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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38803 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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I would be very interested to see your evidence that abiogenesis happened exactly once!

I'm pretty sure it's the scientific consensus that all life that we've seen has a common ancestor? Or are you saying across the universe, in which case that seems comparable to Russell's teapot—we have no evidence in any direction, so we need to resort to estimates of base rates.

I was saying this since you were trying to use the prevalence of life in our surroundings to argue that life is prevalent across the cosmos, but the prevalence of life in our surroundings is clearly influenced by the anthropic principle, and shares a common ancestor.

As another comment points out, the available scientific evidence suggests multicellularity evolved independently multiple times. I would be pretty surprised if this wasn't the case for single cellular life as well.

That aside, I'm happy to say my prior is that inorganic matter becoming organic matter via natural processes is more probable than natural processes spontaneously forming a jet engine.

All life on Earth is remarkably compact when it comes to biochemistry, fundamental pathways of metabolism and biosynthesis, and genetics. In particular, the genetic code (the rule translating sequences of nucleotides into sequences of aminoacids) is almost identical in all living species, despite being, as far as we know, arbitrary.

Multiple abiogeneses might very well have occurred, but in that case it seems the product of one has assimilated or destroyed the products of the others -- or perhaps, the products of multiple events have mixed together so tightly, in a period in which organisms were a lot more porous and promiscuous than even modern bacteria, that the different components cannot be told apart.

Multicellularity seems much more likely to me. Eusociality, which is very similar, also occurred several independent times. But that's taking existing life guided through evolution, not creating new life. We'd need to look at the actual complexity or difficulty of making a self-replicating thing through entirely unguided processes to have a sense of how likely it could be expected to be. If it's fairly easy, why not. If it's very hard, even given the size of the earth, then not likely. The impression I'd been given was that the second was more accurate.

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