From: Richard McGough (richard@biblewheel.com)
Date: Tue Jul 29 2003 - 11:13:51 EDT
Re post: http://www.calvin.edu/archive/asa/200307/0600.html
Josh wrote:
>Richard wrote: "Is there any reason whatsoever to believe that abiogenesis
>requires conditions that can not be met in the lab? I don't know of any. If
>you do, please share."
>
>How about a billion years time?
I acknowledged this possibility in the line immediately following the one you quoted. I quote:
---Quote--------
Is there any reason whatsoever to believe that abiogenesis requires conditions that can not be met in the lab? I don't know of any. If you do, please share.
One could argue that abiogenesis is very unlikely so we would not expect to happen in the lab, even under optimal conditions (if we knew what those are). But that's another argument ....
----End Quote-----
I was distinguishing between physical conditions like temperature, atmospheric composition, etc. and the question of time.
The real problem is that we don't know anything about abiogenesis, so we can only guess about why we don't see it in nature, the lab, or even in theory.
It seems like most folks think that abiogenesis is a natural phenomenon that just happens to be fairly rare. Thus, we just need to wait a really long time in the lab to see it.
The question then is this: Why is a long time needed? I see two immediate possibilities:
1) We need a lot of time because there are lots of pre-biotic processes that need to be completed, like the generation of amino acids and proteins.
2) We need a lot of time because the singular event that led to life was a randmon combination of the prebiotic molecules that just happened to spring into life.
Re #1: The scientist is free to start with any chemical soup desired, thus skipping whatever millions of years required for the natural generation of the molecules, (and adding many that would not be found in nature, thereby seemingly giving the scientist a great advantage over nature in the generation of abiogenesis.)
Re #2: I think we can successfully argue that the simplest *living* organism is too complex to have happened by a random combination of molecules. The only hope for abiogenesis seems to be some sort of self-organization through the operation of natural laws. Such natural laws would have a *rate* - therefore it is incumbant upon the proponent of the arguement to show that this rate is too slow to be observed in the lab. I know there are chemical processes that take millions of years, but should we really believe that such slow processes led to life, especially in light of the typical rate of the processes involved in life itself (e.g. respiration)?
In service of Christ our Biogenesis,
Richard Amiel McGough
Discover the sevenfold symmetric perfection of the Holy Bible at http://www.BibleWheel.com
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