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Moore's Law and the Origin of Life
DoctorBit writes "MIT Technology Review is running a story about an arXiv paper in which geneticists Alexei A. Sharov and Richard Gordon propose that life as we know it originated 9.7 billion years ago. The researchers estimated the genetic complexity of phyla in the paleontological record by counting the number of non-redundant functional nucleotides in typical genomes of modern day descendants of each phylum. When plotting genetic complexity against time, the researchers found that genetic complexity increases exponentially, just as with Moore's law, but with a doubling rate of about once every 376 million years. Extrapolating backwards, the researchers estimate that life began about 4 billion years after the universe formed and evolved the first bacteria just before the Earth was formed. One might image that the supernova debris that formed the early solar system could have included bacteria-bearing chunks of rock from doomed planets circling supernova progenitor stars. If true, this retro-prediction has some interesting consequences in partly resolving the Fermi Paradox. Another interesting consequence for those attempting to recreate life's origins in a lab: bacteria may have evolved under conditions very different from those on earth."
This is a fine example of how not to use arXiv as a news source. This old yarn has been trotted out before, and it is based on bad assumptions about complexity and offers a handy False Dilemma Fallacy.
Either
1+1=6 or
1+1=8.
1+1=6 is disproved, so 1+1 =8!
Or your math is wrong.
Complexity != genome size.
See c-value enigma.
This is dealing with evolution, not origin of life. While it fits even less with a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible than life originating on Earth, it weighs neither positively nor negatively on whether life arose on its own or was created by a deity.
http://xkcd.com/605/
All of this assumes that the complexity of life, as he defines it, increases at a relatively constant rate. There is no reason that this has to be true. Environmental effects on organisms increases selective pressure and causes evolution to progress at a faster rate. Cataclysmic events happen every now and then and causes extinctions and hardship on surviving organisms. Seems pretty uneven to me...
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
"SARS and the Origin of Life"
"Horny Rabbits and the Origin of Life"
"Rice on a chess board and the Origin of Life"
PROTIP: Just because there is exponential growth doesn't mean a subject has anything to do with Moore's "Law".
On the other hand evolutionists rarely notice that a process of natural selection doesn't create something "new", it only causes a (mathematically preexisting) potential arrangement of atoms, one of an infinite set, to actually appear
The problem with "philosophical literacy" is that it makes you say things like "mathematically pre-existing" as if it meant something other than "non-existent".
You seem to want to reify the mathematical language we use to describe reality, as if the tool we use to describe the world and which we have invented and adapted to describe the world ever more deeply, somehow "predates" the world that language was invented to describe.
I see no reason to privilege math over English in this regard. Both are just languages we use to describe, understand and communicate our understanding. Neither has any ontology apart from us, the beings who invented them, and to impute otherwise is both unwarranted and uninteresting. There is no explanatory need to do so, nor any operational test we can apply to test the validity of the hypothesis (although it would be damned interesting if you could come up with one.)
There are certainly many cases where our mathematical description has to be "fixed up" by hand to actually describe the world, the most obvious one being the excess of solutions to almost all the basic differential equations we use in physics, particularly the things like the backward-in-time solutions to any given wave equation. (That the time-reversed solutions of the Dirac equation can be given meaning does not change this, it merely emphasizes what a poor tool mathematics is for describing the universe in all the other cases where the advanced wave has no apparent physical meaning.)
Given what a lousy tool math is to describe the world, it would be very, very weird if the world were somehow "following" math. The hypothesis that we invented math to describe the world in much the same way we invented to stone ax for changing the world looks a lot more plausible.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.