6 ms·

No, because like in JCVI-syn1.0 "They didn’t build that cell completely from scratch. Instead, they started with cells from a very simple type of bacteria call

No, because like in JCVI-syn1.0 "They didn’t build that cell completely from scratch. Instead, they started with cells from a very simple type of bacteria called a mycoplasma. They destroyed the DNA in those cells and replaced it with DNA that was designed on a computer and synthesized in a lab. This was the first organism in the history of life on Earth to have an entirely synthetic genome." In another words, like in the previous attempt (in which i was equally amazed - at first - only to then became disappointed latter) THEY DID NOT CREATE LIFE!!! They picked up an already living organism and "reprogrammed it". Its like having a computer. They are learning to program, and remove all the unnecessary parts but they still don't have a clue on to build the hardware. The problem, it seems, is in transforming bare lifeless quimicals into something "alive". Creating life, it seems, is still something reserved only to God Himself! (and i suspect it's going to be like that for a loooong time, if we ever manage to accomplish it anyway)

camjohnson26 6y ago
Intelligent Design as a theory for life’s origins has received a lot of unfair criticism because people think it’s code for “young earth creationism”. It’s not though, it’s an observation that random natural processes are too slow at generating information to be responsible for life on earth. It’s the same deductive logic you would use if you found an artifact in the middle of the desert. Yes natural forces could have carved an image from the rock, but the more detailed the image the less likely it arose naturally. The fact that even now, no one has any idea of how to create the basic forms of life shows the astonishing amount of information that exists in even a simple cell. It’s time to reconsider intelligent design, even if the designer is an alien species or a programmer of a simulation. There’s too much information to spontaneously generate, and we have never seen life come from non life. The theory has been essentially banished from academia for political, not scientific, reasons, but Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer’s books, specifically Darwin’s Doubt and Signature of the Cell, lay out the case in detail.
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  It’s been banished from non religious parts of academia because it’s not falsifiable or testable, so it belongs in the theology department.
  - camjohnson26 6y ago
    It is testable, if a scientist creates life in a laboratory then intelligent design exists. It is falsifiable, you can compute the amount of information contained in biological structures, and compute whether known natural processes can create that amount of information on the timescale of the universe. If they can, intelligent design is falsified. Regardless, where the theory lives in the org chart is irrelevant to whether it is true or not, and it’s certainly no worse than all the other origin of life speculation.
    - whatshisface 6y ago
      >If they can, intelligent design is falsified. That's not true, demonstrating that process A could have resulted in the observed effect does not show that process B did not cause it.
      - camjohnson26 6y ago
        If that’s true every paper that references life’s origins needs to be retracted. If natural processes can be responsible for abiogenesis then intelligent design becomes much less likely, which is as close to falsifiable as you can get for a statement of history.
  - api 6y ago
    The larger metaphysical claims are not testable. Some of the narrower claims are, such as that self-replicating evolvable structures cannot arise naturally. This basically amounts to the claim that the complexity floor of life is too high for such a structure to arise naturally over terrestrial time spans. Obviously a demonstration of abiogenesis would invalidate that claim. This could also be challenged by computational models that are sufficiently physically plausible, or the discovery or creation of even simpler lifeforms that extend the lower complexity bound of life down to regions that challenge the argument. Of course another possibility is that this is our Fermi paradox answer: life is in fact so profoundly unlikely that its frequency of occurrence is e.g. less than once per billion years per galaxy!
- mssundaram 6y ago
  Sorry for your down votes. I'm grateful that you would share this perspective. As a Hindu, science and religion are not conflicting. I'm looking forward to reading those two books you cite - thank you for sharing!
- eloff 6y ago
  The theory is banished because there is no supporting evidence for it - compared to evolution which has an enormous amount of supporting evidence. That's science working at its best, and nothing political. I say this as someone who once believed as you do, that you've been fooled, perhaps like me, by not honestly examining the evidence for the other side with an open mind. May you also find enlightenment.
  - camjohnson26 6y ago
    Intelligent design is not incompatible with evolution, it deals with the origin of life not the process by which it adapts.
    - eloff 6y ago
      That's a very different intelligent design to what I've come across. I guess people had to try to salvage it somehow.
    - maverick74 6y ago
      Ok... Let's put a end to this! GOD CREATED LIFE! There it is! I said it! And I'm going to say even more: there is absolutely no scientific proof that shows otherwise. In fact the complexity points keeps pointing this way. It's just a question of keeping the mind open. :) Ok... You can now ban me for my comment!
      - ncmncm 6y ago
        Great! Now, how did your god evolve from non-divine material? Indeed, where can we find some divine material to experiment on?
        maverick74 6y ago
        Do I look like God? Go ahead pray a bit and maybe He'll answer you those questions!!! I surely don't know the answer, the same way scientists don't know how life was created in the first place. What everyone have is wild guesses and faith in those guesses. ;) As to the material: First we should try to find out where to look for...
- kens 6y ago
  You recommend Behe's book; I read his earlier book "Darwin's Black Box"a while back. I found it interesting, well-written, and superficially convincing but fundamentally flawed and ultimately a waste of time.
  - camjohnson26 6y ago
    Thanks for actually engaging the arguments, do you remember what you found fundamentally flawed?
    - kens 6y ago
      I read "Darwin's Black Box" over 20 years ago so I can't give a lot of details. His fundamental idea was "irreducible complexity", a system that won't work if you take away any piece, such as a mousetrap. He claimed that a lot of biological mechanisms were like this. The fundamental argument was that something irreducibly complex can't be formed by evolution because it won't work if is anything missing, so you can't evolve part way. E.g. a mousetrap that lacks the spring doesn't work at all. Therefore, evolution couldn't create the irreducibly complex mechanisms found in biology. QED. The big flaw that I see is that he looks at the problem of creating irreducibly complex mechanisms by addition, but they can easily be produced by subtraction. As an analogy, an arch is irreducibly complex because if you take out any stone, it collapses, so you can't build it one stone at a time. But you don't build an arch this way. Instead, a support is built and the stones are put on top of the support, one at a time. When you take the support away, now you have an irreducibly complex structure. Similarly with biology, something can evolve step by step with redundancy, and then pieces are removed by evolution, ending up with an irreducibly complex mechanism that Behe views as impossible. I should reiterate that I read the book decades ago so I'm probably wrong on the details of Behe's argument. I figured I should answer your question but I'm not particularly interested in having a debate on evolution.
      - camjohnson26 6y ago
        Me either just interested in other perspectives, thanks.
- yumraj 6y ago
  So if you say that alien scientists created life on Earth and is hence intelligent design, sure why not. Earth could be some alien civilization’s lab for all we know.. But then at some point those aliens, or the ones that created them, or the ones that ...... created them ..., must have been created spontaneously.
  - camjohnson26 6y ago
    Totally, it just moves the problem but potentially moves it to a larger search space. If you find a piece of marble isolated on top of a cliff it’s not cheating to deduce that it came from a larger group of similar rocks. You would calculate the probability that it was formed there, vs the probability it was formed somewhere else and moved there.
    - yumraj 6y ago
      I think there is a flaw in the logic. Life forms spontaneously. Just because this life evolves into higher beings who can also create above life in lab, the fundamental fact that life formed spontaneously is not affected in any way.
      - mensetmanusman 6y ago
        It moves the question as to why is the fine constant exactly what it is to support life. If it was off by a billionth of a percent, hydrogen wouldn’t form, etc. You are a cloud of atoms wondering about why the atoms exist.
        ncmncm 6y ago
        The fine-structure constant is only just known to that degree of precision. How far different it would have to be to interfere with known chemistry is much larger, maybe even a half-percent: that is, a half-billion times more than suggested. We don't know what else could form, instead, with a different value; maybe even a better basis for life than what we got.
        6y ago
- sdht0 6y ago
  I want to clarify the idea here. 1) We don't know how life originated on Earth. 2) We don't have a full idea of what happened during the Cambrian explosion. 3) We don't know how human consciousness manifests itself in the brain. 4) Evolution by random natural processes is not possible without deliberate nudges. Is the claim here that 1-3 is simply not possible without an intelligent entity intervening in the natural laws? If so, I'm personally fine with it. God (who is the most popular potential Intelligent Designer) has always been a God of the Gaps. In the future, I am pretty confident we'll figure out the explanations using just the physical laws of the universe. But if the claim also includes 4, then I think it can be discarded with a high confidence. We can already observe how evolution works at the virus and bacteria level. We have found the transitional fossils [0]. The science of evolutionary development biology [1] is already giving us great insights into how organisms translate the genetic code to build our complex bodies. It also shows how the same genes have been reused across species (e.g., the genes for eyes in the house fly and humans are the same). We don't need the Intelligent Design hypothesis to explain evolution. (EDIT: I see from another comment that you already agree to the above point.) The claim Intelligent Design supporters can make at best is that God created the first cells, perhaps nudged them a little during the Cambrian explosion, and perhaps again intervened before the evolution of Homo Sapiens. But all the rest happened the boring way, following the natural laws. > we have never seen life come from non life. Does not imply we never will. Given the countless other times this argument has been used to justify an Intelligent Creator when we didn't know something, I give very low credence to the idea that /this/ time is truly it. Unless someone can show mathematically why life cannot possibly emerge from the natural laws, naturalism remains the best hypothesis. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_fossil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_fossil [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_developmental_biology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_developmental_bio...
  - lurquer 6y ago
    Geology is killing evolutionary biology. The time-frame established by Geology for the age of the earth is fairly firm. Yet, our knowledge of the complexity of life keeps increasing. While we keep uncovering additional scales of complexity in biology, the time in which it was supposed to have randomly occurred remains constant. We ARE reaching the point (long past it, actually) where the mathematics demonstrate it is highly improbable that life as we know it today could have emerged from nothing in the limited timeframe imposed by the geologists. To a skeptic, the evolutionist sounds like this: “It would take my program about 10 minutes to run through 2^N combinations.” “How long if N was twice as large?” “Ten minutes.” “What if N is 100 times as large!” “Still ten minutes! If you don’t believe me, you’re anti-science.” “Maybe you’re anti-mathematics...” “Lalalalla... I can’t hear you... here’s a link to a Dawkins video.” “Yeah... whatever...”

camjohnson26 6y ago

Intelligent Design as a theory for life’s origins has received a lot of unfair criticism because people think it’s code for “young earth creationism”. It’s not though, it’s an observation that random natural processes are too slow at generating information to be responsible for life on earth. It’s the same deductive logic you would use if you found an artifact in the middle of the desert. Yes natural forces could have carved an image from the rock, but the more detailed the image the less likely it arose naturally. The fact that even now, no one has any idea of how to create the basic forms of life shows the astonishing amount of information that exists in even a simple cell. It’s time to reconsider intelligent design, even if the designer is an alien species or a programmer of a simulation. There’s too much information to spontaneously generate, and we have never seen life come from non life. The theory has been essentially banished from academia for political, not scientific, reasons, but Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer’s books, specifically Darwin’s Doubt and Signature of the Cell, lay out the case in detail.

selimthegrim 6y ago
It’s been banished from non religious parts of academia because it’s not falsifiable or testable, so it belongs in the theology department.
- camjohnson26 6y ago
  It is testable, if a scientist creates life in a laboratory then intelligent design exists. It is falsifiable, you can compute the amount of information contained in biological structures, and compute whether known natural processes can create that amount of information on the timescale of the universe. If they can, intelligent design is falsified. Regardless, where the theory lives in the org chart is irrelevant to whether it is true or not, and it’s certainly no worse than all the other origin of life speculation.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    >If they can, intelligent design is falsified. That's not true, demonstrating that process A could have resulted in the observed effect does not show that process B did not cause it.
    - camjohnson26 6y ago
      If that’s true every paper that references life’s origins needs to be retracted. If natural processes can be responsible for abiogenesis then intelligent design becomes much less likely, which is as close to falsifiable as you can get for a statement of history.
- api 6y ago
  The larger metaphysical claims are not testable. Some of the narrower claims are, such as that self-replicating evolvable structures cannot arise naturally. This basically amounts to the claim that the complexity floor of life is too high for such a structure to arise naturally over terrestrial time spans. Obviously a demonstration of abiogenesis would invalidate that claim. This could also be challenged by computational models that are sufficiently physically plausible, or the discovery or creation of even simpler lifeforms that extend the lower complexity bound of life down to regions that challenge the argument. Of course another possibility is that this is our Fermi paradox answer: life is in fact so profoundly unlikely that its frequency of occurrence is e.g. less than once per billion years per galaxy!
mssundaram 6y ago
Sorry for your down votes. I'm grateful that you would share this perspective. As a Hindu, science and religion are not conflicting. I'm looking forward to reading those two books you cite - thank you for sharing!
eloff 6y ago
The theory is banished because there is no supporting evidence for it - compared to evolution which has an enormous amount of supporting evidence. That's science working at its best, and nothing political. I say this as someone who once believed as you do, that you've been fooled, perhaps like me, by not honestly examining the evidence for the other side with an open mind. May you also find enlightenment.
- camjohnson26 6y ago
  Intelligent design is not incompatible with evolution, it deals with the origin of life not the process by which it adapts.
  - eloff 6y ago
    That's a very different intelligent design to what I've come across. I guess people had to try to salvage it somehow.
  - maverick74 6y ago
    Ok... Let's put a end to this! GOD CREATED LIFE! There it is! I said it! And I'm going to say even more: there is absolutely no scientific proof that shows otherwise. In fact the complexity points keeps pointing this way. It's just a question of keeping the mind open. :) Ok... You can now ban me for my comment!
    - ncmncm 6y ago
      Great! Now, how did your god evolve from non-divine material? Indeed, where can we find some divine material to experiment on?
      - maverick74 6y ago
        Do I look like God? Go ahead pray a bit and maybe He'll answer you those questions!!! I surely don't know the answer, the same way scientists don't know how life was created in the first place. What everyone have is wild guesses and faith in those guesses. ;) As to the material: First we should try to find out where to look for...
kens 6y ago
You recommend Behe's book; I read his earlier book "Darwin's Black Box"a while back. I found it interesting, well-written, and superficially convincing but fundamentally flawed and ultimately a waste of time.
- camjohnson26 6y ago
  Thanks for actually engaging the arguments, do you remember what you found fundamentally flawed?
  - kens 6y ago
    I read "Darwin's Black Box" over 20 years ago so I can't give a lot of details. His fundamental idea was "irreducible complexity", a system that won't work if you take away any piece, such as a mousetrap. He claimed that a lot of biological mechanisms were like this. The fundamental argument was that something irreducibly complex can't be formed by evolution because it won't work if is anything missing, so you can't evolve part way. E.g. a mousetrap that lacks the spring doesn't work at all. Therefore, evolution couldn't create the irreducibly complex mechanisms found in biology. QED. The big flaw that I see is that he looks at the problem of creating irreducibly complex mechanisms by addition, but they can easily be produced by subtraction. As an analogy, an arch is irreducibly complex because if you take out any stone, it collapses, so you can't build it one stone at a time. But you don't build an arch this way. Instead, a support is built and the stones are put on top of the support, one at a time. When you take the support away, now you have an irreducibly complex structure. Similarly with biology, something can evolve step by step with redundancy, and then pieces are removed by evolution, ending up with an irreducibly complex mechanism that Behe views as impossible. I should reiterate that I read the book decades ago so I'm probably wrong on the details of Behe's argument. I figured I should answer your question but I'm not particularly interested in having a debate on evolution.
    - camjohnson26 6y ago
      Me either just interested in other perspectives, thanks.
yumraj 6y ago
So if you say that alien scientists created life on Earth and is hence intelligent design, sure why not. Earth could be some alien civilization’s lab for all we know.. But then at some point those aliens, or the ones that created them, or the ones that ...... created them ..., must have been created spontaneously.
- camjohnson26 6y ago
  Totally, it just moves the problem but potentially moves it to a larger search space. If you find a piece of marble isolated on top of a cliff it’s not cheating to deduce that it came from a larger group of similar rocks. You would calculate the probability that it was formed there, vs the probability it was formed somewhere else and moved there.
  - yumraj 6y ago
    I think there is a flaw in the logic. Life forms spontaneously. Just because this life evolves into higher beings who can also create above life in lab, the fundamental fact that life formed spontaneously is not affected in any way.
    - mensetmanusman 6y ago
      It moves the question as to why is the fine constant exactly what it is to support life. If it was off by a billionth of a percent, hydrogen wouldn’t form, etc. You are a cloud of atoms wondering about why the atoms exist.
      - ncmncm 6y ago
        The fine-structure constant is only just known to that degree of precision. How far different it would have to be to interfere with known chemistry is much larger, maybe even a half-percent: that is, a half-billion times more than suggested. We don't know what else could form, instead, with a different value; maybe even a better basis for life than what we got.
      - 6y ago
sdht0 6y ago
I want to clarify the idea here. 1) We don't know how life originated on Earth. 2) We don't have a full idea of what happened during the Cambrian explosion. 3) We don't know how human consciousness manifests itself in the brain. 4) Evolution by random natural processes is not possible without deliberate nudges. Is the claim here that 1-3 is simply not possible without an intelligent entity intervening in the natural laws? If so, I'm personally fine with it. God (who is the most popular potential Intelligent Designer) has always been a God of the Gaps. In the future, I am pretty confident we'll figure out the explanations using just the physical laws of the universe. But if the claim also includes 4, then I think it can be discarded with a high confidence. We can already observe how evolution works at the virus and bacteria level. We have found the transitional fossils [0]. The science of evolutionary development biology [1] is already giving us great insights into how organisms translate the genetic code to build our complex bodies. It also shows how the same genes have been reused across species (e.g., the genes for eyes in the house fly and humans are the same). We don't need the Intelligent Design hypothesis to explain evolution. (EDIT: I see from another comment that you already agree to the above point.) The claim Intelligent Design supporters can make at best is that God created the first cells, perhaps nudged them a little during the Cambrian explosion, and perhaps again intervened before the evolution of Homo Sapiens. But all the rest happened the boring way, following the natural laws. > we have never seen life come from non life. Does not imply we never will. Given the countless other times this argument has been used to justify an Intelligent Creator when we didn't know something, I give very low credence to the idea that /this/ time is truly it. Unless someone can show mathematically why life cannot possibly emerge from the natural laws, naturalism remains the best hypothesis. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_fossil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_fossil [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_developmental_biology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_developmental_bio...
- lurquer 6y ago
  Geology is killing evolutionary biology. The time-frame established by Geology for the age of the earth is fairly firm. Yet, our knowledge of the complexity of life keeps increasing. While we keep uncovering additional scales of complexity in biology, the time in which it was supposed to have randomly occurred remains constant. We ARE reaching the point (long past it, actually) where the mathematics demonstrate it is highly improbable that life as we know it today could have emerged from nothing in the limited timeframe imposed by the geologists. To a skeptic, the evolutionist sounds like this: “It would take my program about 10 minutes to run through 2^N combinations.” “How long if N was twice as large?” “Ten minutes.” “What if N is 100 times as large!” “Still ten minutes! If you don’t believe me, you’re anti-science.” “Maybe you’re anti-mathematics...” “Lalalalla... I can’t hear you... here’s a link to a Dawkins video.” “Yeah... whatever...”