Thank you, but I must ask. Have you taken the time to understand what ID is or have you just listened to the opponents and assumed everything they said was true? Is this discussion going to be both an ID lesson and an ID debate simultaneously? If it is both doesn't it seem like this is a bit unfair on your part. I understand evolution well and would never require anyone to teach me the theory all while I rejected it. Sounds absurd on its face.
I've read plenty of ID material from ID websites. I've never read an ID book, but then again I'm a poor student.
I've read many critiques of ID as well; the ones I've found most helpful (and which I think any serious ID-er needs to read and consider) are those by philosopher of biology Elliott Sober. He discusses creationism in general in his book
Philosophy of Biology, and ID in particular in his book
Evidence and Evolution. In particular, in the latter book he takes the same attacks against ID and applies them against natural selection (and finds that it does not emerge entirely unscathed, not without qualifications).
But at this point in our dialogue I don't know if I really need to say anything about ID in particular, so much as about your philosophy of science in general.
Well if anything is "ideologically colored" it is your statement here. You are "pretty sure you will disagree with" sounds as if you reject the reasoning and evidence without knowing it. I have taken and continue to take the time to understand, read and study evolutionary and origin of life science. So it appears I'm the one who is studying all perspectives here. There is no excuse for staying uninformed. There are plenty of free resources on ID.
What I mean to say is that since I disagree with most ID source material that I find on ID websites, I think I would also tend to disagree with whatever ID material I can find in sources I have to pay for. I would love to be surprised, of course; but I hope you can see that this is just a simple inference from what I have read to what I haven't.
I must ask you something about
your understanding of conventional science though.
Science does not by definition ignore gaps and proclaim victory. This is almost what OOL researchers do. They give us some tantalizing tidbits on the edges, which do not in any way come close to demonstrating a plausible sequence to life and then just waive their hands and say time and chance takes care of the rest. This is an admission of ignorance. This is not how science works. You don't celebrate and then discover.
I am not aware of any researcher of the origin of life who believes that we have completely elucidated its theoretical mechanism or historical sequence. Yes, they give us some tantalizing tidbits on the edges. But I am not aware of any researcher who has called them more than tantalizing tidbits. Do
you read the source material of conventional OOL science?
Of course, the media tends to hype things up - but then again the media tends to hype anything up. The incompetence of most science reporting should not be blamed on the scientists themselves.
In any case. Back to the philosophy of science.
Hmmm ... this is not an analogy. Your experiment on ice does in fact directly demonstarte the freezing point, and hence would directly imply ice in similar conditions. You are grossly trivializing the problem and the evidence of the OOL if you think these are in any way analogic.
I understand the need and role of problem reduction. Ribozyme engineering, which is what the article was demonstrating, is not a reduction of the problem into its simpler form. It was a fabrication of a "virtual homeostasis" and then jumping to conclusions.
I just gave you substantive reasons in the post you quoted. I bolded the saliant points.
Really? I'm not sure that you understand the need and role of problem reduction.
I'll repeat the freezing water analogy and expand on it to show you what's wrong with your reasoning.
In experiment A, I put a thermometer into a test tube of liquid water that has been left in a salt-ice bath (having a temperature below 0 degrees Celsius). The temperature of the water stays constant at 0 degrees Celsius while it goes from liquid to solid. I tell the class that this demonstrates that water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius.
Boy A comes up to me after the experiment and says: "This proves nothing about the temperature at which water freezes in my refrigerator." But he cannot tell me anything about why the water in his refrigerator would behave any differently from the water in my test tube.
In experiment B, I put my thermometer above a test tube of liquid water being heated by a Bunsen burner. The temperature of the thermometer stays constant at 100 degrees Celsius while it is immersed in water vapor. I tell the class that this demonstrates that water boils at 100 degrees Celsius.
Boy B comes up to me after the experiment and says: "This proves nothing about the temperature at which water boils at home." When I ask him why, he says: "I may study here but I live up in the Himalayas. The air pressure is much lower there, and thus water there boils at closer to 90 degrees Celsius!"
You are trying to appropriate the credibility of Boy B, while acting for all intents and purposes like Boy A. The bolded reasons you gave were:
This demonstrates that RNA enzymes in vitro can be selected against/for. It shows that given the right chemical and thermodynamic conditions along with artificially maintained homeostasis some RNA enzymes react more favorably.
Let's look at them in turn:
"In vitro": is there any reason to believe that early life originated in a condition that was not
in vitro? Given that
in vitro means in the absence of life or biological activity,
by definition life must have originated
in vitro (if it originated naturalistically). In this aspect at least we know for sure that the experiment was faithful to original conditions.
"Right chemical and thermodynamic conditions": is there any way you can demonstrate that early life originated in somehow "wrong" chemical and thermodynamic conditions? I can tell you the exact procedure of the experiment:
A starting population of 1 pmol of each ligase was challenged to ligate a chimeric DNA-RNA substrate (S0) having the sequence 5′-CTTGACGTCAGCCTGGAC
TAATACGACTCACUAUU-3′ (T7 promoter sequence in italics; RNA residues in bold). Continuous evolution was carried out as described in ref.
5, in a reaction mixture containing 5 μM substrate, 2.5 μM fluorescein-labeled cDNA primer having the sequence 5′-FAM-GGATGGCACGGAGTCAG-3′, 2 mM each NTP, 0.2 mM each dNTP, 25 mM MgCl2, 50 mM KCl, 4 mM DTT, 50 mM EPPS (pH 8.5), 10 U μL−1 SuperScript II reverse transcriptase (
Invitrogen), 2.5 U μL−1 T7 RNA polymerase, and 0.001 U μL−1 inorganic pyrophosphatase, which was incubated at 37 °C for times decreasing from 30 to 12 min.
Which of these were missing from the origination of life? Which chemical wasn't around at the dawn of time, or which one was? Were the concentrations wrong? Was the temperature wrong? Can you really tell me?
"Artificially maintained homeostasis": really? "Homeostasis" is by definition the maintaining of internal
biological equilibrium, so there could have been no homeostasis whatsoever neither in this experiment nor in the original conditions for origin of life. In any case, the paper also says something about this:
At the end of each incubation, a small aliquot was transferred to the next reaction vessel, with the dilution increasing from 100-fold to 1,000-fold over the course of 40 transfers.
By simple kinetic theory, diluting by a factor of 10 should slow any chemical reactions down by a factor of about e^10 ~ 22,000. Whatever else you care to say about these enzymes, they were certainly not coddled.
You can say all you want that this experiment could not have faithfully captured at least a part of what happened at the origin of life. But can you credibly say why? Or are you just going to be a Boy A with feisty argument but little evidence?
Paper cited: Sarah B. Voytek and Gerald F. Joyce.
Niche partitioning in the coevolution of 2 distinct RNA enzymes.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Online April 28, 2009
First, I was not saying that ID says anything about the Cambrian Explosion. I was contrasting an accepted study of modern evolution (the Cambrian Explosion) with one that is not (ID). I was demonstrating that it is hypocritical to reject the study of one while accepting the study of the other based on the argument of the latter not meeting the criteria of being science.
The predictions of both are in regard to side effects or "echos" if you like. For example, one variation of why the Cambrian event took place was because of oxygen. We can then look at the geology to determine if there was a coincident or preceding increase in O2. Yes there was, and we mine iron because of it. So in this sense the theory can be corroborated or weakly verified, but the theory can still not be falsified strictly. It is important to note that in the case of the Cambrian we have multiple competing theories about why it happened and there is internal debate about which is better suited as an explanation. The OOL is analogous in the sense that it was a single historical event that has multiple competing "theories" of why it took place. In the case of OOL we theoretically should be able to fully reproduce the correct one. Not even close.
I'm not sure what exactly your issue is here. Why should we in the case of OOL theoretically be able to fully reproduce the correct theory?
Also, if ID says nothing falsifiable about the Cambrian explosion (which might only be what you implied, certainly not what you explicitly said), wouldn't that justify its exclusion as a scientific approach to studying the Cambrian explosion?
