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ID the Future Intelligent Design, Evolution, and Science Podcast
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New Origin-of-Life Proposal Revives a Hopeful Monster

Episode
1351
Guest
Eric H. Anderson
Duration
00:25:14
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Audio File (34.8 mb)
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On this episode of ID the Future, host Eric Anderson talks with scientist and fellow engineer Rob Stadler about a recent origin-of-life paper and how the authors paint themselves into a corner. The context for the paper is this: Decades of research have undermined the three great hopes for a purely naturalistic origin of life — scenarios starting with some sort of metabolism, scenarios starting with some kind of membrane, and scenarios starting with RNA. All three are necessary for cellular life; none seems able to have come ahead of the others. So now some recent work described in an article in New Scientist suggests it all happened at once in a sort of “chemical big bang.” It’s the return of an old idea long ago dismissed as too improbable. Is this “hopeful monster” plausible after all? As Anderson and Stadler show, there are numerous hidden assumptions and imaginary entities lurking in the proposal, which when surfaced, call its soundness into question.

Eric H. Anderson

Eric H. Anderson is an attorney and software company entrepreneur, design theorist, and contributing author on evolution and intelligent design at Uncommon Descent. His research interests include origin of life, self-replication, and the logical and rhetorical underpinnings of evolutionary theory and intelligent design. He is co-author of the popular introductory book Evolution and Intelligent Design in a Nutshell (DI Press, 2020). Eric holds a BA magna cum laude in Russian with a minor in Spanish, and received his JD cum laude from J. Reuben Clark Law School.
Tags
abiogenesis
Intelligent Design
Materialism
membrane first
metabolism first
Naturalism
OOL
origin of life
protocell
RNA first
RNA world
scientific Materialism