5+ day, 5+ hour ago   (586+ words) The reagents of the feedstock are never produced by processes as on the early Earth. Production requires substantial energy and controlled industrial procedures Source Research into life’s origin typically falls into two broad categories. The first consists of experiments designed…...

1+ week, 1+ day ago   (276+ words) Adami runs through an example. In his example, 100 bits of information are required. This would take about 1030 attempts to produce by random chance. If we generously grant a billion attempts for every second in the half-billion years it took life…...

1+ week, 1+ day ago   (193+ words) From Dr. Selim, “It came as a big surprise to us that one of the earliest life forms on Earth — evolutionarily older and simpler cells — had already developed communication structures regulated by calcium signals similar to those found in the…...

1+ week, 2+ day ago   (652+ words) You don’t have to spend much time skimming the voluminous philosophy of mind literature to come across the mind–body interaction problem. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains it thus: Originally, the problem of mental causation was that of understanding how…...

1+ week, 2+ day ago   (503+ words) This paper contains the imaginative storytelling, speculative leaps, and inflated claims that have become staples of the origin-of-life literature. Source In my previous article, I describe how a recent paper proposing chemical pathways to life’s origin recycles failed models and…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (401+ words) Adami says, “Over the years, molecular biologists have collected many examples of the evolution of new functionality” and he cites a review by Long et al. from 2003. This sentence caused me a little trepidation. Did this review contain a list…...