Scientists Keep Speaking Unrealistically About Life's Origin

The concept of abiogenesis is the idea that life can naturally arise from non-life. This is a concept that has zero basis in observational science or theoretical science. No one has ever done an experiment supporting the idea that life can naturally arise from non-life. There is no truth in claims such as claims that experiments such as the Miller-Urey experiment did anything to support claims about abiogenesis.  In multiple ways the Miller-Urey experiment failed to realistically simulate early Earth conditions; and the outputs of the Miller-Urey experiment (mere amino acids) were no more a living thing than a handful of nuts and bolts is a working digital computer. As described in my recent post "When Hi-Tech Manufacturing Is Passed Off as Evolution," some of the results that are being passed off these days as being supportive of the concept of abiogenesis are cases in which hi-tech manufacturing results are being passed off as examples of evolution, which is an example of extremely misleading speech.

Our scientists sometimes make wildly unrealistic statements on this topic.  An example can be found on the page here. An astronomer named Steven Vogt speaks about a planet called Gliese 581g, a possibly nonexistent extrasolar planet that may be in the "Goldilocks zone" around its star, neither too far from it nor too close to it. No one has even discovered either liquid water on this planet or oxygen in its atmosphere. We are not even sure that the planet exists, because the Wikipedia.org article on the planet states the following:

"Gliese 581g...unofficially known as Zarmina (or Zarmina's World), is an unconfirmed (and frequently disputed) exoplanet claimed to orbit within the Gliese 581 system, twenty light-years from Earth. It was discovered by the Lick–Carnegie Exoplanet Survey, and is the sixth planet orbiting the star; however, its existence could not be confirmed by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) / High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) survey team, and its existence remains controversial. It is thought to be near the middle of the habitable zone of its star. That means it could sustain liquid water—a necessity for all known life—on its surface, if there are favorable atmospheric conditions on the planet." 

Even though the very existence of this planet is uncertain (as indicated by the statements above), Steven Vogt is quoted as saying that he is 100% sure that the planet contains life.  Below (from an article on www.space.com) is a quote that reveals a whole lot of wishful thinking going on:

" 'Personally,given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say, my own personal feeling is that the chances of life on this planet are 100 percent,' said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, during a press briefing today. 'I have almost no doubt about it.'

His colleague, Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, in Washington, D.C., wasn't willing to put a number on the odds of life, though he admitted he's optimistic.

'It's both an incremental and monumental discovery,' Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told SPACE.com. Incremental because the method used to find Gliese 581g already has found several planets most of the known planets, both super-Earths, more massive than our own world outside their stars' habitable zone, along with non-Earth-like planets within the habitable zone.

'It really is monumental if you accept this as the first Earth-like planet ever found in the star's habitable zone,' said Seager, who was not directly involved in the discovery."

Vogt's statement was not one with any sound scientific basis. It is a statement based on his own personal preferences, as he reveals by confessing that he is speaking based on "my own personal feeling." The rationale given for the opinion makes no sense. It is not true that life is ubiquitous; it does not exist everywhere. No life exists on the moon. As best we can determine, there is no life on Venus. A recent article suggests that claims of a phosphine signal of life on Venus was just a false alarm. A poll of planetary scientists revealed that only a quarter of them think that life could exist now on Mars.  The propensity of life to flourish wherever it can is a different thing from the likelihood of life naturally arising, and the two things should not be confused. 

As for Seager's language, it was the type of speech that gives you the wrong idea. A planet on which life has not been discovered is referred to as an "Earth-like planet." No planet should ever be called Earth-like until the existence of life has been confirmed on that planet. 

There is the strongest reason why it is utterly unrealistic to estimate a 100% probability of life accidentally originating on some planet on which life has never been detected. The reason is that even the simplest microbial life involves a state of organization so vast that we should never expect it to be arising accidentally, even given trillions of planets of just the right type existing at just the right distance from a sun-like star. 

Natural selection does not fix the impossible odds prohibiting the natural origin of hundreds of genes and protein types needed at the very beginning, at the origin of life, before Darwinian evolution has started. A team of 9 scientists wrote a scientific paper entitled, “Essential genes of a minimal bacterium.” It analyzed a type of bacteria (Mycoplasma genitalium) that has “the smallest genome of any organism that can be grown in pure culture.” According to wikipedia's article, this bacteria has 525 genes consisting of 580,070 base pairs. The paper concluded that 382 of this bacteria's protein-coding genes (72 percent) are essential. Life can't get started until there arises in one tiny spot a vast amount of functional information, about as much functional information as in a 300-page technical manual.  We would never expect so much information to arise accidentally, even giving trillions of years and trillions of planets on which accidental chemical combinations can occur. 

Experiments have provided no support for claims such as Vogt's. In experiments realistically simulating early Earth conditions, there has never even arisen a single functional protein molecule. But many types of such very complex molecules would need to arise simultaneously for life to arise from non-life. Experiments realistically simulating early Earth conditions will produce neither the building blocks of one-celled life (protein molecules) nor the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life (amino acids and nucleotide base pairs). 

So why do people such as Vogt make claims such as he made? Probably what is going on is mainly ideology and psychology.  Faced with an unpleasant improbability, the human mind is prone to assert a 100% likelihood, rather than admit an improbability such a mind would prefer not to recognize.  Asserting such a 100% likelihood is a great way of kind of mentally squashing some possibility you don't want to recognize.  So, for example, on your wedding day you may tell yourself that there's a 100% likelihood that your spouse will always be faithful to you, rather than realistically conceding some small chance that some day your spouse might be unfaithful. 

Were scientists to realistically calculate the chance of life arising from non-life, they would have to say that such an origination would require some miracle of luck on the same order of someone throwing a deck of cards into the air and having them all form into a house of cards.  But many a scientist prefers not to recognize fortune so improbable in the past. The easiest way to cover-up such miracles of chance is to claim that they are inevitable. But that's as foolish as someone claiming that if you keep throwing decks of cards into the air, one day your toss will luckily form into a house of cards. When scientists such as Vogt say that they are 100% sure that a planet has life when we are not even sure that such a planet exists, that is a very good sign that what is going on is psychology, wishful thinking and ideology rather than realistic mathematical calculation. 

Quanta Magazine has a recent interview with origin-of-life researchers. We have more unrealistic talk and a conspicuous lack of straight talk. Jack Szostak says, "We used to think that life definitely started with just RNA, because we were thinking about ribozymes, RNA catalysts, RNA’s roles in modern cells." Then Szostak paints a portrait of the origin of life that senselessly leaves out the key ingredients of protein molecules. He states this:

"Okay, so, so I think we have to think about some environment on the surface of the Earth, some kind of shallow lake or pond where the building blocks of RNA were made and accumulated, along with lipids and other molecules relevant to biology. And then they self-assembled into lipid vesicles encapsulating RNA, under conditions where the RNA could start to replicate driven by energy from the sun. And that would allow Darwinian evolution to get started. So that the, some RNA sequences that did something useful for the protocell that they’re in would confer an advantage, those protocells would start to take over the population. And then you’re off and running, and life can gradually get more complex and evolve to spread to different environments, until you end up with what we see around us today." 

The idea that life can get started with just RNA and fatty bubbles (only a few of the many types of very complex molecules needed for even the simplest living thing) is utterly unrealistic silly talk, as goofy as saying that you can get a car by having only a steering wheel and an axle. The only reason scientists make these kind of goofy  statements is that they have no realistic explanations for how a living thing with all of its minimal requirements could have arisen from non-life. The long discussion in the interview includes no realistic talk of the difficulty of explaining the origin of very complex protein molecules, which is the principle difficulty of explaining the origin of life from non-life. It's kind of like if someone was discussing the accidental origin of automobiles, and forgot to mention the little difficulty of explaining the accidental origin of an engine. The discussion has some "bubble baby talk" in which someone tries to convince us that the ease of some fatty bubble splitting into two has some relevance to a cell dividing into two (it does not). 

Why is it that the quotation above does not mention protein molecules? Because explaining the origin of protein molecules is too hard for origin-of-life researchers. There is no factual basis to claims that you can get "off and running" with only RNA and some fatty molecules, and no self-reproducing cells packed with protein molecules. Such a thing has never been observed. No one has ever observed mere RNA and some fatty molecules evolve into a living thing. What we have here is more requirements underestimation, the perennial sin of theoretical scientists.  

A scientific paper has this to say about the RNA World theory promoted by Szostak:

"The 'RNA World' hypothesis suffers from a number of insurmountable problems of chemical and informational nature. The biggest of them are: (a) unreliability of the synthesis of starting components; (b) catastrophically increasing instability of the polynucleotide molecules as they elongate; (c) exceedingly low probability of meaningful sequences; (d) lack of the mechanism that would generate membrane-bound vesicles able to divide regularly and permeable to the nitrogenous bases and other RNA components; (e) absence of driving forces for the transition from the 'RNA world' to the much more complex 'DNA-RNA world'. Therefore, the 'RNA World' scenario is highly improbable."

The Quanta Magazine article includes an interview with a researcher named Betül Kaçar, who makes the extremely untrue and utterly preposterous claim that "life’s origins and early evolution created the blueprints for everything complex around us." To the contrary, there existed no blueprint for human anatomy or human cells in the first hundreds of millions of years of biological evolution.  There is still no known blueprint for human anatomy or human cells in any DNA molecule or cell. Contrary to the frequent misleading claims and insinuations of biologists, DNA only specifies low-level chemical information, not high-level anatomical information.  How the enormously complex hierarchical organization of human anatomy arises from the growth of a speck-sized ovum that does not specify such complexity is a wonder of origination utterly beyond the explanation of today's scientists.  

They don't claim flying horses -- just stuff more unbelievable

In related news, there was a recent story of Chinese radio astronomers reporting candidate signals from extraterrrestrial civilizations, but then retracting their claims.  This was very probably a case of picking up signals from earthly sources. The original report stated this (I've used Google Translate to get a translation):

"After launching the search for extraterrestrial civilizations, the 'China Sky Eye' has made important progress. A few days ago, Professor Zhang Tongjie, chief scientist of the China Extraterrestrial Civilization Research Group of the Department of Astronomy and Extraterrestrial Civilization Research Group of Beijing Normal University, revealed that his team used the 'Chinese Sky Eye' to discover several cases of possible technological traces and extraterrestrial civilizations from outside the earth...Zhang Tongjie said that these are several narrow-band electromagnetic signals different from the past, and the team is currently working on further investigation. 'The search for 'China Sky Eye' is a long one, and we have been working hard.'"

Since the history of SETI has been a history of false alarms, it is hard to get too excited about such a report. As a salon.com story makes clear, this is probably just another example of SETI researchers picking up unidentified earthly signals.