[ExI] Chemical Origins of Life (was Re: Panbiogenesis)

[Kelly Anderson]

2012/2/3 Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com>:
> On 3 February 2012 11:53, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:
>> This is an extraordinary statement. It's the kind of stuff I read in
>> second rate Creationist literature. I expect better of this list.
>> Let's dive into the details for a bit. I've been studying this subject
>> fairly deeply for about the last two months, so this is pretty fresh.
>
> I can see that. Your stuff is pretty interesting.

Thanks. I've been reading and thinking a lot about it.

> There is also an additional angle.

There always is. :-)

> One thing is to deliberately synthesise, say, a protein, DNA or even a cell.
>
> Another thing is to re-create what is believed to be the appropriate
> environment and wait for things to happen.
>
> Now, such simulations could never be accurate, if anything for reasons of
> *scale* and *time*, even if we do everything else right. After Lavoisier, we
> know for sure that abiogenesis is not a frequent, everyday phenomenon in a
> vial containing the appropriate elements, and we have no reason to suppose
> that it ever was.

Yes. Absolutely.

> I was however impressed by Dawkins's Ancestor's Tale contention in that what
> is really hard is not to go from mineral to procaryotes, but from
> procaryotes to eukaryotes.

If you measure the times involved, then clearly Dawkins is correct.
>From chemicals to prokaryotes took somewhere between 100 and 150
million years.... and to get from prokaryotes to eukaryotes took from
400 to 900 million years (depending on who's dates you use). Plus, if
you believe in Kurzweil's law of accelerating returns, since there was
preexisting technology, it should have gone faster rather than slower,
further indicating that it was a much more complex transition.

On the other hand, it might have simply taken that long for the oxygen
levels to rise to the point that Eukaryotic life could be sustained...
(though it may be the case that there are anaerobic eukaryotes, but
I'm not aware of them). My point is, that there may have been other
reasons aside from complexity that account for the delay. I've heard
that it took a billion years+ for the stromatolites to terraform the
earth's atmophere...

-Kelly