don't know is the nature of most knowledge

On Tue, 26 Dec 2023 13:12:53 -0800 (PST), "broger...@gmail.com"
<brogers31751@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Tuesday, December 26, 2023 at 4:07:20?AM UTC-5, Martin Harran wrote:
>> On Sun, 24 Dec 2023 04:10:26 -0800 (PST), MarkE <me22...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >On Saturday, December 23, 2023 at 4:42:16?AM UTC+11, Martin Harran wrote:
>> >> On Tue, 19 Dec 2023 20:49:17 -0800 (PST), MarkE <me22...@gmail.com>
>> >> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> [ snip for focus]
>> >> >Given that God has either option equally available, if we detect significant override of natural laws, we infer that God may be intentionally revealing himself.
>> >> >
>> >> >Either way, spacetime, the world and us are understood by many to be a revelation of God (within the limits of natural theology).
>> >> Mark, how do you get from God fiddling with molecules 3+ billion years
>> >> ago to a personal God with whom humans (apparently exclusively) can
>> >> interact?
>> >
>> >I don't. I get to that directly from the special revelation of the Word and Spirit of Christ.
>> Sorry Mark, but I find out answer not at all helpful. You seem to
>> believe in two different Gods.
>>
>> The first one is the God that you get from the special revelation of
>> the Word and Spirit of Christ; that is essentially the same God that I
>> believe in.
>>
>> The second one is a God you find through Intelligent Design, a God who
>> created molecules and then fiddled about with them to create life and,
>> over the last 3+ billion years, has gone on to intervene at sporadic
>> intervals to further tweak those molecules to modify existing life
>> forms or create new ones.
>>
>> I see absolutely no relationship between those two Gods and no
>> proponent of intelligent design has ever been able to explain one for
>> me.
> I don't think that he sees the God of Intelligent Design as being anything well defined or important in itself. He knows you need a leap of faith to get from an unspecified cause of the OoL to a Christian God; and he knows that you could make that same leap of faith, even if the OoL had a perfectly clear, empirically supported scientific explanation. The point of ID, for him, as far as I can tell, is simply the negative one. It takes science down a notch, so that if anyone out there is refusing to consider a revealed religion because they think science explains all that exists, well, then if you could definitively show that OoL could not have a naturalistic explanation, then you'd refute that objection and open the door to someone's being receptive to revealed religion.
>
>There may be people out there like that, who see no point to religion because they think science already explains whatever needs explaining. I don't know. I still think that, even for them, a much better evangelical approach is to sell them on the personality and message of Jesus, rather than to have them listen to James Tour shout about how random processes could never assemble a car and how everything turns to tar if left to its own devices. And I think that most people who reject Christianity do not reject it for scientific reasons anyway - theodicy, poor behavior of some religious leaders, politicization of religion, any number of reasons completely unrelated to science.

I know lots of people who have walked away from Christianity. I can't
think of even one instance where science was a factor.

On Thu, 28 Dec 2023 13:31:45 +0000, Martin Harran
<martinharran@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Tue, 26 Dec 2023 13:12:53 -0800 (PST), "broger...@gmail.com"
><brogers31751@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>On Tuesday, December 26, 2023 at 4:07:20?AM UTC-5, Martin Harran wrote:
>>> On Sun, 24 Dec 2023 04:10:26 -0800 (PST), MarkE <me22...@gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>> >On Saturday, December 23, 2023 at 4:42:16?AM UTC+11, Martin Harran wrote:
>>> >> On Tue, 19 Dec 2023 20:49:17 -0800 (PST), MarkE <me22...@gmail.com>
>>> >> wrote:
>>> >>
>>> >> [ snip for focus]
>>> >> >Given that God has either option equally available, if we detect significant override of natural laws, we infer that God may be intentionally revealing himself.
>>> >> >
>>> >> >Either way, spacetime, the world and us are understood by many to be a revelation of God (within the limits of natural theology).
>>> >> Mark, how do you get from God fiddling with molecules 3+ billion years
>>> >> ago to a personal God with whom humans (apparently exclusively) can
>>> >> interact?
>>> >
>>> >I don't. I get to that directly from the special revelation of the Word and Spirit of Christ.
>>> Sorry Mark, but I find out answer not at all helpful. You seem to
>>> believe in two different Gods.
>>>
>>> The first one is the God that you get from the special revelation of
>>> the Word and Spirit of Christ; that is essentially the same God that I
>>> believe in.
>>>
>>> The second one is a God you find through Intelligent Design, a God who
>>> created molecules and then fiddled about with them to create life and,
>>> over the last 3+ billion years, has gone on to intervene at sporadic
>>> intervals to further tweak those molecules to modify existing life
>>> forms or create new ones.
>>>
>>> I see absolutely no relationship between those two Gods and no
>>> proponent of intelligent design has ever been able to explain one for
>>> me.
>> I don't think that he sees the God of Intelligent Design as being anything well defined or important in itself. He knows you need a leap of faith to get from an unspecified cause of the OoL to a Christian God; and he knows that you could make that same leap of faith, even if the OoL had a perfectly clear, empirically supported scientific explanation. The point of ID, for him, as far as I can tell, is simply the negative one. It takes science down a notch, so that if anyone out there is refusing to consider a revealed religion because they think science explains all that exists, well, then if you could definitively show that OoL could not have a naturalistic explanation, then you'd refute that objection and open the door to someone's being receptive to revealed religion.
>>
>>There may be people out there like that, who see no point to religion because they think science already explains whatever needs explaining. I don't know. I still think that, even for them, a much better evangelical approach is to sell them on the personality and message of Jesus, rather than to have them listen to James Tour shout about how random processes could never assemble a car and how everything turns to tar if left to its own devices. And I think that most people who reject Christianity do not reject it for scientific reasons anyway - theodicy, poor behavior of some religious leaders, politicization of religion, any number of reasons completely unrelated to science.
>
>I know lots of people who have walked away from Christianity. I can't
>think of even one instance where science was a factor.

There are dozens of Youtube authors who have publicly testified to
exactly that.

--
To know less than we don't know is the nature of most knowledge