The Dirty Secrets of Life by Paul Davies

[@wade5941]

Davies is one of the best. “What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.” Mark Twain

[@nicolasignacioarancibiagod8242]

I agree

[@PrivateSi]

I agree and it's always a good quote to read but Science has self-correction and improvement mechanisms. Overall it embraces knowledge evolution, revolution and growth. Science has its prevailing dogma(s) but it isn't set in stone and doesn't claim to be when push comes to shove. Nothing is certain - but the concept of 'nothing' is certainly not understood or even proven to definitely exist, unlike matter and energy. Energy would be like nothing without matter to act on though. Could energy even exist without matter?........ I'm a materialist! Even the emptiest of space is a material... The only energy is kinetic fundamentally..... This I neither know nor truly believe...

[@enkiepic432]

I love the man...

[@edgregory1]

Sounds like a Yogi Berra with intellect.

[@caricue]

It's really refreshing to listen to a real scientist be humble enough to tell everyone how little he really knows. Admitting that you don't know is the first step on the path of knowledge.

[@PifflePrattle]

It's fairly normal for scientists to be circumspect. One problem in the current climate is attacking the process of science. Often a scientist will say we have no evidence for...(whatever) which is just being accurate and truthful but can sound evasive. When a politician says "we have no evidence for..." we all hear evasiveness. The difference may be that after looking hard the scientist hasn't found any evidence (yet?) whilst the politician may have gone to some effort behind the scenes to prevent a search for the evidence.

[@gavinhurlimann2910]

Steve C Well said.

[@goodsirknight]

Paul Davies is the man. Curious, intelligent, open to new modes of thinking and humble.

[@brettlunden8268]

Davies thinks about and presents things so that they seem like common sense. Such a brilliant yet down-to-earth guy.

[@dr.satishsharma9794]

Excellent..... thanks 🙏.

[@superjaykramer]

Davies is the smartest and most logical Physicist Full Stop...I love his practicality application inference.

[@minimum20mins]

A proper scientist.

[@kjustkses]

Someone should show this to Aron Ra.

[@brownj2]

He would point out to you that ths is a big god of the gaps argument. We do not know something therefore god.

[@caricue]

Apparently, the worst slur against a biologist is not that they are creationist, but that they are Vitalists. Creation has been rightly disregarded as childish myth, but Vitalism has a religious or magic strain, and a naturalism strain which doesn't posit a mystic force, but rather an unknown organizing principle that allows matter to be animated, which is consistent with, and in addition to the known laws of nature. Life does seem to be quite strange, so I am open to this natural Vitalism, but that's because I am not trying to get tenure or published. We need an Einstein and a Grand Unified Theory of Life.

[@ronaldmangal2518]

Great

[@ambassador_in_training]

I am observing an interesting phenomena: hundreds & probably thousands of PhDs w/advanced training & fully formed brains, and lab equipment studying the nano-technology of the living organism and concluding how little is understood. Yet, at the same time these living organisms are thought to be the product of supposedly mindless/brainless & unguided dumb nature. Nature appears to know much more about quantum mechanics, advanced calculus, sophisticated chemistry & physics, and all of that via blind chance and without strictly controlled conditions of the 21st century laboratory!!! I wish to get such an advanced understanding by chance :))))) Great is the faith of the naturalist/materialist!!!! Marvelous!!! James Tour, the renowned synthetic chemist, was right to say "the emperor has no clothes"

[@nivekvb]

Professor Gerald Hooft says the multiverce theory is nonsense. This means that life of Earth is special.

Great Davies, very interesting...

[@maryfrost4787]

Really interesting

[@Neueregel]

nice talk

[@robertflynn6686]

Good for you, Paul Davies!! Need new plans, from the parts to the whole of a living thing, and, from the whole of life itself, to construction process to all the parts. Good College/University. I think its clear today that some answers are in Penrose/ Hammerof but others for dna codes lie in ideas of v. Stcherbic quantum genetics book. Bye.

[@lsbrother]

I'm not sure "you cannot estimate the odds of an unknown process" ,19:30 , is true. If say, we found life on the planets of 0.2% of a number of stars that were investigated wouldn't that mean we could put an estimate as a 0.2% chance? And we still might not know the process.

[@frederickj.7136]

While I couldn't say that calling 0.2% your estimate from hypothetical observation is reasonable without much more information, Dr. Davies certainly never dismissed the sort of extrapolation from observation you allude to as being an insufficient basis for making such an estimate, irrespective of identifying or understanding a "genesis" process for life from inanimate matter. Therefore, I don't quite see the point of your question... since you posit evidence that *might* exist within, say, the next thirty years, given the sort of technology just now being recruited to the search... but which certainly does not exist as of 2/'19; as Paul Davies correctly emphasizes. Optimistic speculations about, especially, non-microbial life's existence elsewhere, offered in some confident manner, will remain rather silly, casual guesses until empirical evidence for the products generated by understood life processes starts showing up in spectrograph analysis of exo-planet atmospheres across a range of planetary environments.

[@pauliediamonds]

I would uphold Davies' statement by saying, yes it may be true that the rate is .2% in every case so far but you can't be sure it will be .2% the next time. In other words let"s say you've witnessed 1000 white swans but never a black one. You cannot conclude that there are no black swans.

[@brownj2]

He is keen on the ideas that no one has found life elsewhere in the universe. Except we are bound to this earth so this would be what you would expect. If you do not know how life started you do not know how it started. The rest of the conjecture about extra new science needed is based on ignorance and a desire to make a place for his religion.

[@steve743]

Why was the end cut short !?

[@rubiks6]

time constraints.

[@rubiks6]

This is a leading atheist pulling the carpet out from under a lot of atheistic, materialist, evolutionary bullshit. Paul Davies is one of very few atheists I respect. He has put real effort into being intellectually honest. It's a shame he cannot let go of the dogma there is no god. In his honesty, Davies walks right up to the door where God stands on the other side but he just won't go through. As a biblical creationist, I will be taking many quotes from this lecture.

[@johannuys7914]

Yes, grab the straws that are on offer, I guess. I am waiting with baited breath on your alternative theory to "evolutionary bullshit".

[@rubiks6]

@@johannuys7914 - Apparently you cannot read. The alternative is "biblical creation."

[@Released_Sausage]

I believe that Genesis is a metaphor for the creation of the Universe.

[@rubiks6]

@@Released_Sausage - I fact, Genesis is a narrative. There is nothing in the text to indicate it is a metaphor. When you call something a metaphor, you then open it up to any interpretation whatsoever and it can no longer convey truth. Do you also believe Jesus Christ's death on the cross is a metaphor?

[@Released_Sausage]

@@rubiks6 boring

[@PrivateSi]

Decent talk and points. I'd stick my money on life being 'fairly common' given the size and laws of the universe. Even more intelligent life than us existing...... and I don't believe in advanced ETs on Earth - given the size and laws of the universe.

[@losayoussef2415]

there is One God.

[@stephenbrereton1467]

Tell that to the hundreds of Gods who came before yours. I bet Zeus won't be happy.

[@Released_Sausage]

@@stephenbrereton1467 All the other Gods were of this Universe, not outside this Universe.

[@edgregory1]

The Universe is hostile to life without very very fine tuning.

[@Faustobellissimo]

The "life is a cosmic imperative" theory matches the Cosmological Principle. As long as the CP is held as true, scientists are bound to consider the creation of life as a common phenomenon in the universe. But the CP is a dogma, it's only a philosophical assumption. The homogeneity of the universe has not been proved and cannot be proved ever.

[@kennethbransford820]

Fausto Levantesi Did you say that "The homogeneity of the universe has not been proved and cannot be proved ever." How can you say forever? Are you not being very presumptuous to say ' ever' ? You are just a man like all the rest of us who is making such grandiose statements. Is it possible that you can be wrong? Then don't say ever.

[@naimulhaq9626]

The transition from non-life to life, no doubt was quantum mechanical phenomenon. But starting from Feynman's quantum field fine tuned to produce life must be explained/understood along with how information/consciousness got self-organized/self-simulated in QF. In abizarre way life began 13.7 billion years ago.

[@luckyyuri]

So our knowledge is incomplete, but that's not unexpected in any way. Very likely there will always remain something, however "insignificant", outside our knowledge. But hey, our modern science project is just a child, what can we expect after 400 years?

[@rubiks6]

anywherein12seconds - incomplete? That’s a bit of an understatement. Actually, it’s an _enormous_ understatement. Watch the video again. We are clueless how the leap is made from non-life to life. We’re also clueless about how space-time and matter-energy and the rules under which they operate came into existence. We’ve learned an awful lot about _how_ things work. Quite amazing. We learned nothing about why things work and how they got started.

[@luckyyuri]

"We are clueless how the leap is made from non-life to life" ? That’s a bit of an overstatement. Actually, it’s an enormous overstatement :)) Just like there were people who thought that the earth is round (long before this stopped being deemed insane), or ones who thought that the laws of the earthly realm are identical to the laws governing the celestial realm, or ones who thought that the sun doesn't revolve around earth, or ones that thought that humans evolved from apes, or ones that thought that the body's inner workings are not divine but very much understandable, and so on and so forth, again and again people seeing a natural world around.. and eventually proven right by Nature. To believe in an explainable natural process of abiogenesis is a natural consequence of knowing your history, knowing aspects of Nature as physics and chemistry, and being up to date with research, such as the work of Jeremy England. This eminent scientists, like many others, thinks that what we call biological evolution, is only a segment of a much more general physical process, which started much earlier, that governs the behavior of thermodynamical systems following the statistical law of entropy maximization. We exorcized ghosts one by one out of every corner of our world, where our ignorant ancestors "postulated" them as convenient explanations. There's no logical reason to think this will stop-dead right here where you are, there's no difference in importance between you and countless billions of people who already lived and died while believing in all sorts of fantasies. Apparently there's a huge statistical probability that a human being will live and die without ever knowing the true principles of the world he inhabits. We only get to know our stories and fantasies about it. I doubt that you or i are so special to do different. However, there's a difference between us, and (i'd like to think) it's due to the fact that i try to stay in the general direction of truth. There is an obvious impossibility to have a formal explanation of Everything - not to mention, an explanation that would casually fit inside a human skull, go figure that :)) But "how life started from matter" by all the natural evidence we have.. is something very much explainable.

[@iain5615]

Typical naturalism of the gaps argument. All we need is time and we'll explain it. Once time has been removed and shown to not be an argument, then they just ignore the elephant in the room, because their narrative can't deal with the truth or they start relying on metaphysics that can not be tested and so is equivalent to pseudoscience.

[@pekkar4460]

What we can except after 400 years is that climate change has made some of the regions unhabitable, sea level rose 1m, there are more plastic in the Oceans than fish, most of the planet is so overpopulated and contaminated that is reminds more of a apolalyptic horror movie than reality. Also we killed most of other species and most natural recources are long gone. It could be that humanity as a civilisation is no more..

[@ddandrews6472]

Hmmmmm... this guy sounds like a closet preacher of 'Unintelligent design theory'. Dirty secret no. 1 = "All life on the planet is not the same" (His argument is that we haven't genome sequenced all the microbes, yet") - Lame argument Dirty secret no. 2 = "Life cannot be fully understood using ball and stick chemistry" - Nobody said it can. Another lame argument and no secret, let alone being dirty. Dirty secret no. 3 = "We have not made life in the lab, or got anywhere near doing it" - Nobody said we have, and no chance of we doing it anytime soon either. No secret and certainly nothing dirt about it.

[@TheGreatAlan75]

I can't think of anything more pathetic than those whose childhood indoctrination is so strong that denial of evolution is the order of the day. How can you deny it with all the irrefutable evidence??? Jesus...

[@ingenuity168]

Some people have stupid genes.