Robert Sheldon

In Part 1 we argued that Origin-of-life (OOL) was indistinguishable from creationism, but distinguishable from panspermia. In Part 2, we argued that panspermia had not, in fact, solved the problem of OOL by positing infinite space or eternal time. However, we pointed out that panspermia at least recognized that there was a coupling between space-time and OOL, a coupling we identify with the Fourier Transform. In contrast, most OOL theories suppose life began at two points and a line: a point in time, a point in space (microscopic coacervate, etc.) and a line of serially encoded information (DNA, enzyme, etc.) Our goal for this post, is to elucidate what this FT does to the traditional OOL theory, how this transform Read More ›

In my previous post, I suggested that we can learn from panspermia how to avoid the Origin-of-life (OOL) problem–by spreading it out. In the case of materialists from Epicurus to Hoyle, this was accomplished by making time eternal. If you have eternity to do something, they argue, why even the most improbable will necessarily occur. One can also make a spatial version of this argument by saying if the universe is infinite, then somewhere the improbable will necessarily occur. Sounds good, but… Does this argument work? Not the way they intend it to. For one thing, most cosmologists believe the universe to have begun in a Big Bang, which severely restricts the amount of time available for any improbable object. Read More ›

In a previous blog, I mentioned the fact that meteoritic amino acids are undoubtedly a signature of extraterrestrial life and not abiotic, because they are all chiral. However, they are all L-amino (none are D-amino), which is unexpected from the hypothesis of independent spontaneous generation for each event, which should randomly select between L- and D-. There are three possibilities: (1) we hit the lottery with a one-in-a-million chance of never having seen a common D-amino; (2a) there’s a “Darwin-of-the-gaps” materialist explanation for the prevalence of L-amino life; (2b) another “Darwin-of-the-gaps” materialist explanation for abiotic formation of L-amino life; (3) all these meteorites are actually infected from the same source of life. Now (1) offends my mathematical sense as it Read More ›

One of the smaller mysteries of life is that it is built out of asymmetric building blocks. The amino acids that are chained together to make proteins are asymmetric, as are the sugars that are chained together to make starch, cellulose, and other useful polysaccharides. The standard way to show this, is by making a solution of the specific molecule, shining polarized light through it, and demonstrating that the “plane of polarization” has rotated. Those that rotate the light counter-clockwise are “left-handed” and those that rotate it clockwise are “right-handed”. Using the letters “l” for left, and “d” for right, we now can label the mirror-image molecules with their appropriate chirality. (The amino acids are labelled L or D not Read More ›

Recently Stephen Hawking finished a video series with the Discovery Channel which, in his paralyzed state, took him 3 years to finish. According to the news releases, he insisted on rewriting large sections of the script. One wonders how long it took a man who communicates to his computer through eye-blinks to write a new script. But however long it took, we are now blessed with yet another “science for the common man” video. My college-aged children all have a “Great American Video” waiting for them to make. When I was in school, everyone wanted to be the “Great American Garage Band”. And as far as I can tell, the previous generation all had a “Great American Novel” that was Read More ›

I had an exchange recently that brought up the subject of life on comets and its implications for ID. As I reviewed the work on comets, it brought up some surprising connections that I had not seen before. I thought it was worthy of a blog, though somewhat old material. The correspondent complained that comets carrying bacteria do not explain the origin of life. It wasn’t comets. This is like Carl Sagan saying we came from some other place. Well where did that other place come from! I tend to agree with you, comets don’t really solve the origin of life. They merely move it to a distant place. I was as surprised as you that comets had fossilized life Read More ›

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was a polymath of no mean skill. Mathematicians bemoan the fact that he spent his later years doing physics, and physicists wish he had started earlier. One of his contributions was the derivation and proofs for the bell-shaped curve known as a “Gaussian” or “normal” distribution. It is the result of a random process in which small steps are taken in any direction. So universal is the “Gaussian” in all areas of life that it is taken to be prima facie evidence of a random process. Only in recent years have people addressed situations that can deviate from a Gaussian. For example, one of the criteria that produce a Gaussian, is that the probability of a Read More ›

I normally don’t write reviews of slanderous articles, but Pennock’s article piqued my curiosity by claiming that ID-founder, Phillip Johnson, is a Post-Modern Fundamentalist Creationist. Since most Fundamentalists would deny any relation to PoMo, and most Presbyterians would deny being Fundamentalists, I had to read the article, and once I began to read the article, I had to post a response. So here goes. Pennock starts out with the worst name-calling he can think of, calling Johnson “illegitimate” and a “bastard” child of his two worst nemeses: fundamentalism and post-modernism. Then on page 4 he whines that Johnson is name-calling when he says Darwinism is a creation-myth. Somehow I get the sense that this isn’t going to be a cool-headed, Read More ›

Chris McKay, an astrobiologist with NASA and therefore keenly interested in the search for extraterrestrial life (ET), reviewed Paul Davies recent livre de l’annee, The Eerie Silence. Why is it in this 50th anniversary of the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), we haven’t heard a thing? Chris thinks that Davies’ answer might be that ET has come and gone, leaving us a farewell note in the genome of some otherwise undistinguished critter. My problem with SETI, and apparently Davies as well, is its completely parochial view of communication. As an example, I suggest that we should imagine SETI beginning in 1900. What would it look like? Well, the state-of-the-art in communication technology at the time was telegraph. So it Read More ›

Stanley Fish, that noted literary theorist and Post-Modern reader-response relativist, has posted a review of Steven Smith’s new book, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse. I thought I was going to disagree with Fish, but I found myself in complete agreement (which might actually be Smith). Morality is “smuggled” into secular debate, into the “naked public square” through these presumably “religion-free” concepts like equality and fairness. The corollary with ID is astonishing. The political “separation of church and state” is nearly identical with the scientific “methodological naturalism” (MN) principle. Just as MN requires “smuggling” of information to function, so Smith is acknowledging, and Fish agreeing, that the political world is having the same “smuggling” of morals leading to the same kind Read More ›