So Where’s the Evidence…?
The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas
Carl Sagan
I read Isaac Asimov’s A Short History of Biology, and his Guide to Science and found no evidence that Life had ever been manufactured by man, which would have supported the Hypothesis of Materialism.
I read several other books, but still found no Evidence. In An Encyclopaedia of Evolution by Richard Milner, under the entry Life, Origin of it says: ‘Scientists cannot agree on a single formal definition of life’, which made me think ‘If you don’t know what you’re looking for, how could you know when you’ve found it, and how could you know how to go about synthesising it?’
§ Encyclopaedia Britannica also states that there is no generally accepted definition of life. Wikipedia says much the same thing.
A caution: there are many things associated with Life, like movement, metabolism, reproduction, reacting to stimuli, and so forth, but these do not describe the nature of Life itself, merely observed behaviours of things agreed to be living. Curiously, Mr Milner’s book does not have an entry on Materialism. Is it The Dogma That Does Not Speak Its Name? (If so.. Why? What is it afraid of?) Or is it just that ‘everybody knows’ that science and Materialism are inseparable? Say the one and say the other? Neither option bodes well for clarity.
***
The 1950’s was a time of scientific optimism. Jet aircraft, nuclear power (offering electricity ‘too cheap to meter’), new vaccines, better fertilisers and pesticides, amazing new plastics… science was on a roll. All that remained before Man could finally triumph over Nature was the simple task of assembling Life from its component atoms. Stanley Miller carried out experiments in 1952 which tried to synthesise a living molecule from what were thought to have been the raw materials available, millions of years ago. These famous ‘Primordial Soup’ experiments were symbolic of the optimism of the times. Nobody doubted that the job would be done.
§ Miller sealed samples of water, ammonia, hydrogen and methane inside a series of tubes and flasks. The water was warmed to encourage evaporation, and sparks mimicking lightning were fired into this ‘atmosphere’. Then the system was cooled down to allow condensation, and the process was repeated. After a week of continuous operation, Miller found that some 10% of the carbon within the system was now in the form of ‘organic compounds’.
But it wasn’t done. Miller, and all the others who followed him, performing many experiments in many institutions have never assembled Life or a living object, or a ‘replicating molecule’ (which would be an acceptable first step) from any sort of Primordial Soup. Despite revised ideas on what the primordial atmosphere might have been, and in what proportions chemicals might have been mixed, and what temperatures and lighting conditions might have been like, Life stubbornly refused to appear in the apparatus. They produced chemicals ‘associated with life’, and sometimes quite complicated chemicals, but no Life. Milner calls this episode ‘decades of persistent failure to ‘create life”.
Miller produced some ‘organic’ amino acids such as are found in proteins in living cells. Much confusion has arisen over these amino acids, not least because the word ‘organic’ actually has three confusable meanings. The everyday meaning has the connotation of ‘being alive’, as in ‘all life is organic…’. However, in chemistry, ‘organic’ simply means ‘the chemistry of carbon’ (often ‘..in conjunction with hydrogen’).
*A caution: synthesising a ‘chemically organic’ chemical as is often found in a living creature does not mean it must exclusively belong to a living creature (as you have just proved by synthesising it).
*Also, C12H22N2O2, or nylon, is chemically ‘organic’, but not biologically ‘organic’: ie, it is not considered to be alive and is not associated with Life at all.
*’Organic’ farming has a third and entirely different meaning, alas, being concerned with keeping soil biologically healthy.
§ The carbon in the compounds Miller produced came from the methane (CH4) included in the mix. Methane is a natural gas which, like coal and oil, is produced by the biological decomposition of ex-living entities. ‘Natural’ methane seems to be almost entirely the product of Life already existing (although volcanoes may produce some and one of the moons of Saturn apparently contains a lot of methane which seems to be abiotically formed: ie, not from a living creature). So the ‘newly organic’ amino acids Miller found were all but certainly derived from the already-organic methane he added to the mix.
And after all that, the Big Question is not so much ‘How did amino acids form?’, but ‘How did those same acids link up and twist and coil and supercoil to make specifically-shaped 3-d proteins, which in turn would need to interlock with other highly complex specifically-shaped 3-d proteins, each specific protein being made of hundreds or thousands of amino acids?’ Scientists have calculated that the odds on a modest protein of just 100 amino acids having self-assembled by random accident are 1 in 1085, or 10 followed by 85 zeroes. Try writing it out… One error in any element in the ‘random’ coiling and twisting and the system fails. But everything works…
Despite all this, The Dogma of Randomness persists…
After the Soup Hypothesis failed, other hypotheses arrived for how Life self-generated from non-life. Someone suggested it happened among layers of clay; others think that super-heated vents called ‘black smokers’, found in the ocean depths, might have provided suitable circumstances. There is no evidence to support these hypotheses, and of course, they both have the same problem that the Primordial Soup approach has: by what theoretical principle might Life ’emerge’ from non-life? How might Something spontaneously derive itself from Nothing?
This lack of evidence for ‘abiotic self-generation’ (or ‘abiogenesis’) confirmed my discovery that Materialism was irrational, in that if the theory was wrong there could not possibly be proper evidence to support it.
§ This YouTube talk is interesting. Listen to it very carefully. The overall impression presented is that Life derived itself from chemicals, but at no point does the presenter definitely claim it as fact. However, his talk is peppered with phrases like ‘points to’, ‘tends to show’, ‘could have’, ‘possible’, ‘plausibly’, ‘potentially’, etc. He is an honest man!… but everything he presents is intended to leave the impression that Life actually did assemble itself from abiotic Matter according to his Dogmatic expectation. Just look at the title! (10) How did life begin? Abiogenesis. Origin of life from nonliving matter. – YouTube
I suspect that most people, myself once included, have a vague feeling that Making Life had probably all been done and dusted long ago, and was no longer worthy of comment. My palaeontologist friend was so confident of this that he transmuted this vague background feeling into ‘fact’ when he claimed that ‘making life is easy’.
If you find it impossible to believe what I’m exploring here, then I do as I did, and check. You will find that there is plenty of hugely optimistic literature on the subject, assuring us that it’s only a matter of time, etc… but no evidence. The best you might find are claims that ‘It must have happened, because, well, here we are!’, ..which is an illogical argument on a par with my friend’s claim that whistling Send in the Clowns for three minutes every Tuesday is successfully keeping polar bears out of Wolverhampton.
You will find lots of experiments that have produced ‘interesting results’.. but nobody has ever synthesised Life from raw chemicals.
This caused me to wonder how so many of us have come to be misled in this matter.
§ Some Materialists claim that the Soup experiments have failed because the Laws of Nature must have changed during the aeons between the original accidental synthesis of Life from no-life, and today, when chemicals refuse to self-assemble into living things. Is there any evidence for this? Not that I know of. And I would also like to know by what Law might the other Laws be allowed to wander. And what force might have prompted such a change in the status quo?
Presumably the Laws must have wandered more than once, as a Big Bang without a Cause appears to break at least the first of the Laws of Thermodynamics.
And at the end of it all, we still have the problem of how non-intelligent non-life can spontaneously assemble itself into something more complex than itself, thus running head on against the Second Law of Thermodynamics which claims that entropy is universal. Each and every living organism consistently contradicts this Second Law.
(Entropy: the process whereby all complex systems eventually lose energy: eg, a hot drink becomes cold; a battery runs down…While living things resolutely complexify and grow.)
Materialism must be abandoned if science is to make further progress in its attempts to understand Life, Cosmology and (possibly…) the Point of it All.
I was conscious of now being in a state of shock in being forced to accept that science (with a small ‘s’) had adopted a philosophy as a Truth: and had thus done the one thing science should never do: it had adopted a dogma. Worse, this dogma was not debatable, but plain wrong; Science (with a large ‘S’) was barking up the wrong tree.
Let me say clearly: I am not anti-science. But I am against bad science, which includes adopting a duff dogmatic premiss.
Every scientist agrees that science should never have a dogma. As TH Huxley, ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, put it ‘Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed’. However, anyone hoping to pursue experiments in telepathy, or homeopathy, or anything else that goes against The Materialist Dogma, will find funding (and subsequent promotion) hard to come by, although I detect a slight change of late, as I have heard of two experiments into NDE’s (Near Death Experiences) perhaps following the success of Raymond Moody’s book Life After Life.
§ Why does it matter that Materialism is wrong? Immediately, it explains why (Materialist) Science has no interest in spooks because a definitely non-material entity is inconceivable and unacceptable to it; but there is much much more to it.**
If you are still with me, then the rest of the book should be of great interest. Reasonable resolution is possible!
You might be anxious that accepting Idealism will mean that the Theory of Evolution must be abandoned. Not necessarily, although you may wish to re-consider one (or maybe more) important associated element/s of it.**
In fact, I can think of no scientific Theory that is threatened by substituting Naked Idealism for the Emperor’s New Clothes of Materialism, and I can think of several Theories that would be immediately enhanced, by enabling previously ‘forbidden’ lines of enquiry, or other possible interpretations of data: bilateralism and cell differentiation in embryology; the origin of pattern in Nature; quantum multiverses and collapsing waves; hypnosis; psychosomatic illness; self-healing; the placebo effect. Also, abandoning Materialism does not mean returning to superstition, or unreasoned Creationism, or blind Fundamentalism, as many S/scientists fear. There is a rational, reasonable alternative to both the irrationality of Materialism and the obscurantism of The Church, as I hope to explain.
§ I understand how hard it might be for some people to abandon Materialism, especially if one’s livelihood and reputation hangs on defending a status quo. While researching for this book I asked a friend to find flaws in my logic if he could. After a brief exchange of emails, Charlie said that he could find no fault in my logic. ‘So!’ I said… ‘you must thus abandon Materialism in favour of its only logical alternative, which is some form of basic Idealism.’ ‘Well, yes…’ Charlie responded, ‘but I prefer to sit on the fence a bit longer.’ Many others feel the same way.
But there is no fence! It’s a clear either/or decision. Sitting on a non-existent fence, means sitting on an illusion. Could be painful..
This will all be too much of a shock to the mental habit of decades for many, but a few will face the decision and its implications, especially among the as-yet-undogmatised young. Materialism will go. Give it 50 years. Maybe 100.
One explanation of an unexpected point of logic will not do. It will be overlooked. And people frequently tend to read what they think is there, rather than what actually is there. Even two or three mentions may not do, as people are disinclined to change their minds about anything they think they are right about, especially when backed up by some sort of powerful establishment. And in the case of Materialism the establishment comprises Science, most of the media, and most of ‘educated society’: three super-heavyweights, each as nimble to the call for a fundamental change in direction as a supertanker in a canal.
Emerging from my state of shock, I found more questions queuing up:
*How had Science come to adopt a dogma?
*And such a duff one?
*And how could my palaeontologist friend assure me that ‘making life was easy’? He had passed through the rigours of a scientific degree. How had he come to make such a woefully wrong assertion?
In the 1920’s Oparin (a Russian) and Haldane (an Englishman), as men of their time, thought chemicals must have spontaneously self-assembled in the Primordial Soup, eventually producing Life. Oparin’s book, The Origin of Life is still a lively read although, as with all Materialist writing, you need to look out for the sudden ‘sleight of words’ in which ‘structure’ or ‘pattern’ or ‘complexity’ or ‘design’ suddenly ’emerge’ or appear from nowhere, without due Cause.
Oparin wrote an article in a 1970’s biology book I found in Carmarthen library. In it he said that as we’ve been trying unsuccessfully to synthesise life from chemicals for fifty years, maybe we should give up. But that hasn’t happened. Materialism still reigns, and Mr Dawkins and his colleagues are still convinced that their own astonishing Life created itself spontaneously from abiotic chemicals and energies, and nothing more. Assumptions were made about what the Primordial Soup may have been like, based upon the best information of the day. All that the researchers had to work on were optimistic guesses. Fair enough. But as the expected results failed to arrive, they must have fiddled the components a bit here, and tweaked a bit there, to encourage the process along. After all, they were not troubled by doubt. But despite all the help they could offer to the experiments, Life remained resolutely unsynthesised. The rabbit stubbornly refused to appear in the hat.
§ A Materialist Mind Experiment: ‘Which chemical precisely is it that knows how to read this book?’
The International Association for the Study of the Origins of Life (ISSOL) has been trying for over 50 years to find what Life is and where it came from, but with no success. It has widened its search into outer space, presumably as an admission that the origins of Life are unlikely to be found on Earth, the only place we know Life exists.
And a PS.. Even if Miller and co had succeeded in assembling a replicating molecule, the process would not have been representative of any process in blind materialistic Nature because of the enormous input of human Intelligence, Purpose and Will which set up the experiment in the first place, and then monitored and guided it, just as Professor Dawkins did with his ‘self-evolving’ biomorphs. ‘Mind’ and ‘Purpose’…
DNA is Served
We have found the secret of life!
Francis Crick
Nobel prize 1962 for discovery of the structure of DNA
I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken
Oliver Cromwell
You may be wondering why DNA has not yet made an appearance in this story. After all, isn’t it ‘the secret of life’, as many have called it? Well no, I’m afraid not. DNA is just a chemical, and chemicals are not alive, by definition. Nobody disputes this. Put a strand of DNA on a plate, and it just stays there until it dries up and blows away. Put piles of DNA on a billion plates for a billion years and it still just lies there. It’s just a chemical. Mix it with other chemicals or chop it about and you get mixed chemicals or chopped-about chemicals. No more.
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