Timeline for Is abiogenesis virtually impossible?
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| Jun 6, 2023 at 12:17 | comment | added | Oddthinking♦ | @JackAidley: I do get your point. I think we have trouble with questions (often under the economics tag) where someone makes a simplistic mathematical model based of explicit assumptions of the "spherical cow in a vacuum" style, and people ask "Is it right?" Well, it is if the assumptions are true, and no-one is claiming they are. In this case, I was hoping someone else might have come up with a competing abiogenesis mechanism hypothesis which was more plausible. | |
| Jun 6, 2023 at 8:45 | comment | added | Jack Aidley | @Oddthinking The "hypothesis" section isn't about the (made up, imo) distinction between hypothesises and theory in science; it's a section of the journal where scientists are invited to publish more speculative works rather than the normal publication of research output. As to the off-topicality, doesn't that make this question off topic? | |
| Jun 5, 2023 at 16:20 | comment | added | Oddthinking♦ | @JackAidley: Putting aside the qualitative differences between a "hypothesis" and a "theory", this is the sort of discussion that isn't welcomed here [because we can't advance scientific knowledge, we can only popularise existing results]. "Research-level science" - i.e. where even researchers in the field don't yet know the answer - is off-topic here. | |
| Jun 5, 2023 at 7:53 | comment | added | Jack Aidley | Describing a paper published under the "hypothesis" section of the journal that published it as "not a scientific theory" is a silly. Discussing the consequences of scientific ideas from other fields is a perfectly relevant part of scientific discourse. | |
| Jun 5, 2023 at 6:18 | comment | added | quarague | I would also add that with the current state of knowledge any claim to a concrete numerical probability for abiogenesis is not considered serious science. There is a lot of research on the topic and the steps are complicated and can be considered unlikely to happen by chance but no serious scientist in the area combines that to some specific probability estimate. | |
| Jun 4, 2023 at 23:15 | comment | added | Ray Butterworth | "In reality, in our observable universe, the probability of abiogenesis is 1." — Certainly the probability that our universe has life is 1, but this question is about abiogenesis, not about the existence of life. This definition of "reality" assumes the non-existence of external factors (e.g. "god", however that word is defined). | |
| Jun 4, 2023 at 21:20 | comment | added | user68172 | I think you are right that P(abiogensis happened somehow) = 1, because we are clearly here, but what Koonin is saying is that P(abiogenesis happened in this specific way) < 10^-1018. So your probability and Koonin's probability are estimating different things. I think that from Koonin's analysis we can conclude that either abiogenesis happened in some unknown alternative way which doesn't suffer from this huge improbability issue, or abiogenesis happened in the specific way Koonin described with the aid of a multiverse to compensate for the astronomically low probability. | |
| Jun 4, 2023 at 21:10 | comment | added | Avery | This is because he was arguing within string theory which was still in vogue in 2007, because the mathematics involved was very beautiful to some theoretical physicists despite its lack of testability. At the time, in the mid-2000s, string theorists were proposing ways to make non-testable predictions more compelling to scientists, and this argument from incredulity is one such offering -- although not a very good one IMHO. I strongly recommend this book by Lee Smolin for more details about this. | |
| Jun 4, 2023 at 21:07 | history | edited | Avery | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jun 4, 2023 at 21:06 | comment | added | user68172 | But Koonin is making an argument for the real world given an optimistic model/approximation of it (he's using the toy model to calculate an upper bound). If P should have been 1 instead of < 10^-1018, this is a clear reason for rejecting the paper, but none of the four reviewers brought this up. | |
| Jun 4, 2023 at 21:01 | comment | added | Avery | He's calculating the probability of molecules linking together into RNA in a hypothetical "toy model" universe, instead of the probability of this happening in the only observable universe relevant to science, which is our own. | |
| Jun 4, 2023 at 20:58 | comment | added | user68172 | Going from P < 10^-1018 to P = 1 means that Koonin must have made a huge mistake in his calculations. Where did he get his math wrong? | |
| Jun 4, 2023 at 20:52 | history | answered | Avery | CC BY-SA 4.0 |