There are no "odds" in the evolution of the universe. That is a misuse of the concepts of probability and statistics. Everything happened in accordance with what things are. It didn't "go right" or "wrong". If the nature of things had been different we wouldn't be here talking about it. Long lists of things that happened don't make them a miracle. You did not address what I explained.

There is no rational presumption of "purposes behind the origin of life forms" beyond things behaving and evolving in accordance with their nature and that of their surroundings. Conceptually identifying and classifying what things are and isolating causes to explain action is not teleology, whether you call it "god" or anything else.

Purpose requires consciousness. Consciousness is one aspect of existence; it is aware of existence not its creator. To reverse the role and proclaim that a conscious purpose must direct the nature of existence is the fallacy of the stolen concept.

No one needs to explain any presumed "intelligent purpose". The burden of proof and explanation is on he who asserts the positive. There is no rational presumption or meaning of "higher purpose", to be accepted in advance that someone else is obliged to explain.

So your indicating that universal order, life, the total complexity and structure of what we see, simply manifest itself without any intelligent design or external action. You ascribe intelligence to something that is inanimate?

Your question indicated by extension that a pile of rocks will eventually become a fully formed building by themselves if only there was a big enough windstorm to crush them, form them into bricks, wait till they harden and dry, mix the mortar, lay them in a solid formation that matches a squared building, coupled with the trees that will naturally and totally by accident cut themselves into 2 x 4's of appropriate length, fasten themselves to the roof lay themselves out completing a roofed structure. Again all by random and without help or external interaction. Now if you are indicating by your point that Energy itself posses intelligence, I would point out that there are many forms of life. Carbon based we know of but science theorizes on silicon based life forms, and the possibility of life forms that consist of pure energy.

Interestingly God is described in Isaiah as guess what..."A Powerful Mighty Force..., .i.e.Energy"

KJV Isa 40:26 Lift up your eyes on high, And see who has created these things, Who brings out their host by number; He calls them all by name, By the greatness of His might And the strength of His power; Not one is missing.

Douay Rheims Isa 40:26 Lift up your eyes on high, and see who hath created these things: who bringeth out their host by number, and calleth them all by their names: by the greatness of his might, and strength, and power, not one of them was missing.

Webster Isa 40:26 Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names, by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth.

NWT (Isaiah 40:26) 26 “Raise YOUR eyes high up and see. Who has created these things? It is the One who is bringing forth the army of them even by number, all of whom he calls even by name. Due to the abundance of dynamic energy, he also being vigorous in power, not one [of them] is missing.

Christians know based on the writings God does not exist in physical form, therefore by extension and based on these writings the understanding God exists as a form of intelligent energy.

If you ascribe intelligence to the energy whereby that energy "created" the physical matter, why not call it for what it is. "GOD"

You will say that is just stupid, and I say yes, just like Evolution simply because what I described happening has a better chance of occurring than even the development of the human eyeball alone.

Raw energy is unintelligent. It exists. To form itself indicates intelligence. Any suggestion that raw energy "just happened to turn into everything in our universe, is just a plausible as the rocks and wind becoming a fully formed perfectly square building all by itself.

E = MC(squared) indicates that matter and energy are just two manifestations or states of the same stuff, a natural process. Why do you think an external agency is necessary for the conversion?

Our perspective on the complexities of the universe are probably much like those in Star Trek: The Next Generation episode 6 of season 1 where a time traveler called "The Traveler" helps the crew go Where No One Has Gone Before, which is the name of the episode. When Commander Riker wonders why we have not seen "The Traveler's" kind before, the Traveler responds "What wonderful arrogance! Up until now ... well. .. you have been ... uninteresting." Then he compares the unusual giftedness of the boy wonder Wesley Crusher's understanding of time and propulsion to Mozart's ability to write fine symphonies as a young boy. I am not saying "God did it." I am saying that a being of an ability that we have a very limited comprehension of did it. Perhaps in longer than we will live humanity will understand such things. If you read blarman's comments in this same post, you will see some of the things that went right for Earth to exist, let alone life on Earth. The odds of all of those things happening are so astronomically long that it would require me to be irrational to believe it. Ironically, theists THINK that atheism requires far more faith than theism.

When an atheist can explain the purposes behind the origin of life forms, the origin (and more importantly, the arrangement) of matter into the way we see it, then I will be interested. Consequently, one of my areas of research is self-assembly of nanostructures.

The loaded terminology was intentional. Atheism has a premise that its practitioners do not check, namely that the universe would exist without a purpose. Everything that you, I, and anyone else creates has a purpose. It would be completely beyond reason to say that a star, the earth, water, or anything else would just exist ... with no purpose.

A universe with far fewer stars and planets without life would have been beyond all of our abilities and beyond most (I would argue all) of our comprehension as to how to create.

As someone who makes things for a living as a materials scientist specializing in 3D printing, I struggle to make the tools that make creation here on Earth possible. I am barely intelligent enough to appreciate the sets of differential equations required to define orbital mechanics, the predator/prey relationships between species, etc., let alone the proper levels of each of the control variables of something as complicated as the Earth's weather. What Prof. England's model does and dbhalling's upcoming book will do is account for the seeming contradiction between a universe proceeding toward a state of maximum entropy and the persistence of life forms bent on avoiding such a state. The ability to transform energy (such as via light harvesting) into useful life functions, whenever implemented, acts as a disturbance in the set of differential equations of life that temporarily delay our equilibrium state ... of death.

The "argument from design" known as the teleological argument for a higher intelligence (Notice that I did NOT refer to such an intelligence as "god".) is one that has often been dismissed by atheists, but not debunked. When I see humans terraforming planets and seeding worlds with life, I will say that humanity has gotten 1% of the way toward what happened "naturally" (said with dripping sarcasm).

I am quite willing to say that evolution, Darwinian selection, and what Prof. England discuss was part of a master plan, but I will never say that what we know was created by a cosmic series of fruitful accidents without a plan. I see no mysticism in my understanding whatsoever. I readily admit that I don't understand how things evolved completely. In closing, as I have said before, the default position on the atheism/theism debate should be neither. Both have illogical premises.

Tem, it may be happening all around us, but the energy absorption by certain molecular compounds in a way that has the right energy input and resonance might happen infrequently enough to not be noticeable on a human lifetime scale.

Just because you don't see it happening in big lumps as you walk down the sidewalk doesn't mean it isn't happening or can't.

I find the concept interesting and look forward to hearing more about it in the future, whether it stands up to rigorous analysis and critique or not.

The only offputting part for me is that at some level it seems to switch cause and effect... as if the molecules Decide to get more complex in Order to reverse their Entropic decay....

I'd be much more comfortable with a description that postulated that certain molecules might have an inherent and natural tendency to combine with other chemicals or molecules under the right circumstances.

After all, not all systems are inherently decaying. For many billion years, one HELL of a LOT of Energy has been bathing interstellar space, and we've already detected many complex molecules in interstellar space!

Entropy implies that 'everything eventually cools off or reaches some minimum energy level,' but heck, given the energy bath and radiation intensities in interstellar space and near fusion reactors like stars, how could anyone say that the right resonant driving frequencies would NOT encourage certain molecules to latch on to each other in more, rather than less, complex ways?!

This looks like an exciting theory... now, on to developing or disproving it!

Or, as I might more likely put it...
https://www.facebook.com/IFeakingLoveSci...

He has gotten anywhere near such details. He is still working on the relation of energy flows to emerging complexity of self-organizing systems of any kind, looking at physical properties associated with life, but not yet distinguishing life from non-life. Did you watch his lecture video? It's much better than the article in explaining what he is doing.

He's trying to advance knowledge with a combination of hypothesis and established theory. The next steps are refinement, observation, and testing. Whether or not he is substantially on the right track, principles of energy flows are throughout physics and are almost sure to be relevant in some form. But other causal factors are needed for better explanation.

When Dagny and Rearden saw Galt's motor they knew it took intelligence and ability to build it because they already recognized that it was a man-made entity with a human purpose, not because they thought that every complex entity in the universe requires an intelligence to build it. That is not what Ayn Rand described.

No rational person rejecting the supernatural believes that "a thoughtless, random explanation can be made for the sophistication of the universe" -- or that the universe is "sophisticated" or that explanations are "thoughtless". Note the loaded terminology built into the alleged implication.

Everything does what it does because of what it is. It has an identity and acts accordingly, in accordance with external factors in its environment which differ in different contexts. Animistic causes versus the random is a false alternative. The notion that Darwinian evolution is based on a metaphysical randomness with infinitesimal probabilities is a misrepresentation promoted by religionists; it is not Darwin's theory and is not the modern theory of evolution.

Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design, 1986, explains how the "randomness" in genetic mutation does not mean literally completely random, but rather refers to the relatively small number of possibilities determined by different kinds of causes that arise in different contexts. Cells do what they do under different influences because of what they are. The "randomness" is epistemological, not metaphysical. It refers to the fact that we don't know all the secondary causes which are present in different situations. David Bohm makes the same point about unknown secondary causes in his 1957 Causality and Chance in Modern Physics.

These are not new ideas. Anyone who has ever tried to design a simple mechanical device, let alone complex machinery, from first principles expressed mathematically knows that only limited accuracy is attainable due to the myriad unknown factors always present but which do not dominate the principle causal factors. It does not mean that the complex mathematically unpredicted actions of the machine must be created by a god to avoid metaphysical randomness with infinite possibilities that are too remote to occur.

The theological attribution of causes to the gods is a primitivist lack of understanding of identity and its corollary, causality, not a rational alternative to the inexplicably random. We first experience the concept of causal efficacy through the effects of our own actions. Grasping the principle that things act in accordance with their nature as opposed to some consciousness being directing everything is a more sophisticated conceptual understanding that comes later. It is the basis of science. Primitive people lack that understanding and remain arrested at the level of animistic "explanations" of everything they can't explain in simple perceptual terms. Everything from fire to the weather is claimed to be caused by the gods.

The "argument from design" as an alleged proof of a god is a very old logical fallacy that accomplishes and explains nothing. Not only is it no explanation, being in terms of a speculated, unknowable supernatural realm, it replaces the problem of not knowing an explanation of something complex with a fantasy of a cause in terms of a far more complex speculated entity that isn't known or explained, leading to a much larger problem -- if explanation was the purpose at all. Resorting to "god did it" mysticism as the ultimate default position in the face of the not known is neither science nor a "rational" substitute for Darwinian evolution. It replaces not knowing with deliberate ignorance on a much grander scale.

Except that Gravity is a result of matter. Raw energy does not exert gravitational forces. So then you have to go back to what or who converted the energy to matter.

"And if Energy has always existed, what or who manipulated into the form it currently has with all the precision of the universe. "
Gravity, Strong, Weak, and Electromagnetic forces are responsible.

And if Energy has always existed, what or who manipulated into the form it currently has with all the precision of the universe. Considering Aristotle providing the concept that no thing moves itself, raw energy cannot manipulate itself without intelligence to "create" all we see and that we do not see being space is so vast.

And "raw energy" being non-intelligent has no "need" to alter itself.

Question: You know why they call it space?
Answer: Because there is so much of it.

What about the proposition that energy has always existed? Which is to say that it had no beginning. Aristotle's argument concerning motion in his Physics and Metaphysics starts from the self-referential concept that no thing moves itself. Can this be proven?

The Denver Science Museum has a short film currently showing titled We Are Aliens on the subject of astrobiology. Two salient facts are that life on Earth is largely bacterial and the observation that where there is water, there is life. These hold even under harsh environments such as deep ocean thermal vents where sunlight does not penetrate, the low temperatures found in the Antarctic, and acidic hot springs on the surface to name some.
I wonder how and if England's theories relate to the water molecule and the bacterial form of life?

Excellent! And it will send the "intelligent design" crowd scrambling to wedge their belief systems in with a shoe horn of science babble.

What is most interesting to me is that the combinatorial dynamics of matter may serve as well for the evolution of consciousness, ergo the cohesiveness of memes.

Here's a little science to consider about our Earth and the probability of Life:

1. Type of Star. Only a very small subset of main-sequence, yellow stars put out the necessary range of energy: not too much so as to bake everything crispy, but enough to warm things properly. And it has to have the proper life span to produce fairly steady radiation.
2. Position from star. There is only a very small orbital distance capable of sustaining life.
3. Orbital eccentricity. A planet's orbit must be within a certain eccentricity ("ovalness") range - too much and seasonal shifts become too extreme to support manageable weather.
4. Planetary composition. Many people do not know this, but an iron-cored world is VERY unusual. The common consensus among planetary geologists is that our Earth is actually the result of a collision of two other planetary bodies: one mostly of iron and the other of mostly silicates. The iron formed the super-heated core to give us a strong magnetic field capable of warding off things like coronal mass ejections (commonly misnamed as "solar flares") and also created enough heat inside the earth to prevent the oceans from freezing solid. Then there is the silica-based crustal plates that move around on top of this which provide a base for the growth of plant life, etc. To go further, there are only a very few elements on the periodic table which do not appear naturally. Naturally forming asteroids and other planetary bodies usually gravitate (pun intended) to certain elements as a process of stellar fusion and decay. Heavier elements typically are not formed except by extremely large, very old stars, meaning that this Earth's makeup is very unlikely to have been the result of our Sun's generation.
5. Water content. Water is the necessary ingredient for the formation of life. Recently, scientists have discovered that it is very likely that the majority of Earth's water didn't originate on this planet, but was actually dropped over millions/billions of years by erosion from passing comets. Considering our massive neighbors like Jupiter and the Sun in comparison to the Earth's relative mass, there is an incredibly tiny window of opportunity for such passing bodies.
6. Speed of revolution. Too fast, and gale-force winds and hurricanes are the norm. Too slow, and cloud formation and precipitation patterns stall - alternately inundating or deserting vast swaths of land and preventing plant development and growth.
7. Axial tilt. While contributing greatly to our seasons, the tilt of the earth also contributes greatly to the weather.

Items to ponder, but put together, all of these things had to come together just perfectly even to give life a chance. Pretty amazing.

Woodlema and Barwick get roundly criticized below for making what is known as the teleological argument for "God". In summary, the universe is a highly sophisticated and ordered system. When Dagny and Rearden saw Galt's motor, without completely understanding the motor, they marveled at how well built it was and could recognize the intelligence that went into it. Those who are theists (or deists) make a similar argument about recognizing the intelligence required to make a universe of a far higher level of sophistication and order than Galt's motor. AR and all atheists that I have met claim that their explanation of a universe does not require a "god". Such a claim implies that a thoughtless, random explanation can be made for the sophistication of the universe. I am sure there will be those who disagree, but that takes far more faith for me to believe than that there was one rational designer (or perhaps a civilization of rational designers). Atheism denies that there was an intelligence behind the sophistication of the universe; that just does not seem rational to me.

What is discussed in "A New Physics Theory of Life" is an interesting, albeit far from conclusive, hypothesis of abiogenesis. It does answer some questions better than I have seen before, but there are still major unexplained phenomena that I and others will always want an explanation for.

A simpler universe without life would have been beyond my limited brain capacity, and yet still would have been demonstrative of an amazing intelligence.

I worked on Monte Carlo (probabilistic) simulation enough many year ago to realize that random, thoughtless occurrences, even if they give an adaptation advantage (making them no longer strictly random), are RARE.

Before you give up on human intelligence watch this guy move Stonehinge size blocks by himself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCvx5gSn... and read this http://www.history.com/news/solving-the-....

Until such time as scientists create life from scratch in a lab, there is no way to prove a hypothesis about the
origin(s) of life. Even if the project is proven with math, there cannot be belief until it is proven in actuality and then duplicated many times by different researchers. I think it will happen, as will conquering the speed of light limitation, and eventually the cause for every phenomena in the universe. Look at the progress in the last 100 years and ask yourself what can we accomplish in a thousand years. Just as the last 50 years were unpredictable, a thousand years would be unimaginable.

interesting point

db should read about Greece's new finance minister, a guy named Varoufakis. His economic theories, especially as exemplified in online gaming communities (and described in Reason Magazine a few months ago), have a lot in common with what Gulchers think about a completely unrestrained economic system.

http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts/21...

It is a shame that his politics are completely incongruent with his economics.

When living things harvest light, they move away from a thermodynamic minimum energy. One could think of this as a disturbance in the governing set of differential equations (I want to think of the kind that give rise to predator/prey relationships). You argue in your book that economic situations reach a temporary steady-state rather quickly, but then a disturbance is introduced that disrupts the situation before a new temporary steady-state is achieved.

Jokingly, I was playing a role playing game once and found Schroedinger's cat in a locked chest after destroying a quantum mechanic. The cat snarled.

Seriously, this is a far more satisfying explanation of a number of conundra that I have been feebly trying to understand over the past 20 years. It is as least self-consistent. I don't think I will ever be satisfied (at least in this life, whether there is an afterlife or not) with any explanation of life, its origins, etc. I have been investigating evidence that might support an ancient alien visitation or colonization of Earth recently. Some things, like construction of the Sphinx or Stonehenge, just don't seem possible otherwise. If a god exists, I don't think he/she/it would be anything close to what man might expect.

As for point 2), I agree with you on principle, but there are many species for which the rate constant to a steady state is smaller than you think.

I've only had time to look at 20 minutes of his talk so far.

Regarding 3), there has always been a seeming contradiction between a thermodynamic (mostly entropic) driving force toward equilibrium and the fact that life really doesn't ever get to equilibrium. One key is the idea that living things harvest sunlight.

As for the comparison to economics, the video doesn't add much; however, this video could be one of two key missing puzzle pieces to your book's argument.

J thanks for the very interesting video. He is doing very interesting work and he is very good at getting his ideas across without being too technical and he is clear when he has a solid argument and when he is making heuristic arguments.

1) I wonder why he is not using carbon atoms or hydrocarbon atoms. An experiment like that reminds me of an experiment that starts with primordial soup and ends up with amino acids or something like that.

2) I disagree that you cannot talk about the fitness of a whale compared to algae. The fitness of any life form is based on whether its population is growing or shrinking. Another way of saying that is whether the species has more energy available than it consumes. Of course most species quickly reach a pseudo equilibrium, which is called the Malthusian Trap. I make this point in my book.

3) I think he has some interesting ideas of where life comes from. I do not see how it applies to my book. My main concern (hope) was to strengthen my argument between entropy (2nd law) and diminishing returns in economics. Does this suggests to you how this can be done?