> May I send a counter-"ripple" back Loren and ask you if you think
> that life is just a complex "Materialistic" process, fully explicable
> by the laws of physics and chemistry, and in principle the same as
> the origin of galaxies? If so, why? If not, then what was the point
> of the comparison? :-)
I've thought about this question before. IMO, the question is logically
irrelevant, but psychologically very relevant, to the origins debate.
The answer to the question, "Is biology 'just' very complex chemistry,
or intrinsically something more?" is logically independent of the
question of supernatural intervention in biological history. In my
experience, however, people's opinions on this question have a good
correlation to their opinions on origins.
(I note that the way Steve asks that question is loaded with terms which
are, well, loaded. Example: the fourth word in the second line, "just."
Eliminate that word, re-read the sentence, and see what a different tone
it takes. Another example: the connotations involved with the three
little words at the end of the third line, "the same as." As you might
guess, "Nothing But-tery" is not my favorite sandwich spread.)
As for my opinion: I do suspect that biology is an emergent property of
highly complex physical and chemical systems. I think that cellular
biology will eventually be thoroughly and predictively understood,
with (very complicated) empirical laws and computational models which
are generally acknowledged to be derivable in principle, if not in
practice, from the laws of physics and chemistry --- as much of solid
state physics is now. (We're still a loooooooong way from that
achievement.) Why do I think that? I would say that the primary
reasons are (1) the ongoing success of molecular biology and protein
structure research, and (2) I have yet to read any proposals, for what
that mysterious "something more" driving cellular biology might be,
which weren't conceptually mushy, pantheistic, or both.
I expect that the success in computationally modeling cell biology
will be extended somewhat to the level of organisms, but run into
serious limitations when confronted with the complexity of brains. This
is big-time speculation on my part, but I suspect that standard
computational techniques can't be scaled up enough to model the
complexity and subtlety of a brain, and the only way to model brains
will be with a device which operates on similar principles (i.e. another
brain). How many neurons are too many to model computationally? I'd
guess somewhere between 10^3 and 10^12. :-)
I'm getting thoroughly off-topic now, so I'll come back to galactic
formation in another post.
Loren Haarsma