Abiogenesis is speculative, without evidence

From EvoWiki

Contents 1 Claim 2 Source 3 Responses 4 Fallacies contained in this claim 5 Further Reading 6 Related claims 7 See Also 8 Acknowledgments

Claim

Abiogenesis is speculative, without evidence. Since it hasn't been observed in the laboratory, it isn't science.

Source

• Anon, 1985. Life--How Did It Get Here?, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., pp. 50-52.
• Dembski, William. 2002. No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence, Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 243-4.

Responses

1. The first sentence of the claim is true; the modus operandi of abiogenesis is indeed speculative, though this is not the same thing as claiming that it doesn't involve experiments, viable lines of research and the application of evidence to the question. It is true that no single coherent or comprehensive theory of abiogenesis exists, and likely no abiogenesis researchers would disagree. While progress has been made on various potential steps of how abiogenesis could have happened, very few would be willing to say that science has the one historical answer.
2. The second sentence is false - science does not always require observation in laboratories.
3. add more responses

Fallacies contained in this claim

• Red Herring (abiogenesis is irrelevant to the evidence for evolution)
• Fallacy of Soundness (direct observation is not essential to science)

Further Reading

• Wächtershauser, Günter, 2000. Life as we don't know it. Science 289: 1307-1308.
• Anon., n.d., Origins of Life. [1]
• Deamer, David and Ferris, Jim, 1999. The origins and early evolution of life. [the table of contents of the journal Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere and related information] [2]

Related claims

• Abiogenesis has never been observed
• Pasteur proved life only comes from life (law of biogenesis)
• The odds of life forming are incredibly small
• DNA needs proteins to form; Proteins need DNA
• Why isn't new life still being generated today?
• Not all amino acids needed for life have been formed experimentally
• Early molecules would have decayed
• Miller's experiments had invalid assumption of type of atmosphere
• Life uses only left-handed amino acids
• Evolution is baseless without a theory of abiogenesis
• Naturalistic mechanisms do not provide a means for making life from simple molecules
• Dawkins acknowledges that generation of a self-replicator is more than improbable
• Richard Dickerson had no explanation for generation of macromolecules
• Generation of macromolecules is one of the hardest problems evolutionists have to fight
• Membranes are too complex to have existed during abiogenesis
• First cells couldn't come together by chance

See Also

Why is Creationism not a Scientific Theory?

Acknowledgments

• User:Cubist