Life Origin

A Scientific Approach

Edited for the Non-Scientist

Can anything be organized without making purposeful choices?  

      Organization, like all formalisms, requires choice contingency. 1, 2   One thing must be deliberately and purposefully chosen over another. 3-5   Nonliving (inanimate) nature cannot make purposeful choices. 6-8   This means that nonliving nature could not possibly have made the programming choices recorded into DNA. 9-11  DNA is a program (a very sophisticated Turing Tape). 12, 13

      If programming choices are made by flipping a coin (by chance), nothing will compute.  The computer (or cell) will “blue screen” every time.  The program will crash.  “Cannot compute!”  Nothing useful will be processed.  The “instructions” of a randomly generated program will be the equivalent of linguistic meaningless gibberish.  The cell would not only die, it would never have come to life in the first place.

      If the programming choices were made by law, they would all be the same.    The program would consist of all 0’s, or the program would consist of all 1’s — by law!   No freedom would exist at each decision node to pick from among real alternatives.  Programing is impossible without freedom of choice at each decision node or configurable switch-setting opportunity.  No circuit could be integrated.  No computation would be possible.  No algorithms could be optimized or processed.  No biofunction or metabolism could be organized.  Law (“necessity”) cannot program any better than chance can program!

      When a metaphysical worldview pre-assumes and believes that “chance and necessity (nature) is all there is,” that worldview is left high and dry, with nothing that could possibly explain the reality of choice contingency in everyday life.  Philosophic naturalism cannot explain the phenomenon of programming, either.  Programming is the key to life.  Long before computers were invented, millions of nanocomputers were computing millions of parallel programs at the subcellular level of tens of millions of species.

      Any worldview that draws a perimeter that cannot contain all of reality’s puzzle pieces should be eliminated from consideration.  That worldview cannot abide as a scientific metanarrative.   Chance and Necessity alone cannot explain the repeatedly observable biological data. 14, 15    Mass and energy cannot organize. Chance and necessity (law) cannot steer, program, control, or regulate subcellular metabolism.

  1. Abel DL. The three fundamental categories of reality. In: Abel DL, ed. The First Gene: The Birth of Programming, Messaging and Formal Control. New York, N.Y.: LongView Press-Academic: Biolog. Res. Div.; 2011:19-54  Also available from http://lifeorigin.academia.edu/DrDavidLAbel.
  2. Abel DL, Trevors JT. Self-Organization vs. Self-Ordering events in life-origin models. Physics of Life Reviews. 2006;3:211-228  Also available from http://lifeorigin.academia.edu/DrDavidLAbel.
  3. Abel DL. The capabilities of chaos and complexity. Society for Chaos Theory: Society for Complexity in Psychology and the Life Sciences; Aug 8-10, 2008; International Conference at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA.
  4. Abel DL. The Cybernetic Cut [Scirus SciTopic Page]. 2008; http://lifeorigin.academia.edu/DrDavidLAbel [Last accessed: July, 2016].
  5. Abel DL. The ‘Cybernetic Cut’: Progressing from Description to Prescription in Systems Theory. The Open Cybernetics and Systemics Journal. 2008;2:252-262 Open Access at http://benthamopen.com/ABSTRACT/TOCSJ-2-252 Also available from http://lifeorigin.academia.edu/DrDavidLAbel  [Last accessed July, 2016]

  6. Abel DL. What is ProtoBioCybernetics? In: Abel DL, ed. The First Gene: The Birth of Programming, Messaging and Formal Control. New York, N.Y.: LongView Press-Academic: Biolog. Res. Div.; 2011:1-18  Also available from http://lifeorigin.academia.edu/DrDavidLAbel.
  7. Abel DL. The Cybernetic Cut and Configurable Switch (CS) Bridge. In: Abel DL, ed. The First Gene: The Birth of Programming, Messaging and Formal Control. New York, N.Y.: LongView Press--Academic, Biol. Res. Div.; 2011:55-74  Also available from http://lifeorigin.academia.edu/DrDavidLAbel.
  8. Abel DL. What utility does order, pattern or complexity prescribe? In: Abel DL, ed. The First Gene: The Birth of Programming, Messaging and Formal Control. New York, N.Y.: LongView Press--Academic, Biol. Res. Div.; 2011:75-116   Also available from http://lifeorigin.academia.edu/DrDavidLAbel.
  9. Abel DL. The Birth of Protocells. In: Abel DL, ed. The First Gene: The Birth of Programming, Messaging and Formal Control. New York, N.Y.: LongView Press--Academic, Biol. Res. Div.; 2011:189-230  Also available from http://lifeorigin.academia.edu/DrDavidLAbel.
  10. Abel DL. The Universal Plausibility Metric (UPM) & Principle (UPP). Theor Biol Med Model. 2009;6(1):27 Open access at  https://tbiomed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1742-4682-6-27  [Last accessed: July, 2016]   Also available from http://lifeorigin.academia.edu/DrDavidLAbel.
  11. Abel DL. Examining specific life-origin models for plausibility. In: Abel DL, ed. The First Gene: The Birth of Programming, Messaging and Formal Control:LongView Press Academic; 2011:231-272  Also available from http://lifeorigin.academia.edu/DrDavidLAbel.
  12. Abel DL, ed The First Gene: The Birth of Programming, Messaging and Formal Control. New York, N.Y.: Longview Press Academic; 2011.
  13. Abel DL. Is life unique? Life. 2012;2(1):106-134  Open access at http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/2/1/106  [Last accessed July, 2016]  Also available from http://lifeorigin.academia.edu/DrDavidLAbel.
  14. Monod J. Chance and Necessity. New York: Knopf; 1972.
  15. Trevors JT, Abel DL. Chance and necessity do not explain the origin of life. Cell Biol Int. 2004;28(11):729-739.