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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Are we really arguing about abiogenesis using the fighter jet analogy in 2023? The Blind Watchmaker is almost as old as me.

The scale of Earth history is mind-boggling. Five hundred million years of chemical reactions in the primordial ocean is a whole lot of time to get the first self-replicating mechanism going. You could bomb human civilization back to the stone age, leaving it with just the knowledge of basic agriculture, let it build back to the thermonuclear bomb, bomb it again, and do this forty thousand times. Forty thousand distinct human civilizations, waging wars, building monuments, creating art, living and dying. If that sounds like not enough, bomb it to the dawn of writing. Then you can squeeze a hundred thousand civilizations into the time it took random chemical reactions to come up with the first replicating machine. That's a lot of time for the largest Petri dish on Earth to come up with something randomly. Or semi-randomly, since you only need a nucleic acid that makes other nucleic acids to try again and again until a nucleic acid that makes itself emerges from the soup and quickly takes over.

Those simple replicators then spent the next two and a half billion years as single-celled organisms of increasing complexity, evolving predation, organelles, photosynthesis, until finally getting to multicellularity. Then it's a billion more years of coming up with modern kingdoms of life, and then everything you know from popular fossils, all these mammoths, terror birds, dinosaurs, dimetrodons, gigantic butterflies, tree-like horsetails, terrifying sea scorpions, ammonites, belemnites and trilobites are all squeezed into the last five hundred million years or so.

That's a lot of time for the largest Petri dish on Earth to come up with something randomly.

You don't know that. It's really important for evaluating this to know how complicated something would need to be to self-replicate in a manner such that evolution could work on it (that is, not like the self replication found in quartz or something). We can't just go "that's a lot of time" or "that seems really hard" and say, well, we've got two big numbers. We'd need to actually manage to compare the difficulty and the time. (With of course the understanding that we could be missing simplifying factors in abiogenesis, which I have no idea how to evaluate.)

You're not wrong. I was just showing that "abiogenesis is very, very improbable" isn't a slam-dunk counterargument. There's also "it took 500 megayears of chemical reactions in a literal world-spanning ocean of organic chemicals for abiogenesis to work" and "abiogenesis doesn't mean a living cell spontaneously spawned, it means a relatively simple chemical replicator spontaneously spawned and iterated until it finally found a loop that kickstarted natural selection".

I wasn’t arguing against evolution, which doesn’t address the origin of life. Evolutionary theory explains how life became diverse/descent with modification happened, but it’s not even an attempt to explain life’s origins. Abiogenesis is still the leading explanation.

Yes, abiogenesis is the leading explanation, and there's nothing wrong with it.