Tag: origin of life

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post

Author
Guillermo Gonzalez

Date
November 8, 2021

Categorized
Life Sciences

Tagged
abiogenesis, binary star systems, Casey Luskin, Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, Guillermo Gonzalez, interstellar panspermia, interstellar transport times, Jupiter, Lord Kelvin, meteor impacts, Milky Way, moon, origin of life, panspermia, planet Earth, Svante Arrhenius, undirected panspermia}

It Came from Outer Space? Astrobiologist: Not Likely

_{Guillermo Gonzalez

November 8, 2021

Life Sciences}

On today’s ID the Future astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzalez and host Casey Luskin discuss the idea of undirected panspermia. Gonzalez explains the basic idea and what the best current evidence says about its plausibility. The occasion is his chapter on panspermia in the new anthology A Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, co-edited by Casey Luskin, associate director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Undirected panspermia is the idea that the first life on our planet came from outer space, carried by chance processes from a faraway living planet on space dust, asteroids, or comets either from within our solar system, or from another star system to here. The idea of panspermia was inspired by the extreme difficulty of Read More ›

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post

Author
Rob Stadler

Date
October 25, 2021

Categorized
Evolution

Tagged
abiogenesis, amino acids, Arkansas Tech University, Biological Information, chemical evolution, degradation, entropy, Eric Anderson, homeostasis, homochirality, interfering cross-reactions, James Tour, Jim Tour, John Narcum, John Southerland, Long Story Short, Miller-Urey experiment, Murchison meteorite, origin of life, primordial soup, propaganda, relay synthesis, ribose, RNA, Rob Stadler, self-replication, simple life, Stairway to Life, synthetic organic chemistry, The Basic Building Blocks and the Origin of Life, toxic molecules, YouTube}

New Animated Video Dismantles Origin-of-Life Hype

_{Rob Stadler

October 25, 2021

Evolution}

Today’s ID the Future spotlights a new origin-of-life video showing that researchers aren’t anywhere close to creating life from non-life, despite the fact most Americans seem to believe otherwise. In the episode, host Eric Anderson interviews Stairway to Life co-author Rob Stadler, who helped create the new Long Story Short animated video. Stadler and Anderson explore how origin-of-life papers and popular media reports have misled the public, evidenced by a survey underscored by Rice University synthetic organic chemist James Tour. Then they discuss several daunting origin-of-life hurdles beyond the synthesis of key chemical building blocks. These are hurdles significant enough that each alone may doom the idea of life having once emerged from non-life spontaneously. Indeed, it is now a Read More ›

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post

Author
Stephen C. Meyer

Date
September 17, 2021

Categorized
Faith and Science

Tagged
alien life, Atheism, Big Bang, deism, extra-terrestrial life, fine tuning, Francis Crick, front-loaded, Intelligent Design, Michael Polanyi, Michael Shermer, Natural Theology, origin of life, origin of the universe, panspermia, Richard Dawkins, Sean Carroll, Shermer’s Last Law, skepticism, Stephen C. Meyer, The Big Picture, Theism, theology of nature}

Pt. 3: Stephen Meyer and Skeptic Michael Shermer

_{Stephen C. Meyer

September 17, 2021

Faith and Science}

On this ID the Future, Return of the God Hypothesis author Stephen Meyer and skeptic Michael Shermer address the question of how a divine immaterial being could act in the material world to design and fashion things such as the first life. Meyer argues that while we don’t know precisely how an immaterial mind would do this or did do this, we have good evidence that minds can and do affect matter, as for instance in the evidence that our minds can affect our brains and, by extension, our bodies. Meyer and Shermer also discuss the idea of front-loaded intelligent design—that is, where God loaded into the moment of the Big Bang everything necessary for the emergence of stars, planets, Earth, Read More ›

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post

Author
Stephen C. Meyer

Date
September 13, 2021

Categorized
Faith and Science

Tagged
Allen Sandage, Altenberg 16, Atheism, beginning of the universe, Big Bang, BioLogos, Brian Keating, confirmation bias, Darrel Falk, Eugene Koonin, exotic naturalism, fine tuning, fine tuning of the universe, Francis Crick, God and the Astronomers, Günter Bechly, imaginary time, James Tour, Materialism, metaphysical hypotheses, methodological naturalism, Michael Shermer, multiverse, Neo-Darwinism, origin of life, oscillating universe model, panspermia, Return of the God Hypothesis, Richard Dawkins, RNA World hypothesis, Robert Jastrow, skepticism, steady state theory, Stephen C. Meyer, Stephen Hawking, Theism, theistic evolution}

Stephen Meyer and Skeptic Michael Shermer, Pt. 1

_{Stephen C. Meyer

September 13, 2021

Faith and Science}

Today’s ID the Future spotlights the first part of a lively and cordial conversation between host and atheist Michael Shermer and Stephen Meyer, author of Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe. In this first of the four-part series, the two touch on everything from Meyer’s three key lines of evidence for theism to a quick flyover of less well-known materialistic origins theories, including the oscillating universe model, panspermia as an explanation for the origin of the first life on earth, and Stephen Hawking’s idea of imaginary time. Meyer lumps many of these ideas under what he terms exotic naturalism and suggests that the atheists who defend these explanations are multiplying exotic Read More ›

Molecule 3D illustration. Laboratory, molecules, crystal lattice. Nanotech research. Decoding genome. Virtual modeling of chemical processes. Hi-tech in medicine

^{Type
post

Author
Brian Miller

Date
September 8, 2021

Categorized
Life Sciences

Tagged
abiogenesis, Area 51, Biological Information, cell membrane, cells, Craig Venter, design inference, DNA, emergence, entropy, epicycles, genetic information, geocentrism, heliocentrism, homeostasis, information, Intelligent Design, James Tour, Jeremy England, Justin Brierley, methodological materialism, minimally complex cell, mysterious physics, nanotechnology, noise, origin of life, Paul Davies, Ptolemaic system, scientific Materialism, scientific revolutions, self-organization, self-reproducing machine, the mystery of life’s origin}

Physicist Brian Miller Talks Nanotech, Origin of Life, and Area 51

_{Brian Miller

September 8, 2021

Life Sciences}

On today’s ID the Future physicist Brian Miller and host Eric Anderson continue their exploration of a recent conversation between origin-of-life investigators Jeremy England and Paul Davies on Justin Brierley’s Unbelievable? radio show. Miller begins with a quick flyover of the many nanotechnologies essential to even to the simplest viable cell. A minimally complex cell is vastly more sophisticated than our best human nanotechnology. What about England’s insistence that real progress has been made in origin-of-life studies since the 1950s? True, Anderson says, but the progress has been principally in better understanding how the simplest cells function, and in figuring out what doesn’t work to blindly evolve life from non-life. That is, the direction of discovery has been to throw Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Brian Miller

Date
September 1, 2021

Categorized
Evolution

Tagged
abiogenesis, Biological Information, Brian Miller, early Earth, functional organization, Georgia Tech University, high energy, high order, Jeremy England, Justin Brierley, low entropy, minimally complex cell, Non-equilibrium Systems, order, origin of life, Paul Davies, Sara Walker, self-organization, the mystery of life’s origin, Unbelievable}

Dissecting an Unbelievable Conversation about Abiogenesis

_{Brian Miller

September 1, 2021

Evolution}

On today’s ID the Future physicist Brian Miller and host Eric Anderson explore a recent conversation between physicists Jeremy England and Paul Davies on Justin Brierley’s Unbelievable? radio show. Davies admitted he doesn’t want the origin of life to require divine design, while England argued that his work on non-equilibrium systems offers a promising avenue for explaining the origin of the first life in naturalistic terms. Miller and Anderson demur on both counts. They hold out hope that Davies, having recognized his philosophical bias, will eventually decide to follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if doing so has theistic implications. And as for Jeremy England’s approach, Miller says it’s fascinating work but fails to solve the origin-of-life challenge in Read More ›

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post

Author
Neil Thomas

Date
August 23, 2021

Categorized
Evolution

Tagged
agnosticism, atomists, British Rationalist Association, Darwin’s warm little pond, Darwinism, Epicurus, Erasmus Darwin, Evolution, evolutionary theory, Frankenstein, history of evolutionary thinking, Intelligent Design, Mary Shelley, Miller-Urey experiment, Neil Thomas, Neo-Darwinism, origin of life, propaganda, rationalism, Robert Chambers, scientific dogma, skepticism, Theism, University of Durham}

Author Neil Thomas Discusses Taking Leave of Darwin, Pt. 1

_{Neil Thomas

August 23, 2021

Evolution}

On today’s ID the Future, meet Taking Leave of Darwin author Neil Thomas, not at all the sort of person one might expect to find waging a campaign against modern evolutionary theory. An erudite and settled Darwinist living comfortably in a thoroughly secular English academic culture, Thomas nevertheless came to reject Darwinian materialism and, as he insists, did so on purely rationalist grounds. Listen in to learn about his journey and about his new book from Discovery Institute Press, Taking Leave of Darwin: A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design.

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post

Author
Neil Thomas

Date
August 11, 2021

Categorized
Evolution

Tagged
abiogenesis, Adam Ure, agnosticism, Alexander Oparin, Andy Dougan, Atheism, Charles Darwin, Darwin’s warm little pond, Darwinism, DNA, double helix, Erasmus Darwin, Evolution, Francis Crick, Frankenstein, Harold Urey, Intelligent Design, James Watson, John Haldane, Karl August Weinhold, Louis Pasteur, Mary Shelley, Materialism, Matthew Clydesdale, Miller-Urey experiment, origin of life, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus, Prometheus Unbound, Richard Dawkins, spontaneous generation, Stanley Miller, Theism, Watson and Crick}

Taking Leave of Darwin’s Warm Little Pond

_{Neil Thomas

August 11, 2021

Evolution}

Today’s ID the Future offers a sneak peek at the new book Taking Leave of Darwin: A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design by Neil Thomas (Discovery Institute Press). Here Scotsman Andrew McDiarmid reads from a Chapter 2 segment titled “The Elusive First Step.” Much of the book is a critical examination of Darwin’s theory of biological evolution, in its original and updated forms; but here Thomas takes up Darwin’s proposal for the unguided origin of the first living cell. Thomas, like others before, points up the persistent and growing problems with a designer-free origin of life, but here he also explores some of the cultural influences that primed society to view the leap from non-life to life as Read More ›

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post

Author
Michael Behe

Date
July 28, 2021

Categorized
Intelligent Design

Tagged
Aristotle, autopoiesis, bacterial flagellum, bottom-up causation, Chloroquine, co-option, Darwin, Darwin Devolves, Darwin’s Black Box, Darwinism, design detection, devolution, E. coli, epigenetics, eternal universe, Evolution, exaptation, Intelligent Design, irreducible complexity, Jim Madden, Kenneth Miller, malaria, Michael Behe, Molecular Machines, origin of life, Pat Flynn, Pax genes, Pax7 gene, purposeful arrangement of parts, Richard Lenski, self-replication, selfish gene, The Edge of Evolution, Thomas Aquinas, Top-down causation}

ID Pioneer Michael Behe Tangles with Two Philosophers, Pt. 2

_{Michael Behe

July 28, 2021

Intelligent Design}

In today’s ID the Future, intelligent design pioneer Michael Behe continues his conversation with philosophers Pat Flynn and Jim Madden. Here in Part 2 of a three-part series, Behe offers an illustration from language and Madden presses him, noting that meaning detection in language is not parts to whole. A lively exchange ensues and then Behe turns the discussion back to his primary focus, detecting design in molecular biological machines by recognizing the purposeful arrangement of parts. From there the conversation turns to everything from epigenetics, systems biology, and autopoiesis to co-option, mousetraps, tie clips, biologist Kenneth Miller, and the philosophers Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. For Behe’s newest book, A Mousetrap for Darwin, go here. This discussion is presented here with permission of philosopher Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Brian Miller

Date
July 21, 2021

Categorized
Evolution

Tagged
abiogenesis, Brownian motion, building blocks of life, cell death, chemical evolution, Dave Farina, entropy, homochirality, information problem, James Tour, mass transfer problem, Molecular Machines, origin of life, synthetic organic chemistry, the Levinthal paradox of the interactome, yeast cell}

More on James Tour’s Abiogenesis YouTube Series

_{Brian Miller

July 21, 2021

Evolution}

On today’s ID the Future, physicist Brian Miller continues his review of James Tour’s origin-of-life YouTube series. As Miller explains, Tour, a world-renowned synthetic organic chemist and professor at Rice University, was inspired to create the series when YouTuber and evolutionist Dave Farina critiqued Tour’s critique of contemporary origin-of-life claims. In reviewing Tour’s video series, Miller and host Eric Anderson praise the Tour series and discuss the Levinthal paradox of the interactome, the ridiculously long odds of blind processes assembling the first living cell, and the challenge of cell death (think Humpty Dumpty and what all the king’s men couldn’t do). Also discussed: entropy, molecular machines, the challenges that Brownian motion and homochirality pose, the presence of intelligent design in Read More ›