Dear Abiogenesis

There's a tactic creationists use in their manufactuversies that I find particularly dislikable. I'm not talking in this case about their tendency to use statements by noted scientists completely out of context to make it appear they support the creationist position, despicable as that is. It's not the discounting of evidence that doesn't meet their view, or the different standards they apply to proving actual facts as opposed to "revealed truth", or the way they claim to want to "teach the controversy" about evolution as opposed to their real aim of making science education consistent with a literal reading of the book of Genesis. It's this:

They use language to score cheap shots rather than to make a real point.

Here's a classic example: someone refers to a living creature, which is a perfectly commonly used word in English. The creationist points out that a "creature" is part of "creation" and asks "how can you have a 'creation' without a Creator?". Zing! The scientist is left to either explain just how stupid the argument is and why it is so stupid, express his disgust at the level of the argument, or let it go by. In the creationist's own mind, however, s/he scored a rhetorical point. Why win the argument by boring old facts when you can do it by rhetoric?

Here's another one. In online discussions on evolution, some creationists will point out that evolution is clearly impossible because if you take evolution far enough, there must have been some time before there was life and then some time after there was life. Therefore life came from non-life (abiogenesis) and this is clearly impossible! After all, maggots do not spontaneously erupt from dead flesh and fleas do not spontaneously occur in sterile sand. All life comes from previous life. Thus evolutionary theory is a house of cards that falls at the first wind.

Although it isn't.

First, the creationists refuse to accept that evolution by variation and natural selection does not depend on a particular starting point. The evolution of, say, the horse can be inferred from the fossil record regardless of eohippus's ancestor. Thus as far as proving evolutionary theory is concerned it's irrelevant (though incredibly interesting) if the first "life" on Earth was the result of local chemical processes, "spores" carried through space, or someone's manufactured work. Once the first self-replicating entities exist in the correct conditions, a combination of variation and natural selection would lead to speciation.

Second, this particular "point" assumes that living things are fundamentally different from non-living things. If you look at a living thing like, say, a cow and a non-living thing like, say, a rock, those differences seem pretty clear. Cows eat, excrete, make noises, move, generate methane and so on while a rock just sort of sits there and erodes. A cow is composed of a variety of different cells that coordinate to produce the aforesaid activities while the rock is composed of a relatively limited number of compounds and crystalline substances that don't do much but react to chemicals in the environment. Some have gone further and decided that there must be some form of "life force" (possibly or possibly not the same thing as a soul) that differentiates living things from non-living things. Thus a cow and a dead cow are different because one has life force and the other doesn't.

Unfortunately, the line between "living" and "non-living" is fuzzy and relatively arbitrary. While it appears obvious in one limit case (a cow vs. a rock) when you get to the other limit (a virus vs. a solution of the same proteins and nucleic acids one would have in the virus) it's far less clear. A virus is little more than a string of nucleic acids surrounded by protein. As part of its normal reproductive cycle it loses its protein shell, reproduces the nucleic acid strings, and spontaneously recreates its protein shell. One does not need to hypothesize some mysterious life force for this; this is entirely explainable in terms of chemistry.

One can easily imagine that multiple types of self-replicating chemicals could arise from natural processes. In a suitable environment the chemicals that were better at reproducing would become more common than those that weren't. As they reproduced they would incorporate changes due to chemistry and physics - some would improve their reproductive capability, some would "kill" the reaction completely. It is certainly conceivable that these compounds could self-organize (as shown by current work on nanotechnology) into increasingly complex systems with increasingly interesting emergent behavior. At some point these crossed the fuzzy boundary between "non-life" and "life" and the tools of chemistry and physics become too cumbersome to explain their behaviors. Thus we apply a different science with a different set of tools: Biology.

So the next time someone tries the argument that life can't come from non-life, ask just how, precisely, life isn't controlled by chemistry (which is controlled by physics) and just how a self-replicating set of molecules isn't life.