For the alternative theorists:

http://ib.berkeley.edu/courses/ib200/lect/ib200_lect07_Mishler_Trees.pdf

This lecture is the first in a series of several increasingly technical ones that discuss how evolutionary genealogical trees are constructed. It gives kind of an overview and seemingly there are two schools of thought regarding statistics. One (the population genetics inclined 'estimation' school) make great use of statistical induction. The other school (the cladistics inclined 'reconstructionists') which the professor seems to favor, make use of 'data matrices' from which trees are deductively derived by mathematically solving the matrix. (My entirely layman's impression is that the difference might be more apparent than it seems concerning statistics at least, since in the case of the matrices statistics are involved in the initial construction of the matrix. But this is all well above my pay-grade and I might very easily be wrong about that.)

At the very least though, these kind of methodological disagreements among phylogeneticists do seem to illustrate that there's quite a bit of theory involved in how genealogical-relationship conclusions are ultimately drawn from data.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Let me first say that it's above my pay grade also, but what I do seem to understand is that it is not invalidating Evolution, or even questioning Evolution, rather it questions the exact workings of the evolutionary tree.

And of course once again, no one has yet offered any alternative possibilities of the question of how life arose in the Universe...That is life arose from non life at its most basic assumption and fundamentals.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Yes, I totally agree with you about that.

My intention isn't to attack evolutionary biology or to cast doubt on it. Rather, it is to inquire in a little more detail about what practicing evolutionary biologists spend their days doing.

Or how best to figure out what the evolutionary tree looks like.

My point was that it isn't just something that people look at and observe. The tree of life can't be found among the raw data of experience. Instead, the history of life on earth is something that must be deduced from the observational data, with the aid of a great deal of theory and only after lots of hard work.

 

OK, accepted.
But can you offer any scientific alternative, to the life arising from non life question which was another aspect under discussion?

 

Trippy

And this is the crux of my problem with the use of the word "belief".

The first one is the only one many laymen understand. Just like a theory is only someone's guess. And I'm frankly tired of having to explain the difference. So my attempt to avoid having to is to use other words and phrases to describe the confidence(a good word), the provisional acceptance(a good phrase). Belief, as it has become in the common vernacular, just does not make enough of a distinction, in my opinion.

That is really two stories...

Wakefield et al published a paper in a journal, that being a step in the peer review process. That process exposed his fraud and his paper was trashed, his reputation ruined. The paper was never accepted as being valid, it did not survive peer review. The process worked. Scientifically, he never even got near trust, the crapstorm was quite...er, crappy. Scientists can be quite vicious when it comes down to fraud, that's a death sentence for your reputation(and, likely, employment).

While this was going on certain members of the...er, stupid party, believers and other political anti-science idiots took the paper on faith(mainly because it fit their internal faith based world view). Right wing media hyped it and it became a cause celeb, they believed because a scientific priest said it was true, many of them still believe. Some will never believe anything else, no matter how hard you try to explain. They have a belief that what he said was true. It was the media/political circus that was/is the cause of the trouble, that plus the people who believed the hype.

These two situations should not be described by the same word, especially since at least a third(and maybe more)of the population only understands one of them. Just sayin'.

That is why one should not believe anything in science, not because it is not mostly true. In fact you should not accept anything as being true that has not survived that process. And even then, give it a couple of decades of testing before accepting it as provisionally true(IE true until proven otherwise). The Scientific Method works, even when operated by messy, dishonest and sometimes, frankly, stupid humans. It's not perfect, nor is it perfectly applicable(yet)in all sciences, but over the long term, it gives us high levels of confidence that we know(not believe)something about reality.

Relativity has a record of over 100 years of being tested(new tests are almost always underway today), it has not been falsified even once, it accurately predicted the outcomes of every test yet devised. A repeatable falsification of anything in Einstein's theories will be front page news. But I don't think even that is the last word on the subject, it is incomplete, there are problems in the interface between the macro and the Quantum, for example. I believe that there is something fundamental that we don't yet understand that will revolutionize physics on the same scale as Einstein, but I don't know that.

Consider math. In a base ten system under the rules of math, 2+2=4. Do you call that a belief? I don't. Neither you nor I invented the rules of math, they were developed over centuries into a system that, if applied correctly, gives you absolute truth(concerning math). It gives the same answer no matter who uses it.

The Scientific Method is a similar, but much less precise system than TENDS toward truth about reality. Mainly by a process somewhat analogous to Evolution, by killing off the hypotheses that don't fit the facts(all of them, even new ones), can't be repeated by others or contain flaws in their process. Like many other scientists have said about belief in science, if I could be said to believe in anything in science it is a belief that the Scientific Method will distill what we can say we know from what we believe(rational or not). It is a method for wresting truths from the mish-mash of human thought, which is awash in beliefs that are just not true. And like math, if you apply it correctly it will give you an accurate picture of reality, one that gets more accurate over time. The picture we have now is pretty low resolution, we see what's there but there are areas that are pretty fuzzy still. There is still a lot we do not yet know, so belief is in no danger of dying out.

Or they could both have faith in the process and accept(provisionally)what the process has distilled out of the respective disciplines. That would be a description of my position on faith in science. If it survives the process(especially for long periods of time)it is probably true.

Grumpy

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

i assume you are referring to a god type of "blind belief".
is it really baseless?
conscienceness, life, the placebo effect.
the really crazy part is that this entire mess gets more complicated the closer you look.

 

Well the more we learn, the more we probe, the more we observe, the hypothesis of the creation of the Universe by supernatural means, becomes ever more baseless.

We have come along way since times when we worshiped mountains, rivers, the Sun and Moon as deities, and we have a reasonable handle as to the Evolution of the Universe/space/time and all that has followed.
No, far more ordered explanations are now obvious, and our models based on much observational data, are far from being complicated or a mess.

 

and :

Paddoboy, in your Post #569, you Posted the Following Link : http://phys.org/news/2013-08-martians-theory-life-mars.html#jCp
That Linked Page contained this at the bottom : “Explore further: Astrobiologists find Martian clay contains chemical implicated in the origin of life” Link : http://phys.org/news/2013-06-astrobiologists-martian-clay-chemical-implicated.html#inlRlv

That Linked Page contains the following (highlight by dmoe) :

- the ^^above quoted^^ from : http://phys.org/news/2013-06-astrobiologists-martian-clay-chemical-implicated.html#inlRlv

Paddoboy, I pointed all of this out with my response in my Post #572 :

So…paddoboy, your thoughts on that were , your Posts , #573 :

...which of course seems to be an example of what Trippy refers to in his Post #673 :

…and #574 :

...again, which of course seems to be an example of what Trippy refers to in his Post #673 :

Paddoboy, of course you “found” it, it was in my Post # 572!!!

At any rate, it seems that in addition to some Posts not being fully read and fully understood - Prior to responding to those Posts - some Posters evidentally do not even fully read and fully understand the information at the Pages that they themselves Link to.

So...I came accros this article this morning, at the the BBC.com site :
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27669572

The article has some interesting information about the "origins of Life", as well as "rocky planets may have formed earlier in cosmic history than many thought possible"! (highlight by dmoe!):

*** NOTE : possibly the word "know" should have been between the words "we' and "very" in the ^^above quoted^^...?? ***


So...paddoboy, it seems that not only may it be possible that "Life" just may be an inherent geochemocal progression of Nature, but that "Life' may just indeed be a "spontaneously produced and stabilized" natural consequence of the Universe itself!

So...paddoboy, again I ask :

Thoughts?

 

I'm not sure why you keep asking that question.

You ask if I can provide any "scientific alternative" to life arising from non-life. That raises the question of what 'scientific' means.

I tried to address that earlier when I wrote about naturalism.

Naturalism comes in two broad categories, metaphysical and methodological.

Metaphysical naturalism attempts to lay down the law about what can and can't be real. It asserts that everything that exists is natural, that everything belongs to the world of nature and is open to study by the means appropriate for studying that world, natural science in other words. It's attempting, seemingly by fiat, to predetermine what the boundaries of the unknown as well as the known must be. I don't know of any way that anyone could possibly know that it's true and it looks like an article of metaphysical faith to me. It might be better to take an agnostic stance on such things.

Methodological naturalism is a heuristic as opposed to a metaphysical principle. What it does is prescribe that when natural science is seeking to account for this-worldly natural events, that it restrict itself to seeking this-worldly natural causes and explanations. That's what science is equipped to do and what it's been so extraordinarily good at doing. In other words, it's suggesting what the proper scope of science is, as opposed to trying to predefine the limits of reality itself. I'm very much a supporter of methodological naturalism.

Ok, returning to the idea of offering a "scientific alternative" to life arising from non-life, assuming that science is governed by methodological naturalism, it will seemingly have to assume (as a working hypothesis) that if life isn't eternal, then it must have arisen naturally from non-life at some point. (Naturally doesn't necessarily suggest easily, it might have been a very complex, fortuitous and unlikely process.)

But methodological naturalism isn't metaphysical naturalism. It's defining what 'scientific alternative' means, it isn't really predetermining how the origin of life had to have happened. Maybe there was some unknown non-natural being or process involved, something that by its nature isn't amenable to investigation by the natural sciences. I don't know of any plausible reason to believe that's so, but it's something that can't just be ruled out by metaphysical fiat either.

Personally, in my own case, I'm inclined to think that the origin of life came about through some unknown natural process. But again, I'm just hypothesizing about that, based on my own rather physicalistic worldview. And certainly it's the presupposition that science uses when it looks for answers, because that's what science is and how it goes about its business.

But at this point, we just don't know. That's the bottom-line answer to your repeated question.

 

So dmoe, I must once again say, [and as noted by others] your convoluted posting style, tends to leave one rather confused.
So dmoe, we move to the crux of what I'm on about......
And that is the simple fact that life in the Universe at its most basic level, arose from non life...Ignoring any supernatural non scientific explanation.
So dmoe, it's obvious to most, that the above explanation is the only scientific explanation available, and it doesn't matter how many fancy ways you want to dress that up.

Albert did once say words to that effect, or what we commonly refer today to the "KISS"principle.
Even If as you put it, life is an inherent property of the Universe, it arose from non life.

Now it's great you agree with me and rather flattering, but I'm not sure now If I was the first to raise that point, or if it was someone else.
I do recollect "Panspermia" being raised [that was me I recall] and again Panspermia only infers to how life arose on Earth.....Certainly in no way as you will agree, does it invalidate "Life from non life" speaking Universally.

In essence then, and deciphering your convoluted style, crowded with highlights, exclamation marks //^^>>> and such, you agree that life did obviously arise from non life, speaking Universally.
That's nice.

 

Not much to say on that, except to refer you to what Carl Sagan said thus.....
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
"" [Elegance] goes directly to the question of how the laws of nature are constructed. Nobody knows the answer to that. Nobody! It's a perfectly legitimate hypothesis, in my view, to say that some extremely elegant creator made those laws. But I think if you go down that road, you must have the courage to ask the next question, which is: Where did that creator come from? And where did his, her, or its elegance come from? And if you say it was always there, then why not say that the laws of nature were always there and save a step?[6]
—Carl Sagan, Conversations with Carl Sagan
from....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

So, I think in reality, we can kill that one stone dead.

I'm not sure how "eternal life" can be considered, when we know with some certainty, that even the Universe had a beginning. I also strongly disagree with claiming "life arising from non life" is a working hypothesis. It's as near a fact as one would hope to be, and the only logical answer, considering what we already know for certain.
That arising of life from non life, may well have been a fortuitous and lucky process, but once that process has started, it would appear to be plain sailing from there, taking into account the size, numbers and the stuff of life being everywhere we look.

In essence, and speaking scientifically, the Universe/space/time may well have been the ultimate free lunch, as has been discussed by Penrose and Hawking. Life appears to be the desserts from that lunch.

 

paddoboy

First we must define what the simplest form of life must be able to do to be defined as life. Any self replicating molecule, no matter how small or environment dependent would be my definition. Once replication with modification begins evolution is underway and you are no longer talking about biogenesis. That is the line between life and just complex chemistry. Every lifeform on Earth is a reproductive apparatus for the replication of that individual's genome, it's DNA. That DNA is, in reality, the only truly living thing in those organisms, everything else is support machinery. Prior to DNA having evolved, however, is much harder to understand. We've created self replicating molecules, we've seen mutations of those molecules successfully replicate, but there is a huge gap in our understanding between that and DNA. But all of it is just chemistry, complex chemistry, but just chemistry. There is nothing outside of normal physical laws separating life from non-life.

Grumpy

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

BINGO!
Now that has my full concurrence.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

So...paddoboy, how many "//"'s and ">>>"'s were contained in my Post #871?

Is that another example of what Trippy might refer to as :

"convoluted style"...!!!

paddoboy, have you ever heard of attacking the argument - and NOT the Poster?


SFA/MS:UPTABS?

 

I am attacking the convoluted rather weird style of your argument...which when we get to the nitty gritty, is actually non existent and just semantics. :shrug:

And the usual, unusual remark "SFA/MS:UPTABS?" [ which you have refused to elaborate on] actually testifies to that.

 

But let's get back on track.....You agree that Life arose from non life?
You have no other alternative to that near fact?
[Forgetting of course, the non scientific claim of an almighty deity]

 

Which IS NOT Attacking the Argument. That IS Attacking the Poster.

Which is just : "once again with the misrepresentations of others:" , as Trippy might say.

No, paddoboy, it "actually testifies" to nothing more than your ability to "assume", "presume" and "just plain make things up".

No, paddoboy, I CAN NOT "agree that Life arose from non life", because I DO NOT KNOW "that Life arose from non life" is indeed, a fact.

paddoboy, interspersed with all of the //'s and >>>'s of my Post #871 were two (2) possible "alternatives" to your nowhere "near fact".

It seems that that is something that you, paddoboy, can not "forget" - based upon your seeming need to bring it up fairly regularly in your Posts.