James MacAllister

Karen,”Think of a piece of monopoly money, and think of Michelangelo’s David.  Now imagine dropping a huge weight on both of them.  The monopoly money would survive, but is it truly more wonderful?”  This is just not the right analogy.  You and I are communities not individuals. The word for our animal cells is the “holobiont”, the rest of each…[Read more]

I think there is a danger of personal prejudices, judgments and opinions being presented as if there is data to back them up.  Let me request that we not become uncivil in simply slinging around mud. I think characterizations such as “scientists rail against” things or that scientists are not good at storytelling or sciontists are not good at inte…[Read more]

I want to say that I agree for the most part with what Ursula has said particularly to emphasize that scientists (if they are true to their calling) are not closed minded  or prejudiced. To be a scientist requires being open to surprise, but the surprise must be evidence based and science has very practical rules for what constitutes evidence in…[Read more]

Having spent some time on this discussion/debate in an attempt to bring some scientific rigor to it, I am not satisfied to let it close with any suggestion that there has been any evidence presented that the Universe is any kind of “living entity”.  This is not a hypothesis. A hypothesis is an attempt to explain data or evidence (facts). What…[Read more]

It took me a minute on Google to find this http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/originoflife.html”For a long time the synthesis of RNA monomers under prebiotic conditions appeared to be a fundamental problem since the condensation of sugar (ribose) and nucleobase (purines and pyrimidines) does not work (Orgel, 2004). The prebiotic synthesis…[Read more]

“If there now is consensus among origin-of-life researchers that RNA chains are too specialized to have been created as a product of random chemical reactions, then where did the life-forming intentionality come from that enabled RNA to self-emerge/auto-emerge?”Consensus does not equal evidence.  There was a consensus for the past 70 years that e…[Read more]

Duane, Here we have confusion due to the use of language in the use of the word “self”.  Table salt will crystalize out of solution following the form of the NaCl molecule and this might be referred to as “self-organizing”, but what is mean is that the crystal forms according to the molecular bonds in a fashion that is nearly “automatic”. There…[Read more]

Duane, You might want to look at the constructal law <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructal_law&gt;  as stated by Adrian Bejan in 1996 as follows: “For a finite-size system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in such a way that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it.”  He is a physicist and his def…[Read more]

Jennifer, Since you have asked me,  I will attempt to condense Maturana and Varela’s thesis and explain why the new paradigm, the Third Way of Evolution and the new Integrative Biology turns what we have long considered the truth on its head.Humberto Maturana, biologist and philosopher, and Francisco Varela, biologist, philosopher and neu…[Read more]

I think the basis of this discussion/debate is fatally flawed. The list of qualities that describe life is hopelessly outdated, inadequate and vague.Metabolism is more than the ability to “the ability to take in energy from the surroundings to keep going” (whatever that means). Cells are the basic units of life and they have very distinct req…[Read more]

 Many better men and women have wrestled with attempts to define life. Perhaps Humberto Maturana and Francisco Vatema come the closest to explaining why life defies simply definitions. Vernadsky recognized that there was a difference between the geophysical Earth and what he called living matter. Lovelock used the metaphor of the Earth as a…[Read more]