Does Death Pose Challenge To Abiogenesis

This is a question not an argument, however it may develop into one later on, for now though I would just like to pose it as a question. Evolutionist claim that life arose from dead matter once the required elements were all in place. But doesn't the fact that organisms cease to exist show that these view cannot be right, dead organism have all the required elements of life, that is proteins and all the carbon-compounds essential for life, yet they are dead. Why? At least what can be derived from this is that carbon-compounds are not all that is required for life, perhaps some kind of life-sustaining force is also required, I will propose that this life-sustaining force is God, you are at liberty to propose your own, what is certain is nothing natural is known to cause life or to add years to it. When it's time to die it's time to die.

Thread copied here from the Does Death Pose Challenge To Abiogenesis thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

For the first 3 billion years organisms didn't die unless they were killed. When does a bacteria die? When it divides into two?Life isn't an additional "force" or woo-woo. It is an emergent property of the organization of compounds. If you disrupt the pattern enough the property is lost.For more complex organisms the reason for death is an interesting question. Why don't the patterns remain intact and self-repairing indefinitely?I can suggest some ideas but why don't you think about it first.

Not too certain - restricting lab rats to 70% of their normal amount of food adds a year or so to their three-year normal lifespan. And recent research is narrowing in on the chemical basis for that extension.And life as we know it now needs a lot more than carbon compounds - one really important class is phosphorus compounds like ATP (with carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen also present) which provide the electrical currents to keep bacteria and people moving.

Bacteria do die at some point, everything is subject to the second law of energy. Due to predation or limited food supply disease etc. But the fact is when life sin't sustained it does cease."Life isn't an additional "force" or woo-woo"How do you know this?"For more complex organisms the reason for death is an interesting question."It's more than interesting I believe it's a real challenge to abiogenesis; the fact that it's close to impossible to maintain life after a certain period with all the essential components for life in tact show that life is not just a matter of having all the components and having them in place it's more than that.

Hi, Cedre.I would argue that there is a difference between "not living" and "dead." To be "dead," something has to have previously been "alive."Thus, the fact that something is "dead" indicates that something went wrong that caused its "aliveness" to cease.Not so with "not living" or "abiotic" things.Neither the religious nor the scientific think life is nothing but its chemical components. The "emergent properties" Ned mentioned are qualities of life that arise as a result of the chemical components interacting, such as via the electrical currents Coragyps mentioned.So, just having all the parts in one place doesn't mean something should be able to come to life. Nor does anyone think differently. You could pile all the parts of a car into one place, and still not have a functioning automobile if the brake pedal isn't attached to the brake pad, or the fuel tank isn't attached to the fuel injector. Likewise, if some parts aren't working properly, the entire automobile may not function properly.But, abiogeneticists don't think the earliest lifeforms had all of these complex, interacting parts that required such precision: they were just amalgams of associated chemicals that gradually grew in complexity until the result could be considered "alive" by our definition.There is a major difference between turning borderline "not living" into bordeline "living" and turning "dead because of malfunction" into "alive again."

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Cedre. First, it's the Second Law of Entropy.Second, dying of external cause is fundamentally different from failing to sustain oneself. Bacteria can sustain themselves indefinitely, as long as there is ready access to all necessary resources. Humans and mice, however, cannot sustain ourselves indefinitely, even if we have ready access to all necessary resources.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Of course bacteria are "dead" if they are dismembered by a predator. How is that relevant to the point in any way at all? Your challenge only counts if it is a problem for abiogenesis right?Of course everything is subject to the second law of entropy(Not "energy"). That is why life ceases without the necessary energy input that is needed to do anything when subject to the 2nd law. So since the 2nd law always applies and food is a way of carrying right on without that being an issue why is the food issue a challenge?When those disruptive to the pattern influences are removed when exactly does a bacteria die? But complex organisms aren't what "abiogenesised" are they? So the issue of death of those organisms isn't relevant either.As noted it is clearly not at all impossible to maintain life indefinitely since the bacteria like forms did it continuously for 3 billion years after abiogenesis. Well, "know" would be not tentative enough here perhaps. But it is the most reasonable position to hold right now. We have examined the functioning of living things down to minute levels of detail. Everything that happens, so far, is explainable by the chemistry involved. Every little bit of it.Just like a diesel engine works when it is all assembled but is just scrap when not in the right pattern life is a pattern of chemicals to all levels of current knowledge. You don't, I am pretty sure, understand what an emergent property is.I would quote Laplace:"I have no reason for that hypothosis."I have no reason for woo-woo because, so far, all we see is complex chemistry and nothing is unexplainable so far.

Hi CedreBluejay's example of a car is a good one.Complex bodies like the human body require a number of systems to operate. Just like a car, a body can cease to function if it runs out of fuel, develops serious faults, parts wear out, or if it suffers a serious accident. A newly dead body may appear to have everything necessary to sustain life, but if the heart won't work, or the arteries are blocked, or there is insufficient energy available, or the brain is badly damaged, it just won't function.For various reasons that others can probably explain much better than I, after it stops functioning the body deteriorates almost immediately to a point where it cannot be resusitated.

It is the "Second Law of Thermodynamics".Evolution claims nothing about abiogenesis, Cedre should know this by now. The fact he/she does not is an editorial comment in and of itself.The OP's suggestion that death is contrary to abiogenesis makes no sense at all. Abiogenesis does not claim that putting all the ingredients of say, a squirrel, into a jar and shaking it long enough will yield a squirrel. Rather, it suggests the origination of self-replicating organisms capable of descent with modification through naturally occuring conditions.The proposal that things dying is contrary to the concept of abiogenesis is simply thick-headed.

As it has already been pointed out to you, dead implies once living. Abiogenesis deals with non-life to very simple life, which is very different.Right off the hop, death does not pose a problem for abiogenesis, in the way you present it here. Dead organisms were once living. Non-life (different from a dead organism) was never alive, and therefore never degraded from living to dead.So no, death does not pose a problem for abiogenesis.

Hi Cedre, Actually, I'm an evolutionist, and I don't claim that (though I will say I don't know how life began). But in a way, what you're describing is undeniably true. Life is made of non-living matter, and however it started, even if God put it together himself, life was still made from non-living parts.Evolution is not about how life began, only how it has changed and diversified. I suggest you create a new term, "abiogenesist", to describe proponents of abiogenesis without a supernatural component. You're jumping to conclusions here. Before we continue this discussion, I'd like you to define "life". What does it mean to you that something is alive? There is a huge difference between a simple bacterium's and a complex human being's way of life. The bacterium is like a machine, wired to replicate and respond to external stimuli. It doesn't exhibit any subjective awareness, free choice, or intelligence. The human being is like a huge colony of specialized interdependent microorganisms. Each individual cell is as unaware as a bacterium, simply carrying out the tasks it is wired to do.But when large numbers of cells are wired together in a complex pattern, they can begin to exhibit "emergent behaviour". To make an analogy, let's call a bacterium a simple mathematical function. You give it input (stimuli), it processes the input, and it produces an output (response to stimuli). Pretty simple behaviour once we understand the function.
But a human is like millions of little functions. When we give a human some input, the output may be highly unpredictable, because there are so many parameters, and so many processes that are as yet unknown. Each process (function) may be predictable and understandable at the basic level, but the whole system is not. This is how an organism takes on emergent behaviour. Why is this certain? We know enough about what makes people tick today, that we can almost always tell why somebody has died. And so far it has never been "because his spirit left the body". If someone has a heart attack, it's not because someone waved a magic wand, but because a part of the heart is dying (usually blood flow to that part has been disrupted). There are many ways in which a person can die, and all that I know of can be explained through natural processes.Do you know of any deaths that didn't involve natural processes?Respectfully,-Meldinoor

Hi MeldinoorYou raise a question to Cedre asking him to define "life".I'm interested in simple definitions of "life" and "death" (not as a sort of weird hobby, but in the context of this discussion).Would you agree that life could be defined as "a functioning organic system" and that death could be defined as "an organic system completely ceasing to function"?

Hi Jumped Up Chimpanzee,That's a very good question. Life can be and has been defined in many ways. But the definition depends on the context of the discussion. If Cedre has a different definition of life than we do, we will not make any progess with this discussion. In order to discuss whether death precludes abiogenesis, we need a common definition of life and death to work with. I would agree, provided that you define the function of the organic system. If we want to include all organisms commonly understood as living in our definition of life, we must choose a function that is common to all of them. Like replication. All organisms that are commonly understood to be alive utilize some mode of replication, whereby information in the replicator is copied into its replicates. Further, all of them do so using some kind of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA). We could make this trait our definition of life, in which case any self-replicating molecule could be considered "alive" whether it be organic (carbon-based) or not.This definition has some limitations however. Take an organism that becomes unable to reproduce. Is it no longer alive? Or take a brain-dead human, kept alive through artifical means. He can still "replicate". But is he alive? So you see it depends on context.I'd consider a cell whose self-sustaining function became so disrupted that it could no longer prevent itself from breaking down into its components to be dead.Respectfully,-Meldinoor

1. Interesting; Lifeforms having no life. 2. It would seem that the less complex a compound of chemicals is, the more subject to entropy it would be, having no ability to naturally select or randomly mutate successive stages into something more complex until life emerged, not to mention the likelihood, if life emerged to survive long enough to reverse entropy pressure for advancement into complexity sufficient to replicate or divide.3. Are there any scientific models which would depict even a remote possibility of random abiogenesis as per your explanation?

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
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