559 thoughts on ““We can know nothing about the origin of life””

1. I should confess that the reason I’m still here is to try to get insights into how deeply the new atheist desire to turn science into an ideological tool goes.

   “Atheists are turning science into a religion? Raging Bee

   So, which is it Raging Bee, you don’t know how to read or you don’t know how quotes are used? You are amazingly consistent in your inaccuracy and hair trigger nuttery. I think you should go see your shaman and get help.

   DuWayne, Stephanie, I’ve learned all I need to from this discussion. BKS, good luck. Greg Laden, I will be writing something about this later this month.

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2. No fair there Anthony, taking your deformed little ball and going home, before dazzling me with your insights into my psyche. I have waited oh so patiently for you to point to the evidence that I am a credulous, illogical, ideological materialist. Frankly, I’ve kind of been hoping you would also satiate Stephanie’s interest in learning what the fuck “ideological materialist” even means.

   I can only conclude that you’re just another fucking tease…Asshole.

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3. Wow me with your logical erudition. Points will be taken off for the incorrect use of “Occam’s razor”, “straw man”, “cherry picking”, “quote mining” or any other common dodges of new atheist discourse.

   This is actually my favorite comment of the week, though I’d re-write it slightly:

   “ow me with your logical erudition. Points will be taken off for the incorrect use of “Occam’s razor”, “ad hominem”, “straw man”, “cherry picking”, “quote mining” or any other common dodges of the so called skeptical movement’s discourse.”

   … and one might question the exact usage inre commas and quotation marks but that’s a British vs. US English thing.

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4. Greg Laden, I just got a message telling me you had suddenly reentered the discussion, after I’d given up on getting you to answer those two questions at 202. To refresh your memory:

   Greg Laden, I can’t find that you’ve answered my questions about what you are asserting. Would you answer them now?

   1. When you talk about “the origin of life” do you mean the actual event that happened in the way it did and only in the way that it did, resulting in exactly the organism that it did result in, or do you mean something else.

   2. Do you also agree that if you are not talking about that, specific, event you are not talking about something that really happened but something that didn’t happen?

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5. 1. When you talk about “the origin of life” do you mean the actual event that happened in the way it did and only in the way that it did, resulting in exactly the organism that it did result in, or do you mean something else.

   What do you mean by “the organism”?

   Do you also agree that if you are not talking about that, specific, event you are not talking about something that really happened but something that didn’t happen?

   I do not understand that question, but it seems to be predicated on an assumption you are making about my answer to the first question. But, I can’t address your first question as it is (see above).

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6. Certainly the origin of life resulted in an organism. What was alive if there wasn’t an organism? What reproduced if there wasn’t an organism at the end of “the origin of life”?

   You don’t understand the second question? Are you talking about the actual origin of life if what you are talking about isn’t a description of how it actually happened? If your conception of the origin of life completely misses the way that event happened, aren’t you, in fact, talking about something that didn’t really happen and so isn’t real?

   For example, if you talk about the universe, the Earth, life etc, happening in six days, if you talk about the origin of life in that scenario you aren’t talking about what actually happened so you are talking about something that isn’t real. And if another scenario is greatly different from the actual way that life originated, you are also not describing something that happened and so isn’t real.

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7. My response to Anthony’s questions, just to further highlight his dishonesty…

   1. When you talk about “the origin of life” do you mean the actual event that happened in the way it did and only in the way that it did, resulting in exactly the organism that it did result in, or do you mean something else.

   We’ve already gone over this at least twice before, and you’re still pretending we don’t get it. We don’t have to establish a single specific instant for the creation of the first life form, any more than we have to specify exactly when and where the first T-Rex hatched, or the first Asian stepped onto Alaskan soil from the land-bridge. The progression of our understanding will, as in the other examples I cited, lead us to a range of time, places, and conditions under which the first living cells are most likely to have been formed; just as our understanding of dinosaurs leads us to a range of times, regions and conditions in which certain reptile species began to evolve dinosaur-like traits. In neither case do we have to pin down a single first-ever-creature event before we can rightly claim to have increased our understanding of the subject-matter.

   We can achieve great understanding of the origin of dinosaurs without having to specify exactly when and where the first dinosaur EVER was hatched. We can understand the first migration of people from Asia to the Americas without having to give the name of the first Asian ever to walk onto Alaskan soil*. And, by the same token, we can understand a lot about the origin of life on Earth without having to pin down EXACTLY when and where the very first living cell was formed.

   We may actually be able to pin down exactly when and where the first life-form was formed, or we may not; but no honest person actually believes that’s necessary to be able to claim increased understanding of the origin of life.

   2. Do you also agree that if you are not talking about that, specific, event you are not talking about something that really happened but something that didn’t happen?

   No, we’re talking about narrowing down the range of possible scenarios for the origin of life. Again, we’ve belabored this point for your benefit already, and you refused to listen. Your question looks like it was deliberately worded to exclude the answer that didn’t fit your script. And again, I’ve seen behavior like this from dishonest religious zealots.

   _____________________
   * It was Bob.

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8. Greg Laden, certainly those points didn’t stump you, did they? I thought you might be avoiding answering them but I never would have suspected you would avoid dealing with the events of the origin of life and the organism that resulted from that process as if those were not, actually, what the origin of life consisted of. What was it if it wasn’t that? Something that didn’t happen in a specific way that resulted in an actual, specific organism? If that’s so then nothing anyone says about the origin of life has a tether in reality but is like those imaginary universes discussed above. That’s not biology, it’s metaphysics.

   Bee, I’m not bothering with you anymore because you are clearly somewhere in the meaner parts of Nephelokokkygia.

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9. @292 Now they’re a bunch of necromancer coccyx blockers and anti-shemitic thorny crown of data conflators??

   Wow, you just don’t quit do you? Then they are a caballo full of chestnuts, then they are a troop of groupers, what next??

   And who said life had only one main organism? Imagine an explosion of proteins and other muck that resulted in simultaneous organisms that were separate entities, but also oddly, conjoined in the ether–by the ether? Like pools of conjoined muck, related by electromagnetic pulses; with the capacity to interact as a group or as individual slime formers for the benefit of the larger interconnected entity?

   Or, if you will, bloggers, and crafty word manglers?…

   http://pornalysis.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/academic-culture-is-the-etic-rapist-of-emic-meaning-by-classification-co-option-and-preemption-of-secular-paralanguage-part-1/

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10. BTW Greg–that is an incredible list of resources you have posted up there–thanks for that!

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11. It’s pretty astounding the extent to which you are going to avoid dealing with the meaning when you talk about “the origin of life”, the topic of this post and this discussion. Apparently when you assert that something can be known about “the origin of life” you aren’t, actually, talking about the actual formation and animation of the first organism, the time when life on Earth began, nor the first organism, both as it was forming out of non-living matter, as it somehow became alive and what it was which allowed it to live and successfully reproduce. Aren’t you, at all, curious about the question of what led to it reproducing? It’s not obvious that the first organism would have had any need to reproduce. Just attaining life would have been pretty remarkable, but then to reproduce? It’s pretty remarkable that the first organism which could have just maintained its own life, apparently, either was originally designed to reproduce or it developed that ability as it lived. And it’s even more remarkable that it worked, that whatever contained it successfully divided without spilling its guts, as it, perhaps, were.

    Just what does this “origin of life” you are proposing to know about consist of if not that remarkable event, unknown in any detail except that it, obviously happened and we are the result of it? If it wasn’t that, actual, event, you’re talking about something that didn’t happen or something that isn’t the actual and very real origin of life. You’re talking about an academic fiction.

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12. Why the discussion about the origin of life always turns to a debate between creationists and evolutionists? Why canâ??t we keep the religious matter out of the discussion?
    This debate is so important in USA, cause while the evolution theory is hold as a non-false statement, it can be treated as a scientific theory (using the falsifiability conception of Popper), therefore it can be taught in public school classes, whether creationistic ideas, or at least some of them, or at least in some form, is considered nonscientific. If the evolution theory â??break downâ?, and the creationistic idea is considered â??nonscientificâ?, what will we teach to on school?
    Even though the evolutionists and creationists start in a different point (a common origin or Godâ??s creation), both theories go to a common end: humans are the most evaluated specie and human is better than all the other beings lived (as the most evaluated or as the final creature made by God to run the whole world). Those theories repeat the anthropocentric value which bases our societyâ??s choice of destroying the environment as if it was all human property. Thatâ??s why this discussion is so important not only on the scientific level, but also reflects on the ideology which is chosen by our society to teach our kids and to direct the values which will be protected by the law.
    Why the evolution theory is so acceptable among the scientists even though there are lots of discoveries that at least would make us rethink about the evolutionâ??s premises?
    Evolution theory is based on Darwinâ??s studies, who said: â??Now let us turn to nature. When a part has been in an extraordinary manner in any one species, compared with the other species of the same genus, we may conclude that this part has undergone an extraordinary amount of modification, since the period when the species branched off from the common progenitor of the genus. This period will seldom to be remote in any extreme degree, as species very rarely endure form more than one geological period.[â?¦] And this, I am convinced, is the case. That the struggle between natural selection on the one hand, and the tendency to reversion and variability on the other hand, will in the course of time cease; and that the most abnormally developed organs may be made constant, I can see no reason to doubt. (The origin of species., page. 172-173).
    And Darwin also said â??If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case. No doubt many organs exist of which we do not know the transitional grades, more especially if we look to much-isolated species, round which, according to my theory, there has been much extinctionâ? (DARWIN, Charles. The origin of species. Londres: Collectorâ??s Library, 2004, p. 210. Grifos acrescidos).
    Thatâ??s Darwinâ??s first premisse: one common origin, which being mutating until create all sorts of life, and those mutations ceased in a remote period. If that premise was proved to be wrong, why canâ??t we rethink his theory and try to find a different explanation to the origin of life, or at least we can recognize that the evolution theory could possibly be wrong?

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13. The scientific consensus is that there is a Last Universal Common Ancestor(LUCA). This is single organism from which all life on the planet is evolved. If you believe in evolution but you don’t believe that, you are several lightyears into the twilight zone of crankdom.

    But there are no limits on the number and types of thingees that existed before, or contemporaneously with, LUCA.

    Hope that helps.

    –bks

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14. Bee, I’m not bothering with you anymore because you are clearly somewhere in the meaner parts of Nephelokokkygia.

    No, you’re trying to avoid me because I answered your questions and caught you on all your BS. That’s why you ran away without ever trying to actually, you know, refute or disprove what I’ve said.

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15. The scientific consensus is that there is a Last Universal Common Ancestor(LUCA).

    A common ancestor organism, or a common ancestor species?

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16. Aren’t you, at all, curious about the question of what led to it reproducing? It’s not obvious that the first organism would have had any need to reproduce. Just attaining life would have been pretty remarkable, but then to reproduce? It’s pretty remarkable that the first organism which could have just maintained its own life, apparently, either was originally designed to reproduce or it developed that ability as it lived. And it’s even more remarkable that it worked, that whatever contained it successfully divided without spilling its guts, as it, perhaps, were.

    Sounds like yet another recycled ID argument: It’s totally remarkable, therefore Goddidit.

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17. Certainly the origin of life resulted in an organism. What was alive if there wasn’t an organism? What reproduced if there wasn’t an organism at the end of “the origin of life”?

    Are you talking about a single individual, like if it was my pet I would give it a name and have just one of them? You need to be VERY clear what you mean by “organism” if you are trying to ask me that particular question.

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18. Oh, and while you are working out the answer to my first question, you should work out this as well: What exactly do you mean by “event.”

    I really do feel as though you are asking a question that has a very specific answer that is inside your head but not inside my head.

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19. Not sure if your question is reasonable, Raging Bee. Do you mean that a number of identical organisms arose simultaneously?

    –bks

    p.s. I admit that since Porny arrived you’re sounding a lot more rational (by comparison) but I wish you’d stop dismissing points out of hand. If there is a cogent refutation of an argument, offer it or point to it. In the old days we’d type it in but now you can just cut and paste or offer a URL. Saying that something “sounds like yet another recycled ID argument” is specious to the max.

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20. Saying that something “sounds like yet another recycled ID argument” is specious to the max.

    Not to someone who’s heard ID arguments before, and doesn’t have a vested interest in pretending he hasn’t.

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21. Greg Laden, how about we concentrate on the one proposed origin of life I’d imagine we all would pretty much have to agree existed, the one whose line we are in, the one whose descendents evolved and, eventually gave us the only evidence we have that evolution happened.

    Is it your contention that what that organism was actually like, how it actually formed from nonliving materials, in the environment that provided those materials and the physical forces that resulted in them forming into life, is unimportant to knowing anything about the origin of life?

    It seems to me that you are asserting that those things, as they actually were, are unimportant to knowing about the origin of life instead those things being the only possibility of knowing that anything proposed to be relevant to the origin of life IS actually relevant to it.

    Which is complete nonsense.

    Your attempt to mock my questions by feigning not to understand them actually illustrates the problem instead of supporting your effort. Your attempt to divert attention from those inconvenient problems with your proposition that we know something about it, is only possible because of the huge numbers of unknown and unknowable aspects of the the origin of life on Earth, that there is no evidence of what it was or even agreement about the number of “origins of life” we are talking about. Though, unless you are supporting the idea of simultaneous multiple “origins”, one had to happen first. I will point out in passing that spontaneous, multiple origins is a lot closer to creationism than what I recall was the assumption of evolutionary science, a single common ancestor, the idea I’m supporting, tentatively. Even a later “single common ancestor” would have had to have had an ancestor, the origin of life in that line.

    I’d guess that a single original organism which had the potential to generate the more complex biological chemistry but with far simpler chemistry, is a likelier thing for nature to put together in the dearth of materials available, as pointed out in that interesting article by Robert Shapiro bsk linked to above, It would be far easier to explain how it could have plausibly happened than some disembodied assemblage of RNA that was, somehow, reproducing in the buff in who knows what environment.

    I would expect such a very different original form of life than what we know from much later biology – assuming a rapid rate of reproduction over a quarter of a billion years or more – would to be able to generate a lot of variation, perhaps including some which later could have, somehow, been incorporated as organelles in later life, but which weren’t able to pass through some unknown bottle neck and so didn’t survive to leave independent lines today, But that’s merely a guess.

    You ask, what do I mean by “event” in this discussion. The process of life forming for the first time, however long and consisting of however many steps involved.

    Really, you’re quibbling over simple words that have a clear meaning.

    Now that I’ve answered you, why don’t you answer my questions instead of pretending they aren’t obvious ones.

    If the way it happened and the resulting organism aren’t what “the origin of life” consists of, what do you mean by knowing something about it? How can you know about an event unless your idea of it corresponds to what actually happened and what it resulted in?

    If you are going to open up the right to assert that you know something to that level of speculation the results aren’t going to be reliable, they are going to be as liable to the rise of unfounded fashions and their catastrophic collapse as psychology is. Given the political atmosphere surrounding evolution, I couldn’t imagine a worse thing for the public acceptance of the fact that evolution happened.

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22. Obviously Raging Bee is as ignorant as the stereotypical hillbilly fundamentalists her good pals among the new atheists are always sharing yucks about. And to no correction by the champions of truth and accuracy. How very revealing of their actual motives.

    A bumblebee, perhaps?

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23. Marta Torres, evolution is known from the enormous amount of science done after the death of Charles Darwin. Citing Charles Darwin is not necessary to support the knowledge of evolution except in historical terms. The fixation on him is political, not scientific.

    Evolution is the the idea in science most supported by massive and diverse evidence. If nothing is ever really known about the earliest form of life that doesn’t negate what is known about evolution anymore than not knowing what went on before the origin of the universe would overturn chemistry.

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24. I really do feel as though you are asking a question that has a very specific answer that is inside your head but not inside my head. Greg Laden

    Oh, I forgot this, the veiled, tacit accusation of some kind of creationism or vague scientific apostasy.

    What I have in my head is exactly what I’ve said, that science doesn’t have the evidence it needs to know what happened, how it happened or what the organism that resulted was like except that it was alive and it successfully reproduced. No one has that evidence, it is lost, almost certainly for all time. I have the certainty that science can only deal with physical evidence so any ideological or religious ideas about that origin of life must remain outside of science and science has to ignore them or suffer a loss of reliability in what it asserts, becoming less scientific.

    I believe we will never know what the origin of life was like though I’m certain a parade of assertions about it will gain followers who might fight over it like the children of Freud or that schools of thought will rise to dominate, before they are toppled like those in the social sciences, one after another, gulling middle brow followers and university administrations into ignoring the parade doesn’t actually consist of reliable knowledge and that science will become the more decadent for that. And all for an ideological struggle that science never had any business getting involved in to start with.

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25. Anthony –

    Every time you claim that given terms have specific meanings, you reveal a profound ignorance of the process of science. When I have been tasked with designing experiments, the very first aspect of the actual design process (after I have developed a hypothesis and come up with a question) is to define my terms – ie. provide operational definitions. The reason this is important, is that language is not an absolute.

    Words are not static. They have different meanings that are not only dependent on context, but also dependent on regional variations, the background of the transmitter and receiver, linguistic evolution and general cultural context. Even if you are choosing to use a lexicographer definition, such definitions leave more room for ambiguity than is usually acceptable in science.

    The problem you are having with getting people to answer your questions, is that you are asking questions that are relevant to what you think we believe. Questions relevant to what you think we should be talking about/asserting, rather than what any of us are actually talking about. You want us to be asserting something that fits a paradigm that you want to attack. Because we aren’t doing that, you just pretend that we are.

    If you were asking honest questions that relate to what people are talking about, you would get answers. But you aren’t interested in honest, good faith discourse. You want to argue with something no one is actually arguing – that is fine, argue against what you want. But I would strongly suggest that you actually find someone who is arguing those points.

    There are people who do make those sorts of arguments. They make them about OOL, they make them about evo psych – they make them about all sorts of shit. Of course they also tend to be rather easy targets and are generally disparaged by the very people you are arguing with here. Even worse, you would be forced to engage in honest discourse.

    What is interesting to me, is that you are actually arguing with people who have a lot they could teach you that would facilitate your ability to argue with those folks. But instead of choosing to alleviate your ignorance, you are bent on maintaining that ignorance and arguing from it. And based on what you have said about psychology (I am not that familiar with the OOL argument, so I’ll stick with what I actually know) you are absolutely clueless about what is being taught, researched and how that research is performed.

    There are all sorts of things to argue are wrong with most psych research and even the things being taught in most psych programs. But while what you are arguing certainly exists, it isn’t any more representative of mainstream psychology, than the Phelps clan is representative of mainstream Christianity.

    If you want to be taken seriously, I would strongly suggest that you consider listening, learning and not making dishonest assertions about the people you’re arguing with and what they are actually saying. I would also strongly suggest that if you are going to accuse people of being “ideological materialists” as though it is a bad thing, that you not then turn around and argue for materialism.

    I would also suggest you try to understand a very important concept – one that is virtually impossible for most religionists to understand. Assuming materialism as the default, doesn’t = believing in materialism. My assuming materialism as a default means I don’t believe in the supernatural. That is not the same as believing the supernatural doesn’t exist. I don’t believe the supernatural exists, but neither do I believe it doesn’t exist. I accept that a time might come when the tools that can prove the existence of what we call the supernatural may be developed and ultimately indicate that it does.

    Of course given teh best evidence we have, you wouldn’t grasp nuance, if someone attached it to a 2×4 and beat you upside the head with it. And you have provided us with more than ample evidence in this comment thread.

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26. DuWayne, if you think I have any interest in the opinons you, Stephanie Z, Raging Bee, Freerefill, or several of the others here who have tried every way to wiggle out of these problems on Greg Laden’s behalf have of me, you are mistaken.

    What I am interested in is having Greg Laden answer the points I have brought up without hiding behind pretended ambiguities as if those bolstered his claims instead of actually undermining them. When your claim is knowledge, that either stands of falls on the evidence for it and your claimed knowledge being the inevitable logical conclusion that has to be drawn from that. You guys don’t have it. No one does.

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27. I wasn’t going to come back but since you mentioned me…

    How dare you claim I was trying to wiggle out of any problems. That is completely wrong. Hell, several times I pointed out that you are technically correct… and you accuse me of trying to wriggle out of problems?

    How dare you. That is completely wrong, sir.

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28. If you are going to open up the right to assert that you know something to that level of speculation the results aren’t going to be reliable, they are going to be as liable to the rise of unfounded fashions and their catastrophic collapse as psychology is.

    Welcome to science, Anthony. You’ve got some of the details wrong, of course, but you’re new. You’ll get it eventually.

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29. This is the best presentation I’ve seen about abiogenesis:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6QYDdgP9eg

    by a researcher in the field – who starts by stating that abiogenesis and the Theory of Evolution are related, but different things. He seems a credible source to me – much more so than this site, frankly, which, the last time I was here, was telling me that a Windows PC couldn’t start up and go online in less than three minutes or so – when this piece-of-crap Windows 7 Dell laptop I’m typing on does it in one minute and 26 seconds.

    Dr. Laden has a right to his opinion, but it would be great in a science blog if he did some research into contrary opinions before coming out with one of his pontifications.

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30. Oh, I forgot this, the veiled, tacit accusation of some kind of creationism or vague scientific apostasy.

    That is not what I was thinking at all. Seriously. Let me ask you a different way: Are you claiming that the origin of life involved the coming into existence one way or another (we presume by natural processes, not talking about creation here) of one single organism? Like “joe the organism” who then is the grandparent of all other organisms? And if so, on what basis do you think this is the likely scenario?

    What I have in my head is exactly what I’ve said, that science doesn’t have the evidence it needs to know what happened, how it happened or what the organism that resulted was like except that it was alive and it successfully reproduced.

    OK, I was addressing the two questions you asked me. Now you are getting well beyond those questions; I suppose if you don’t think science can know stuff, then likely you don’t think YOU can know stuff either, thus there is no way to clarify your point about what you mean by “organism.”

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31. JimV, thank you for your insightful contribution to this discussion. I’m so glad some guy on YouTube can clear this all up for us.

    Jack’s video is a response to the creationist claims about evolution. He and I disagree, and I think his separation of the two is political though well intentioned. Of course, that was the point of my post, which you should read over.

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32. DuWayne, if you think I have any interest in the opinons you, Stephanie Z, Raging Bee, Freerefill, or several of the others here who have tried every way to wiggle out of these problems on Greg Laden’s behalf have of me, you are mistaken.

    Well, I guess you’ve just listed, and brushed off, everyone who has actually addressed your questions — without actually showing why our responses were flawed or wrong; and without even showing you understand our responses. Which proves, once again, that you are arguing in transparently bad faith, just like every other religious bigot I’ve heard trying to discredit rational inquiry.

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33. Oh, and Jim, did you notice that the video to which you point is an excellent summary of amazing stuff we know about the origin of life because of research donein an EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY LAB by and EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGIST?

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34. Wait, I guess I haven’t been paying attention… is Anthony making a religious argument about the origin of life?

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35. Incidentally, if anyone needs further proof of Anthony’s religious, anti-rationalist agenda, let’s just re-paste these words of his from comment #79:

    I don’t know how many times I’ve got to tell you people, when someone asserts they KNOW something, it puts it in an entirely different category of claims than if they merely say they believe something. The claim of knowing something carries higher responsibilities of providing evidence and being honest about it than the more modest claim of believing in something.

    There you have it: a knowingly crafted rationalization for accepting belief without question while treating observation and reason as suspect and easily discounted unless it can meet some high standard of proof. And it comes complete with the standard (and unsupported) insinuation that observation and reason somehow have failed to meet that standard.

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36. Raging, I don’t know, one could interpret this the other way around as an argument from Anthony that “knowing” something is misguided and that knoweldge is essentially tenuous and always subject to revision, not a supporting argument for religious “belief.”

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37. No, Anthony is making an argument for science being based in physical evidence. He is making an argument that science can’t do anything else but collect, measure, analyze, publish and review physical evidence about physical phenomena and that even the high priesthood of theoretical science is answerable to the less prestigious address of the real world. Without relevant information from the real world their ideas aren’t any more than guesses. He is also arguing that when any extraneous ideological content is forced into science the reliability of what it can tell is impaired.

    The question of whether life has a religious explanation is quite a different matter, which I have not dealt with. But no religious people have any more evidence of what the origin of life was like than anyone else so they are no more able to make science support whatever they wish that was any more than ideologues of any other character can.

    We are all in a state of unknowing about the actual event event, anyone calling what they believe about the origin of life “knowledge” is distorting reality.

    Now, why don’t you answer those questions I’ve been trying go get you to answer for well over a hundred comments instead of avoiding them. It might upset a few of the true believers here but it might help the cause of intellectual integrity.

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38. Anthony, are you making the claim that we can’t know about the origin of life because it happened in the past and we weren’t there?

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39. Greg Laden, what was alive as a result of “the origin of life” if it wasn’t a living organism? Or did organisms not come about at “the origin of life?

    How do you know that was “the origin of life” if there was no organism of some kind that lived and reproduced?

    You keep adding problems to the claim of “knowing” something about the origin of life but if you’re going to claim that the origin of life didn’t result in a living being you apparently think it was some event far more nebulous and undefinable than I did and so would be even less known that what I proposed. I don’t think there is a rational way to talk about “the origin of life” if a living, reproducing organism which left descendents including all of life which is the topic of biology. If that’s not the case then your “origin of life” has no connection to evolution at all since it would be entirely unrelated to the process of reproduction and inheritance of traits. Evolution is all about those things, the word means nothing in terms of biology if that is the case.

    I’ll have to say, I’ve elicited some odd assertions in these kinds of arguments but that one is the oddest of them all.

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40. Anthony, are you making the claim that we can’t know about the origin of life because it happened in the past and we weren’t there?

    No. That is just another way to try to associate my argument with creationism, something your side has done consistently since the beginning of this discussion.

    It’s possible to know something without being present IF YOU HAVE EVIDENCE OF WHAT HAPPENED.

    What is it that has made all of the materialists here go allergic to evidence all of a sudden? Not to mention the self-appointed “skeptics”. I thought you were the “only evidence” folks who believed evidence was a requirement for even the modest claim to believe something, never mind the far more exigent claim of knowing something.

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41. Anthony, I take it you have ruled out the possibility that the origin of life could involve the emergence of multiple things we would call “alive” from some chemical background that is not life. Why?

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42. I haven’t ruled anything out except that whatever happened at “the origin of life” it had to result in a living being which successfully reproduced.

    If you want to multiply complications, with different, alternatives of “origins” with different outcomes, you are only making it more unknowable and, certainly, more at odds with the majority of evolutionary science. As I pointed out above, you are also handing creationists ammunition because they, also, believe in more than one genesis of life. But since you can’t know even the one, proposed “origin of life” which resulted in us and our fellow living beings today, it all looks like two-stepping in terms of this argument.

    Now, why don’t you answer the question?

    If someone comes up with a description of “the origin of life” which is not an accurate description of the real, “origin of life” as it happened, in whatever way it did happen, are they not, actually, talking about something that didn’t happen and that wasn’t real? Are they not, just as someone who proposes a six-day creation less than ten thousand years ago, talking about something that didn’t happen?

    Certainly, in order for any assertion about “the origin of life” to be known that has to be true. If anyone can say

    Reply

43. cont. If anyone can say something about “the origin of life” and it isn’t susceptible to that level of falsification, doesn’t that make the concept of “the origin of life” a meaningless phrase?

    Reply

44. I haven’t ruled anything out except that whatever happened at “the origin of life” it had to result in a living being which successfully reproduced.

    I don’t think you understand my question.

    Reply

45. Oh, Greg, I think I did understand your question, as I addressed it completely, including the problem multiple “origins of life” poses to knowing something about it.

    I do think the assertion that it happened even twice in the same way also adds, considerably, to the unlikelihood of it happening, though that’s got little to do with this argument, I can imagine the people happiest with that assertion being made would be creationists who could make an effective recruiting tool of it.

    I doubt it happened more than once, that it would have almost certainly been an extremely complex series of occurrences, each which could have happened in a way that didn’t produce life and which could have extinguished the experiment, as it were. Any variation in genetic contents in cells today could have been the result of one organism absorbing variants extending from the original organs and the first generations after that. Though, since there is no evidence to go on, that’s all guessing, just as every other proposed bit of knowledge about this is since there is no evidence of what actually did happen, in the natural world, very unlike in laboratory conditions, about the only definite thing you can say about that.

    I’m finding this to be quite informative as to the current state of the understanding of what science is. Apparently evidence has gone into the “optional” list. In which case I think materialism and skepticism both need to trim their claims.

    Reply

46. Anthony, one more time: which specific claims that you see here or in the linked posts need to be trimmed?

    Reply

47. Interestingly, Anthony, the idea that it happened the same way multiple times is MORE likely than the idea that it only happened once.

    I actually became enlightened to this on another one of Greg’s posts, regarding the origin of life and whether it should be included in the theory of evolution. I argued that, no; since evolution describes the way a species changes over time due to selection pressures from the environment, it necessitates a living set of organisms (or self-replicating molecules, what have you). Basically, it demands that something fulfill the qualities of “life” as we know it, even down to the molecular level. Evolution requires life, and the origin of life must require that something is not alive; thus the two cannot be combined.

    Someone who responded to me said no; it’s entirely possible that the same process which spawned one self-replicating molecule probably did not do a “good” job of it; it was probably random, and although the molecule could have replicated itself, the randomness meant that it probably didn’t do a very good job; it likely died out. But what of the process that spawned it? To think that any chemical process that generates a self-replicating molecule could ONLY happen once, or that once it happened the process can no longer occur due to other circumstances, is a highly improbable assertion. It is more likely that the process happened repeatedly, and through trial and error (similar to evolution, but not exactly), produced something that eventually produced us. The idea here is that, like trimming down a single cell to determine what is absolutely necessary for self-replication, we trim down evolution to determine what is absolutely necessary to produce greater amounts of complexity; one process spawning multiple molecules which may or may not be able to self-replicate and to different degrees would actually be a similar process to evolution. The process is not subject to adaptation pressure, but the results of it are. And instead of self-replication, the process which made one molecule makes another, somewhat different; similar to how one organism mutates with each generation.

    And, you know what, that makes a lot of sense. Whatever happened to produce the first “something” that fulfilled even the most basic definition life (ie, self-replication), for it to only happen once requires an immense amount of probability; once again, like the idea of a watch coming together without a watchmaker, or the Boeing 747 parts caught up in a series of tornadoes, any single, complex event is more unlikely than several, less complex events.

    What are your thoughts on that? That whatever process spawned something that could be considered “alive” likely went on to spawn other things equally likely considered “alive”?

    Reply

48. No, Anthony is making an argument for science being based in physical evidence. He is making an argument that science can’t do anything else but collect, measure, analyze, publish and review physical evidence about physical phenomena…

    And who here has ever asserted otherwise? You keep making assertions that imply someone here has made an argument against them. You have also repeatedly accused people of all sorts of shit, while steadfastly refusing to actually point out where they have done anything that would support such accusations. You keep preaching about logic, while repeatedly engaging in multiple logical fallacies.

    What is really annoying though, is that you keep demanding responses to your questions, while refusing to respond to basic questions – such as what exactly would indicate that anyone here is anything you have accused us of being.

    You are either really fucking stupid, a hypocrite, a liar or some combination of the three. I hope that you understand that the internet is, for all intents and purposes, forever. This discussion – a discussion in which you have made a complete ass of yourself, isn’t going to disappear. Your ignorance will continue to be on display, long after you have forgotten about this conversation – as will your hypocrisy and lies.

    Reply

49. DuWayne, I would add this:

    Say there is a thing we’d call life -1, not life, but chemicals doing stuff that is almost life, but for one thing missing.

    Then, the thing is added to a whole bunch of instances of this chemical: Thousands of primordial ponds on a continent all acquire that one thing at roughly the same time, and life -1 becomes life in all of them.

    Further assume that the missing element was a change in the gaseous environment, and further assume that this change was caused by the chemical activity of life -1.

    Frankly, if something like that didn’t happen, I’d be surprised (not specifically gas, but whatever … some molecular byproduct or aqueous condition or something).

    This is why I’m uncomfortable with a model that asserts that there is a single organism, like something you could carry home from the pet shop in one of those blank Chinese food containers, and name “Fido.”

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50. I think I will make the unwillingness of Greg Laden to address those questions will be the theme of this when I write it up.

    Sciency is good enough for the regulars here, I guess.

    DuWayne, thank you for reinforcing my skepticism about contemporary standards in neuro-sci,
    Stephanie, I don’t think I’ll be looking up your books,
    Refill, without evidence there is no way to evaluate probabilities, you can’t know that life can only originate in one way and that it is the most improbable of events or that it is extremely common.

    Though, as Greg Laden’s avoiding the issues he was asked about seems to show, none of you are really interested in how these things happen, you’re interested in it as an ideological tactic.

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51. Anthony: I think I will make the unwillingness of Greg Laden to address those questions will be the theme of this when I write it up.

    I’ve asked you for clarifications that you refuse to address, apparently. Please include that as part of your writeup!

    Where will you be writing this up, by the way?

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52. It doesn’t matter… Anthony does not want to learn, he just wants self satisfaction. Everyone, including me I begrudgingly admit, wasted our time trying to educate someone who does not want to be educated.

    I said it earlier… Anthony is a troll. He knows nothing and doesn’t want to; he is content with his limited view and refuses to accept anything outside of it.

    Case and point: the original post leading to this discussion was an enumeration of the evidence and research into the origin of life. A paltry collection, as admitted by Greg, of what actually exists. Anthony has claimed numerous times that this evidence does not exist. He is a troll.

    Reply

53. oofreerefilloo, agreed, but I don’t think Anthony is a creationist.

    Reply

54. AM has an interesting blog entry here:

    http://zthoughtcriminal.blogspot.com/2011/07/you-dont-have-to-believe-it-but.html

    in which he explains his motivations, and from a *tactical political* viewpoint he has some valid points (IMO) and it is not unrelated to the *tactical* reasons that I switched from calling myself an atheist to calling myself a pantheist[1].

    –bks

    [1] If you want to attack this, please read this first:
    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pantheism/#PaT

    Reply

55. DuWayne, thank you for reinforcing my skepticism about contemporary standards in neuro-sci…

    Would you please either stop making claims about me, or fucking back up your assertions? The only thing I have done is pointed out you’re making a number of logical fallacies (some of which I explicitly note in comment 232), explained what science is and psychology is – because you seem not to understand them and have repeatedly asked you to point out the comments that would indicate I am a credulous, illogical, ideological materialist.

    You have no credibility here Anthony. You have repeatedly exposed your abysmal ignorance of science, psychology and logic. You have repeatedly engaged in numerous logical fallacies. You have proven that you’re either stupid, or lying. You have repeatedly misrepresented what people are saying and bandied about insults that you refuse to back up and that you seem to believe are adequate responses to arguments you don’t respond to.

    You might at least achieve some credibility, if you were to actually provide us with what we have said that indicates that anything you have accused us of is true. But of course you can’t actually do that, because you’re full of shit and have nothing to show.

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56. bks, Anthony has an obsession that appears to have come out of the accommodation debate (although it’s possible that the debate just fed into an existing obsession), that atheists are the reason that people refuse to accept evolution. His “tactics” amount to sneering at atheists in hope that will help somehow. He’s never, in my experience, been good at answering questions or accepting answers that anyone has given him.

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57. I’m not saying Anthony is a creationist. I wouldn’t, since he has specifically stated (several times, I think) that he isn’t. However he IS refusing to accept the piles of evidence that have been laid before him. He is demanding answer to questions that do not address the issue. He is refusing to answer questions put against him which clarify or defeat his argument.

    I think DuWayne mentioned that these tactics were similar to those employed by creationists; I agree. However, again, Anthony has stated that he is not one. Since we can infer but not irrefutably prove one way or another, we must accept the evidence as given and make judgements from that. That is why I theorized that he is either attacking it from a philosophical standpoint (in which nothing could ever be known for certain) or a self-centered standpoint (in which he perpetuates the argument for his own satisfaction). I confess that these are only theories, and the evidence I use to back them up is only evidence refuting other theories, essentially narrowing down the possibilities. I also accept that the truth may be different from what I have theorized, however the truth cannot contradict the evidence unless the evidence has been falsified.

    And despite that, I would not be surprised to see a scathing reply by Anthony which completely ignores the caveats I have just placed, despite being partially inspired by his own arguments and partially driven by scientific methodology.

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58. Well, I think he’s over-read Lewontin.

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59. I’m not saying Anthony is a creationist. I wouldn’t, since he has specifically stated (several times, I think) that he isn’t.

    He’s also made wild accusations that he’s never tried to back up. He’s proven himself so blatantly dishonest that his word cannot be trusted. We have only his actions — his overall argument style, if you will — to judge him by, and those actions show him to be a dishonest obscurantist with a religious/anti-“materialist” agenda. He may never have been an actual creationist, but his blither-points are suspiciously similar to those of creationists, and other denialists.

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60. He’s also made wild accusations that he’s never tried to back up.

    In the words of Ricky Jay,

    No argument from me. 🙂

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61. Raging Bee wrote (of Anthony McCarthy):

    He’s proven himself so blatantly dishonest that his word cannot be trusted.

    Indeed. I consider him to be the by far the most consistently intellectually dishonest person I’ve encountered on the internet – and that’s saying something. Y’all here on this thread have showed astonishing endurance in dealing with him for as long as you have.

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62. I went searching for the “just-so stories” cite and found Lewontin’s 1997 review of a book by Carl Sagan. I’ll quote the paragraph, but I recommend reading the whole review (it includes some Dawkins bashing!). It’s not long, it’s very entertaining, and to my eye his comments on Cancer and the Human Genome Project have not been proved wrong in the intervening 14 years. Excerpt follows:

    Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

    http://www.drjbloom.com/Public%20files/Lewontin_Review.htm

    –bks

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63. Wowbagger. Yeah, I’m really going to lose sleep tonight.

    Well, I think he’s over-read Lewontin. Greg Ladin

    That would be as compared to who? Daniel Dennett?

    bks, Lewontin’s comments about the actual political cause of the fundamentalist reaction against Darwinism in that review were quite insightful. But Lewontin is always worth reading or listening to. This lecture he gave at Berkeley was particularly good.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we4ZzjKxFHM

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64. I think the problem, Wowbagger, is that he is accompanied by a fellow evidential Church of Lewontin disciple. Because of this tag-team of bks and Anthony, it looks as though there’s actual discussion going on, when there is, in fact, actually a bunch of people trying to convince TWO people to point us to what’s got them so hot under the collar, not just one. They don’t appear to be internalizing any of our repeated assertions that science isn’t interested in “just so stories” but is rather about building theories and gaining evidence to improve our certainty or to scuttle it in favor of a new theory that better fits.

    As Stephanie points out, I strongly suspect Anthony fights almost entirely against atheists, whom he feels have an ideological necessity to support materialism, to the point where he projects this “certainty” or support in absence of evidence even where everyone in the discussion couches their assertions in terms of probability. I strongly feel that he and bks are both more interested in scoring points in the accomodationism debate than in actual rational discourse. If either were interested in rational discourse, they might understand that we actually for the most part agree that nothing is “certain” or “absolutely true”, and that there is a difference between ideological (meaning: philosophical) materialism and methodological materialism, in that the latter would turn on a dime if any shred of evidence turned up that showed they were on the wrong path.

    Instead we get rhetoric. No arguments, no addressing of the points we make, no acknowledgement of every concession anyone has ever made on the topic. They are desperate to paint scientists as ideological materialists without having to point to a single person or claim that shows that this is the case.

    It’s for these reasons (and reasons like my freshly discovered ulcer) that I bowed out of the conversation.

    I suspect the ulcer predated the conversation, for the record.

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65. Okay, I guess I’ll have to read about “the accommodation.” Jason and Stephanie (or anybody): Where is this debate going on? I have no idea what you’re talking about.

    –bks

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66. @303 BKS, are you that concern troll from over at ERV’s blog? I see you piddling in and out of converstaions, with nothing but humorless snark–you must be either a lesbian or a male lab rat.

    I thought your sycophantic, shallow critique sounded familiar.

    Did you have a substantive critique of anything I have said or represented, here or anywhere? If so, please state it–but I am certain it is just more useless feministic mindlessness that will dribble from the holes in your fingertips.

    If you really want to attack me, do it to my face: I currently have a posting up requesting data from medical professionals and othersabout autopsy processes, and procedural differences between medical examinations when the victim is a boy versus a girl.

    Because we know that male children die in great numbers compared to female children, and a good deal of that is at the hands of women, I am curious to know if saliva samples are taken from little boy corpses that are dumped, burned, and buried by female murderers.

    I don’t have a lot to add here that Greg and Anthony haven’t said already, but I have a little bit to say about the “END” of life at the hands of women, for many young boys who don’t have science bloggers advocating for their safety and health.

    Anything to say about that? I didn’t think so

    Useless parrots….but it is refreshing to have someone else note the redundancy of Raping Bee.

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67. I only came back because someone who knows me was reading it and told me they were still going on about me. Flattering as that is, it would be a lot more interesting if Laden answered the questions about his topic. Which he won’t because he knows what the answers to those would have to be for him to not say something really silly.

    The origin of life not producing a living organism. The origin of life not producing a living organism. How detached from reality does it get?

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68. I just read that entire article that bks linked to, and I think I have a better understanding where the two are coming from.

    Yes, it is in fact a philosophical perspective, and it is wholly correct. I’ve considered the gist of the argument myself several times, and I have found it to be without resolution, as Lewontin, Anthony and bks seem to think.

    The idea here is that, because science cannot be replicated by the average Joe, it demands Joe’s faith in authority (logical fallacy) or his “gut instinct” to provide the “one true answer.” Anyone reading that would admit that it is both true and completely unscientific. If Richard Dawkins sauntered up to you and began a rant about biology, would you accept that the facts he states are true? That they have been repeatedly observed and verified multiple times by third-party researchers? If you do, you have succumbed to an argument from (in this case, literally) authority.

    This is primarily why I said that Anthony was technically correct. Reading Lewontin’s article, I can see further; it -is- technically a correct argument. Philosophically.

    As I stated a while ago, though, science understands this argument. This is why we keep testing things; even after 150 years, we’re still testing evolution. Do some theories, which may be true, get shoved aside because they are counter-intuitive? Or because certain “respectable” scientists throw their weight around? I’d have to say that, yes, that does happen from time to time. It’s an imperfect system created by imperfect beings. And it is unfortunate. However, there’s a difference between “science” and “scientist”. A scientist can make all the mistakes a human can, regardless of how hard they try. Science is a collection of scientists that, by that collection, attempt to remove the human factor. Science, as opposed to scientists, does have a trend toward understanding the nature of the universe. Some things slip by, yes; but anyone at any time can produce a new study with new data and keep trying. To think that science, by default, does not allow certain ideas to exist is to suggest some sort of conspiracy amongst scientists to actively blacklist certain concepts.

    So I agree fully that scientists are human and they make mistakes, and that appeal to authority is a necessary evil of science… but BOTH of those, whilst fully non-scientific, are accounted for IN science; mistakes can be corrected by repeated trials performed by other people, and so authority can be removed from an individual. Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins are not authorities on a subject; they have done much investigation and discovery sure, but they have only been able to do that because of the contributions of hundreds, if not thousands, of the giants upon who’s shoulders they stand. And it is the group who holds the authority, the group where each individual has, to varying degrees, either reviewed the reasoning for inconsistencies or performing the experiment in its entirety a second time. This is the “peer review” part of science; there are humans who speak louder than others yes, but there are no authorities, only peers. And yes, I do wish it worked better, I’m sure we all do. But it’s doing literally the best it can. You can’t have science without scientists, which means human factors will come into play, regardless of how hard we try to prevent them.

    But that’s that. My real beef with this article is this:

    Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them? Astronomers tell us without apparent embarrassment that they can see stellar events that occurred millions of years ago, whereas we all know that we see things as they happen.

    Intuition and common sense are human factors and, as I stated, have no place in science. What “seems reasonable” or “appeals to common sense” is neither data nor evidence. I don’t even need to point out that matter and energy are interchangeable; I can simply say “atomic theory” and then ask whether or not Lewontin can distinguish the flavor of a proton. Let me reword it a bit: “Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless atoms with nothing but empty space between them?” Sir, do you deny atomic theory? Do you deny chemistry? Or does your statement imply something that I cannot perceive? As to the second, again, a resounding “yes”. We know that light can only travel so fast, and our perceptions of an event rely on when our physical senses pick it up. We view the Sun as it was 8 minutes ago, because that’s when the photons left the surface of the Sun. The information is limited in its travel time. We cannot look at the Sun and see what is happening “now” unless we allow that “now” is subject to relativistic effects, in that “now” extends backwards in time as it extends away from us. But that is simply a different way of looking at the same thing; it is imply that “now” here is “8 minutes ago” on the Sun. Is Lewontin denying relativity?

    This one I cannot understand:

    We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs

    This, to me, seems to sum up everything this man is talking about: “I don’t understand it, therefore it cannot be.” Yes, to the uneducated, a whole heaping lot of physics goes against what we would consider “normal”. Quantum physics itself often carries the warning, “If you think you understand quantum physics, you don’t understand quantum physics.” It is highly counter-intuitive, and in many cases, undesirable. Who wants the universe to evaporate? That would suck. But, even if it was the ultimate in suckiness (I think having the universe disintegrate into energy would fulfill that requirement), it does NOT mean it is not true. Ask anyone at NASA if they would like gravity to turn off every time they launch a rocket ship; If they don’t unanimously say “yes”, then ask the guys footing the bill. Physics is routinely inconvenient and disturbing; this does not, can not, mean that it is false.

    And perhaps this is where Anthony is coming from. Perhaps he disagrees with certain concepts, because they are either counter-intuitive or disturbing. If that were the case, it would be natural for him to combat them and, of course, deny any evidence necessary to be denied. After reading Lewontin, I would say that that is a valid theory, and certainly not one of the two I previously suggested.

    When I learned that all of life could be accounted for by chemical interactions, it dawned upon me that there is no such thing as life. I am not alive, I am merely a temporary arrangement of complex chemical phenomena. This idea was disturbing… at first. It still twists my stomach a bit. But I understand it to be true. I know it happens. I accept it. It is ugly, it is counter-intuitive, it is undesirable, it is fact, it is physics, it is science. And it will not go away no matter how much you debate it.

    In fact, that’s good advice for all of you. Anthony seems unwilling to accept it, so don’t bother trying to force-feed it to him. Let him get his last word, let him feel smug for another day, let him write up a wholly incorrect blog post. No matter how much he, or anyone else, complains, facts will not change.

    “We’re just fucking monkeys in shoes.” – Tim Minchin

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69. Anthony McCarthy wrote:

    Wowbagger. Yeah, I’m really going to lose sleep tonight.

    Of course you won’t. It takes character to feel guilt for one’s profound dishonesty, and you’ve got about as much of that as can be found in the average helping of navel fluff.

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70. Refill: Lewontin is a scientist of the first rank. When he says We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs. he is not setting up a bowling pin in order to knock it down for some ulterior purpose, he is trying to give you an accurate picture of how he sees science. At the same time he was at Berkeley to give the Hitchcock lecture, he gave an interview to Harry Kreisler for the Conversations With History series. I think you’re underreading him and will understand him better if you watch even the first ten minutes:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBZJWyGh1EI

    –bks

    p.s. I am not a member of the Church of Lewontin but if it’s a choice between that and one of the abrahamic religions …

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71. I was wondering how long it would take for pornonymeme to try to bring his pet grudges into this. Obsessed troll is obsessed…

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72. I didn’t want to reply until I did indeed watch the first ten minutes of that video. Which I just did. And yes, it did give me some insight into the nature of the man; indeed he seems to have a respect for science, an honest one.

    However, that has no bearing on anything I just said. None whatsoever. The quote being:

    We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs

    I can see that as being interpreted in one of two ways.

    First, the clear argument that there are flaws in the execution and distribution of science. I accounted for that when I admitted to the flaws and attributed them to human error, and then went further to point out that the scientific model is aware of the flaws and attempts (albeit not entirely successfully) to fix them.

    Second, the argument that the science itself implies “absurdity” as he makes clear when he refers to “accepting without serious qualms” that “pungent cheese” can be constructed of “tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless” entities. As I said, to make that claim is to deny atomic theory.

    Perhaps I am simply misinterpreting the man. If I am, then please, educate me.

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73. He’s not denying atomic theory, Refill. He precedes that with:

    With great perception, Sagan sees that there is an impediment to the popular credibility of scientific claims about the world, an impediment that is almost invisible to most scientists.

    He believes in atomic theory, he’s talking about the impediment to public acceptance of consequences of the theory.

    There are endless examples of the difficulty of wrapping common sense around even trivial scientific concepts, e.g.

    There are several interesting things about the relationship between gravity and horizontal velocity. Assuming, once again, that air resistance is not a factor, the vertical acceleration of a projectile is g. This means that when a cannonball is at the highest point of its trajectory, you could simply drop another cannonball from exactly the same height, and they would land at the same moment. This seems counterintuitive, or opposite to common sense: after all, the cannonball that was fired from the cannon has to cover a great deal of horizontal space, whereas the dropped ball does not. Nonetheless, the rate of acceleration due to gravity will be identical for the two balls, and the fact that the ball fired from a cannon also covers a horizontal distance during that same period is purely incidental.

    http://www.answers.com/topic/projectile-motion#ixzz1UPLjPnXL

    –bks

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74. OOps, sorry Bee, were you being redundant again?

    I am still cracking up over the cannibals, and Gregs comment about the body o’ chrise” eating the body of their spiritual leader in the form of a sort of voodoo doll made of a cracker”
    hawhawhawhaw..

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75. The origin of life not producing a living organism. The origin of life not producing a living organism. How detached from reality does it get?

    It depends on what you mean by “a” … as I’ve been saying, and you’ve been ignoring.

    Why do you keep ignoring the question I’ve asked you?

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76. As opposed to the meaning of “is”? I thought that kind of quibble was one of the reasons that scientists didn’t think very highly of the standards in the legal profession.

    An organism which would be the actual topic of your alleged study of “the origin of life”, an organism which was able to sustain its life as an independent entity – there being no other organism to live off of at that point – an organism which would reproduce, leave descendents, eventually including us arguing here over it having been kind of an important aspect of “the origin of life”.

    As it is you seem to want to have this thing you’re calling “the origin of life” but which doesn’t actually have a living thing which originated. An academic study that, somehow, is able to sustain itself without its focus ever being available for study.

    If it’s the word “organism” that you want to use as a shield against those questions, how about I replace “organism” with “a living thing” What was the living thing that originated in the origin of life? What was it like? How did non-living matter assemble itself to produce that living thing? You propose to know about it other than that it was alive and it reproduced living things. You propose to know about it without knowing anything else about it. And not only knowing about it in an informal use of the word but in the far more formal sense which something is known by the procedures of science.

    So, tell me how you can know you know about it without knowing about it.

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77. refill, some people have trouble with Lewontin because he assumes anyone paying attention to what he says can read and has a minimum level of awareness of what he’s talking about. Some of his antagonists have depended on the opposite, on a group of people who weren’t very good readers and who wouldn’t notice the problem with stuff, like that they had no real basis for what they were claiming. Stuff you used to be able to count on before the current decadence set in.

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78. I posted the following at my brothers blog, because it is nearly as relevant here, as it was there;

    I get increasingly frustrated and irritated with this fucking â??psychology (or insert social science and in some cases biology here) isnâ??t scienceâ? meme. If it isnâ??t science, then why the fuck am I spending more time (as an undergrad) learning about method and theory of science, than I am about specific clinical techniques for treating mental illness? Why I am virtually being beaten about the head and neck about what constitutes â??badâ? or more often just sloppy science, versus solid methodology? Why have I been repeatedly tasked to design experiments that would explore (usually well studied) a given question â?? or on many cases asked to also work out a reasonable question to explore as well?

    I get this sort of attitude from the anti-intellectuals that seems so pervasive in U.S. American culture â?? especially those who simply believe that â??Jesus is always the best abswerâ? (though my fundy, cultish mother doesnâ??t even buy that). But I most certainly donâ??t understand this when it comes from people who espouse to be skeptics and scientifically minded. And when it comes from actual scientists, it is even more fucking ridiculous.

    Do these folks actually believe that because it is so fucking complicated, we just shouldnâ??t try to understand human behavior? Are we supposed to just let people with mental illness suffer, because we canâ??t work out exactly the best way to help them â?? though psychologists are constantly striving to understand a little more and improve treatments accordingly, all the fucking time?

    Donâ??t they get that the exact same fucking problem exists in medical research? Should we just give up on improving medicine, because we canâ??t actually do the science they believe is actual science?

    Human behavior is fucking complicated. In the field I am going into, addiction/substance use disorders, there is currently no way to know just how many underlying factors there are to contend with. In my own case, all it took to deal with it, was being treated for my rather extreme attention deficit and mood disorder/s.

    After spending my late teens, up until I started on meds for my underlying mental illness, with a compulsive need to be high or drunk as much as possible, I literally lost the desire, much less the pervasive need to get high after about three weeks on medication. But that was my relationship with my substances of abuse. There are many others who have many different such relationships, because substance abuse and addictive behaviors are far from being a singular problem.

    Now according to the psychology â??skeptics,â? this is just too complicated an issue to ever understand using science. What a fucking load of horseshit. It is too complicated to break down into a simple paradigm with universal predictive power â?? that doesnâ??t make it impossible. It just means that what I am going to spend most of what is left of my life doing, is contributing to a body of knowledge. The science I am going to engage in will likely produce only very limited applications in terms of treatments â?? but it will also produce more pieces of a very large picture.

    And that is what psychological science is about. It is about understanding that what I daresay the vast majority of those of us who choose to go into the science of human behavior wanting to learn, will not actually come together as comprehensively as we would like, until long after we are dead. But also understanding that if we donâ??t do what we are doing right now, it is a larger picture that will never come together.

    It would be absolutely wonderful if we could just put all the variables together and easily define human behavior in mathematical terms, like they do in physics. I would love nothing more than to be a part of breaking down human behaviors in such elegant and simplistic terms. But that is simply not possible. I will never learn the answers I really want to understand about human behavior â?? though I am going to spend my life trying to learn them. That doesnâ??t mean I should just give it up for lost, because it isnâ??t as simple as physics. It just means that I am going to take part in an ongoing, likely never-ending quest to answer those questions.

    And I, for one, am absolutely fucking grateful that biomed researchers feel the same way. Because just as this ongoing quest that I am taking part in provides real, tangible results in terms of helping people who have problems with behavior, biomed science is constantly coming up with new ways to help people live longer and healthier lives. Our respective sciences are messy, complicated and inundated with problems of subjectivity. But we keep plugging along, refusing to accept that â??itâ??s just too complicatedâ? and continually find ways to improve not only our understanding of our respective sciences, but also finding ways to eliminate more and more of the subjectivity.

    So if you want to claim we arenâ??t doing science, that is totally your right. But in so doing, you should probably quit using modern, evidence based medicine â?? because who wants to risk their body to unscientific bullshit and you should just give up the mentally ill for lost â?? because obviously there is no way to understand any way of helping them. By all means, feel free to dive headlong back into the dark-ages in terms of health.

    For my part, I would much rather spend my life using the tools and methods of science to develop more successful tools for helping my fellow humans. Whether you think it qualifies as science, or not.

    And if you neither believe what I am studying to do is science, nor want to just give up ill humans for lost â?? then by all means, enlighten me as to what the fuck you think we can do to make them better. Put up, or please feel free to shut the fuck up.

    I would just add, to bring it full around to this conversation, that those who believe this is somehow related to proving some ideological stance, need to get over themselves. Trying to understand the origins of life has absolutely nothing to do with proving or disproving some ideology and everything to do with trying to understand the natural world. Because one thing that becomes increasingly apparent with each passing day, is that we never know what lines of inquiry are going to prove useful in terms of improving the quality of life of our fellow humans. And we never know just what might shed light on interesting and important questions.

    The idiotic notion that we should just assume that there are things that science can’t explore or understand is fucking pointless. Because I don’t believe that there aren’t things science can’t explore, I am willing to accept that that is a real possibility. But understanding that might be the case, is not an argument for not trying to understand everything we can about ourselves, our world and the universe we inhabit. It is precisely because I don’t have an ideological belief about some hypothetical natural/supernatural dichotomy, that I am all for assuming materialism – especially in terms of scientific inquiry.

    Because when it comes down to it, whether you believe in the supernatural or not, what is the point of not trying to understand everything we can of the material world? When I was still a Christian – and this includes when I was a very young fundamentalist Christian, I still believed we should do everything we can to understand the material world. Such investigations weren’t a threat to my religious beliefs – to the contrary, they would serve to help me better understand the world that, at the time, I believed my god had created.

    I had the confidence in my beliefs necessary to not perceive such inquiries as any sort of threat to my faith. As far as I have come to understand it, the reality revealed by those inquiries directly contradicted my beliefs – though it certainly didn’t and can’t disprove them altogether. For my own part, the contradictions became way too much to maintain that faith – and that is the threat that folks like Anthony can’t accept.

    Anthony is here with his arguments, because he is afraid of what sort of evidence science will come up with next – what else of whatever beliefs he holds will be contradicted. I can understand that. The final loss of my religious beliefs was fucking terrifying, traumatizing and left scars behind that I will likely never be rid of. It was a brutally painful and in some ways, humiliating process. But it also freed me of burdens that have caused a great deal of damage to me, since I was a small child. It hurt and in some ways will likely continue to cause me pain until I die – but the trade was worth it.

    The dishonesty of Anthony and his ilk is irritating, because in their desire to maintain their own ideological posture, they make my job and the jobs of other scientists that much more complicated. They fuel anti-intellectual sentiments that prevent people from accepting what science has to offer – even though all we are doing is investigating ourselves, our world and the universe we inhabit.

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79. As opposed to the meaning of “is”? I thought that kind of quibble was one of the reasons that scientists didn’t think very highly of the standards in the legal profession.

    Did you pay any attention to my question?

    If it’s the word “organism” that you want to use as a shield against those questions, how about I replace “organism” with “a living thing”

    So am I to understand that you require all theories of the origin of life to involve the rise of one single individual organism and not, say, 2 or 100 or some other number? Just one. Is that what you require?

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80. some people have trouble with Lewontin because he assumes anyone paying attention to what he says can read and has a minimum level of awareness of what he’s talking about.

    Anthony, you are describing a man very different than the one I knew when I was getting my degree. Has he changed that much?

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81. So am I to understand that you require all theories of the origin of life to involve the rise of one single individual organism and not, say, 2 or 100 or some other number? Just one. Is that what you require? Greg Laden

    How about we settle on what we can agree on, that there was at least one which would have had to, among other things, have been formed from non-living matter, would have been alive and which would have successfully reproduced, leading to lines of organisms as its offspring reproduced,eventually including life, including us and the other life which had it as a common ancestor.

    Knowing anything proposed to be about that living thing requires knowing what that living thing was like, anything proposed to be about how it formed out of living matter requires quite a high level of knowledge about how that happened, knowing how it reproduced would also require quite a bit of knowledge. Consider that we only know anything about any living thing today is because we have quite a lot of physical evidence available that is of knowable relevance to those contemporary living things, anything without that link between proposed knowledge about living things now and the actual living thing isn’t known but it is believed.

    Two or a hundred? Why not billions or an infinity of them? It would be a rather modest claim as opposed to what the multi-universe people who are in style these days are claiming. Only, unless you have actual physical evidence that yields information known to be relevant to even one of them you can’t know if what you are proposing about it has anything to do with it.

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82. DuWayne, that something is “fucking complicated” doesn’t change that if you want to address it scientifically you have to observe the requirements of science. Neither complexity nor the need for something changes the fact that if you want to attain the reliability of knowledge that is the only reason that science was invented, the requirements to get that are pretty stiff.

    The history of psychology and the standards accepted for publication in journals accepted as legitimate within psychology are pretty wretched. Which accounts for the unreliability of its holdings and schools which get overturned with astounding frequency.

    We might need history and economics to be able to do what real science does, produce reliable knowledge through honest and rigorous procedures, that doesn’t mean they really can be. They are too complicated and what they study too ineffable to study scientifically. They don’t get a dispensation because “it’s really hard”.

    Don’t get me started on memes.

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83. What do you define as a “high level of knowledge”?

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84. Just as an example, DuWayne. “Gay conversion therapy” isn’t an invention of the fundamentalist hucksters, it was an accepted practice within clinical psychology and is still practiced by people given credentials in psychology by real universities. One of the big proponents of it, even today, is Robert Spitzer, a psychiatrist who has taught at Columbia University, who happens to be an atheist.

    He became convinced to change his former, “science based” position on the basis of some pretty shoddily done research – based in self-reporting.

    But before it went out of fashion, “curing the gaii” was an acceptable “therapy” in the major schools of psychology, Freudianism and Behaviorism, for example, leading to much misery for the unfortunate victims of the “therapy” and their parent, especially, of course, the mothers. And all of that “gay conversion” was “based in solid science”.

    And then there is the case of the former head of the APA who claims that he had no idea his lecture about torturing dogs into submission, given to military and CIA agents in the wake of 9-11, might be taken as a how-to to be applied to prisoners in Afghanistan and elsewhere. That a psychologist of that stature couldn’t have suspected what any reasonably bright 8th grader might have known about how people really think is one of the most absurd things said in recent times.

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85. How about at least on a level to get a scientist claiming to be able to intuit something from a fossil published in a real scientific journal and for that to stand review. You know, something that at least has an object something can be known about.

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86. So because the history of my field is shady, we can not possibly have changed?

    When I say it is complicated, I am not claiming we need some dispensation from the rigors of scientific inquiry. I am merely pointing out that we have far more variables to account for. This does not make scientific inquiry impossible, just very difficult and therefor slow.

    Meanwhile, just like evidence based medicine, we use the tools that the best evidence would indicate for treating a given patient. It is not perfect, but like evidence based medicine, we do our best while constantly using science to improve our tools.

    Or do you believe that evidence based medicine and evidence based mental health care should just be abandoned for their imperfections?

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87. I’m saying exactly what I said. That if something is too complicated or, in your terms, that it has too many variables to be handled with sufficient rigor, any conclusions you draw about it will be unreliable.

    If scientists want science to devolve into its former state by accommodating claims that aren’t reliable I’m not in any position to stop them. That doesn’t’ make the crap produced anything but what it is. They can’t expect people not to notice that and they will have done a lot to ruin the reputation of science.

    I’d like a lot of things to be available in medicine on a reliable basis. That doesn’t mean they are.

    Do you think medical science should be allowed to adopt the standards of the psychotherapy scam? How about the Rorschach Test, which has representation in the AAAS, the last time I looked. How about the kind of “therapy” Dr. Spitzer advocates for curing gay folks? How about the “science based” practice of giving gay men shocks to their genitals when they see sexy photos of men? Not to mention the psychiatrist who told the mother of one of my high school friends that it was natural for husbands to hit their wives? He knew that on the basis of evolutionary science and what he’d learned in his education at one of the big name universities in the North East. All of that was psychological science and “therapy” of its time.

    The dumping of the most severely schizophrenic patients from mental hospitals, only to have lots of them die on the streets or to be convicted of crimes and sent to prison was done with the excuses of professionals in psychology and psychiatry, leaving aside the collusion of politicians and others. And so was the testimony of Dr. Death in Texas that based on his superior and scientific knowledge of psychology that he could guarantee that death penalty defendants would kill again.

    Pretty big mess to have resulted from that rigorous “science”. I think it’s been allowed to spread and influence what gets called “science” in the real sciences today. Not to mention fields like economics and history. If the scientific history of this period is ever written, I think it will be seen as teetering on decadence because of stuff like that.

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88. Anthony: there is evidence that groups of organisms collaborate to consume the resources of smaller, singular organisms to eventually produce life.
    Here is some video evidence if you don’t believe science ( and I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t believe science, after all it is such a pure, evidence based discipline, devoid of biases….
    http://pornalysis.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/men-are-all-rapists-checklists-brought-to-you-by-sex-negative-feminists-and-bitter-girls-with-red-hair/

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89. That if something is too complicated or, in your terms, that it has too many variables to be handled with sufficient rigor, any conclusions you draw about it will be unreliable.

    You are misrepresenting what I said and basing your response on that misrepresentation.

    Psychology is absolutely not too complicated to be handled with sufficient rigor. It just isn’t as simple as physics and will require a great deal more time in which to draw absolute conclusions. Meanwhile, the research that is done is providing us with increasingly useful treatments for a variety of mental illnesses. That the goal of achieving answers that can be broken down into absolute terms may never be achieved is irrelevant. We are using the methods of science to work towards that goal and in the process of working towards that goal, we are improving our ability to treat mental illness.

    You are welcome to claim that isn’t science, it really doesn’t matter. You can claim that evidence based medicine is also not science – you sound like a complete nutter when you do, but it really doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change the basic fact that the rigorous study of human behavior in myriad contexts is leading to improved treatments for mental illness and it doesn’t change the fact that the rigorous study of the human body and illness is leading to improved treatments for other illnesses.

    Most importantly, it doesn’t change the fact that our use of the methods of science to make our inquiries means that we are scientists, working in legitimate fields of science. Your belief that it is simply too complicated doesn’t mean that it is – it just means you are too narrow minded to accept that your inability to understand how something could be possible, doesn’t mean it is.

    Now you are welcome to point out the failures of psychology – of which there are many, but you are being disingenuous if you don’t also point out the failures found in every fucking science. Science isn’t perfect and doesn’t offer perfect answers. Science is subject to the biases of scientists and no matter how aware a given scientist is of their biases, no matter what they do to try to compensate for those biases, biases always enter into the equation. All we can do is work to ensure that science continues to be self-correcting. And of course there are cranks and quacks in every profession and every science.

    As I have said repeatedly, your biggest problem here is a complete and utter ignorance of psychology and science. And for someone who quacks poetical about rigor and evidence based assertions, you have made a hell of a lot of assertions in this thread that – no matter how many times you are challenged to produce it, you have absolutely refused to back up with evidence. Not evidence that would be hard to come by, if it actually existed – it is all right here, in black and white.

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90. How about at least on a level to get a scientist claiming to be able to intuit something from a fossil published in a real scientific journal and for that to stand review. You know, something that at least has an object something can be known about.

    I wouldn’t expect fossils. Were you thinking this would be figured out with fossils? Highly unlikely.

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91. That if something is too complicated or, in your terms, that it has too many variables to be handled with sufficient rigor, any conclusions you draw about it will be unreliable.

    How many variables is to many, what is the shape or nature of the falloff of reliability, how do you know this, and can you cite some peer reviewed research that develops this claim?

    Even more interesting …. what would cause you to rethink this rather strong conclusion you’ve drawn, what kind of finding would prove you wrong?

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92. Anthony [368] those may be good examples of bad science, or of science getting it wrong, but they are also good examples of science getting it right. You do see that, right?

    The way science works, it would be impossible …. utterly impossible … to look at the history of thinking on some area of research and not find that it was wrong at various points along the past. You get this, right?

    If so, I’m not sure why you are pointing this out exactly. Did you have a point?

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93. That if something is too complicated or, in your terms, that it has too many variables to be handled with sufficient rigor, any conclusions you draw about it will be unreliable.

    That depends almost entirely on what you try to do with such conclusions. If you draw such conclusions and say “This is the final answer,” then yes, you’re on very shaky ground. But if you use such conclusions only as a basis or guide for further research and experimentation, then you’re well within the bounds of valid scientific inquiry. And it’s the latter, not the former, that is curently being done by OoL researchers. The conclusions curently being drawn are not “reliable” as final answers, but they are very useful in pointing the way for subsequent inquiries.

    Do you think medical science should be allowed to adopt the standards of the psychotherapy scam?

    Now you sound like a $cientologist.

    How about the kind of “therapy” Dr. Spitzer advocates for curing gay folks? How about the “science based” practice of giving gay men shocks to their genitals when they see sexy photos of men? Not to mention the psychiatrist who told the mother of one of my high school friends that it was natural for husbands to hit their wives?

    None of that is based on valid science, it’s based on entrenched popular bigotry; and honest scientists have lately been exposing such practices for the bigoted nonsense it is. (Otherwise how do you know it’s bogus?)

    He knew that on the basis of evolutionary science and what he’d learned in his education at one of the big name universities in the North East. All of that was psychological science and “therapy” of its time.

    So now you’re bashing science AND evolution AND universities AND that old standard boogeyman the “North-East Coast Elite” in one paragraph? You’re blatantly dishonest, but you sure are efficient about it. Once again, your true agenda is showing, and it’s all about politics, religion and culture, not science or a decent understanding of how it works.

    Seriously, Anthony, have you considered a career with Uncommon Dissembling?

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94. Greg Laden, if don’t have physical evidence of what happened in the past and no way to trace that back across a silence from a tenth to a quarter of a billion years, also with nothing on the other side of it, you have nothing to go on. Especially with something which is entirely unknown as to how it happened or what was produced. Which is the first point I made about the problem of “knowing about the origin of life”.

    Nothing you have come up with has lowered the barriers preventing us from knowing about the origin of life, everything you have pointed out only makes what is asserted as far more uncertain.

    As to psychology, it’s the business of psychology to clean itself up. Its professional practices, its bumbling ad hoc methods of research that is published in its journals and other, ridiculous junk gotten away with in psychology. Until they do that no one has any reason to take what they say seriously without checking out the methodology used and what is being claimed. And, given what I’ve found when I looked into those, it won’t do a thing to build confidence that it doesn’t measure up as a science.

    Dr. Death, Dr. George Denkowski, hasn’t been kicked out of the profession that I’ve noticed, neither has Seligman. As the Hauser scandal shows, when it’s allegedly science done around “behavior” the slack is cut incredibly long. And it’s the people in the “science” that do the cutting of that slack.

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95. Greg Laden, if don’t have physical evidence of what happened in the past and no way to trace that back across a silence from a tenth to a quarter of a billion years, also with nothing on the other side of it, you have nothing to go on.

    Why do you say there is no physical evidence go go on?

    …everything you have pointed out only makes what is asserted as far more uncertain.

    I haven’t pointed to anything. I’m still trying to clarify where you are coming from on this.

    As the Hauser scandal shows, when it’s allegedly science done around “behavior” the slack is cut incredibly long. And it’s the people in the “science” that do the cutting of that slack.

    Slack = research thrown out, career ended?

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96. Slack = research thrown out, career ended? Greg Laden

    Yes, over something that should have been caught in review years ago, before it was taught and built on, probably never to be completely removed.

    So now you’re bashing science AND evolution AND universities AND that old standard boogeyman the “North-East Coast Elite” Raging Bee

    As I was born and have always lived about as far in the North East as it is to get and the graduate of a North Eastern university who holds a graduate degree from another one, and have always accepted the fact of of evolution, etc. you are entirely out of your depth this discussion and can only substitute personal attacks based in nothing for substantial comment. Since I’ve only seen one mild correction of your wacky, paranoid, accusations, Raging Bee, I guess that’s not found objectionable by your side of this discussion on the basis of your shared ideology.

    See, it can come off on you folks if you don’t correct your side.

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97. Why do you say there is no physical evidence go go on? Greg Laden

    Because there is nothing that contains information as to what happened at the origin of life or what the organism that became alive in that origin was like. No evidence, no information from that event, none that might, miraculously (?) survive has been produced. Not a single bit, nothing.

    There, refute me.

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98. …you are entirely out of your depth this discussion and can only substitute personal attacks based in nothing for substantial comment.

    I made a substantive comment in the first paragraph of my last post, and you chose to ignore it. Just as you chose to ignore all of my requests for you to back up any of your wild-assed accusations. Pretending I’m out of my depth, without proving it by refuting any of my points, only further proves you’re nothing but a blustering poseur.

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99. Consider yourself ignored, Raging Bee

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100. There, refute me.

     I guess I would start with the isotopic evidence and the diagenetic mineral evidence from the earliest sediments. See references here

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101. You need more than that to demonstrate relevance to what became alive and how it became alive, which are far from simple problems.

     You do understand that living things aren’t able to be easily intuited from general principles, don’t you? Maybe you should read a bit more Lewontin, if you think that. As he said there is indeterminacy in biology at least as important as that in quantum mechanics, which would make it impossible to even predict just what a living organism would be like based on its genome, far more information than you propose to use to intuit an entirely unknown form of life. As he pointed out, environmental influences on organisms have a profound effect and you can’t predict an organism due to those factors. As mentioned above, it’s a lot harder than rocket science.

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102. You went out of your way to point out that you were “ignoring” me? Consider my point proven, Anthony.

     Oh, and if you really “always accepted the fact of evolution,” then why did you try to blame “evolutionary science” for acts of malfeasance that had nothing to do with evolution? That’s been a standard creationist tactic practically from day one — especially at Uncommon Dissembling, where evolution is routinely blamed for eugenics, the Holocaust, and just about every other evil known to Man. The more you claim to be a supporter of honest science, the more you sound like the exact opposite.

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103. You do understand that living things aren’t able to be easily intuited from general principles, don’t you?

     Do you know what biofractionation of stable isotopes is?

     Maybe you should read a bit more Lewontin, if you think that.

     I’ve read everything he’s written, I’ve had numerous conversations with him, as a student at a University Museum’s connected department I worked with his colleagues on a daily basis for several years.

     I don’t think you understand what he is talking about.

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104. Anthony: be careful–Raping Bazungu, aka Raping Bee prides himself on being ignored! Your feeding the stomachless!

     Bee: there you go again, fantasizing about “wild-assed accusations”….?

     Haven’t Anna Ardin, Sofia Wilen, and Naffisatou Diallo (the false rape accusing wild asses that are trying to frame Julian Assange and DSK )fed you enough of that for a lifetime??

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105. Yes, over something that should have been caught in review years ago, before it was taught and built on, probably never to be completely removed.

     You do understand, I hope, that this happens with far more frequency than it should, in every field of science, with the possible exception of physics. What is ironic, is that it happens with greater frequency in high profile biology journals, than anywhere I am aware of, because those journals limit space so much that they don’t actually want scientists to go into method. At least in psychology the method is there for all to see and criticize.

     That doesn’t always prevent data fraud or confirmation bias problems, but it is a flaw that exists across the board in science. What is fucking brilliant about science, is that it is self-correcting. While bad data may pervade for a long time in some cases, when it happens to be something important, it will come out that there was some bullshit involved, because someone will try to build on that work and discover it doesn’t fucking work.

     And then there is the uber oddity – the occasional bullshit (which often comes out anyways – did recently with a Duke (IIRC) biomed prof) that actually works. Fraudulent data does occasionally conform to reality.

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106. What years was that? I met him a number of times around the Science for the People era.

     Do you think he would endorse the idea that we knew anything about the origin of life in the terms I’ve talked about it, how it happened, what the life that was originated in the origin of life was like, that those things were unimportant to knowing anything about the origin of life? Considering his skepticism about speculations that are, effectively, seconds ago, in terms of geological time, I tend to doubt it.

     I wonder, have you ever gone on about evidence being the only way of knowing something in your activities as a Skeptic? Have you ever endorsed that idea, perhaps here, on your blog? Do you agree with it now? Do you hold that you can’t know something unless you have evidence of it? Do you think that it is wrong for people to believe things for which they have no evidence? And I would appreciate a real answer instead of sidestepping.

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107. Fraudulent data does occasionally conform to reality. DuWayne

     Well, any kind of speculation can. It’s no way to run an intellectual program, never mind one that wants to falsely claim the repute of science.

     You folks do understand that science can’t escape the requirement that it be logically coherent, don’t you?

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108. It’s no way to run an intellectual program…

     Yes, you tiresome troll, we’re all quite aware of that. That is, in fact, why DuWayne called that particular incident “the uber oddity.”

     Do you think that it is wrong for people to believe things for which they have no evidence?

     Who here believes anything that isn’t supported by the (currently available) evidence? Got any specifics here? Given your past performance, probably not. (If you’re referring to OoL researchers, they’re not “believing” things without evidence, they’re speculating and doing research based on what evidence they have. There’s a difference, and you show your religious mindset (again) by failing to see it.)

     And I would appreciate a real answer instead of sidestepping.

     Coming from the king of sidestepping, evasion, and outright lies, your demands are as hyporcitical as they are babyish. This isn’t your forum, you have no credibility, and even your Lewontin bluff has been called. You don’t get to stamp your little feet and tell others how to talk to you. Go f[l]ail somewhere else; and when you’re finished with your temper-tantrum, just go to bed.

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109. Have I mentioned I’m ignoring you Raging Bee? Since you’re focused on attacking me and adding nothing to the discussion I’m not even bothering to read you. Encouraging as that might be that I can’t be all wrong.

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110. Yes, you have, and every time you mention it proves you know damn well you CAN’T ignore me.

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111. I’m ignoring your drone, Raging Bee.

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112. Just like you ignore every question you can’t answer, every statement that flatly refutes your allegations about how science and scientists actually work, and every other comment that doesn’t support your con-game.

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113. I find it very amusing that the only thing you latched onto out of my entire comment was the part that I clearly stated is a rarity and a bizarre one at that. I find it amusing, because the only reason I mentioned it, was to see if you would actually respond to anything else – and you didn’t disappoint.

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114. I’ve been following this thread a bit after I kind’a gave up. Here’s the interesting thing about Anthony McCarthy Leveler’s view of science. He seems to think that if you can’ know something absolutely you don’t know it. The whole concept of conditional probability and building up from simpler concepts and assumptions seems lost on him.

     I brought up way up thread the origin of gold, and Anthony says for gold to be gold it would have to remain the same. But that’s the point: life forms may have changed a lot in the last 3 billion years, but they are all made of the same basic elements (Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Sulphur, Phosphorus, Hydrogen) which haven’t changed at all in that time. Knowing that, you do know more than you did before. Because you know what is not possible (or at least really, really unlikely).

     Scientists often speculate on things like the origin of the moon, that they can’t go back in time for. But there is a reason that the “big whack” theory has gained currency, and it wasn’t because a bunch of planetary geologists just loved collisions. Do we know it absolutely? No, but you can say what is likely. The moon being built by smurfs is less likely than a collision. So we go with the latter.

     Reply

115. I gather that for a number of people in this discussion it is the desire to nail down an absolutely material explanation for that, overturning alternative guesses about how it happened

     There’s a similar desire for absolutely material explanations for the mechanism of nuclear fission. We’ve never observed its fine details with the naked eye and surely never will, and there are still many things unknown about what makes this or that neutron go in whichever direction it does.

     But that doesn’t mean reasonable people can reasonably think that maybe an invisible faerie was at the center of the bomb directing all the particles via magic wand.

     Apparently it hurts AM’s feelings for people to presume him a creationist, but if the whole crux of your argument is that you have to leave the door open for divine intervention, that’s how it’ll be seen.

     Reply

116. if you can’ know something absolutely you don’t know it. The whole concept of conditional probability and building up from simpler concepts and assumptions seems lost on him. Jesse

     I never said that or anything like that. I said that in order to know something you had to have evidence of it. Either direct evidence or evidence known to be close enough to have some reasonable chance of intuiting something that actually had to do with it. Neither of which is available for this topic.

     Any attempt to reconstruct conditions under which life originated is based in assumptions so general about the variety of possible conditions under which that happened, as to be a guess as likely to be wrong as not.

     Any attempt to imagine what the series of chemical events which could have led to life forming is hampered no evidence of how that happened is available. Even imagining how it might have happened is extremely difficult but in order to know anything about the origin of life you would have to know how it DID actually happen.

     The object that went from being non-living to being alive is entirely unknown to us, what that could have been like, what its chemistry and physical character was that could have gone from inanimate to alive, sustaining and reproducing, is entirely unknown to us. We have never observed an object that became alive, we don’t even know what that looks like. Any proposal that the chemistry or physical structures of that object-organism was like which is complex enough to match what we know from life a quarter of a billion years later, a. increases the problem of figuring out the formation of it, b. increases the chance that we can’t figure its formation out. c. makes it likely that there was a unique, very complex series of events leading up to it becoming alive.

     We have no idea why a bunch of non-living matter spontaneously became alive, why that non-living being spontaneously reproduced is even more perplexing. Understanding that requires quite a bit of actual detail about what that being was like, in very great detail and would also require a detailed knowledge of its formation. Anticipating a dodge into an enormous number of living beings that didn’t reproduce and the one which did being just one that lucked out, doesn’t go anywhere because it is a. entirely speculative, b. still does nothing to explain why what happened did.

     This argument is about evidence that is tied to an event in the natural world being an absolute requirement for knowing ANYTHING about it, it’s not a question of absolute knowledge of it. One of my most satisfying moments in a blog argument was the day, after about two weeks of trying, to get Sean Carroll to admit that there isn’t a single object in the universe of which physics had complete and exhaustive knowledge, what you might call “absolute knowledge”. Since I was the one who introduced that question into the argument, I can document that I don’t believe that absolute knowledge is possible.

     All of those things listed in the post, yes, they might have found out some interesting things, they all lack an evidential link with the event which Greg Laden made the topic of this discussion, whether or not we could know about the origin of life. Without that they can discover all kinds of nifty things, some of them might even achieve usefulness. Without that evidential link to the actual event of the origin of life, anyone who thinks those things are relevant to that very real, very specific event, is expressing a belief, quite often a belief motivated by ideology, not scientific integrity.

     I’m interested in the abuse of science by materialists, which is far more subtle and complicated than its abuse by religious fundamentalists. I’m also interested in its commercial abuse, a far more important problem, something in which quite a number of scientists participate. I’ve been studying these issues for about the past three years and will probably continue to do that. I think it’s an important problem that is related to climate change denial, probably the most crucial problem which is both scientific and political. I think there are complex reasons for that, scientists overselling science in other areas, scientists selling out to corporate oligarchs, scientists hostile to non-scientists and their non-scientific beliefs as well as other things.

     I’m mildly interested in the phenomenon of sci-fans, sci-jocks and sci-rangers on the blogs, but that’s only a freak show compared to the real issues that mean something in real life. Real life is the only thing that makes science about something real, it’s the only thing that elevates it from a hobby. I am discouraged at the abysmal level of reading comprehension among the sci-and that you can be one without knowing anything much about logic or even science.

     I could go on for quite a while. If Greg Laden had given real answers to those questions at 202, this could have ended a long time ago.

     Reply

117. I wonder, have you ever gone on about evidence being the only way of knowing something in your activities as a Skeptic?

     I’ve not decided yet if I’m a member of the “skeptics community.” So far I’m a “Skeptical Skeptic” in the business of critiquing insufficiently skeptical skeptics.

     Yes I like evidence. You seem to be arguing that things that I’m pretty sure are evidence are not.

     For instance, stable isotopes, a topic about which I suspect you know very little. And, yet another question that I’ve raised for you that you seem to have ignored.

     Reply

118. Yes, over something that should have been caught in review years ago, before it was taught and built on, probably never to be completely removed.

     Ah, so you don’t actually know the story. I see.

     You need more than that to demonstrate relevance to what became alive and how it became alive, which are far from simple problems.

     You told me I had nothing and you demanded that I disprove that. I showed you I have something. Now you are changing the game. I’m starting to think you ARE some sort of creationist, because that’s right out of the playbook.

     Have I mentioned I’m ignoring you Raging Bee?

     Good idea, but don’t miss RB’s last three comments, they’re amazing!

     Reply

119. …if you can’ know something absolutely you don’t know it. The whole concept of conditional probability and building up from simpler concepts and assumptions seems lost on him.

     then

     I never said that or anything like that. I said that in order to know something you had to have evidence of it.

     And you asked for evidence but you failed to notice that this blog post is all about the evidence, which you’ve ignored. You lie.

     Reply

120. I could go on for quite a while. If Greg Laden had given real answers to those questions at 202, this could have ended a long time ago.

     You are quite correct that I’ve not answered your questions. I’ve asked for simple clarification on question 1 and you refuse to give it. I cant’ address question 2 until after question 1 is addressed, and probably not even then because it is predicated on a construct you’ve got in your head that is not in anyone else’s head and that your not entirely clear on.

     So, this concern you have about my answering the questions is, well, a lie. You lie.

     Lewontin never lied, stop comparing your world view favorably with his. He does not deserve that insult.

     Reply

121. I will have to amend my earlier assessment of you Anthony. You’re definitely stupid, hypocritical and dishonest – I wasn’t entirely sure, but you have indeed confirmed it. And you are also almost, if not completely unhinged. It has been an interesting train ride, but the time has come for me to get off.

     I would just like to note, Anthony, that unless things have changed since the ad takeover from NG, Greg gets paid the more people click on this thread. Your comments have helped drive some amount of cash or another, into Dr. Laden’s pockets, as well as having exposed you as a complete buffoon. Seeing as I don’t like you (dishonesty annoys the hell out of me), this makes me very pleased indeed. I really hope that you post something about this discussion to your own little blog.

     I am not, just to be clear, suggesting that you should go away. You have entertained the masses and will likely to do so, the longer you stick around. Your complete and utter ignorance of science and everything else you have talked about is fucking comedy gold. It is just that I try to limit myself to one or two blog posts at a time and this has gone on long enough.

     That, and I am making a beautiful Italian sausage red sauce with fresh from the yard basil, oregano and thyme (pictures will be up on my blog later). Alas we don’t have enough ripe tomatoes yet, but the couple of Romas we have gotten so far would indicate that when we do, I am going to make some seriously asskicking marinara. They are absolutely incredible – sweet, tart – yet still plenty meaty.

     It may have to wait until Wed though. Rumor has it that we will have fresh tenderloin tuna coming in tomorrow and if we do, a buddy is going to pick some up and bring it by so I can make the good sushimi. No matter how stressful it might get, life is good with good food, good friends and great entertainment.

     Reply

122. Greg Laden, I don’t believe you didn’t understand those questions. I doubt, but don’t yet know, that you have never expressed disdain for the idea that you can know something without direct evidence for it, but I’ve certainly heard and read it often enough for me to doubt you’re unfamiliar with the idea.

     So, Richard Lewontin is skeptical about knowing things which would have to be based in unavailable evidence from the Paleolithic period, from our own species, even, but he would have no problem with knowing about life in the Archaean period with no evidence of even what kind of life that was, hundreds of millions of years before the closest available evidence, in unknown environmental conditions, arising by unknown means, etc.

     Wish I could ask him.

     Reply

123. DuWayne, I don’t know what faction of your specialty you are associated with, but when that is overturned due to the primitive state of the technology it is based on and the vagueries of what is known from it means, remember I told you it was going to happen. Then remember your last comment.

     Reply

124. From my experience, I don’t think Anthony McCarthy can actually be bothered to read any actual scientific articles. Keep that in mind when you argue with him.

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125. Oh, Tlaz has brought her bossy boots act to this blog. I was, actually, expecting that, having mentioned this to a science teacher in her presence. I think she’ll bring the rest of her posse with her. She’s trying to contact the biggest boot of them, just now.

     I can ignore you here as well as at Eschaton, Tlaz.

     Reply

126. Oh, maybe I’ll get to tell the story of how she slammed a comment I posted earlier today as an expression of scientific ignorance. Only, if she’d bothered to read it all she would have seen the entire comment was a quotation from “Cargo Cult Science” by that well known scientific illiterate, Ricard Feynman.

     Reply

127. Wait, is Tlazolteotl a Posse of Science Teachers? COOL!

     Reply

128. I think she’s a lab assistant or something. The other guy is a physics teacher who actually can read and even think.

     I should tell you, Greg Laden, it’s all material at this point. Including the sarcastic attempts to avoid dealing with the issues.

     Reply

129. Anthony, I’m glad to hear you want to stop avoiding the issues.

     No, give us a rundown on stable isotopes and fractionation. Seriously.

     Or do you plan to just reject all science because you worship someone who you think said that nothing is knowable?

     Reply

130. I still don’t know what the accommodation debate is, but onward.

     Let’s quickly note Christian Schwabe’s ‘The Genomic Potential Hypothesis’ which posits more than a billion separate OoL, one for each species. This is apparently a serious suggestion, not creationist, and which at least gets lip service from the OoL theorists. A critical review of the ideas can be found here:

     http://home.wxs.nl/~gkorthof/korthof56.htm

     By the way, the official terms for Shapiroite and Kauffmanite are “Contingency/Determinism.” You can find Nobel winners who think that Life is contingent (a “frozen accident” was Crick’s term) and those, like de Duve, who think it was inevitable. Those in the latter camp will not admit the highly improbably while those in the former insist on it. Note that Schwabe is in the latter camp.

     –bks

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131. Yeah, I did some more research on Lewontin. Smart man. Can’t find a lot to disagree with, even the parts Anthony pointed to. Certainly isn’t saying what Anthony suggests he’s saying though, unless I missed it somehow in the “subtext”. Which is, of course, immaterial and not evidence-based.

     I stand by my earlier Church of Lewontin comment. Surely Jesus Christ, if he were a real person who preached as he is claimed to have done in the Bible, would see as much of a disconnect between his teachings and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, as Lewontin would find between his own philosophy and Anthony’s.

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132. I’m a lab assistant? Good one. I’d give you a list of publications, but I’d like to remain psuedonymous.

     Anyway, at another blog, Anthony was criticizing some study and sniping about its methodology. After some questioning by some members of the community, Anthony admitted he had not read the actual study in question, only the abstract and some stories about the study in the mainstream press. He maintained that he would know enough about the methodology from reading the abstract alone. This makes me highly suspicious whether he has ever actually read a paper published in the scientific literature, for reasons that should be obvious.

     I can only conclude that not only does Anthony not really have a good grasp of the process of science, but he is too intellectually lazy to actually read any actual scientific literature and find out what that process actually involves.

     Reply

133. Greg Laden, here is what I just told Jesse at 400.

     I never said that or anything like that. I said that in order to know something you had to have evidence of it. Either direct evidence or evidence known to be close enough to have some reasonable chance of intuiting something that actually had to do with it. Neither of which is available for this topic.

     And also (unintended editing flubs corrected)

     This argument is about evidence that is tied to an event in the natural world being an absolute requirement for knowing ANYTHING about it, it’s not a question of absolute knowledge of it. One of my most satisfying moments in a blog argument was the day, after about two weeks of trying, I got Sean Carroll to admit that there isn’t a single object in the universe of which physics had complete and exhaustive knowledge, what you might call “absolute knowledge”. Since I was the one who introduced that question into the argument, I can document that I don’t believe that absolute knowledge is possible.

     I can assure you, Carroll was no more eager to answer that question than you are to deal with those I’ve asked you. I knew how he would have to answer it before I asked him and I knew that he wouldn’t want to answer it. Do you think I don’t know how you would have to answer the questions I asked you in order to maintain your credibility in this argument?

     Of course an event in the natural universe happened only in the way it happened, with exactly the physical entities, objects and forces being intrinsic to the nature of that event. Things happen the way they happened, they happen with and to the things involved with that event.

     Any description of that event which deviates from an accurate account of that event is wrong, it’s far easier to be wrong about complicated events you can’t observe and for which you have no direct evidence. If it’s nothing like anything you have yet seen and for which you have no direct evidence, the chances of your getting it right rapidly approach being so improbable that you have no right to assert that what you conclude is known and anyone would have a right to point that what you have done is made a speculation.

     Of course you have to have evidence that anything you want to claim about an event that happened is relevant to that event in order to legitimately claim to know something about it. That is so basic to logic, never mind to science, that to answer that you don’t need to establish that link would be ridiculous. Though, as ridiculous, is for someone with your blogging history to pretend that what I asked you about that is incomprehensible.

     In order to establish that link to an event in the natural world, you would already have to have sufficient knowledge of it before you can reliably link your proposed evidence to it. If you don’t know anything about it, then you have no way of knowing if what you conclude about the event on the basis of your “evidence” has anything to do with it. Your existing knowledge has to be sufficiently detailed for you to know it is relevant to your description of that event. You might propose something about DNA to the organism that was the product of the origin of life, though RNA is more in style. But without knowing that organism contained either or a primitive predecessor of either, you have no way of knowing that is relevant to the origin of life. It’s possible it had neither or that any predecessor of those would have quite different characteristics and nothing you bring from your knowledge of later chemistry would be relevant to it but would, actually, lead you farther into the cold.

     No one has that evidence of the event you have chosen to make assertions about, the origin of life. There is no way to know if any asserted application of modern science to that event has anything to do with it.

     I’m fascinated at the flexibility of the “skepticism” demonstrated in this argument, how I have consistently, from the beginning, insisted on the necessity of evidence in trying to know something and the demonstration that any ideas proposed as relevant to what you want to know had to have a demonstrable relevance to it and it’s the “skeptics” who have been, consistently, arguing against those logical necessities.

     Do you think that science can escape the necessity that it be logically coherent? That science, somehow, has power that allows people to know something without that logical coherence? It seems that you do and it’s certain that many of the others participating in this argument do. Which is magical thinking, not science.

     Reply

134. I have no idea what you do, Tlaz, I do know you tend to be irrational at times.

     As I mentioned, she’s capable of mistaking a long passage written by Feynman as being something I wrote and declaring it to be scientifically incompetent on that basis. And that’s with a citation, author and title, and a link given. Happened just this morning.

     Since the comment I made was about that stupid study that said Boston was the meanest city in America (meaner than cities that have illegalized feeding the homeless), and the only thing available by the authors of the study was an abstract of a study, I quoted that. I doubt she has read the thing. It was all about cities that voted for Obama as being “head cities” and those which voted for McCain as being “heart cities” (everyone knows that Republicans are all heart, right) I stand by my statement that it was crap science.

     Tlaz is a bit OC about me. It’s given me a few laughs.

     Jason, maybe we’ll get lucky and someone will show this to Lewontin so he can speak for himself. I’d like to hear what he has to say about knowledge without evidence of organisms from more than three and a half billion years ago in light of his profound skepticism of science about evidence free assertions made about people a few tens of thousands of years ago. Though I can imagine him having better things to do.

     You really hadn’t read him before this? Geesh, imagine if I’d chosen to cite more people.

     Reply

135. I see you have an Anthony infestation. He used to leave his droppings all over PZ’s place. Try to ignore it, its only interest is its own ego.

     Greg, thanks for this post, it’s a fascinating field.

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136. Lewontin, atheist socialist commie and beloved professor: His grad stats class is/was legendary. I never took it because it was basic and I was busy teaching advanced elsewhere, but my then spouse and many fellow students did.

     Here’s the deal: If you do the daily homework (and yes, daily homework is a bit unusual for a PhD program grad class) and hand it in and address corrections, you get a B in the class. Otherwise, you get a D. A’s are for class obsessed running dogs! Oh, and he generally wore workers clothing, as I did in those days as well.

     Everyone who wants to talk seriously to me about race but is not otherwise an expert is assigned this book: Human Diversity, and of course, this classic: Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature

     Reply

137. I think I might have commented at PZ’s playhouse about five times, in all, under my name and the pseudonym I used to use on blogs. Though, at PZ’s, who could tell one person’s droppings from the heap?

     I wonder if PZ is on record as thinking evidence is optional in science. Maybe I’ll look at the archives of some prominent ideological materialists to see what they’ve said on that topic.

     Reply

138. I can tell you that pz and I discussed the issue Of the origin of life a few weeks ago in a public forum on evolution And we essentially agree on the main outline

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139. As I mentioned, she’s capable of mistaking a long passage written by Feynman as being something I wrote and declaring it to be scientifically incompetent on that basis.

     Actually I didn’t read it at all, and my only comment had to do with when you probably last did read an actual scientific paper, when you were in college back in – when was it? The late 60s?

     Anyway, I have no wish to derail the thread further.

     Reply

140. So, PZ thinks you can know about something without evidence for it? Is this some revolution in atheism among scientists I missed? Because if there’s one thing I’ve heard them say it’s that without evidence, you couldn’t know anything.

     Does he think science has escaped the necessity of logical coherence as well?

     I have had more than enough material for what I’d planned but if PZ wants to give me more I’ll take it. I haven’t had such an easy time since I was writing about Nixon

     How about you, Tlaz, you going to endorse evidence free science? I’d ask you about logic but if you think you can know what something says without reading it…

     Reply

141. You have a plan?

     Reply

142. I’m interested in the abuse of science by materialists, which is far more subtle and complicated than its abuse by religious fundamentalists.

     Examples, please? If you’re really interested in the subject, then you should have at least a few really good examples, right? (Oh, and you’re showing your creationist colors again — that line about how science is okay but it’s been corrupted by “atheists”/”materialists” is one of their oldest lying-points.)

     I’ve been studying these issues for about the past three years and will probably continue to do that.

     If you’re really been “studying” it for that long, then you REALLY should have some good examples to cite. Where are they?

     I think there are complex reasons for that, scientists overselling science in other areas, scientists selling out to corporate oligarchs, scientists hostile to non-scientists and their non-scientific beliefs as well as other things.

     Oh yeah, lots of things…things of which you still have no specific examples. No examples? No case.

     Oh, Tlaz has brought her bossy boots act to this blog.

     “Bossy?” What’s so “bossy” about pointing out something that’s bloody obvious from your behavior? She didn’t give any orders. Once again, you’re hiding behind patronizing macho insults when you have nothing else to offer.

     Also, it’s funny how so many of us said a certain thing about you, but the only one of us you call “bossy” is the one you either think or know is female. You got a special problem with women speaking up to your face? And now you’re responding with both paranoia and mockery about her “posse?” God but you’re a bogus little git.

     Oh, maybe I’ll get to tell the story of how she slammed a comment I posted earlier today as an expression of scientific ignorance.

     Oh, I get it — you’re still all butthurt ’cause she didn’t follow your precious script either, and you’re still nursing the grudge.

     Greg Laden, I don’t believe you didn’t understand those questions. I doubt, but don’t yet know, that you have never expressed disdain for the idea that you can know something without direct evidence for it, but I’ve certainly heard and read it often enough for me to doubt you’re unfamiliar with the idea.

     Um…you still didn’t give Greg the clarification of your question #1 that he asked for. You said you were waiting for his answers, then when he asked for clarification, you tried to duck and dodge. Do you really think you’re fooling anyone here?

     Reply

143. I for one see no evidence for Tlaz’s boots.

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144. Anthony, what counts as evidence?

     Really, I want to know.

     People say the origin of the moon is likely a large collision, because the moon is made of stuff that looks a lot like the Earth’s mantle. Is that evidence of anything? Anything at all? THe fact that it is made of stuff like the Earth’s mantle — and unlike the other differentiated bodies of similar size. Do you think that tells you anything? What?

     Life as it is on Earth is made of a certain basic six elements across the board. What does that tell you, Anthony? Anything at all?

     You keep saying “we know nothing about the earth then” when that is patently false. You keep saying “life has changed a lot” which is true, but the laws f chemistry and physics have not changed. You keep saying that narrowing down the problem — the fact that we know that much of the periodic table won’t form self-catalyzing molecules — tells you nothing. Holy. Freaking. Shit.

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145. I think I might have commented at PZ’s playhouse about five times, in all, under my name and the pseudonym I used to use on blogs.

     I think John Kwok posted more than that before getting thrown in the Dungeon. Although you weren’t ever thrown in the Dungeon, even though you spent a lot of time and energy saying that you had.

     Do you realize I’ve been posting and lurking on Pharyngula (among others) since before there even was a sciblogs?

     Reply

146. Jesse: I’m not sure what you’re getting at with your refrain about elements. Life passed throught the LUCA bottleneck, but there are various other necessary elements beyond your six to produce LUCA. Iron for the iron pyrite world, aluminum and silicon for the clay world, etc. So we have no real knowledge of what the essential elements are to *produce* life. I’m not even sure that the six you list are enough to sustain life. Certainly not human life.

     –bks

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147. So, PZ thinks you can know about something without evidence for it?

     Quote PZ himself saying that, or admit you’re full of shit.

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148. Nah, it’s pretty obvious that Anthony is a broomhandle.

     Because he’s convinced himself that the origin of life had to be a single, finger-of-god event and refuses to listen to anyone who tries to tell him that it had to be spectacularly more chaotic than that based on what we’ve discovered about biology. I mean, hell, they can still see the separate protein pathways in the human genome that predate the synthesis of the eukaryotic cell.

     There’s a fundamental disconnect in that he keeps insisting that there had to be only one single organism that arose one single way, instead of, say, dozens upon dozens of different self-catalyzing proteins like more or less everyone here has pointed out. Also, the fact that he refuses to accept that if someone manages to synthesize an organism, we’ll have learned at least a little bit about the conditions needed to synthesize an organism seems kind of telling.

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149. Greg Laden, you clearly don’t follow Eschaton. A cute attempt at rejoinder is no substitute for a logical refutation, though. I’m looking forward to your next blog post touting the primacy of evidence and logic and “skepticism”.

     Quote PZ himself saying that, or admit you’re full of shit. Raging Bee

     Though logic doesn’t seem to be a strong point with the regulars here.

     RB, you’ve got to be about the stupidest person I’ve ever seen who could pass muster among the self-appointed rationalists. And considering what the typical regular at of some of these blogs is like, that’s pretty stupid.

     Macho insults? That she was too foolish to notice the difference between Richard Feynman, with his name and the title of his piece attached to the quote, for something I said? That’s stupid in any gender. Tlaz is an ass.

     Graculus, PZ’s fanboys might think he is the center of the universe but, let me break this to you gently, he isn’t. He’s a side show, something I might look into on occasion if something calls my attention to it, the left side bar of more interesting Scienceblogs, typically, but I don’t go there unmotivated. That’s how I came here after making the argument to a creationist at Josh Rosenau’s blog that our not knowing how life began wasn’t bar to knowing that evolution happened and quite a bit about it. I said that unlike the origin of life, about which we could know next to nothing, evolution is the phenomenon in science that is most heavily SUPPORTED WITH EVIDENCE. Then Greg Laden put a link to this post in that thread and things went on from there. But I digress.

     I have had the pleasure, several times, of asking biology teachers and about three working researchers in biological topics what they thought of PZ Myers, only to have most of them ask, “Who’s PZ Myers?”. He’s really not a big deal outside of the blogs and most people don’t bother with blogs. I suspect most public school science teachers have better things to do with their limited time. Maybe they’re looking for something substantial about their topic.

     I thought a “lurker” was someone who read a blog but didn’t comment. How do you perceive “lurkings” at a blog? Though as you can apparently see things that aren’t there maybe you think you can do that too. Or is it that you can’t count? As some here seem to not see tacit information during a quarter of a billion years, I suppose you losing count isn’t to be noticed.

     If I lurk, it’s at political blogs. Politics being of a lot more pressing importance than these brawls. I’ve been wasting my time here but studying the folly of conceited pop materialists is a weakness of mine.

     I could spend the next week trading insults with idiots, Greg Laden, and it’s clear you are never going to

     Reply

150. cont. you are never going to address what I’ve said, dodging and weaving around questions you don’t want to answer because you can’t without undermining your argument, so I’m just going to look in to amuse myself unless something substantial happens.

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151. Anthony Leveler@
     “I said that in order to know something you had to have evidence of it. Either direct evidence or evidence known to be close enough to have some reasonable chance of intuiting something that actually had to do with it. Neither of which is available for this topic.”
     and
     @424 “So, PZ thinks you can know about something without evidence for it? Is this some revolution in atheism among scientists I missed?”

     Anthony, one thing you will get used to at sciblogs is “conflation” of evidence with massive amounts of opinion, in-group out group ad hominem, and misguided misandry.

     For a remarkable treatise on the power of conflating scientific fact with popular opinion (popular to the minions), and the masquerading of opinions with ‘scientific fact’ look at the recent Rebbeca Watson man in an elevator’ debacle.

     Then stumble over to ERV blog and see some of the fallout.

     Reply

152. Looks like Panspermia is back in vogue. New article in PNAS:

     Detection and formation scenario of citric acid, pyruvic acid, and other possible metabolism precursors in carbonaceous meteorites

     http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/08/04/1105715108.abstract

     –bks

     Reply

153. pornonimous I supported Rebecca Watson in that thing, you can go to read some of what I said about it here:

     http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2011/07/point-you-are-proving-it.html

     Anthony, one thing you will get used to at sciblogs is “conflation” of evidence with massive amounts of opinion, in-group out group ad hominem, and misguided misandry.

     Do you people know what a question mark is used for? Greg Laden said that PZ agreed with him about the origin of life. So I was asking if he agreed that evidence relevant to that was optional as G.L. seems to.

     I know the evo-psys have a hard time understanding some of the simpler aspects of math foundations, a lot of their pals seem to have a problem with some of the simpler aspects of reading.

     As for your charge of “misandry” I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about and can only assume you don’t know what the word means.

     I think you might mean its opposite, but that would be even stupider. If you mean me telling Raging Bee that she’s among the stupider people I’ve encountered on a new atheist’s blog, that’s got nothing to do with her gender but with her inability to think. I thought she was stupid before I knew her gender.

     Reply

154. Anthony, you have failed to quote PZ saying anything like what you imply he said. That’s an admission that you’re full of shit. (That, and, of course, the fact that you even mentioned PZ in a thread that wasn’t about him at all.)

     RB, you’ve got to be about the stupidest person I’ve ever seen who could pass muster among the self-appointed rationalists. And considering what the typical regular at of some of these blogs is like, that’s pretty stupid.

     So show me where I’m stupid by refuting my arguments and/or showing why my questions are invalid. Or, again, admit you’re full fo shit.

     Macho insults? That she was too foolish to notice the difference between Richard Feynman, with his name and the title of his piece attached to the quote, for something I said? That’s stupid in any gender.

     Then you should have pointed out where she was wrong, instead of calling her “bossy,” which is totally unconnected to any of her alleged mistakes. Childish macho insults in lieu (that’s French) of direct refutation, doesn’t cut it here, and doesn’t convince us that you even think you’re right.

     Tlaz is an ass.

     Even if she is, she’s an ass with a LOT more credibility than you have. It’ll take a LONG time for her to dump as many lies and logical falacies as you’ve dumped here. In the meantime, her word is trustworthy, yours isn’t.

     Reply

155. Anthony McCarthy ‘Leveler’ wrote:

     you are never going to address what I’ve said, dodging and weaving around questions you don’t want to answer because you can’t without undermining your argument, so I’m just going to look in to amuse myself unless something substantial happens.

     There was so much irony inherent in that comment that it set off the metal detector in my spare room.

     Reply

156. …so I’m just going to look in to amuse myself unless something substantial happens.

     Does anyone trust a bald-faced liar like Anthony to keep this promise?

     Reply

157. Greg Laden said that PZ agreed with him about the origin of life. So I was asking if he agreed that evidence relevant to that was optional as G.L. seems to.

     Where does Greg even imply that evidence is “optional?” Direct quotes please, or admit you’re full of shit.

     Reply

158. OK, I looked at your blog, pornonimous, and you don’t seem to be able to write a coherent idea.

     I’ve written quite a bit about porn at the blog I formerly wrote for. I’ll repost all of those pieces at my current blog so my former blog partner doesn’t have to be bothered by more irrational comments. Here’s one I already have reposted.

     http://zthoughtcriminal.blogspot.com/2011/06/cold-case-crush-porn-has-more-rights.html

     I’ll begin reposting the others later today.

     Reply

159. Raging Bee asked:

     Does anyone trust a bald-faced liar like Anthony to keep this promise?

     In the immortal words of Rowan Atkinson: I wouldn’t trust him to sit the right way on a toilet seat.

     Anthony McCarthy wrote:

     I’ve written quite a bit about porn at the blog I formerly wrote for. I’ll repost all of those pieces at my current blog so my former blog partner doesn’t have to be bothered by more irrational comments. Here’s one I already have reposted.

     You know, if someone had ever asked me what would be the least appealing author/subject combination I could envisage, I’m fairly sure ‘that pompous fraud Anthony McCarthy writing about porn’ would almost certainly be at the top of the list.

     Reply

160. I’ve been giving Laden the opportunity to say that you had to have evidence relevant to the actual origin of life in order to know something about it from the first comments I posted on this thread.

     He’s the one who suggested PZ saw eye-to-eye with him. I was hoping that Myers would tell us how he saw that little detail of evidence known to be relevant to what you want to know.

     I don’t know what to suggest, RB. Reading some very, very easy things and seeing if you can deal with what’s written without inserting delusional content? I know reading can be hard but words don’t do their work if you won’t.

     Reply

161. Here’s the first comment I made on this thread @13, Notice :
     the last part where I said that without evidence you could know nothing. I had been under the impression that’s something I could agree with new atheists on, but apparently they don’t believe it anymore. I haven’t noticed them coming to the defense of evidence in this brawl.

     If you believe that we are descended from one common ancestor, which I do believe, you are not talking about some theoretical entity, you are talking about a real, living organism that reproduced itself and its offspring reproduced. Those offspring came from whatever biology-chemistry was operating in that first organism, that doesn’t explain the development of the original organism which would have had to have had a far different origin because it wasn’t the product of reproduction of a living organism.
     The origin of life is through that original ancestor, whatever bio-chemistry allowed its creation, amazingly complex just in itself, and the chemistry of its successful reproduction was not theoretical, it was whatever it was and specific to that organism. You would have to know about that organism to know about it, you can’t reconstruct it out of theories, no more than you know you had successfully imagined another form of life that arose on another planet. That is speculation and you might develop some science in the effort but that still doesn’t tell you anything real about that organism and how it formed at that level of complexity. With that level of complexity your chances of getting it very wrong a very high. And that doesn’t even get to the question of what the environment it survived and reproduced in was like. You don’t know when, or where, or what its environment was like, you don’t know what its method of being contained was, you don’t know anything about the chemistry of its reproduction or any possible mechanism of inheritance of traits or if it was subject to what is called, by us, “selection”, in far later generations.

     In the end, you can not know anything about it except that it was alive, it reproduced and that subsequent generations of its descendents changed to produce the diversity of life. Without physical evidence about it, you can know nothing. You can’t even know if you’re barking up the wrong tree. And as speculations in the name of science show, there will be a forest of those trees as time goes on and scientists compete with each other. That even happens when there is physical evidence, without it, all hell breaks loose.

     Reply

162. I’ve been giving Laden the opportunity to say that you had to have evidence relevant to the actual origin of life in order to know something about it from the first comments I posted on this thread.

     Greg NEVER disputed that premise. He has, in fact, said — literally from the get-go — that we do indeed have at least enough evidence to speculate on possible scenarios and guide further research. Your assertion that he said or implied that evidence is “optional” is a total fabrication. In other words, you’re full of shit. Now take your balls and go home and sulk with them like you promised.

     Reply

163. Wowboy, I said I was going to look in for my amusement and I’m finding this amusing. I’m not arguing with Greg Laden until he stops side stepping, I’ve got enough to of that to use already.

     I’ve got to teach at eleven EDT so I’ll be amusing myself for about another ten minutes.

     Reply

164. Here’s the first comment I made on this thread @13, Notice : the last part where I said that without evidence you could know nothing.

     Go back a little further than that…like, to the original fucking post. Notice: dozens of peer-reviewed papers that discuss evidence pertaining to the origin of life. WE HAVE EVIDENCE, you stupid lying sack of shit, and no one here has ever said evidence is “optional.” You’ve been lying about what we’ve been saying, plain and simple, the whole time.

     Reply

165. You’re a “teacher?” I pity your students, and sincerely hope they fnid out how untrustworthy you really are before you do them serious harm.

     Reply

166. Anthony, since you’ve reposted your first comment, here’s a summary of everything you’ve been ignoring in the hundreds of comments since then: (1) We do not have complete evidence, but we have some, as Greg has helpfully provided to you; (2) as such, we make provisional statements about what that evidence tells us; (3) we do not, as you vaguely claim, overstate the certainty or completeness of our knowledge based on this evidence; (4) we expect that, as in any scientific endeavor, further evidence will change our understanding; (5) this does not mean that everything we understand now is incorrect, simply that it is incomplete; (6) we consider this is a desirable outcome, even if it’s sometimes uncomfortable, because it means that science and human knowledge have advanced; and (7) any scientific field that you view as relatively settled has gone through exactly this kind of process, but now the main body of knowledge in that field is stable and the process is happening in the details. Care to address any of that, or are you going to go on just repeating your original premise as though no one had answered it and swapping insults?

     Reply

167. I’ve been giving Laden the opportunity to say that you had to have evidence relevant to the actual origin of life in order to know something about it from the first comments I posted on this thread.

     Thank you for giving me this opportunity. I’ll take it. Here is a list of references and blog posts that discuss the evidence and the overall science pertaining to the origin of life: click here

     Refute that.

     Reply

168. I’ve got to teach at eleven EDT so I’ll be amusing myself for about another ten minutes.

     Holy crap.

     Reply

169. Anthony, since you’ve reposted your first comment…

     It kinda looks like he’s been doing that the whole time, with the garnish of various wild, irrelevant and unsupported (and probably made-up) accusations tossed in for “variety.”

     Reply

170. Yep. It’s standard denialist troll behavior.

     Reply

171. @Anthony McCarthy Leveler:

     And here’s how we can tell he’s a compete fucking idiot. He refuses to back off the idea that the origin of life and the last common ancestor were the same thing.

     Fuck, as it stands know, some of the biologists I know are pretty comfortable saying that the origin of life probably happened a couple of times. Pull your head out of your ass (It’ll make more room for those ten paragraph piles of drek you keep finding in there) and listen to what people are saying.

     The evidence of what the last common ancestor was like is right fucking here. It’s US. The evidence of what the origin of life was like are spottier, but the number one way we’re going to start figuring out WHAT MUST HAVE HAPPENED on Earth for life to originate is by figuring out WHAT HAS TO HAPPEN for us to make life *now*.

     I pity whichever class you’re going to teach, and have a feeling that you’re akin to the miserable 10th grade World History teacher whose class I bullshitted my way through because he’d never read a god-damned history book in his life.

     Reply

172. Greg@451: Thank you for that link! What a useful compendium of references to our current evidence and what scientists have extrapolated from it.

     Reply

173. @Anthony Leveler: Geez, tell me what you really think–oh, wait you did.

     Thank you, good criticism is always welcome. So try a do-over, you blow-hard; and I mean that with all the juicy relish that such a term carries.

     I made it to your blog–some post about something or other and was awe struck with your use of words–lots and lots and lots and more lots of them, without any substantiation, any second opinions, or any life anecdotes that made such a loooong hot wind seem tolerable.

     Sure,you have the Henry Miller page-length paragraphs, but without the humor, the substance, the passion, or the ‘life’ for which Miller strove.

     Or more appropriately: as Henry sought to exuviate from himself the detritus of his soul–which by the way is and was an eminently readable soul,it seems that Anthony is looking for one in the first place;

     And I might add, Henry would have fit Anthony’s defintion of a loathly paramour to free speech absolutism in his day–he said cunt!Run for the shotguns! Protect your daughters from the filth! Uphold the virtuos women, shelter their ears from …CUNT!

     And, equally, the Supreme Court, which didn’t allow Millers novels to enter the country, would indeed still be required to uphold the ban on Miller, et al, by Anthony’s logic.

     Which makes me wonder: if what I read at Anthony’s blog is indeed the genuine refuse of Anthony’s soul, what emptiness must now lurk in his heart, his mind and his thoughts, because even Anthony’s refuse contains no hair of human,no whiff of an animate stayer, or stink of fresh nailed frame,post, or plinth upon which one can hang a hat, or rest a novel idea.

     A caricature: Anthonies writing, a mere limning of [a] reality of some kind-but wholly unsubstantiated, highly opinionated regurgitation of well worn moralistic tropes. But no spirit! No feist! And certainly no spice.

     I had to do a double take, and make sure I wasn’t reading a something or other from a Catholic school boys daily catechism journal, that would be edited eventually by an approving nun, or his mother.

     And then I got to the paragraph where there actually was a period in a sentence! And I paused; not stopped…and when I awoke, I realized that baiting Anthony could be an endless task. Reading his work for substance that can’t be found elsewhere–and certainly IS found anywhere–a one time thing!

     But there at that point, a note to self: a better idea not to tread again, ever, at Anthony McCarthy Leveler’s incredibly dull blog.

     Reply

174. Holy crap. Greg Laden

     I know, for years they’ve been asking me to teach summer school again, I finally had to agree because of the economic downturn.

     Being as I’ve spent a good part of the last two hours with students hoping to pass Freshman math and go into the 10th grade, I could put it in terms of sets and your inability to find the intersection of those sets, when most of the elements of one of them are unknown and there is a gap of a few billion years between the two sets but….. naw.

     Do you always deal with people pointing out inconvenient lapses in your assertions by irrelevant sarcasm or is that something you picked up when you came to the Scienceblogs?

     Reply

175. pornonymous, you sound like The Dirty Vicar sketch. Only that was coherent.

     Here’s the second in that series.

     http://zthoughtcriminal.blogspot.com/2011/08/reason-for-liberalism-to-exist-at-all.html

     Greg, you ever read any of p’s writing? Go look at the quality of support you’ve got.

     Reply

176. Steph, what am I supposed to be denialing?

     Reply

177. Anthony, you’re denying that the substance of this discussion is as represented in comment 450, which you have again failed to address.

     Also, the name is Stephanie. And pornonymous jumped in to support your PZ-bashing, not Greg. Now he just doesn’t like you.

     Reply

178. Greg, you ever read any of p’s writing? Go look at the quality of support you’ve got.

     Greg’s got plenty of support right here, and you’re desperately pretending to ignore it because we’ve proven you wrong and you can’t defend yourself or your words. Once again, Anthony, you show your cowardice and dishonesty by pretending the most obviously irrelevent troll is “representative” of Greg’s “supporters.”

     Reply

179. I thought a “lurker” was someone who read a blog but didn’t comment. How do you perceive “lurkings” at a blog?

     “others” is a plural. I lurk on some blogs, I occassionally post on others.

     With your level of reading comprehension it is no wonder you get yourself into these shitstorms.

     Reply

180. So, Tony, what exactly are you trying to say, anyway? That we can’t find out about the origin of life?

     How does figuring out how the conditions necessary for organic molecules to appear not teach us something about the origin of life? How does determining the conditions that result in the appearance of nucleic acids not teach us about the origin of life? How does trying to determine how the jump can be made from simple self-replicating protein to RNA and DNA as the self-replicators not teach us about the origin of life? How does studying how self-replicating proteins could aggregate together not teach us about the origin of life?

     Honestly, you’re either a blinkered dolt, or you’ve got your hand down creationism’s pants without realizing it.

     Reply

181. (1) We do not have complete evidence, but we have some, as Greg has helpfully provided to you;

     Laden has linked to a lot of experiments and posts talking about things that happened in the past 60 years which may have shown what they showed within the boundaries of the experiments. He has not provided any evidence that links those to an event that happened a few billion years ago. No one has. You can’t because there is no evidence of the event and what aspects of an imagined origin of life which Laden and others wish to associate that science with, may not have actually present at the origin of life.

     If you wrote a nonficton book asserting something about an event in the past that you knew exactly two general facts about but absolutely no detail of how those happened, you would either have to provide evidence of that event or you would be writing conjecture. What Greg Laden has done is present conjecture about of the origin of life as knowledge. Which is standard procedure in the social sciences but it is also the reason what they claim as knowledge is so regularly overturned.

     I don’t think you understand the difference, I think he does but he doesn’t want to have to admit it. Some of the others just know which team they like and nothing else.

     Reply

182. BinJabreel: “self-replicating protein” “conditions that result in the appearance of nucleic acids”? You’re not helping Greg, if that’s your intention. Quite the contrary.

     I speak only for myself, but the dialogue between AM and Greg, once engaged, would have been much more interesting without the howler monkeys in the canopy.

     –bks

     Reply

183. What Greg Laden has done is present conjecture about of the origin of life as knowledge.

     Exact quotes from Greg, please, or admit (again) that you’re full of shit.

     Reply

184. Anthony Leveler:You’re kidding right? Go over to your blog more than once? Naaw. Once was more than plenty nuf, thanks.

     I think the bigger issue is looking at the level of support that you need–as well as lacking any form of citation and substantiation your work is just dusty at best.

     Your a puffer fish with no poison up against lionfish here.

     And you are not a very good reader, are you? Read my post above, and refer to it in the future as I deride, and criticize your long winded time consuming, Anthony Leveler referencing, vain assertions from this day forwards.

     But my post @457 is clearly a review of you as writer, [you], that isn’t worth reading–the first time was gratuitous, because after all, you did peek at my work as well.

     But Anthony, your writing is shit; self effacing, windy, droll, dull, repetitious restatements of other peoples work. And all of that without any substantiation!

     You are a classic example of college being a training ground for the ordinary, the conformist, and the status quo–why college is wasted on the white middle class, I will never know.If you were any type of minority–even someone with a sixth finger–I might give you a break, because after all, I am a liberal at heart; but your work sucks.

     Or, to re-iterate: “Anthony’s refuse contains no hair of human,no whiff of an animate stayer, or stink of fresh nailed frame,post, or plinth upon which one can hang a hat, or rest a novel idea.”

     Another way to say it is, your work is what one might expect out of someone who had spent most of their living, reading about living instead; a mathematical rationalization of what life should be,what it looks like on a blackboard, but isn’t, in reality. Dusty, dry, formulaic, without the raw materials of actual experimentation.

     Stick with teaching the kids–after all, most of them are at your intellectual level-r already and the most you can do for them is provide the pedantry that is requiredto inspire fifteen and sixteen-year-olds; and they will soon surpass you. That is by design, teacher–because those who know….and those who don’t?

     You get the picture. Didn’t you get that out of my review? I think others might.

     Reply

185. So, yeah, your answer is, “Were you there?”

     You reject out of hand everything that came from the origin of terrestrial life as being evidence about the nature of the origin of life, despite not doing the same when the subject is historical evolution or the origin of the universe. You reject geochemical evidence regarding the time period during which life has to have arisen, as demonstrated by the changes that life made on our world. You reject reasoning from general chemical principles, as though they may have changed in the intervening time.

     None of that, all of which is represented in Greg’s list, is anything you consider evidence because it isn’t a handy, dandy little snapshot of the one thing you want to know about absolutely or not at all. How do you get through the day?

     Reply

186. bks: Anthony would have had to engage with Greg’s original presentation, which he never did, and probably will never do. That’s all Anthony would have had to do, and he chose not to do it. You cerainly can’t say Greg was unwilling to engage; nor can you pretend us “monkeys” had any power to stop Anthony from engaging.

     Reply

187. “Were you there”?

     I hadn’t figured you’d stoop to that attempted guilt by association dodge, Stephanie, though if you’ve got nothing else what do you have but calumny?

     None of us were there for the Gettysburg address, there is no recording of it being given or another of Lincoln’s voice to compare it with but there is plenty of evidence that it was given by Abraham Lincoln on the date it was given. There is every reason to believe that the enormous amount of physical and documentary evidence of it results in a quite detailed description of the event.

     None of us were there to meet Nicholas Steno and observe his work but there is a great deal of evidence that he lived, did the early research he did and lived and you would be entirely justified in saying he lived.

     None of us were there to see the creation of that 35,000 year old female figure that was much in the news a few years back. There is the evidence of the object, its form, it’s clear signs of having been worked, even the gender represented. Human beings are the only animals we know of at that time who could have done that, we can have a fairly good date for it. Though there were many things asserted about it which were pure conjecture. When I wrote about that I pointed out none of the people I heard talking about it considered the possibility that it might have been made by a woman, so the man drooling over a sexy female figure theory was far less than reliable. I said it was possible it a self-portrait or a portrait a woman had made of her mother, also something that the antropo-boys didn’t seem to have considered as a possibility. They didn’t consider that the artist might have intended a wax or clay head be attached to the vestigial head of that it was merely bad planning that had shortchanged the doll in the head dept, they didn’t consider that the artist considered it a failed work and a piece of junk. They didn’t consider that it could have been the work of more than one hand, perhaps by people very far removed in space, culture and time from each other, with different attitudes and ideas about it, it might have been altered after having been stolen, …. etc.

     And we can go all the way back to the origin of life well, well over 3,000,000,000 years ago of which we have absolutely not a single shred of evidence except that we can safely assume it was alive, somehow, and that it successfully reproduced and its descendents evolved or we wouldn’t be here arguing about it. Multiply the ambiguous possibilities about the manufactured doll above many, many, many times as the original life which was made was not the product of human hands, it had a form that we don’t know, its formation is not known, it wasn’t a nonliving doll but an actual, living, reproducing organism, which may have changed over time, which reproduced offspring of who knows what resemblance to the parent. etc. etc. etc.

     And you want to call that knowledge. And not only knowledge, but scientific knowledge, linking it to lab research from the past sixty years, with no way to compare it with an unknown life form which we don’t know and can’t observe and can’t even look at near relatives remains so there is no way to establish relevance between the research of today and that life. And you think I don’t understand the problem, when I’ve done something neither you nor Laden have, considered that it was a real event that really happened in the one way it had happened and not some disembodied idea to play with. I don’t, now, after all of this, believe you do understand it. I’m certain that Greg Laden does but it is ideologically inconvenient for him to admit anything I’ve pointed out.

     The rest of you, here is what I say at my blog About Me:

     Anthony McCarthy, sometimes known as the infamous, Anthony McCarthy, if not “you goddamned little bastard”, though usually only to my dearest friends. E -mail thinkingcriminal(at)gmail(dot)com. If you are writing to tell me how much you hate what I wrote, or that you hate me! hate me! hate me! save your fingers, I don’t care. I don’t usually communicate with people I’m fighting with in public except in public. I don’t open attachments.

     There’s a reason I call myself The Thought Criminal. I said it and I meant it.

     Reply

188. Aaaaand…splat! Anthony falls back on another anti-rationalist tactic — pretended vindication through phony paranoia and crybaby victimhood. Dude, do you really think that quoting the most ridiculous and childish part of your blog (that I’ve seen so far at least) makes you look MORE credible?

     Reply

189. Anthony, you seem a little off-balance.

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190. I shouldn’t have posted that, but AM’s latest post struck me as funny…for a minute I thought that his examples were leading toward a clue as to where he thinks the cut-off point in evidence was. Obviously 35,000-year-old evidence is okay, but evidence from 4 billion years ago isn’t…but then he went off on a tangent about how those mean anthropologists aren’t taking his opinions into account about how to do research…..

     To (just about) everyone else, this has been a really educational thread about how to try to tackle issues regarding how science is done, and even though “The Leveler” will probably never come around, rest assured that your efforts haven’t been completely wasted.

     DuWayne> I’m a former neuroscience student myself, and I agree with everything you said about the state of psychology as a science. I wish you the best in your future endeavours!

     Reply

191. So, yeah, your answer is, “Were you there?”

     Actually, it’s mostly sort of a muddled mix of recycled “were you there?” arguments and recycled “it’s just a theory” arguments. With little bits of “materialists are corupting science” and plenty of flat-out lies spread all over as icing. Oh, and one little bit of “evolution leads to eugenics and stuff!”

     Reply

192. quietmarc, you really didn’t understand that did you.

     What four billion year old evidence do you know about? The problem with it in this problem, is there isn’t any.

     You don’t think some women 35,000 years ago might have been able to have made that figure? I’d have thought the conjecture that it was a sex toy told us a lot, only a lot about the guys making that assumption far more than it told us about whoever made it, which was the point of my piece.

     I think anyone who has read much of what I’ve written would think it was pretty funny to suspect I’d crave the respect of someone in the social sciences.

     you seem a little off-balance.

     As compared to Raging Bee? And I’m supposed to take your thought on that seriously?

     Reply

193. Anthony, there’s nothing criminal about denying the evidence that’s been listed (and once again ignored in favor of acting injured). It’s just transparent, like your self-aggrandizement.

     Reply

194. The evidence listed is about the success of experiments done recently. They’re fine to the extent they’ve been reviewed and, maybe, even replicated successfully.

     Now, show me how they’re linked to what happened at the origin of life. Show me the details of the organism which those studies address, directly. Since you can’t even show me the organism, you can’t show me anything about it.

     What Greg Laden wants to do is create missing evidence out of these studies. That’s not the way reality works. What you get is only a simulation of evidence. When you create a simulation of evidence instead of having the real evidence, you don’t know if it was ever real and your process is untestable because your “evidence” is the product of your study and so will have to agree with it. I’ve yet to find an evo-psy study of that sort which didn’t support the contention of the one doing the research.

     Laden made a list, he didn’t make the connection of what was on that list to the event, he didn’t because he couldn’t. No one can.

     Reply

195. Anthony@ wherever:
     “that 35,000 year old female figure that was much in the news a few years back”

     Oh, the Hohle Fels Venus–what a rack, huh, huh? I bet they burned the person who crafted her–no doubt they had some form of self promoting, self deluded anti-free speech crusader-douche claiming that viewing her equated with the rape of real womem.

     “anyone who has read much of what I’ve written” Youmeanthere is a person out there who reads Anthony’s references to Anthony?

     “Thanks mom, you make it all worthwhile…”

     Reply

196. So, Anthony, you’re saying the laws of chemistry might have been different when life originated? You’re saying that life could have originated with no influence from the chemistry of the environment in which it originated? You’re saying that the chemical changes in our atmosphere were caused by something other than life? You’re saying that life has mutated so dramatically since its origin that nothing of the original chemistry that new life would have had can be deduced?

     Reply

197. He has not provided any evidence that links those to an event that happened a few billion years ago. No one has

     Anthony, was it you who said this? Please clarify.

     Reply

198. No, that’s certainly not what I said, Stephanie Z. I didn’t make an outlandish statement you could use to avoid what I actually did say.

     If you don’t understand that organisms are considerably more varied, complex, unpredictable and so not reliably guessed about than even complex chemical reactions it’s no wonder you don’t understand what this is about. Not that guessing molecules is all that easy, as seen from the huge effort coming up with various genomes has required. And that’s something they have samples of to base their work in. As I will continue to point out, there is nothing to base such an effort about in attempting to catalog or document the original organism, the result of the origin of life.

     If you had read even a bit about the problem of the origin of life you would know that there are enormous difficulties with just about every proposed aspect of it. You should go back and read that article by Robert Shapiro bks linked to. It was pretty good.

     If it was as easy as predicting what molecule was going to result from a chemical reaction there would be no problem. Go back and read what I said about why this wasn’t like assuming that gold had the same characteristics four billion years ago as it did today.

     I’m waiting for you guys to show some of that scientific rigor you are always pretending you own. Not to mention skeptical discernment. I’m seeing none.

     About “The Thought Criminal”. Stepahnie, Stephanie…. Here, I, a mere blogger, have to remind an author such as yourself of that most famous literary reference.

     I’m simply not going to lie about this, to pretend that what can’t be known, is known. I will, though, use any information you folks reveal to me about the understanding of science among the sciency and “skeptical” and materialist. Which doesn’t seem to be in such good shape around here. Not to mention the epidemic of reading dysfunction.

     Reply

199. No, Greg, I’ve clarified enough around here only to have you and your friends distort it. You are making the claim of knowledge, you clarify. Isn’t that the code of the “skeptic” that it’s the one making the claim and not the one expressing skepticism of that claim.

     Link your proposed knowledge to the actual organism that was the result of the origin of life, the actual organism that embodied “the origin of life”. In the detail necessary to really establish that what you asset is knowledge is relevant to the actual origin of life. Lay it out, back up your claim with evidence of the real thing. It’s what any skeptic would demand of someone making a claim of knowing about something they didn’t like.

     Reply

200. pornonymous, I think you’ve been doing too many poppers.

     Reply

201. Not that guessing molecules is all that easy, as seen from the huge effort coming up with various genomes has required.

     What do you mean by “guessing a molecule.” I think this is what my wife has been doing much of the summer …. guessing molecules in muscle in a lab a the University. Should I be worried that she’s wasting her time?

     No, Greg, I’ve clarified enough around here only to have you and your friends distort it. You are making the claim of knowledge, you clarify. Isn’t that the code of the “skeptic” that it’s the one making the claim and not the one expressing skepticism of that claim.

     You have not answered a single question that I’ve asked you, and you ignored what I said about “skeptic.”

     In the detail necessary to really establish that what you asset is knowledge is relevant to the actual origin of life.

     This does not make any sense. Is this what you meant to say?

     Lay it out, back up your claim with evidence of the real thing.

     I’ve provided evidence for my claims. You have ignored the evidence. You’ve also ignored my claims.

     It’s what any skeptic would demand of someone making a claim of knowing about something they didn’t like.

     What? What do you mean by this? You are not making any sense.

     Reply

202. What do you mean by “guessing a molecule.”

     Guessing the structure of any organic molecules that you know was involved in the transformation of non-living matter into a living organism. How about the popular one, that which led to the unprecedented first act of reproduction. Predict what the structure of those were like as they spontaneously assembled by chance out of nonliving matter of no one knows what character. Assuming you can make recourse to the chemistry found in modern cells will necessitate you explain how that happened before they became life.

     There, Greg, you can no longer claim that I’ve not answered a single question. I’d catalog the others I’ve already answered, though you would only deny it.

     I will assume you, or Stephanie or your other fans here would subscribe to the idea that claims require evidence, perhaps even that extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence. I won’t be as exigent as that with you, though.

     I’d characterize a claim to know something about the origin of life to be one sufficiently extraordinary to at least require a clear connection between the claimed knowledge and the living being which was the embodiment of that origin of life, the only possible evidence that there would be of life originating. That connection doesn’t have to be extraordinary, it just has to be clear and unambiguous.

     You are the one making the claim to know, not me. I’m the one skeptical of your claim for all the reasons I’ve given. Back up your claim with evidence. Real evidence from that real organism, not the simulation of evidence created out of supposition about otherwise legitimate science.

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203. Um, Anthony, have you read the Shapiro piece? You do understand it’s arguing for the plausibility of one hypothesis over another, right? You understand that instead of hand-wringing over the impossibility of it all, it lays out a chain of evidence that would demonstrate a likely origin of terrestrial life? You understand that it makes reference to the same sort of evidence that Greg lists in this post?

     And I’m well aware of the origin of the idea of a thought criminal. That’s part of what makes it pretentious.

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204. Predict what the structure of those were like as they spontaneously assembled by chance out of nonliving matter of no one knows what character.

     Why do you use the word spontaneously here?

     There, Greg, you can no longer claim that I’ve not answered a single question. I’d catalog the others I’ve already answered, though you would only deny it.

     Thank you, you did answer that question. Earlier, however, you said ” Not that guessing molecules is all that easy, as seen from the huge effort coming up with various genomes has required” which made me think you were talking about molecules in general. But now you have clarified that in your earlier statement that you were talking about specific molecules at the origin of life.

     We know that cells are alive and a lot about how they work without knowing about all the molecules in them. In fact, we knew quite a bit back when we know only about a very small number of molecules in them. I’d be very pleased with that level of understanding of the earliest cells or proto-cells.

     Regarding molecular structure, I refer you again to fracionation and stab. isotopes. I’m sure you see how this relates.

     I’d love to see the catalog of questions I’ve had that you’ve answered, if you’d post it. I can’t keep up with all the comments, I certainly don’t read them all. That would let me know what you’ve responded to. Thanks.

     I’d characterize a claim to know something about the origin of life to be one sufficiently extraordinary to at least require a clear connection between the claimed knowledge and the living being which was the embodiment of that origin of life, the only possible evidence that there would be of life originating.

     So, is your null hypothesis that life did not originate? Do you think that the claim that life originated is extraordinary?

     You are the one making the claim to know, not me.

     Well, I’ve not really “made a claim” … it’s more like I’ve “provided a buttload of information” about claims.

     Real evidence from that real organism, not the simulation of evidence created out of supposition about otherwise legitimate science.

     What does that mean? What would “real evidence from that real organism” look like? Are you saying that you want the actual organism(s), or that you require that we go back in a time machine?

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205. Anthony, you mean jalapeno poppers, right, like the kind your mom used, to pack your lunch?

     Dude, get over yourself.The whole time I have been watching you post, I am wondering if you aren’t on coke, which is why I thought you and Bee were a good match.

     Not that I have been reading your shit here, I just saw the opportunity to inflate your wind-prone ego some more, just to watch the lil’ puffer deflate himself.

     That and watch you get skewered by Laden’s rather brilliant dome. Hell, this shit ain’t even my subject; I was just tuuning in to watch your debacle.

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206. Refill points us to an important remark by Lewontin at #357. It’s not an OoL topic, per se, but it should not be swept under the rug with Occam’s broom. Hopefully it can be returned to on another day. I think AM and Greg might have common ground there.

     –bks

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207. Anthony McCarthy ‘Leveler’ wrote:

     I’m simply not going to lie about this…

     That’d be a first. I’m not holding my breath, though.

     Reply

208. Dammit, Wowbagger of the changing name. Now I’m going to have to find that book. Missed out when I was a kid.

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209. Why do you use the word spontaneously here? Greg Laden

     If spontaneously isn’t to your liking how about we just say we drop that and say:

     “Predict what the structure of those were like as they assembled by chance out of nonliving matter of no one knows what character, in who knows what way.”

     I think you’ll find that “spontaneously” isn’t going to be anywhere near as problematic as verifying your prediction, in this case, in who knows what way.

     And as the quibbling continues, how about we say:

     “Not that guessing many molecules of known relevance to life is all that easy, as seen from the huge effort coming up with various genomes has required”

     I assume you won’t assert that was easy, seeing the enormous effort it took some extremely good scientists to first find the structure of DNA, some believe even resorting theft, and the technical apparatus and science they needed to map genomes decades later.

     So, is your null hypothesis that life did not originate? Do you think that the claim that life originated is extraordinary?

     You should get points off for excessive cuteness.

     Considering that I’ve said from the start of this that there are only two things that you could know about the origin of life, that it produced a living thing and that it reproduced, its offspring eventually evolving and producing the diversity of life around us, you are just stalling. And, while I’m sure it will thrill your fans tonight, it’s just plain pathetic.

     As the rest of your comment is quibbling in order to avoid answering questions, you’ve certainly failed yet another opportunity of providing evidence for your claim that the we knew the origin of life.

     That your pals, especially the “skeptics” among them, clearly miss that you have not provided even clear evidence of an unextraordinary nature that anything in the list of citations you give can be linked to the origin of life, isn’t a surprise. If there is one thing I’m certain it is that “skeptics” don’t hold themselves to the standards they advocate for others who make claims, some of them far less extraordinary than what you have proposed.

     Claiming to know about the origin of life requires you to know an event without any evidence of it. Which is an extraordinary claim. I wonder what your or Stephanie’s archive might show about your reaction to similar claims by other people.

     If I claimed I knew the gender of the person who made that 35,000 year old statue, mentioned above, the choices would be that it was either a woman or that it was a man so there is an even chance I would be right. Though I’m sure you’ll bring up the possibility of a hermaphrodite making it, just to stall more. But if I said that I could know the gender of the artist in, say FATE magazine, and one of you wanted to mock that claim, you would demand clear evidence that I could back up my claim that I knew it. And, of course, I couldn’t and there would be no way to verify that because it would require identifying the artist and how I knew she had made it. So you would smugly mock the claim as woo or some other such word.

     There would be no way to know that because there is no evidence to back it up. And that is with far more information available about the statue and the species that made it. You have nothing like that with your claim of knowledge about the origin of life and you also have no way of determining the probability that your guess would be right, though for many things you might claim to know about it would be far more likely to be wrong.

     The longer you stall and quibble, the more material you are giving me and the harder to back up your claim of knowing about the origin of life becomes to support. If the questions surrounding it are this hard to parse, that only adds to the possibility of any claim of knowledge you make is wrong. Which would turn your claim of knowledge into an assertion of belief.

     Again, not that I expect your fans to even understand that, though I expect you will continue to pretend you don’t understand it.

     Stephanie, you did understand the improbability of a number of those scenarios proposed by competent scientists was quite extraordinarily large. I liked the one he said that a gorilla typing out a recipe was larger than life forming from one of them.

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210. That’d be a first. I’m not holding my breath, though.

     Oh, do, Wowbagger, hold your breath until you turn blue to get me to lie about this question. Maybe you can win one for your team. I promise I’ll notice.

     Reply

211. Anthony, you do understand that knowing some of the possibilities are improbable is still knowledge, yes? And again, Shapiro makes reference to the same body of evidence Greg lists and links to in this post.

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212. Stephanie, there is a large difference between being able to estimate the infinitesimally remote probability of the evaporation of a pool containing amino acids condensing into larger parts assumed to be relevant to the original form of life and knowing how life actually originated. In making that estimate of probability, you haven’t approached how that very dilute liquid formed life and what that life was like, which is a good part of the problem, those surrounding reproduction another good part of it.

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213. Anthony, search this thread for the word “probability.” See how many times it’s been explained to you. Then get around to addressing the fact that you cited something that cites some of the same evidence Greg cites.

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214. If you don’t understand that organisms are considerably more varied, complex, unpredictable and so not reliably guessed about than even complex chemical reactions it’s no wonder you don’t understand what this is about.

     So now you’re falling back on “life is too complex for science to explain?” So why is science able to explain life in the present day, even though that’s far more complex than it was back when it first began? Your religious obscurantism is showing again.

     No, Greg, I’ve clarified enough around here only to have you and your friends distort it.

     You haven’t clarified anything, you lying jackass. You certainly haven’t clarified any of the wild groundless accusations you’ve made about scientists; nor have you made any attempt to even clarify your own questions for Greg.

     You are making the claim of knowledge, you clarify.

     Um…Greg DID clarify, right in the OP, with — as he just put it — a buttload of information. And here you still are, denying the information exists, like the classic denialist you’ve been proving yourself to be.

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215. I was waiting for evidence of a Galileo complex. “The Thought Criminal” is no doubt it, since Anthony is equating his ideas with that which an establishment might seek to prosecute him for having. Oh, all these scientists are being mean to me because I can’t comprehend what they’re actually saying about things! Go cry, emo kid.

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216. Anthony McCarthy ‘Leveler’ wrote:

     Oh, do, Wowbagger, hold your breath until you turn blue to get me to lie about this question.

     Get you to lie? But you do it with as little effort as most people breathe; getting you to stop lying, on the other hand…

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217. Wow–Anthony is still at it? Anthony:here is evidence of the origin of life, in real time!

     When you stumbled over here, you were known for irrational, incredibly non descript phrases, sentences, and poor reasoning smashedup into HUGE paragraphs of almost incomprehensible logic bombs.

     Now look at you! Growing up, into not necessarily-always focused on Anthony phrases; some reading skills,combined with shorter paragraphs, sometimes two way conversations, and listening skills!

     Good job! Gold Star, class champ, you’re waking up! You are starting to LIVE!

     To whit: “you haven’t approached how that very dilute liquid formed life and what that life was like, which is a good part of the problem, those surrounding reproduction another good part of it.”

     Look at your earlier posts, and how thick and gooey they were–in contrast to the now somewhat dilute flow of conversation here with Steph!

     See, even Anthony can crawl up from the muck, and make a life for himself at Gregs blog;-)

     Oh–did I forget to mention white female privilege, Steph? I bet competitive Tony has some thoughts on that!

     https://pornalysis.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/rule-number-one-never-never-ever-make-the-white-women-mad/

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218. Stephanie Z. I’ve known what probability means in a mathematical sense since about 1968. Yours and Laden’s condescension doesn’t do a thing to make your case any better. You are lacking knowledge of the event to calculate probabilities from. You have no way of knowing how probable many aspects of actual relevance to the actual origin of life were. Knowing the probabilities of any proposed aspect of that happening would still not tell you what did happen. You would need physical evidence no matter how impressive your math looked.

     Life is a far more complex affair than you seem to want to believe. You still don’t understand that you are talking about a specific event that happened in a specific way with a specific result, nothing you address that wasn’t relevant to that event is relevant to it and you have no way to know just what was relevant to it.

     Bee, Bagger, TSTBW.

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219. This is a thread on which I decided early on that lurking was the better part of valor. Two points, though, I see getting confused here.

     A. “The question of the origin of life” has two possible meanings:
     1. Can we identify the first living organism on earth?; and
     2. Can we identify ordinary chemical processes by which life is able to form from non-life?

     These are not at all the same question. 1. will be much harder to answer than 2., if it is answerable at all. Among other problems with 1., I’m amazed no one has brought up bacterial conjugation– bacteria exchanging genes, even though they actually replicate by division. This phenomenon has been studied since the 1940’s. It offers convincing evidence that we will never be able trace back a neat line of ancestry, since, among other problems, there’s a certain amount of, aah, bestiality, in the prokaryotic community. (Bacteria picking up genes from single-celled individuals who aren’t closely related.) This turned out to be easy to study because bacteria sex lasts several lifetimes, and coitis interruptis can be forced by whirring the bacteria in a blender. [Pornonymous, why don’t you do something useful and write up a disquisition on this?]

     The biggest advance on question 1. is probably discovering that RNA can act as both genetic material and as an enzyme. The question of which came first, DNA or protein, used to be considered unanswerable by science (usually with the implied answer ‘therefore God.’) Now it turns out neither one needed to come first.

     As anyone who actually read the sources Greg cited now knows, the question, 2., of whether there are ordinary chemicals pathways which result in structures associated with life, has resulted in some solid findings. The papers which Greg lists presented, among other things, evidence that membranes similar to modern cell membranes will form spontaneously in certain conditions. In answering question 2., the Miller-Urey experiments were a huge advance, even though they got the conditions on pre-biotic earth wrong.

     If it turns out that life is still forming from non-life today in underwater vents, only to be gobbled up by bacteria, it will be relatively easy to answer question 2., how life can form from non-life. And question 1., what was the actual first life form on earth, will become a possibly interesting, but not really important, question.

     I’ve noticed Leveler has focused exclusively on question 1., ignoring or even sneering at the mass of evidence regarding question 2. I don’t expect he or bks will respond to this post with anything other than incomprehension, but I would be interested if any of the rest of you find dividing the question of the origin of life into the two questions above useful.

     Reply

220. “Predict what the structure of those were like as they assembled by chance out of nonliving matter of no one knows what character, in who knows what way.”

     Are you insisting on a “chance” based model? No selection allowed? Why do we have to use matter of which no one knows the character? Why not matter that we understand based on a combination of direct and indirect evidence? What do you mean “who knows what way”?

     I’m starting to think you are begging the question here, maybe.

     I assume you won’t assert that was easy, seeing the enormous effort it took some extremely good scientists to first find the structure of DNA,

     What was hard about it once the technology of x-ray diffraction was developed and applied? Yeah, that was some good work, but really, once the tools were developed, had they become widely distributed before FWC this result would have developed at dozens of labs in a matter of monhts .

     You should get points off for excessive cuteness.

     A lot of people tell me that.

     Considering that I’ve said from the start of this that there are only two things that you could know about the origin of life, that it produced a living thing and that it reproduced, its offspring eventually evolving and producing the diversity of life around us, you are just stalling.

     I didn’t realize that you had admitted that we could know anything! But your insistence that the two things you decided you will accept are the only things that we could possibly know does not conform to this.

     As the rest of your comment is quibbling in order to avoid answering questions

     You have asked, essentially, “How do you know X based on an unknowable Y and an inadmissable Z, and you must answer the question in a way that relies on irrelevant A, B and C” … and after repeated requests your question has not become any more useful.

     Claiming to know about the origin of life requires you to know an event without any evidence of it.

     I didn’t claim that.

     Reply

221. the evaporation of a pool containing amino acids condensing into larger parts assumed to be relevant to the original form of life

     Is that your theory? That’s not the most common thinking right now on this topic. You should check out the lit from, say, since you were born.

     Reply

222. . It offers convincing evidence that we will never be able trace back a neat line of ancestry, since, among other problems, there’s a certain amount of, aah, bestiality, in the prokaryotic community.

     When the gene exchanges happen, the genes are not digested. They are more or less retained. All DNA phylogeny is about the phylogeny of genetic lineages not organisms. The organisms are a secondary (but useful) inference. So no, there is no way in which bacterial exchange (which may have evolved long after bacteria evolved) obviates paleogenetics.

     Having said that, I don’t think DNA phylogeny was ever considered a way of addressing question 1 of yours. And that question does have the same grammar-related ambiguity that Anthony insisted on, so you should consider rewording. It assumes the way you’ve worded it that a thing we could classify as living is unambiguously classifed as living as opposed to some similar thing that is not (ie that our working definition of life is settled) and then, it assumes that there is one of them in the past (“THE first living organims[no “s” here]”) That may not be how it was at all.

     The biggest advance on question 1. is probably discovering that RNA can act as both genetic material and as an enzyme. The question of which came first, DNA or protein, used to be considered unanswerable by science (usually with the implied answer ‘therefore God.’) Now it turns out neither one needed to come first.

     And more broadly that the current configuration is probably a subset of possibilities. This is a point Anthony could have pointed out in favor of his “we can know nothing” approach but I don’t think he knows enough about the research.

     Funny, that. I’ve been pointing him to evidence that he is correct (which may also be evidence that he is incorrect) all along yet he has refused to look at it.

     Regarding your question 2, I wrote a few words on that, which got me in trouble with some of Anthony’s friends, here:

     http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/12/nasas_new_organism_the_meaning.php

     Reply

223. Repetitive lying troll is still repetitive. And still lying.

     Reply

224. bks–

     I missed your comment maybe, or didn’t have time to deal with it. Anyhow, the short version is that given that every modern life form’s DNA involves a certain set of elements, it isn’t unreasonable to think that whatever origin life has, it probably involves them in some fashion. That is, as I have pointed out several times, since we do not see DNA made of gallium, tin or lead in the place of carbon, there is a reason for that. So, for conditions on earth, if you want to make something like DNA, you have to use those (or more accurately, a class of elements that resembles them).

     This narrows down the problem considerably. Since we can eliminate from consideration origins that involve noble gases, and probably radioactive metals, and a host of other things that say, react violently with water.

     The stuff you’re talking about also has some pretty hard constraints. Clay world, for instance, means you have to have clays, which only form in water. OK, so life probably isn’t forming with lithium or sodium in that instance.

     Once you have that, it’s not so hard to come up with the classes of phenomena that you can plausibly say result in life forming. That still leaves tons of room to experiment in though, which is why there is any scientific controversy about the OoL at all. In that sense it’s like studying the origins of the universe: there are a lot of things you can say about that too, and certain classes of theory that we are pretty sure are wrong given the way the universe looks now. Anthony would probably say we can’t know anything about it tho, since the universe has changed so radically int he last 15 billion years.

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225. Is that your theory? Greg Laden

     Maybe you should try reading the article we were talking about, Greg Laden. It was one mentioned as being of enormous improbability in it.

     I have no theory, many other people have many, though I’d think those should really be called “guesses”. As I’ve stated, my only guesses is that all living beings today have a common ancestor and even if that ancestor was the survivor of some bottle neck, it’s original ancestor was the product of the origin of life which has left us no evidence that we can use to understand the origin of life.

     I wonder if any other allegedly skeptical blogs is paying attention to this eye-opening discussion. Not that I’d expect them to do more than cheer on their team.

     Claiming to know about the origin of life requires you to know an event without any evidence of it.

     I didn’t claim that.

     You claimed that much was known about the origin of life, far, far more than is supported by evidence that can be linked to that event.

     You’ve had well over a week to come up with something linking the studies you assert produced knowledge of the origin of life and the actual event and you have come up with nothing but come up with a series of dodges that is rapidly looking more like dissembling. Which I’d not expected, considering the general content of your blog.

     Claims of knowledge can be challenged to produce evidence supporting those claims. If the one claiming knowledge can’t produce evidence, their claim to know something is unsupported and deserves real skepticism. Anyone who wants to, is within their rights to point out that your unsupported claim isn’t known but is believed.

     Politically, in the present atmosphere when creationism is making dangerous inroads on science, overselling claims of belief related to the well supported fact of evolution is dangerous and foolish. Without evidence claims about the origin of life should be presented as being entirely contingent and unknown, not as being known. There is no reason not to as that is the actual case.

     But the overselling of simulated evidence created in the absence of real evidence, on the bases of theories, which the simulated evidence, big surprise, supports the theories they were made from, is rampant in several areas that get called science, these days. My guess, that is a habit that began, in large part, from the promotion of ideological materialsm, that seems to account for a huge swath of it in the socalled sciences.

     I despair at the state of science after this discussion. Though I will use it.

     I’m done.

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226. Without evidence claims about the origin of life should be presented as being entirely contingent and unknown, not as being known.

     Got any specific examples of invalid or unsupportable claims made by actual scientists? You’ve had over a week to back up such vague insinuations, and you’ve never done so. Why? Because there are no such incidents to report, and you know it. You’re a liar engaged in a premeditated campaign to defame people who don’t agree with you.

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227. I despair at the state of science after this discussion.

     Oh Heavens, scientific accomplishments like solar power, wind power, flight, antibiotics, space travel, improved farm productivity, electric cars, the Internet, and a vastly greater understanding of our Universe than we ever had before, aren’t good enough for Little Lord Trolleroy? Pray tell us, your Lordshit, what more must science do to get back in your good graces?

     Or perhaps you have in mind something else that’s had more and better accomplishments than science? Perhaps Your Lordshit would deign to tell us what that wonderous and mysterious tool may be…?

     Go to bed, little man. Maybe if you ask nicely enough, perhaps Karl Rove will give you another pearl necklace to clutch, ifyouknowwhatimean…

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228. It’s God-in-the-gaps all the way down.

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229. Raging bee, re comment 510:

     Open research casts doubt on arsenic life
     Blog documenting quest to replicate finding could be taste of things to come.

     http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110809/full/news.2011.469.html

     I just mention that one because it came out yesterday. I think I could provide hundreds of others. See also comment 107.

     –bks

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230. Is that your theory? Greg Laden

     Not sure what you are referring to here. I’ve not presented any theories.

     it’s original ancestor was the product of the origin of life which has left us no evidence that we can use to understand the origin of life.

     That is incorrect.

     I wonder if any other allegedly skeptical blogs is paying attention to this eye-opening discussion. Not that I’d expect them to do more than cheer on their team.

     That would be “are” not “is”

     You claimed that much was known about the origin of life, far, far more than is supported by evidence that can be linked to that event.

     That is incorrect.

     You’ve had well over a week to come up with something linking the studies you assert produced knowledge of the origin of life and the actual event

     Are you talking about time machines again? My Tardis is in the shop.

     Politically, in the present atmosphere when creationism is making dangerous inroads on science, overselling claims of belief related to the well supported fact of evolution is dangerous and foolish.

     Demonstrate that such a claim has been made. Don’t just say it again and again, but prove it.

     simulated evidence

     Wht is “simulated evidence.”

     I’m done.

     This, I doubt.

     TTT: It’s God-in-the-gaps all the way down.

     Anthony is definitely not a creationist.

     bks, thanks for that link, had not seen that yet. Very interesting!.

     Reply

231. bks: thanks for the interesting article, but how does it support any of Anthony’s claims about scientists making unsupportable claims? All I see here is some scientists saying their research shows one thing, and others doing similar research and coming up with differing conclusions, so they argue about who is right. Some of those claims will be proven, others disproven, but in this case at least, all of the claims appear to be supported by at least some evidence and experimentation. If you see a claim in there that’s TOTALLY without support, by all means quote it.

     And there’s certainly nothing here showing unsupportable claims about the origin of life.

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232. Anthony, that’s what you think has been said about probability in this thread? Do you actually read any comment for comprehension or just to pull out some phrase you think merits attack?

     For those who actually care about the topic, understanding the probabilities is accumulating knowledge. Knowledge, not certainty. That’s why we talk about these things as conditional probabilities. All you’ve done in endorsing bks’s link is point to another scientist saying we can determine some of these probabilities based on the kind of evidence Greg listed in this post. Congratulations for making our point for us.

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233. Greg @506– from the post you cited on “NASA’s new organism” “What I’m suggesting here is that the origin of life involved several different biochemical experiments that would now and then spatially overlap, and when they did so, sometimes combined.”

     That’s pretty much what I was trying to talk about [post #503] apparently not very clearly. There may not have been one, single solitary “first life.” In fact, my bet would be that there were repeated instances of chemical combinations spontaneously developing metabolism and/or reproduction (or parts of those processes). And knowing what goes on in bacteria, they probably did sometimes combine. That would make the question of whether we still have chemical processes in our bodies which we inherited from the *very first* living organism, versus, say, the tenth or the three-hundred-and-eighty-seventh– or if we got metabolism from one source and reproduction from another– a pretty uninteresting thing to know, compared to knowing that life can, in the right circumstances, evolve from non-living systems. And on that last point, it looks more and more likely that we will, in fact, learn how things that metabolize and reproduce can develop from things that can’t.

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234. I just couldn’t stay away – though in part, that is because there isn’t much that interests me elsewhere.

     Anthony –

     …but when that is overturned due to the primitive state of the technology it is based on and the vagueries of what is known from it means…

     You really are fucking clueless about science. Of course I expect to get things wrong – though I also expect to get shit right too. I am going to get a bit right and a lot wrong. Then later, someone is going to come along and building on my work, prove that I am wrong and get a little something right in the process – as well as getting a good bit wrong. Then the process will repeat – each step along the way, our understanding of behavior increasing a little – even if it is just to know more about just what we don’t know.

     Indeed, I expect that I will probably come along after my own work and realize that I fucked up.

     The thing is, if we don’t try and fuck up to begin with, we will never get it right. Just like we can’t come up with better technologies, without building on, or noting the weaknesses of more primitive technologies. I think neural imaging technology is a brilliant fucking example of this phenom. Both the equipment and procedures have continually improved over the past nearly forty years – at an increasingly rapid pace. The advances made in this field in the last 8 years, is greater than the advances made in the thirty years proceeding them.

     Anybody who tells you we have absolute certainty about much of anything is lying to you. Science is about what is supported by the best evidence available at a given point in time. There are things that are supported by stronger evidence than others, but about the only place we have real certainty, is in overarching theories. Such as evolution. We know it happened and is happening – but within the field of evolutionary biology, there is a lot of science that is hotly debated – largely because so many people have been wrong, we have a great deal to build on and this leads to conflicting ideas, which in turn lead to more research – more refinement.

     That is what science is about.

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235. Raging bee: You seem to have dropped the word “invalid” from your question. Hedging? Well at least the Tourettes Syndrome has abated.

     But even with your redefinition, it’s trivial to find examples:

     http://tech.mit.edu/V111/N25/balt.25n.html
     http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2008/06/the_hellinga_retractions_part.php

     Just drop it. You’re on the wrong path.

     –bks

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236. This was just posted on sciencedaily.com… < a href = "http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110809144517.html">plausible theory on origin of life?

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237. bks, I just had a look at both of your citations, and neither of them substantiate any of Anthony’s accusations. In both cases, some scientists got something wrong, and some other scientists proved them wrong by trying to duplicate the experiments. Anthony’s bogus accusations about unspecified scientists making unspecified unsuppoertable claims about our knowledge of the origin of life remain just that — bogus accusations.

     And why are you telling me to “just drop it?” Are you trying to bluff me off the trail?

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238. quietmarc, somehow your link did not survive:

     http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110809144517.htm

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239. RB: Now you’re playing Fizzbin[1]. I’m responding to what you said and what you said was nonsense. But you know what? You write down the set of rules for satisfying your question and then I’ll answer it, but you will not be allowed to import new categories for me to jump through like flaming hoops nor to drop old categories as you just did. I’m betting that you’ve forgotten exactly what you’re talking about, if you ever knew. No handwaving, be specific.

     –bks

     [1]
     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_in_Star_Trek#Fizzbin

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240. Thanks Greg. I was having an html moment.

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241. “Import new categories?” What the fuck are you talking about? My original demand was for specific incidents that support Anthony’s vague allegations that unspecified scientists were making unspecified unsupportable claims regarding our knowledge of the origin of life. That demand has not changed, and if you’re trying to say otherwise, you’re a fucking liar.

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242. RB: You are quite right to hide behind a pseudonym. This correspondence is closed.

     –bks

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243. RB: You are quite right to hide behind a pseudonym.

     …says the guy who’s running away behind a pseudonym.

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244. Anthony @47:

     I’m taking an agnostic position. What you don’t have any evidence of, you can’t know scientifically.

     Anthony at Josh Rosenau’s blog:

     I believe in God, I believe God created the entire universe and everything about it. I believe that God is not susceptible to the network of causality that contains the subject matter of science. I believe it is an act of idolatry to turn some human conception of God into a mere thing that can be subjected to science. The insistence that God can be seen through science is an act of desecration. That God might be seen in the majesty of the universe is not the same thing, it is an acknowledgement that God is only knowable, in an absurdly miniscule part, through living experience of a kind far to broad and far too complex for science.

     And now we know Anthony McCarthy’s prejudice and his reason for fighting scientific progress as he has. Despite his claims of agnosticism, he argues like a theist because he’s a theist.

     Hat tip for the link to commenter Ildi over at my blog. 🙂

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245. Thanks, Jason, for confirming the predictive power of my original analysis of Anthony’s rhetoric.

     So he thinks it’s an “act of desecration” to use the minds and senses God gave us to more fully understand the Universe he created? That’s ridiculous even by theistic standards.

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246. @503 hoary puccoon:re, bacteria in blenders ” [Pornonymous, why don’t you do something useful and write up a disquisition on this?]”

     Hoary puccoon, you might just be one of the few who actualy kinf of get it! I love the idea! Sex in a blender, and coitus interuptus!

     That is very funny, and thanks for the nod of sarcasm–you inspire me to go do something bacterial in a blender…hmmmm.

     Jamba Juice, anyone?

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247. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110809144517.htm
     Study Builds On Plausible Scenario for Origin of Life On Earth

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248. pornonymous @530

     Um, thanks. I think.

     But the research about coitis interruptus in bacteria in blenders wasn’t something I invented. It was really done, starting in the 1950’s, at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. And, being French and not fond of prissy euphemisms, they really did call it coitus interruptis.

     I was going to write something prissy myself about what went into the blender was E coli, not bodily emissions. Then I remembered that Andre Lwoff, the head of that research unit, admitted that he got the original research program started by using E coli from his own gut. In 1965, Lwoff and two colleagues were awarded the Nobel prize in medicine. It was the only case in history where a researcher truly deserved to be honored for data he pulled out of his ass.

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249. OK, @bks, let me get this straight. You like to call yourself a “pantheist” and claim that “the Universe is alive.” Soâ?¦

     â?¦interesting variation on the Panspermia dodge. All you’re doing is pushing the origin of life back to coincide with the origin of the universe. That leaves you with an even thornier double-barreled question:

     How did life AND the universe start simultaneously?

     Or – instead of turtles – is it “universes all the way down”? Enquiring Mindsâ?¢ want to know! =^..^=

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250. MadSciKat, I agree 100% with the implication that if the Universe is alive, then OoL and the Big Bang are coincident, However, framing it that way doesn’t help anyone on any side of this discussion. You might just as well ask, as did Einstein: “Why is gravitational mass equal to inertial mass?”

     I pointed out above that Panspermia just pushes the OoL problem offworld, as you state.

     As to Pantheism, please read:
     http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pantheism/#PaT

     I think you’ll find it much more comfortable than Atheism.

     –bks

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251. MadSciKat, I agree 100% with the implication that if the Universe is alive, then OoL and the Big Bang are coincident, However, framing it that way doesn’t help anyone on any side of this discussion.

     Right — it’s a nice enough thing to believe, but it doesn’t help in any kind of scientific discourse because once you’ve asserted that the entire Universe is “alive,” the word “alive” loses its meaning and descriptive value. And you’re still stuck with the question of how the self-sustaining chemical reactions that make up our particular subgroup of “life” got started.

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252. I believe in God, I believe God created the entire universe and everything about it. I believe that God is not susceptible to the network of causality that contains the subject matter of science.

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253. As the concept of life cannot be considered as scientifically sound but on the contrary is a metaphysical concept, litterally speaking, it is true to say that â??We can know nothing about the origin of lifeâ? (as it is true to say that â??We can know nothing about the origin of the soul, of God etc.â?). However it is not true that we can know nothing about the origin of the primordial ancestor on Earth and of the processs at the origin of all the terrestrial systems with the property of Darwinian evolution: we can know much more about the origin of Darwinian evolution. For instance, within the paradigm of open, far from equilibrium systems that should maintain their level of organization, it is possible to only envisage three conditions that would permit the systems to get the property of Darwinian evolution:
     – 1. Local conditions that allow the emergence of open non-equilibrium structural systems, organized on a macroscopic level, generated by a flow of matter and energy that is continuously supplied. These open far-from-equilibrium systems can maintain themselves far-from-equilibrium because they are able to use the matter and energy supplied by the favourable local environment;
     – 2. The systems must be able to self-reproduce;
     – 3. The systems must be capable of acquiring heritable structure/function properties that are relatively independent from the local environment, i.e., the fact that they belong to a specific lineage should not depend on the nature of the nutriments they receive from the local environment. This last condition is required for the emergence of distinct lineages allowing Darwinian natural selection.
     I do not mention an interesting fourth condition:
     – 4. These properties may change sporadically while remaining transmissible to the descendants.
     This fourth condition, although favouring a much more efficient and faster evolution, is not mandatory to allow room for selection if the potential of the systems is very large for the emergence of new distinct lineages. One interesting feature of this set of three conditions is that it does not necessarily involve a genetic component related to nucleic acids. For example there is at least one model, a lipidic vesicle-based model, which can be proposed to address the issues raised by the three conditions above, without involving nucleic acids (Tessera 2011).

     Reference:
     M. Tessera. Origin of Evolution Versus Origin of Life: A Shift of Paradigm. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2011,12,3445-3458.

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254. It is one thing we can know fore sure: there was a period when both metabolism and replication were controlled by RNA. The problem is to know how the first RNA and replication were first generated. But I think we are all the time getting closer to the solution to these questions.

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255. “The problem is to know how the first RNA and replication were first generated.”

     WHY is that a problem, though? All we need to know is how it could have happened and demonstrate that.

     Unlike creation, which we haven’t ever seen happen.

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256. “I believe that God is not susceptible to the network of causality that contains the subject matter of science.”

     Demonstrate that this is true.

     PROVE god is not susceptible in that way. The only one that can is the deist one that is no different from god not existing.

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257. “All we need to know is how it COULD have happened and demonstrate that.” Yes. If we have shown that life is created by a certain process, then that would probably be enough. But that is not very easy. Every attempt so far has been unsuccessful. I have my own thoughts about how the first processes of life created the most basic molecules, the RNA molecules. I have presented these thoughts at http://sandwalk.blogspot.no/2009/05/metabolism-first-and-origin-of-life.html

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258. home health care agency in miami dade

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259. Creationism and science both have holes and flaws in their theory. I’d like to think the truth lies somewhere in both.

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