Sunday, August 11, 2013

Current Limits of Science -a few of very many.

About six months ago I had a tragi-comic exchange with the principal of a North American day school. One of his students, sixteen years old, challenged his teacher and the rest of the class with the words: "Since science can explain everything, there is no need to believe in G-d." I suppose one should both laugh and cry: laugh at the colossal ignorance of the student, and cry for the damage done by the false impression of the scope of science. Just in case that student is not alone, here is a [very partial] list of some outstanding mysteries for which science has no clue. [I invite readers t write to me with more that I can add.]

1. Dark matter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter
In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is a type of matter hypothesized to account for a large part of the total mass in theuniverse. Dark matter cannot be seen directly with telescopes; evidently it neither emits nor absorbs light or other electromagnetic radiation at any significant level.[1] Instead, its existence and properties are inferred from its gravitational effects on visible matter, radiation, and the large-scale structure of the universe. According to the Planck mission team, and based on the standard model of cosmology, the total mass–energy of the universe contains 4.9% ordinary matter, 26.8% dark matter and 68.3% dark energy.[2][3]Thus, dark matter is estimated to constitute 84.5% of the total matter in the universe and 26.8% of the total content of the universe.[4].................According to consensus among cosmologists, dark matter is composed primarily of a not yet characterized type of subatomic particle.[6][7] The search for this particle, by a variety of means, is one of the major efforts in particle physics today.[8]

2. Dark energy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy
In physical cosmology and astronomy, dark energy is a hypothetical form of energy that permeates all of space and tends toaccelerate the expansion of the universe.[1] Dark energy is the most accepted hypothesis to explain observations since the 1990s that indicate that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. According to the Planck mission team, and based on the standard model of cosmology, the total mass–energy of the universe contains 4.9% ordinary matter, 26.8% dark matter and 68.3% dark energy.[2][3][4]
Two proposed forms for dark energy are the cosmological constant, a constant energy density filling space homogeneously,[5] andscalar fields such as quintessence or moduli, dynamic quantities whose energy density can vary in time and space. [[In other words, two contradictory proposals mean that we do not understand what it is.]]

[[Taking 1 and 2 together, all our science explains at most 4.9% of the total mass of the universe. And by the way, not all is well with the 4.9% either - http://www.space.com/15936-astronomy-mysteries-science-countdown.html  Where are the Missing Baryons?
Credit: Spectrum: NASA/CXC/Univ. of California Irvine/T. Fang Illustration: CXC/M. WeissDark energy and dark matter combine to occupy approximately 95 percent of the universe, with regular matter making up the remaining 5 percent. But, researchers have been puzzled to find that more than half of this regular matter is missing. 

This missing matter is called baryonic matter, and it is composed of particles such as protons and electrons that make up majority of the mass of the universe's visible matter.

Some astrophysicists suspect that missing baryonic matter may be found between galaxies, in material known as warm-hot intergalactic medium, but the universe's missing baryons remain a hotly debated topic.]]

3.  See the posts on this blog undr the label "evolution" for the many failures of that theory.

Explanatory gap

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The explanatory gap is a term introduced by philosopher Joseph Levine for the difficulty that physicalist theories of mind have in explaining how physical properties give rise to the way things feel when they are experienced.[1] In the 1983 paper in which he first used the term, he used as an example the sentence, "Pain is the firing of C fibers", pointing out that while it might be valid in a physiological sense, it does not help us to understand how pain feels.
The explanatory gap has vexed and intrigued philosophers and AI researchers alike for decades and caused considerable debate. Bridging this gap (that is, finding a satisfying mechanistic explanation for experience and qualia) is known as "the hard problem".[2]
To take an example of a phenomenon in which there is no gap, imagine a modern computer: as marvelous as these devices are, their behavior can be fully explained by their circuitry, and vice versa. By contrast, it is thought by many mind-body dualists (e.g. René Descartes, David Chalmers) that subjective conscious experience constitutes a separate effect that demands another cause, a cause that is either outside the physical world (dualism) or due to an as yet unknown physical phenomenon (see for instance Quantum mind,Indirect realism).
Proponents of dualism claim that the mind is substantially and qualitatively different from the brain and that the existence of something metaphysically extra-physical is required to 'fill the gap'.
The nature of the explanatory gap has been the subject of some debate. For example, some consider it to simply be a limit on our current explanatory ability.[3] They argue that future findings in neuroscience or future work from philosophers could close the gap. However, others have taken a stronger position and argued that the gap is a definite limit on our cognitive abilities as humans—no amount of further information will allow us to close it.[4] There has also been no consensus regarding what metaphysical conclusions the existence of the gap provides. Those wishing to use its existence to support dualism have often taken the position that an epistemic gap—particularly if it is a definite limit on our cognitive abilities—necessarily entails a metaphysical gap.[5]
Others, such as Joseph Levine, have wished to either remain silent on the matter or argue that no such metaphysical conclusion should be drawn.[1] He agrees that conceivability (as used in the Zombie and inverted spectrum arguments) is flawed as a means of establishing metaphysical realities; but he points out that even if we come to the metaphysicalconclusion that qualia are physical, they still present an explanatory problem.
While I think this materialist response is right in the end, it does not suffice to put the mind-body problem to rest. Even if conceivability considerations do not establish that the mind is in fact distinct from the body, or that mental properties are metaphysically irreducible to physical properties, still they do demonstrate that we lack an explanation of the mental in terms of the physical.
However, such an epistemological or explanatory problem might indicate an underlying metaphysical issue—the non-physicality of qualia, even if not proven by conceivability arguments is far from ruled out.
In the end, we are right back where we started. The explanatory gap argument doesn't demonstrate a gap in nature, but a gap in our understanding of nature. Of course a plausible explanation for there being a gap in our understanding of nature is that there is a genuine gap in nature. But so long as we have countervailing reasons for doubting the latter, we have to look elsewhere for an explanation of the former.[6]
Many philosophers consider experience to be the essence of consciousness, and believe that experience can only fully be known from the inside, subjectively. But if consciousness is subjective and not visible from the outside, why do the vast majority of people believe that other people are conscious, but rocks and trees are not?[41] This is called the problem of other minds.[42] It is particularly acute for people who believe in the possibility of philosophical zombies, that is, people who think it is possible in principle to have an entity that is physically indistinguishable from a human being and behaves like a human being in every way but nevertheless lacks consciousness.[43]
The most commonly given answer is that we attribute consciousness to other people because we see that they resemble us in appearance and behavior: we reason that if they look like us and act like us, they must be like us in other ways, including having experiences of the sort that we do.[44] There are, however, a variety of problems with that explanation. For one thing, it seems to violate the principle of parsimony, by postulating an invisible entity that is not necessary to explain what we observe.[44] 
In 2004, eight neuroscientists felt it was too soon for a definition. They wrote an apology in "Human Brain Function":[82]
"We have no idea how consciousness emerges from the physical activity of the brain and we do not know whether consciousness can emerge from non-biological systems, such as computers ... At this point the reader will expect to find a careful and precise definition of consciousness. You will be disappointed. Consciousness has not yet become a scientific term that can be defined in this way. Currently we all use the term consciousness in many different and often ambiguous ways. Precise definitions of different aspects of consciousness will emerge ... but to make precise definitions at this stage is premature."

Mind–body problem[edit source | editbeta]

Main article: Mind–body problem

Illustration of dualism by René Descartes. Inputs are passed by the sensory organs to the pineal gland and from there to the immaterial spirit.
The first influential philosopher to discuss this question specifically was Descartes and the answer he gave is known as Cartesian dualism. Descartes proposed that consciousness resides within an immaterial domain he called res cogitans (the realm of thought), in contrast to the domain of material things which he called res extensa (the realm of extension).[27] He suggested that the interaction between these two domains occurs inside the brain, perhaps in a small midline structure called the pineal gland.[28]
Although it is widely accepted that Descartes explained the problem cogently, few later philosophers have been happy with his solution, and his ideas about the pineal gland have especially been ridiculed.[29] Alternative solutions, however, have been very diverse. They can be divided broadly into two categories: dualist solutions that maintain Descartes' rigid distinction between the realm of consciousness and the realm of matter but give different answers for how the two realms relate to each other; and monist solutions that maintain that there is really only one realm of being, of which consciousness and matter are both aspects. Each of these categories itself contains numerous variants. The two main types of dualism are substance dualism (which holds that the mind is formed of a distinct type of substance not governed by the laws of physics) and property dualism (which holds that the laws of physics are universally valid but cannot be used to explain the mind). The three main types of monism are physicalism (which holds that the mind consists of matter organized in a particular way), idealism(which holds that only thought truly exists and matter is merely an illusion), and neutral monism (which holds that both mind and matter are aspects of a distinct essence that is itself identical to neither of them). There are also, however, a large number of idiosyncratic theories that cannot cleanly be assigned to any of these camps.[30]

[[This list of alternative theories shows how  far we are from an understanding of consciousness.]]

4. The origin of life. [Not to be confused with the theory of evolution which tries to explain only how life develops, not how it originated.] 
For a very thorough review of the decade of scientific despaif dealing iwth this problem, look here http://torahexplorer.com./. 

And look at this summary of the various proposals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

  • 3 Current models
  • 4 Other models

  • The Scientific American February 2013 contains the following iconoclastic articles:

  • 5. Europe's winter weather. 



  • New Simulations Question the Gulf Stream’s Role in Tempering Europe’s Winters

    It's the flow of warm tropical water across the Atlantic that keeps European winters mild, right? Maybe not
    By Stephen C. Riser and M. Susan Lozier 

    For a century, schoolchildren have been taught that the massive ocean current known as the Gulf Stream carries warm water from the tropical Atlantic Ocean to northwestern Europe. As it arrives, the water heats the air above it. That air moves inland, making winter days in Europe milder than they are in the northeastern U.S.
    It might be time to retire that tidy story. The explosion of interest in global climate has prompted scientists to closely study the climatic effects of the Gulf Stream only to discover that those effects are not as clear as conventional wisdom might suggest. Based on modeling work and ocean data, new explanations have emerged for why winter in northern Europe is generally less bitter than winter at the same latitudes in the northeastern U.S. and Canada—and the models differ on the Gulf Stream's role. One of the explanations also provides insight into why winter in the U.S. Northwest is warmer than it is across the Pacific in eastern Russia.
    At the same time, recent studies have been casting doubt on the popular conjecture made a few years ago that melting of Arctic ice could “shut down” the Gulf Stream, thereby wreaking havoc with Europe'sweather. Yet the studies do suggest that climate change could at least affect thestrength of the Gulf Stream, which could lessen the impact of global warming on northern Europe.
    ....later on in the article they say the gulf stream theory is refuted.......

    6. How does the brain store memory? 


    A Single Brain Cell Stores a Single Concept [Preview]

    Each concept—each person or thing in our everyday experience—may have a set of corresponding neurons assigned to it

    ...in which are described the two theories of memory - millions of cells widely distributed in the brain, or narrow simple storage - that are still in competition after several decades. New discoveries lend some support to the latter, but memory storage in the brain is still not understood. 
    7. What causes aging? 
    Is the Free-Radical Theory of Aging Dead? [Preview]
    The hallowed notion that oxidative damage causes aging and that vitamins might preserve our youth is now in doubt
    By Melinda Wenner Moyer
    David Gems's life was turned upside down in 2006 by a group of worms that kept on living when they were supposed to die. As assistant director of the Institute of Healthy Aging at University College London, Gems regularly runs experiments on Caenorhabditis elegans, a roundworm that is often used to study the biology of aging. In this case, he was testing the idea that a buildup of cellular damage caused by oxidation—technically, the chemical removal of electrons from a molecule by highly reactive compounds, such as free radicals—is the main mechanism behind aging. According to this theory, rampant oxidation mangles more and more lipids, proteins, snippets of DNA and other key components of cells over time, eventually compromising tissues and organs and thus the functioning of the body as a whole.

    Gems genetically engineered the roundworms so they no longer produced certain enzymes that act as naturally occurring antioxidants by deactivating free radicals. Sure enough, in the absence of the antioxidants, levels of free radicals in the worms skyrocketed and triggered potentially damaging oxidative reactions throughout the worms' bodies. [[But they did not die any faster than normal worms. The whole understanding of he process of aging is now in doubt. ]]
    8. Human origins. 

    Will Scientists Ever Be Able to Piece Together Humanity's Early Origins? [Preview]

    New fossil discoveries complicate the already devilish task of identifying our most ancient progenitors
    By Katherine Harmon 

    mammals, do. This familiar yet strange individual is Lucy, a member of the species Australopithecus afarensis, who lived some 3.2 million years ago. She is one of the oldest creatures presumed to have strode on the evolutionary path leading to our species, Homo sapiens.
    From a distance, you probably would have assumed her to be human. Although she stood only about a meter tall, with long arms and a small head, she walked, if perhaps slightly inelegantly, upright on two legs, as we, alone among living mammals, do. This familiar yet strange individual is Lucy, a member of the species Australopithecus afarensis, who lived some 3.2 million years ago. She is one of the oldest creatures presumed to have strode on the evolutionary path leading to our species,Homo sapiens.
    When Lucy was uncovered in 1974, evidence of bipedal locomotion virtually guaranteed her kind a spot in the human family tree. And although scientists had an inkling that other branches of humans coexisted more recently alongside our own, early human evolution appeared to be a simple affair, with Lucy and the other ancient bipeds that eventually came to light belonging to the same lone lineage. Thus, the discoveries seemed to uphold the notion of human evolution as a unilinear “march of progress” from a knuckle-walking chimplike ape to our striding, upright form—a schema that has dominated paleoanthropology for the past century. Yet as researchers dig back further in time, our origins are turning out to be a lot more complicated than that iconic image would suggest.

    [[...indeed, in the body of the article it is suggested that it is unrealistic to expect that the lineage of homo sapiens will ever be established.]]
    end of articles from the Scientific American.  

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Monday, July 8, 2013

Plant communications:Beans’ talk| TheEconomist
www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21580443-vegetables-employ-fungi-carry-messages-between-them-beans-talk/print 1/3
[[The kind of immense sophistication that is being discovered in the plant realm, which evolution - were it viable - would have to explain. D.G.]]
Plant communications
Beans’ talk
Vegetables employ fungi to carry messages between them
Jul 6th 2013 | From the print edition
THE idea that plants have developed a subterranean internet, which they use to raise the alarm
when danger threatens, sounds more like the science-fiction of James Cameron’s film “Avatar”
than any sort of science fact. But fact it seems to be, if work by David Johnson of the University
of Aberdeen is anything to go by. For Dr Johnson believes he has shown that just such an
internet, with fungal hyphae standing in for local Wi-Fi, alerts beanstalks to danger if one of
their neighbours is attacked by aphids.
The experiment which suggests this was following up the discovery, made in 2010 by a Chinese
team, that when a tomato plant gets infected with leaf blight, nearby plants start activating
genes that help ward the infection off—even if all airflow between the plants in question has
been eliminated. The researchers who conducted this study knew that soil fungi whose hyphae
are symbiotic with tomatoes (providing them with minerals in exchange for food) also form a7/8/13 Plant communications:Beans’ talk| TheEconomist
www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21580443-vegetables-employ-fungi-carry-messages-between-them-beans-talk/print 2/3
network connecting one plant to another. They speculated, though they could not prove, that
molecules signalling danger were passing through this fungal network.
Dr Johnson knew from his own past work that when broad-bean plants are attacked by aphids
they respond with volatile chemicals that both irritate the parasites and attract aphid-hunting
wasps. He did not know, though, whether the message could spread, tomato-like, from plant to
plant. So he set out to find out—and to do so in a way which would show if fungi were the
messengers.
As they report in Ecology Letters, he and his colleagues set up eight “mesocosms”, each
containing five beanstalks. The plants were allowed to grow for four months, and during this
time every plant could interact with symbiotic fungi in the soil.
Not all of the beanstalks, though, had the same relationship with the fungi. In each mesocosm,
one plant was surrounded by a mesh penetrated by holes half a micron across. Gaps that size
are too small for either roots or hyphae to penetrate, but they do permit the passage of water
and dissolved chemicals. Two plants were surrounded with a 40-micron mesh. This can be
penetrated by hyphae but not by roots. The two remaining plants, one of which was at the
centre of the array, were left to grow unimpeded.
Five weeks after the experiment began, all the plants were covered by bags that allowed carbon
dioxide, oxygen and water vapour in and out, but stopped the passage of larger molecules, of
the sort a beanstalk might use for signalling. Then, four days from the end, one of the 40-
micron meshes in each mesocosm was rotated to sever any hyphae that had penetrated it, and
the central plant was then infested with aphids.
At the end of the experiment Dr Johnson and his team collected the air inside the bags,
extracted any volatile chemicals in it by absorbing them into a special porous polymer, and
tested those chemicals on both aphids (using the winged, rather than the wingless morphs) and
wasps. Each insect was placed for five minutes in an apparatus that had two chambers, one of
which contained a sample of the volatiles and the other an odourless control.
The researchers found, as they expected from their previous work, that when the volatiles came7/8/13 Plant communications:Beans’ talk| TheEconomist
www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21580443-vegetables-employ-fungi-carry-messages-between-them-beans-talk/print 3/3
from an infested plant, wasps spent an average of 3½ minutes in the chamber containing them
and 1½ in the other chamber. Aphids, conversely, spent 1¾ minutes in the volatiles’ chamber
and 3¼ in the control. In other words, the volatiles from an infested plant attract wasps and
repel aphids.
Crucially, the team got the same result in the case of uninfested plants that had been in
uninterrupted hyphal contact with the infested one, but had had root contact blocked. If both
hyphae and roots had been blocked throughout the experiment, though, the volatiles from
uninfested plants actually attracted aphids (they spent 3½ minutes in the volatiles’ chamber),
while the wasps were indifferent. The same pertained for the odour of uninfested plants whose
hyphal connections had been allowed to develop, and then severed by the rotation of the mesh.
Broad beans, then, really do seem to be using their fungal symbionts as a communications
network, warning their neighbours to take evasive action. Such a general response no doubt
helps the plant first attacked by attracting yet more wasps to the area, and it helps the fungal
messengers by preserving their leguminous hosts.
Plant-fungus symbiosis is a surprisingly underexplored area of biology. The limited data
available suggest most plants go in for it in one form or another, but its role is only slowly being
illuminated. Work like Dr Johnson’s suggests this is a serious omission, not least for the
understanding of how crops like beans actually grow. The underground world, though invisible
to the human eye, should not for that reason be ignored or underestimated.
From the print edition: Science and technology
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Sunday, June 30, 2013

Origin of Life and Philosophical Outlook

[Article by Rabbi Yoram Bogacz, author of Genesis and Genes; see his website TorahExplorer]
June 28, 2013
In Signature in the Cell, Dr. Stephen Meyer presented a comprehensive and accessible history of research into the origin of life. In this post, we take a bird’s eye view of research into this area over the past three-quarters of a century. We shall also digress in order to get a snapshot of how ideological commitments shape the views of many scientists.
***
Let’s begin with Dr. Ernst Chain. Chain won a Nobel Prize for his contribution to the development of penicillin. I mentioned him inGenesis and Genes, in the context of the discussion about whether evolutionary theory is relevant to nuts-and-bolts research in biology. I cited an article by Philip Skell (1918-2010), who was a distinguished professor of chemistry and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the USA and a prominent Darwin sceptic. In a 2009 article in Forbes.com entitled The Dangers of Overselling Evolution, he made the point that evolutionary theory makes no contribution to actual research:
In 1942, Nobel Laureate Ernst Chain wrote that his discovery of penicillin (with Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming) and the development of bacterial resistance to that antibiotic owed nothing to Darwin’s and Alfred Russel Wallace’s evolutionary theories.[1]
Chain understood the immensity of the task of trying to explain life in naturalistic terms. In The Life of Ernst Chain: Penicillin and Beyond, we read that:
I have said for years that speculations about the origin of life lead to no useful purpose as even the simplest living system is far too complex to be understood in terms of the extremely primitive chemistry scientists have used in their attempts to explain the unexplainable that happened billions of years ago.[2]
In August 1954, Dr. George Wald, another Nobel Laureate, wrote inScientific American:
There are only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility… a supernatural creative act of God. I will not accept that philosophically because I do not want to believe in God, therefore I choose to believe that which I know is scientifically impossible; spontaneous generation arising to Evolution.
 This statement may seem astonishingly frank to many members of the public. Informed consumers of science, in contrast, are aware that much of the debate around the origin of life and biological evolution has precious little to do with drawing inevitable conclusions from straightforward evidence. It is far more about worldviews and ideologies, and only extremely naive observers assume that this does not apply to scientists who participate in the debate. Wald makes it perfectly clear that his direction was dictated by his philosophical leanings, and that is true of many scientists and Western intellectuals. Consider the views of Thomas Nagel. Nagel is a courageous thinker whose latest book, Mind and Cosmos, is a fierce demolition of Darwinian evolution.[3] But Nagel will only go so far. In The Last Word, which appeared in 1997, he offered a candid account of his philosophical inclinations:
I am talking about something much deeper—namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers… It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.[4]
 The fact that faith – the faith of many scientists in the ability of unguided matter and energy to create life – drives much of the discussion about evolution, was underscored by Dr. Gerald Kerkut, Professor  Emeritus of Neuroscience at the University of Southampton, who wrote in 1960 that: 
The first assumption was that non-living things gave rise to living material. This is still just an assumption… There is, however, little evidence in favor of abiogenesis and as yet we have no indication that it can be performed… it is therefore a matter of faith on the part of the biologist that abiogenesis did occur and he can choose whatever method… happens to suit him personally; the evidence for what did happen is not available.
 Harold Urey won a Nobel Prize for chemistry, but is probably more famous for participating, with his graduate student Stanley Miller, in what became known as the Miller-Urey experiment. Writing in The Christian Science Monitor on 4th January 1962, Urey wrote: 
All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We all believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that its complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did.
 Hubert Yockey, the renowned information theorist, wrote in theJournal of Theoretical Biology in 1977 that:
One must conclude that… a scenario describing the genesis of life on earth by chance and natural causes which can be accepted on the basis of fact and not faith has not yet been written.
Richard Dickerson, a molecular biologist at UCLA, wrote in 1978 inScientific American that: 
The evolution of the genetic machinery is the step for which there are no laboratory models; hence one can speculate endlessly, unfettered by inconvenient facts. The complex genetic apparatus in present-day organisms is so universal that one has few clues as to what the apparatus may have looked like in its most primitive form.[5]
 Francis Crick needs no introduction. In Life Itself, published in 1981, he wrote that: 
Every time I write a paper on the origin of life, I determine I will never write another one, because there is too much speculation running after too few facts.
 Crick’s conclusion is that:
The origin of life seems almost to be a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.[6]
 Prominent origin-of-life researcher Leslie Orgel wrote in New Scientistin 1982 that:
Prebiotic soup is easy to obtain. We must next explain how a prebiotic soup of organic molecules, including amino acids and the organic constituents of nucleotides evolved into a self-replicating organism. While some suggestive evidence has been obtained, I must admit that attempts to reconstruct the evolutionary process are extremely tentative.[7]
 The views of Nobel Prize winner Fred Hoyle are particularly interesting. He struggled with the conflict between his ardent atheism and his knowledge of the excruciating difficulty of positing a naturalistic start to life. Writing in 1984, Hoyle stated that: 
From my earliest training as a scientist I was very strongly brain-washed to believe that science cannot be consistent with any kind of deliberate creation. That notion has had to be very painfully shed. I am quite uncomfortable in the situation, the state of mind I now find myself in. But there is no logical way out of it; it is just not possible that life could have originated from a chemical accident.[8]
 The writer Andrew Scott hit the nail on the head when he wrote, in 1986, that most scientists’ adherence to naturalistic accounts of the origin of life owed little to the evidence and much to ideological commitments:
But what if the vast majority of scientists all have faith in the one unverified idea? The modern ‘standard’ scientific version of the origin of life on earth is one such idea, and we would be wise to check its real merit with great care. Has the cold blade of reason been applied with sufficient vigor in this case? Most scientists want to believe that life could have emerged spontaneously from the primeval waters, because it would confirm their belief in the explicability of Nature – the belief that all could be explained in terms of particles and energy and forces if only we had the time and the necessary intellect.[9]
 This conclusion is mirrored in the words of Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist and authority on origin-of-life studies. Writing in 2002, Davies affirms that it is scientists’ adherence to methodological naturalism that drives their agenda and conclusions:
First, I should like to say that the scientific attempt to explain the origin of life proceeds from the assumption that whatever it was that happened was a natural process: no miracles, no supernatural intervention. It was by ordinary atoms doing extraordinary things that life was brought into existence. Scientists have to start with that assumption.[10]
 In 1988, Klaus Dose, another prominent origin-of-life theorist, summed up the situation nicely when he wrote that: 
More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance.[11]
 Carl Woese was a pioneer in taxonomy, and one of the major figures in 20th century microbiology. His view of the origin of life: 
In one sense the origin of life remains what it was in the time of Darwin – one of the great unsolved riddles of science. Yet we have made progress…many of the early naïve assumptions have fallen or have fallen aside…while we do not have a solution, we now have an inkling of the magnitude of the problem.[12]
 Paul Davies, too, writes that no substantive progress has been made in this area since Darwin’s time. In a recent short paper suggesting that life be viewed as a software package, Davies writes:
Darwin pointedly left out an account of how life first emerged, “One might as well speculate about the origin of matter,” he quipped. A century and a half later, scientists still remain largely in the dark about life’s origins. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the origin of life is one of the greatest unanswered questions in science.[13]
 Readers of Genesis and Genes will recall Richard Lewontin’s admission that his mathematical models of evolutionary mechanisms are a sham – they do not correspond to reality. The biologist Lynn Margulis reminisced:
 Lewontin, who is one of the most prominent geneticists in the world and a protégé of one of the founders of neo-Darwinism, Theodosius Dobzhansky, was equally forthright about the role that faith plays in moulding scientists’ approach to important issues. In his review of a book by Carl Sagan, Lewontin wrote in 1997 that:
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.[14]
 Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute is one of the world’s leading origin-of-life researchers and a leading expert on self-organisational systems. He writes:
Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started on the earth some 3.45 billion years ago is a fool or a knave. Nobody knows.[15]
 In Genesis and Genes, I also quoted the biochemist Franklin Harold. In his book The Way of the Cell, Harold frankly acknowledged that “We must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.”[16] Regarding the origin of life, Harold writes that:
It would be agreeable to conclude this book with a cheery fanfare about science closing in, slowly but surely, on the ultimate mystery; but the time for rosy rhetoric is not yet at hand. The origin of life appears to me as incomprehensible as ever, a matter for wonder but not for explication.[17]
 Massimo Pigliucci was formerly a professor of evolutionary biology and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and holds doctorates in genetics, botany, and the philosophy of science. He is currently the chairman of the department of philosophy at City University of New York. He is a prominent international proponent of evolution and the author of several books. Writing in 2003, Pigliucci writes that “[I]t has to be true that we really don’t have a clue how life originated on Earth by natural means.”[18]
In 2007, we find science writer Gregg Easterbrook writing in Wired: “What creates life out of the inanimate compounds that make up living things? No one knows. How were the first organisms assembled? Nature hasn’t given us the slightest hint. If anything, the mystery has deepened over time.”[19]
 Also in 2007, Harvard chemist George M. Whitesides, in accepting the highest award of the American Chemical Society, wrote: “The Origin of Life. This problem is one of the big ones in science. It begins to place life, and us, in the universe. Most chemists believe, as do I, that life emerged spontaneously from mixtures of molecules in the prebiotic Earth. How? I have no idea… On the basis of all the chemistry that I know, it seems to me astonishingly improbable.”[20] 
As recently as 2011, Scientific American acknowledged that origin-of-life research has gotten nowhere in the last century. In an article by John Horgan, we read that:
Dennis Overbye just wrote a status report for the New York Timeson research into life’s origin, based on a conference on the topic at Arizona State University. Geologists, chemists, astronomers, and biologists are as stumped as ever by the riddle of life.[21]
 Also writing in 2011, Dr. Eugene Koonin provided a neat summary of the utter failure of this endeavour: 
The origin of life is one of the hardest problems in all of science… Origin of Life research has evolved into a lively, interdisciplinary field, but other scientists often view it with skepticism and even derision. This attitude is understandable and, in a sense, perhaps justified, given the “dirty” rarely mentioned secret: Despite many interesting results to its credit, when judged by the straightforward criterion of reaching (or even approaching) the ultimate goal, the origin of life field is a failure – we still do not have even a plausible coherent model, let alone a validated scenario, for the emergence of life on Earth. Certainly, this is due not to a lack of experimental and theoretical effort, but to the extraordinary intrinsic difficulty and complexity of the problem. A succession of exceedingly unlikely steps is essential for the origin of life… these make the final outcome seem almost like a miracle.[22]
***
The area of origin-of-life research is fascinating not only for its own sake, but also in the way that it exposes what many uninformed members of the public take for granted, namely, that scientists are driven by data, and data alone. I elaborated on this misconception inGenesis and Genes, demonstrating that the commitment of many scientists to methodological naturalism is a far more important factor than the scientific evidence in reaching conclusions about life on Earth.
***
 See Also:
The post Certitude and Bluff:
http://torahexplorer.com/2013/01/15/certitude-and-bluff/
References:
Some of the quotations in this post come from an article by Rabbi Moshe Averick, published in The Algemeiner. The article can be read here:
http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/09/27/speculation-faith-and-unproven-assumptions-the-history-of-origin-of-life-research-in-scientists-own-words/
Retrieved 26th June 2013.

[1] The article can be read here:
.
Retrieved 2nd November 2010.
[2] R.W. Clark, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London (1985), page 148.
[3] To read more about Nagel and his latest book, see these reviews:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112481/darwinist-mob-goes-after-serious-philosopher
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/heretic_707692.html
[4] See http://www.jidaily.com/914e2?utm_source=Jewish+Ideas+Daily+Insider
Retrieved 27th June 2013.
[5] Richard E. Dickerson, “Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life”, Scientific American, Vol. 239, No. 3, September 1978, page77.
[6] Life Itself, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1981, page 88.
[7] Leslie E. Orgel, “Darwinism at the very beginning of life”, New Scientist, Vol. 94, 15 April 1982, page 150.
[8] Fred Hoyle, Evolution from Space, New York, Simon and Shuster, 1984, page 53.
[9] Andrew Scott, “The Creation of Life: Past, Future, Alien”, Basil Blackwell, 1986, page 111.
[10] Paul Davies, “In Search of Eden, Conversations with Paul Davies and Phillip Adams”.
[11] Klaus Dose, “The Origin of Life: More Questions Than Answers”,Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Vol. 13, No. 4, 1988, page 348.
[12] Carl Woese, Gunter Wachtershauser, “Origin of Life” in Paleobiology: A Synthesis, Briggs and Crowther – Editors (Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1989.
[13] See: http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.4803.
Retrieved 27th June 2013.
[14] “Billions and Billions of Demons”, Richard Lewontin, 9th January 1997, New York Times Book Review.
[15] At Home in the Universe, London, Viking, 1995, page 31.
[16] Franklin Harold, The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms and the Order of Life, Oxford University Press, 2001, page 205.
[17] Ibid. page 251.
[18] Massimo Pigliucci, “Where Do We Come From? A Humbling Look at the Biology of Life’s Origin,” in Darwin, Design and Public Education, eds. John Angus Campbell and Stephen C. Meyer (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2003), page 196.
[19] Gregg Easterbrook, “Where did life come from?” Wired, page 108, February, 2007.
[20] George M. Whitesides, “Revolutions in Chemistry: Priestly Medalist George M. Whitesides’ address”, Chemical and Engineering News, 85 (March 26, 2007): p. 12-17. Seehttp://ismagilovlab.uchicago.edu/GMW_address_priestley_medal.pdf.
Retrieved 22nd April 2012.
[21] John Horgan, Scientific American, 28th February 2011.
[22] Eugene Koonin, The Logic of Chance: The Nature and origin of Biological Evolution (Upper Saddle River, NJ, FT Press, 2011, page 391.

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