You talk as if it would be impossible to demonstrate abiogenesis. This is not the case. Abiogenesis is almost certainly not a single event, but a repeated and endlessly variable phenomenon that has happened and is still happening right now on innumerable planets.
To confirm this we need to observe those planets closely (preferably by landing on them) to see what kinds of abiogenesis has occurred on each of them. If we examine enough worlds, then we will likely observe abiogenesis in action, at various stages of the process. So it should be perfectly possible to demonstrate abiogenesis, given enough time and effort.
I’d go farther than that, and suggest that there are many different routes to abiogenesis, and by observing enough planets we will be able to build up a taxonomy for the variations - and using this taxonomy we could classify the event or events that have happened on Earth that led to the existence of life on our world.
Of course, long before we have visited enough planets to establish such a taxonomy, we’ll probably be able to create a similarly wide range of abiogenesis events right here in the laboratories on Earth that would allow us to arrive at a similar taxonomy. But it would most certainly be very helpful if we were able to go out and find naturally occurring examples in the real cosmos.
You could prove that CO2 does not absorb or trap heat. That would falsify modern climatology. You could prove that the earth’s energy economy is the same despite rising CO2. Just two things from a layman.
Also, there’s the most obvious one for global warming, right?
I once asked – right here on this very board! – for a falsifiable prediction about it; and, while I had to ask a whole bunch of times, someone was eventually obliging enough to supply one: we expect to see at least a tenth-of-a-degree rise in average global temperature over the next ten years, and at least a tenth-of-a-degree rise in average global temperature over the next ten years after that.
This post and earlier ones by “Mike is skeptical” and “Watchwolf” do go to the point of falsifiable tests.
If I claim that “life on Earth is due to abiogenesis”, that claim may come under question if life is found on Mars with fundamentally identical biochemistry ( i.e. same RNA and DNA, same amino acids, same DNA encoding, same chirality). We could then wonder if Earth or Mars was first. If there was very good evidence that Martian life was older, most would then accept that life DID NOT arise first on Earth.
If instead we travel to many worlds, including many with liquid water and sources of energy, and find no other examples of life, this would imply that abiogenesis anywhere would be very difficult. If no life (or life fossils) are found on numerous water bearing worlds, people may become more justified in thinking that maybe something remarkable (or even supernatural) occurred on Earth.
If instead, we find life in lots of places, but all sharing our fundamental biochemistry, then people would have to find an explanation for cosmic pan-spermia, possibly invoking space traveling aliens or gods (or demonstrating the impossibility of other biochemistries). But as others have pointed out, this just pushes back the time when abiogenesis happened.
If we found Martian life which was identical to our biochemistry in every way, but opposite chirality, it would suggest to me that some alien beings were performing some sort of experiment, perhaps interested in how life moves from planet to planet. Or that the gods were joking.
These all point to methods for falsifying current notions of abiogenesis.
Lastly, time travel has been brought up. I don’t believe in time travel. But if there’s one thing Hollywood has taught us, if you want to create something out of nothing (a killer robot’s circuitry, spectacles, or a grandfather), nothing works like time travel. I guess time travel is real science (until it’s falsified, somewhere near the end of time.
The punch line for us here today that I did not know about before is that other investigators have since run dozens of similar experiments using materially different starting conditions. They almost *always * get complex organic molecules to form anyway.
IOW, the first stages of abiogenesis – getting from simple molecules to complex polymers – happens pretty reliably and pretty automatically under a wide variety of conditions.
That says nothing of latter stages leading up to life. But it does take one very large area of 'evolution" off the table for the OP’s desire to find where abiogenesis doesn’t work in our real Universe.
We have experimental proof that a meaningful fraction of simple molecules convert themselves into complex ones given energy and time.
And, as I and a couple of other poster have already pointed out, your question is bullshit.
There is no “entire field of abiogenesis.”
Even ignoring the challenges to the rules of Popper and using Popper’s definitions, the ability of a theory to be falsified requires that there be a theory. What is the “theory” of abiogenesis? Your nonsense OP is built in the manner of a Creationist who does not know enough science to challenge the theory of Natural Selection as explicated by Darwin and solidified by Dobzhansky, and who whines that “Evolution is just a theory” as if the theories set forth by Lamarck, Weisman, Wallace, and others were all part and parcel of the same thing and not actually separate theories that each needed to be falsified separately. Falsifying Lamarck has no bearing on the theory proposed by Darwin, for example, and certainly does nothing to falsify “evolution.”
So, what theory of abiogenesis do you need falsified–if you are actually sincere in wanting a discussion and not looking to make random dumb comments?
It also points, indirectly, to something we hear a lot from deniers/skeptics/etc. They often speak as if an experiment has only been performed once. Anti-Einstein people often point to the flaws in the original Michelson-Morley experiment…as if it had only ever been done once, rather than some hundreds or thousands of times – millions of times if you count industrial use of interferometers. The experiments have been repeated, and, as you note, refined and improved.
Several possibilities in which abiogensis, taken here as the theory that life in some way arose from dead matter through natural means, can be falsified.
Abiogensis would be falsified if there was no life.
Abiogensis would be falsified if we discovered some key ingredient of life that was not found in dead matter (say we discovered midi-chlorians).
Abiogensis would be falsified if we had convincing evidence that life was created in some way that didn’t involve natural processes.
However as it stands, there is life, it doesn’t seem to contain anything that is not found in dead matter, we have no other more compelling hypothesis for how it was created.
Therefore, until we see evidence to the contrary, the most reasonable hypothesis is that life, arose in some way from dead matter through natural processes.
I think this is the best answer yet: it directly answers the question, properly and factually. The concept is falsifiable, as simply as that.
It’s like asking how Universal Gravitation might be falsified: someone might discover Cavorite.
Also, while Popper’s insights aren’t scientific laws, they do still have a lot of value, and falsifiability, if no Holy Grail, is still a very worthwhile property of any good scientific idea.
These aren’t falsifications of abiogenesis; they’re outlines of possible worlds in which abiogenesis didn’t occur—this is very different. For instance, in a world in which there is no life (like ours, some billions of years ago), the scientific theories describing the mechanism of abiogenesis still may apply: the RNA-world hypothesis may describe a perfectly viable process, which just hasn’t happened to occur yet. Even if life on our world did depend on some element not present within no-life (some elan vital), that doesn’t make the process of abiogenesis impossible, it just means it’s not responsible for life on our world (which might then have been engineered by lifeforms from a world in which abiogenesis did occur).
A falsification of a given theory of abiogenesis means deriving certain consequences of that theory (‘if I do this, that ought to happen’), and then showing these consequences not to occur under the proper consequences—but the mere nonexistence of life isn’t such a falsification: showing that life doesn’t arise under the consequences that the theory says it ought to would be.
As an analogy, consider a planet whose core has completely cooled down. On such a world, no volcanism occurs; but this isn’t a falsification of the concept of volcanism—and indeed, the theory explaining volcanism perfectly well applies to that planet, it’s just that its preconditions (i.e. a hot, fluid core) aren’t met. The planet still satisfies the (much too crude) conditional ‘if the core is molten, volcanoes erupt’.
Yes, but we ought to be weary about the sort of criticism admissible here: Popper is no pope of science, and his dictums aren’t dogma; criticisms of science based on not following dogma are really mistaken right off the bat, and in fact, a category error stemming from failing to understand that not every view of the world must be dogmatic. Indeed, on a critical view of the world, being non-dogmatic is a good thing; which doesn’t, of course, mean that there can’t be worthwhile guiding principles. But ultimately, science is what scientists do, and scientists do what they find works; if that should clash with falsificationism, then well, good riddance to that.
Here are some things that could falsify the hypothesis of abiogenesis (assuming for a moment that the context is: life on Earth)
Evidence that life on Earth was artificially invoked
Evidence that our universe is a simulation, and life was designed into the startup conditions, (rather than having emerged in the simulation)
One thing that would not falsify it immediately, but would keep it in the ‘hypothesis’ category would be: lack of evidence that some aspect of life (for example some organic chemical) could arise as a result of natural chemical and physical processes.
Both of those would only push the question back a step, assuming that the ‘invoker’ or the architect of the simulation, themselves qualified as alive. If they don’t, then it’s still life arising from non-life.
Anyway, the OP isn’t really interested in having this question actually answered (It has been repeatedly). He wants it to stump everyone on Earth forever, so that somehow, by default, the idea that a wish-granting sky-monkey, conjured the fully formed universe into being, on a whim a few days ago, becomes a plausible explanation.
EDIT; Sorry, you did specify life on Earth. I need to read more carefully.
I think I finally understand what the fuss here is about. The whole “how do we falsify” part was, I think, a poor choice of words, and not at all helped by repeating them and saying “hey, I don’t make the rules.”
Anyway. How about as a test, that if anyone can show that all living things contain elements which are not found in non-living things, that this would show that abiogenesis was not possible.
I didn’t think that the word was strictly restricted to development of life on earth. I understand that’s the focus of study because we assume life wasn’t transported here but if we found out microbes were transported by an asteroid, would that be the end to the question of “ambiogenesis”?
But still, what if we found that one specific element was required to initiate “life” and that element could only exist in the opening seconds of the big bang. That something is now gone and can’t exist again absent another big bang. Isn’t that still part of the question of ambiogenesis?
Boiled down, I thought ambiogenesis was the study of how life started. And it seems a truism that there are only three answers: life has always been here, life has never been here or [fill in the blank] was the beginning of life forms.