Eugene Koonin's professional by-line is that he is a Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. That mouthful means that he is a recognized expert in the field of evolutionary biology, computational biology, and is exactly the kind of guy that would serve as a reviewer on a Origin of Life paper.
Among many other things, he wrote a paper and a book dealing with
"The Logic of Chance", where he gives a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the probability of a "coupled replication-translation" system (like the one I describe on
Biosemiosis.org) arising in an "O-region" somewhere in the universe. An O-region is the habitable zone away from a star, suitable for life.
Grab your abacus and follow his remarks, where he describes the calculation:
...and then he tells you what he is actually after:
...and then gives you the conclusion:
P<10-1018 is meaninglessly-large incomprehensible number. There is estimated to be only 1X10-80 fundamental particles in the whole observable universe. And if you look at Koonin's last sentence, he is telling you that spontaneous coupled-translation only makes sense if we can posit an infinite multiverse, because
this universe just doesn't have the mathematical resources to make the proposition viable - i.e. your "gigantic accident or design" observation. Thus the title of
Koonin's paper:
"The cosmological model of eternal inflation and the transition from chance to biological evolution in the history of life"
There is an interesting side road to this story. The multi-verse is a
non-falsifiable proposition, which would make it (in ANY other situation) a
non-scientific proposition, since falsifiability is a requirement of science. But we cannot allow such a thing, so, believe it or not, there are actually grumblings already to perhaps
let off on that whole "non-falsifiable thing". After all, we cannot let go of such a satisfying idea as spontaneous life, can we? What will those unscientific ID people say?
The hypocrisy is stunning, and scary.
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Meanwhile, we can physically identify an act of intelligence in the coupled-translation system required for life to exist. And we can do so using a methodology that is explicitly endorsed by NASA, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the British Royal Society, and university science departments around the world.
Biosemiosis.org
Why is this Important
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