My bet is that life originated underground as some kind of iron-oxidizing organism.
Poppycock. Nice way to make an inflated salary trying to “prove” that life was accidental. It wasn’t and isn’t.
“Avida operates by creating a virtual world in which programs compete for CPU time and memory access, just like organisms competing for resources in the real world.”
Yes, “JUST LIKE” organisms competing for resources. Lol. Just like it.
“Smith, for example, wonders whether our understanding of the chemistry of complex systems needs to take on a cyborg-like quality by integrating a lot more closely with computational research.”
Cyborg-like quality? This is meaningless nonsense.
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Dawkins pitched a similar program years ago, called Blind Watchmaker. It could make swastikas and other symbols, he claimed, which somehow proved something. The download never worked.
Same ol snake oil.
Biology has really gone downhill now that it’s being used as a source for the new liberal orthodoxy as opposed to being a science.
These are like the modern equivalents to old paintings of cherubs and Adam and Eve.
A religious iconography meant to inspire awe.
In a nutshell, his theory is: protein world -> RNA world -> DNA world -> AI world. The latter will be our own doing—and our undoing.
Sounds like their conceptual foundation is built on the premise that evolutionary theory is true.
Which means if it’s not true, the whole thing falls apart.
Faith in technology comes with great risk of being deceived.
The simplest known living organism is Mycoplasma hominis H39. It contains about 600 different kinds of proteins, each having an average length of 400 amino acids.
Some years ago, NASA contracted a Yale professor (who had since moved to George Mason) named Dr. Harold J Morowitz to try and derive the theoretical limit of the simplest living thing. The result of that study required 239 of 124 different kinds of proteins, each with an average length of 445 amino acids.
There are 20 different types of amino acids in living organisms (all with so-called left handed symmetry.) Chemically produced amino acids would feature the same number of left and right handed amino acids, so there would be 40 types of naturally produced amino acids.
To arrange these 40 types of amino acids into just one specific protein of 445 amino acids in the proper order has a probability of 40^445 = 8x10^712 against. To randomly produce 239 necessary proteins, each with an average length of 445 has a probability of about 10^(170,000) against.
Pretty big odds. But the universe is big, you say? Well, let’s see... We estimate there to be about 10^80 atoms in the universe. If every atom in the universe was an amino acid instead of an atom, and if this universe of amino acids could combine random chains, 445 amino acids in length, a thousand times per second and it has been trying these combinations since the beginning of time (13.7 billion years ago) it could have tried about 10^98 combinations, so far.
The universe is about 10^600 times too small to have produced even one of the necessary proteins. More than 10^(100,000) against to produce the whole set.
This simply cannot happen by random processes. One can argue that the impossible can happen once. That would be just one protein. But to have over 200 distinctly different but specified impossibilities occur all at the time and same place. No way.
Life, once you’ve got it, you can’t get rid of it. But the initial origin or life from inert matter? That requires something beyond our present understanding of the laws of physics.
Emprizice this “science”...grab a can of chicken noodle soup....sterilize it....without destroying most of the life associated molecules..sit in warm bath bathed in sterile environment. ...sunlight...cosmic rays and like natural phenomena...sample every 5 years for simple life forms...if no positive results for 25 years...consider that abiogenesis should never be assumed to be true....no matter what computer say...i.e..if all the raw materials preformed cant organize into living creatures...the theory would have a HUGE argument against it. I think these theorists know the odds...but dont want to accept the philosophical consequences of the obvious. Please note...raw chemicals ARE assembled into living organisms trillions of times a day by gestating organism instructions in reproductive structures.
Life was spoken into existence.
The state of the world is constant decay. And somehow out of a state of corruption and decay “life” magically develops by accident. They’re looking in the wrong place to find the origin of life.
Already been done. Forty-Two.
