Biogenesis

From TORI
Jump to: navigation, search

Biogenesis is scientific concept that The living objects come only from living objects and cannot arise from a non-living substance [1].

Biogenesis is supported at http://creationwiki.org/Biogenesis and criticized at http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

History

The Biogeneisis is pretty old concept. Long ago, the question arised about the origin of life at the Earth. If one suppose the finite age of the Universe (roughly, inverse of the Hubble constant), then the life had to be created as some stage of evolution. One of ways to plug the gap in the theory is to suppose the existence of God who created the life in a way, unavailable for human. The old documents like Bible and Torah attribute the creation of our Universe, the stars, planets, and life on the Earth to the God's will.

Since the time of Bible, the human knowledge did not advance much in the answering that question; the same 3 concepts with small variations compete for the popularity:
1. The life was created by God and exists since that Creation.
3. The life in the Universe always existed.
2. The life at the Earth appeared by itself as a result of an occasional fluctuation.

In such a way, the scientists do not know the origin of the life on Earth [2].

During many centuries, biogenesis remains the most stable, useful and accepted concept in biology. In biology, this concept is so fundamental, as the law of conservation in physics. The attempts to negate biogenesis look similar to the attempts to negate the law of conservation of energy-momentum with various gravitsapas and other perpetual motion mechanisms.

Creationism

Creationism is certain specification of the concept of biogenesis. Creationism can be formulated as follows: The life was created by God, and never arises by itself from a non-living substance.

Several links in support of creationism are listed by John Pieret [3].

Anticreationism

Any concept that negate the Creationism can be called anticreacionism or abiogenesis. The ideas of abiogenesis, as alternative to biogenesis are also traced through the centuries.

The concept about finite age of our Universe (roughly expressed with the inverse of the Hubble constant) implies that the life was somehow created, although, if it was created out of Earth, some kind of delivery, diffusion should be assumed; such a hypothesis is called Panspermia [4].

Usually, the anticreationism implies the spontaneous self-generation of life, negating also the biogenesis. Namely in this way the creationism was criticized by the soviet veterans: Oparin, Lepeshinskaya, Lysenko and other pseudo-scientists. The anti-creationists have shown complete absence of any scientific ethics and are considered as symbol of the barbarian profanation of science by the completely cynic and amoral liars, knives, impostors. The soviet veterans had reported, that in their experiments, the life comes the non-living matter. In order to promote such a claim the anticreationists killed many researchers who worked in genetics (and could reveal the fraud) [5][6][7][8][9][10][8][11][12][13].

The anticreationosts participated in forming of marxism as kind of the most dogmatic and destructive religion. The analysis of the pseudo–scientific orientation of some researchers (not only Soviet and not only biologists) is suggested in the article Place of science in the human knowledge [14]

Fundamental laws of physics and genetics

In principle, the fundamental laws of Physics do not prohibit the creation of life (as they prohibit the realization of inertioids similar to gravitsapa and other perpetual motion). However, the estimates show that the probability of the spontaneous abiogenesis is small [15][16][17].

Even after the rehabilitation of genetics, the teachers in Soviet schools continued to insist on the abiogenesis. They ignored both experimental results and the theoretical estimates; ignored even the common sense, insisting on the "gradual transformation of one spices to another" even in the cases, then the genotypes of these species count different numbers of chromosomes [18].

The slowness of the natural evolution at the scale of order of age of the Earth can be considered as evidence of God; the complexity of species indicates that to produce life, the intelligence must have been involved; it is difficult to explain creation of the first self-reproducing organism within a naturalistic theory of the evolution [19][20]. In such a way, God happens to be a useful scientific concept.

Fraud

Since the century 20, the concept of abiogenesis did not advance beyond creation of the coacervats with organic molecules. The udea of the spontaneous generation of life did not get closer to the creation of self–reproducible species.

The main problem of the abiogenesis is not the anti–scientific conduct of the most of apologists of the abiogenesis of 20th century (although their anti-social behavior predetermines the negative attitude to anticreationists). The main problem is that there is no experiment that would reject, refute the idea about spontaneous generation of life. This concept is not refutable.

The concept of biogenesis, contrary, is refutable: the reproducible experiment showing the creation of some living objects from the non-living matter would be sufficient to reject the concept.

In the terminology by KarlPopper the concept of biogenesis is falsifiable (Popper used this term instead of refutability). This was proven by the group of Soviet veterans - Lysenko, Lepeshinskaya, Oparin and other soviet pseudo–scientists: during tens of years (say, 1920s–1950s), they were extremely successful falsifying, allterating the biological experiments, demonstrating the fake self-generation of life from non-living materials. Later, the results about such a "creation" of life were not confirmed and qualified as fraud. That was the biggest falsification (fraud) in the history of the biological science. The possibility of such a falsification shows the high falsifiability, refutability of biogenesis and therefore, its great scientific importance.

Refutation

2016.03.25, the important adjustment of biogenesis is reported: the new non-parasitic bacteria is synthesised that has smallest number of genes. Hutchison III et al. used a design, build, and test cycle to reduce this genome to 531 kb (473 genes). [21].

Robert Lee Hotz interprets that achievement as a way one can create new organisms [22].

The result mentioned above seems to be significant advance, approach to refutation of the strict version of biogenesis, about inability to create new living organisms (that had not been created by God) in laboratory. This refutation looks as an analogy of refutation of the fundamental chemical concept about conservation of number of atoms of each kind in a closed physical system (that refutation refers to discovery of the nuclear reactions by Henri Becquerel, Marie Curie and their colleagues).

Creation of new, artificial living organisms should indicate the boundary, restriction of the range of applicability of biogenesis.

References

  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biogenesis Biogenesis is the theory that living things come only from other living things, e.g. a spider lays eggs, which develop into spiders. It may also refer to biochemical processes of production in living organisms.
  2. http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Origin_of_life Scientists do not know the origin of life on Earth. They do have pieces of the puzzle, however, and many conflicting plausible scientific scenarios.
  3. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/creationist.html John Pieret. Some creationist claims about Pasteur and Spontaneous Generation. (June 3, 2004) Spontaneous Generation was thought to be the Origin of Life until the late 1850's. It wasn't until Frenchman Louis Pasteur that this fallacy was finally disproved..
  4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
  5. Ольга Борисовна Лепешинская. Развитие жизненных процессов в доклеточном периоде. Изд-во Академии наук СССР, 1952.
  6. http://medactiv.ru/yguide/l/guide-l-0121.shtml ЛЕПЕШИНСКАЯ Ольга Борисовна (1871-1963) - биолог, акад. АМН (1950). Участница рев. движения. Окончила мед. ф-т Моск. ун-та (1915). С 1949 - зав. отделом развития живого вещества, затем руководитель лаборатории цитологии Ин-та экспериментальной биологии АМН СССР. Автор теории "живого вещества", согласно которой клетки живых организмов могут возникать из неклеточного живого вещества, а самозарождение жизни из неживой материи -постоянный процесс. Гипотеза Л. не получила научного подтверждения, однако благодаря поддержке политического руководства страны взгляды Л. широко пропагандировались до 1953.
  7. http://www.ihst.ru/projects/sohist/books/os/71-90.htm А.Е.Гайсинович, Е.Б.Музрукова. «Учение» О.Б.Лепешинской о «живом веществе». Репрессированная наука, Л.: Наука, 1991, с.71-90.
  8. 8.0 8.1 http://russcience.euro.ru/papers/son91vr2.htm А.С.Сонин. Печальный юбилей одной кампании. Вестник РАН, v.61, No.8, с.96-107.(1991). Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; name "sonin" defined multiple times with different content
  9. http://www.svobodanews.ru/content/article/466804.html Александр Марков, Ольга Орлова. 60-летие разгрома советской генетики. (29.09.2008. In Russian.)
  10. http://www.uran.ru/gazetanu/2003/01/nu02/wvmnu_p1a_02_012003.htm А.Застрыец. Заседание Президиума. 'Наука Урала' No. 2 (830), январь 2003.
  11. http://www.mdk-arbat.ru/bookcard?book_id=4289534 В.Н.Сойфер, Власть и наука. (M: Черо, 2002)
  12. http://www.jstor.org/pss/1385258 Mary-Barbara Zeldin. The religious nature of Russian marxism. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 8, No.1 pp.100-111 (1969)
  13. http://svonz.lenin.ru/articles/Klaus-Georg_Riegel-Marxism-Leninism_as_a_Political_Religion.pdf Klaus-Georg Riegel. Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion. Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 6, No.1, P.97126, June 2005.
  14. http://ufn.ru/tribune/trib120111 D.Kouznetsov. Place of science and physics in the human knowledge. (in Russian. English version: Place of science in the human knowledge).
  15. http://whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf ERWIN SCHRODINGER. WHAT IS LIFE? 1944.
  16. http://ufn.ru/ufn00/ufn00_2/Russian/r002c.pdf Д.С.Чернавский. Проблема происхождения жизни и мышления с точки зрения современной физики. УФН, 2000, том 170, номер 1, стр. 157-183 (In Russian)
  17. http://ufn.ru/en/articles/2000/2/c/ D.S.Chernavskii/ The origin of life and thinking from the viewpoint of modern physics. Phys. Usp. 43 151–176 (2000).
  18. http://samlib.ru/k/kuznecow_d_j/lessonbiology.shtml Д.Кузнецов. Урок биологии. (In Russian)
  19. http://philosophynow.org/issues/47/Letter_from_Antony_Flew_on_Darwinism_and_Theology Antony Flew. Darwinism and Theology. Jul/Aug 2013. // the evidential situation of natural (as opposed to revealed) theology has been transformed in the more than fifty years since Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism.
  20. http://www.catholicculture.org/news/features/index.cfm?recnum=33940 Famed atheist concedes: evidence points to God. December 10, 2004. Antony Flew, the British scholar who for years has been the world's most noteworthy philosophical proponent of atheism, has conceded that scientific evidence points to the existence of God. // Flew-- a prolific writer and energetic lecturer who has advanced atheist arguments throughout his long academic career-- made his dramatic concession in a video presentation on scientific evidence for the existence of God. In the video-- based on a conference held in New York in May of this year-- Flew said that the latest biological research "has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved." .. Early this year, writing in Philosophy Now magazine, Flew had indicated that his commitment to atheism was wavering. He wrote: "It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism." .. "My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato's Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads."
  21. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6280/aad6253.full lyde A. Hutchison, Ray-Yuan Chuang, Vladimir N. Noskov et all. Design and synthesis of a minimal bacterial genome. Science, 2016.03.25, vo. 351, Issue 6280. We used whole-genome design and complete chemical synthesis to minimize the 1079–kilobase pair synthetic genome of Mycoplasma mycoses JCVI-syn1.0. An initial design, based on collective knowledge of molecular biology combined with limited transposon mutagenesis data, failed to produce a viable cell. Improved transposon mutagenesis methods revealed a class of quasi-essential genes that are needed for robust growth, explaining the failure of our initial design. Three cycles of design, synthesis, and testing, with retention of quasi-essential genes, produced JCVI-syn3.0 (531 kilobase pairs, 473 genes), which has a genome smaller than that of any autonomously replicating cell found in nature. JCVI-syn3.0 retains almost all genes involved in the synthesis and processing of macromolecules. Unexpectedly, it also contains 149 genes with unknown biological functions. JCVI-syn3.0 is a versatile platform for investigating the core functions of life and for exploring whole-genome design
  22. http://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-claim-to-have-created-independent-organism-with-the-smallest-genome-1458842674 Robert Lee Hotz. Scientists Claim to Have Created Independent Organism With the Smallest Genome. March 24, 2016 2:04 p.m. ET. Bacteria was stripped to the barest genetic essentials required to live on its own..