Morendil comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong

97 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 March 2010 11:23PM

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Comment author: Morendil 15 March 2010 01:59:27PM *  4 points [-]

Have you looked into autocatalytic networks? There is actual research on this topic (e.g. Julius Rebek) with experiments suggesting a likely model for abiogenesis. Don't press me for details, my sources are popularizations from the likes of Stuart Kaufmann and Richard Dawkins. I've just looked enough to confirm that the evidence seems in fact to exist.

As a non-mainstream hypothesis panspermia has some appeal, but it only moves the issue - if life came to Earth from elsewhere it had to appear elsewhere first, and the evidence we possess about the Universe seems to demand that life had to originate from non-life at some point.