Computers don’t arise randomly (without annoying semantic arguments).
To be fair, the probability gets closer to one if you expand your view to include the entire universe and assume that it is many, many orders of magnitude larger than the visible universe. But my take away, at least, is that we are not dealing with a situation where random assembly of RNA is so likely to generate self-replicating sequences that abiogenesis was effectively an inevitability. That was the narrative I was sold in grade school and undergrad, but it appears to be wrong.
There are a good number of free parameters in the journal article that I linked: The fraction of RNA sequences that are self-replicating, the fraction of planets that are habitable for life, the average decay rate of RNA on a habitable planet, etc.
You take can take issue with the empirical estimates for those parameters, but that points to missing pieces in the framework: Was there a chemical process on early earth that stabilized RNA oligomers that no longer exists? Are self-replicating RNA sequences more common than we believe? If so, why haven't we encountered more of them in nature? And so on. In my opinion, these are the truly interesting questions, not whether nucleotides and amino acids can form spontaneously.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-58060-0
[2] https://mathscholar.org/2020/05/the-origin-of-life-in-an-inf...
Is that meaningful? No matter how unlikely our existence is, here we are.
But it parallelizes extremely well - throughout the entire universe for billions of years.
And then of course there’s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism.
Almost certainly yes.
> If so, why haven't we encountered more of them in nature?
Because they can't compete with modern life. Nearly all of the biomass on earth is in use. A primitive replicator, even if it arose today, would have to compete for resources against all the existing life on earth. It wouldn't stand a chance. This is the reason there is only one universal common ancestor. It's not necessarily that abiogenesis only happened once, it's that only the descendants of one common ancestor survive today. All traces of all other abiogenesis events have been obliterated.
You have to compute the abiogenesis odds for an environment that, by definition, does not yet include life. Here is a rough back-of-the-envelope approximation: the biomass of earth is about 2^52kg. Avogadro's number is 2^76. So there is the potential for the early earth to have 2^120 nucleotide bases and amino acid molecules floating around. If the complexity of a simple replicator is around O(100) bits then the odds of finding one by chance when you are rolling that many dice in parallel approaches 1 in just a few million years. After that, evolution takes over.
Second, yes, today's world has an enormous amount of amino acids and nucleic acids, but that is after billions of years of enzyme-catalyzed synthesis inside trillions of living cells. The prevalence of amino acids/nucleic acids prior to abiogenesis would have been orders of magnitude lower in a world where those enzyme pathways didn't exist yet and biologic molecules with catalytic activity were still in the process of being bootstrapped.
Third, does your back of the envelope calculation account for the very short half life of RNA? That is really the biggest issue. If RNA didn't decay, then forget about hundred base sequences; the primordial earth might have been filled with million base sequences.
The figure I cited is the carbon biomass.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-biomass-of-earth-in...
> that is after billions of years of enzyme-catalyzed synthesis inside trillions of living cells
Doesn't matter. What matters is the size of the search space that could be explored by the chemistry, and if even a single replicator exists in that search space. The extent to which that first replicator resembles present-day life is irrelevant. The only reason to refer to that at all is to get some idea of what the information content of a minimal replicator is.
> Third, does your back of the envelope calculation account for the very short half life of RNA?
Again, it doesn't matter. As long as the half-life of the replicator is more than the time it takes it to produce >2 offspring, that's enough to get the ball rolling.
If you throw construction materials up 1 quadrillion times, how many times can they randomly fall in the form of a house?
My response is zero. Building a house is not a product of randomness, it's a product of intelligence and will.
Life also can't be a product of randomness. There's some intelligence and will going on in nature's laws to make life happen.
Or, perhaps you're arguing that the rules of the universe were designed in a way that guaranteed that life would arise?
Something else?
To me, Universal laws aren't random. If they were, I'd expect them to change from time to time.
These laws are immutable and inexorable. They respect, interact and cooperate perfectly with each other.
How did they come to exist and be that way if not by intelligence and will?
I have no idea how this works or came to exist, but it definitely doesn't look random to me.
And the universe also has a bunch of repeated structures, so why wouldn't a universe also be a repeated structure? A heart is a common one found in many different animals. They are each different in their own way, but it is a structure that is repeated. Same with atoms. They all follow the same basic structure, but it is repeated with just various configurations.
> The thermodynamic dissipation theory thus assgins an explicit thermodynamic function to life; the dissipative structuring, proliferation, and evolution of molecular pigments and their complexes from common precursor carbon based molecules under the impressed short wavelength solar photon potential to perform the explicit thermodynamic function of dissipating this light into long wavelength infrared light (heat). In a general sense, the origin of life is no different than the origin of other dissipative structuring processes like hurricanes and the water cycle, except that these latter processes deal with structuring involving hydrogen bonding while life deals with structuring involving covalent bonding. The external photon potential supplied continuously by the environment (our Sun), and its dissipation into heat by the assembly of dissipative structures, are, therefore, both integral components necessary for understanding life.
https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/6923
> The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...
Even if you claim there is a single god that created both of these things, backwards deriving the seed necessary to generate the current state, it still routes through this physical process which is describable with physics and could be extrapolated to other starting conditions or future scenarios that humans can utilize.
It makes no difference.
Some argue the origin is in the - supposedly random - combination of molecules.
Others think the answer is deeper and relates to more fundamental aspects of nature.
no, it's by backpropagation. error is propagated and minimized. simple equations lead to emergent complexity.
canyons form as water follows paths of least resistance, and incrementally erode rock. the water doesn't use its intelligence and will to construct a canal, even though the resulting river system looks like a max flow solution.
the intelligence and will emerges from the math. simple systems with enough feedback can become very sophisticated.
We're not discussing how things act intelligently, but rather why, what's the origin of the intelligence in the process.
Some argue there's no intelligence, it's just randomness. Others think this is not a rationally acceptable explanation for what nature is showing us.
If you arrange your biological soup a large number of times randomly, you will eventually land on a pattern that causes other nucleotides to arrange in a similar or improved pattern around it.
Not too dissimilar from thinking about the creation of specific atoms through various astronomical processes.
Even if you need to believe in god for some reason, it’s not incompatible with god defining the organic chemical reactions that enabled life to form via random interactions of nucleotides until they happened to land on god’s lucky number
It depends on what you call a house.
It will probably never fall in any given expected shape.
It may very well fall into multiple configurations that someone arriving at the scene after the fact, and without prior knowledge of what you expected when you run the experiment, would call a "house".
What it needs to form is any kind of a shelter that is better than not a shelter. A 4x8 sheet of plywood that happens to lean against a brick forming a roof is all that is required for a first house.
Life is a product of randomness. There is no intelligence or will going on in nature's laws. Neither of those things are required.
Would we conclude that everything in the Universe is alive?
I think that's a pretty interesting way of seeing things. And (to me, personally) it strengthens my view that there are intelligent processes going on in the Universe.
What is necessary for life to arise from a random stew of disorganized chemicals is far more than just a good arrangement of a few molecules that exhibit some characteristics of life. Since all life dies as part of the never-ending march toward entropy, you also need to be capable of some form of reproduction and able to carry out reproduction at a faster rate than death. What is the minimum complexity involved in such a thing? I'd argue that it's probably more complicated than any house in existence.
nucleotides spontaneously form, then start to bind to each other in chains. Those chains spontaneously fall apart and reform.
amino acids start to bind to the nucleotide chains and cause them to be more stable. Nucleotide chains bound to the amino acids have a longer life expectancy than those not bound to amino acids. The amino acids start to bind to each other (they naturally do). The RNA binding makes them slightly more energy efficient essentially catalyzing the reaction.
over millions or billions of years, random chaining of nucleotides leads to random chaining of proteins that are slightly more energy efficient. Those forms "outcompete" alternate forms.
Once a particular type of amino acid chain exists, it can influence other amino acid chains to follow the same structure. For example prions are extremely short but binding to normally folded versions of the protein causes the normal version to change patterns.
one of the interesting constraints is you don't have billions of years. Life appeared on Earth within 100 million years of the planet cooling down enough to have standing water, possibly even less, depending on your reading of the evidence that gets more disputed the farther back you go.
It took 2 billion years for prokaryotes to turn into eukaryotes, and it took another billion for eukaryotes to go multi-cellular, but somehow the initial development of a self-replicating cell with a code took less than a tenth of that.
And how do you suppose the intelligence you refer to originated? You're not offering a solution, you're merely adding another layer of complexity that still needs an explanation along the same lines.
So in your example with the house here is how it might be:
Throwing 1 quadrillion times materials will they arrange in a fundation? Of course. Then throw again and will there be some kind of wall or pillar?
Then you now have foundation and pillars. Throw again a huge number of times, will there be materials that might form a wall?
Please also take into consideration that evolution is not only in a vertical progression (from materials to house) but also running horizontally (like creating multiple types of walls of all shapes before going for a roof).
But more importantly evolution will not create a house as long as there is not need for one.
On the other hand, as we are poaching the limits of science: how do you know that given a close to infinite number of arrangements those materials will not arrange into a house?
Darwinian evolution in the narrow sense is duplication of life plus random variation plus filtering (that may also be random, but which at a minimum contains some bias which is, if not consistent over time, at least usually changes very slowly compared to the rate of random of variation.)
Darwinian evolution in the broad sense is the same thing, but without the “of life” part.
But abiogenesis is not Darwinian evolution in the narrow sense, and may or may not significantly involve Darwinian evolution in the broad sense, so arguing about what evolution is or is not in the context of the initial creation of life as opposed to the explosion of diversity of life after its initial creation is, at best, skipping steps.
Intelligence fits into this in interesting ways. One way to consider it is as a guide to the assembly process from less complex from more complex.
If you believe the human brain's processes are computable, and you believe evolution is a random process, then you believe that computers arise randomly.
Is that what you mean by "annoying semantic arguments"?
Discussions of what constitutes a computer in this context or whether an nth order effect of a “random” process are just distracting.
You are right. They don't.
As if, contrary to that, humans do/did.