Re: Folk Psychology and Social Convention

> > Likewise, genes and organism behavior both arose out of a
> > primordial soup, we think.  It's telling that we know next
> > to nothing about origins of language nor origins of life.
> > Our modern science does not study those questions, really.
 
> To the contrary, the Chemical Origins of Life have been
> studied for over 50 years, have been the subject of multiple
> series of scientific conferences, and the field is a hot
> topic of ongoing research and classroom instruction.

Right, people study it and write lots of papers about it.  None of that
activity implies we understand the origins of life.  If we really got it,
someone could set up a chemical soup out of which an organism arose.  No
one's done that.  It really does boil down to demonstration: if we really
understood it we could make it.  There'd be no "creation science" or
"irreducible complexity" mumbo jumbo if we really had answers.

Craig Venter's venture to create a "minimal"  organism is the most
ambitious I know of to date.  But still, that organism would be built out
of a minimum complement of DNA taken from existing organisms, using
machinery also taken from existing organisms.  Should this venture work,
it would still not explain how all the necessary ingredients arose out of
the primordial soup and then, most critically, ORGANIZED IN JUST THE RIGHT
WAY.  Because it's not a matter of the right parts arising in the soup,
it's a matter of the very special way those parts are put together and
interoperate.  The latter is orders of magnitude harder to understand and
explain.

Perhaps you'd object less if I put it: compared to what we know about
examples of life and life processes, we know next to nothing about how
life itself arose.

When I said "our modern science does not study those questions, really"  
here's what I mean.  The "really" is the keyword.  Of course people study
those questions.  But in my estimation, to *really* study the questions,
one has to do a lot of hard, basic research.  "Artificial Life" has
existed since the 1850's (yes, I do mean *eighteen* fifties), yet has
never borne fruit, and not for lack of trying.  Clearly this is a hard
problem on which existing approaches have not succeeded.  Do we have some
kind of magic now that will let us make some incremental leap from what we
already know and land us in a place where we finally get it?  I'll gamble
on "no" as an answer to that.  I think we need a fundamentally new idea to
crack the nut of artificial life (and by extension origins of life).  To 
get that idea requires an honest, fresh look at the problem and not a 
simple regurgitation of existing ideas and techniques.

So who, among the authors you cited, is getting right down to basics, to 
the brass tacks of life, and studying the problem anew from a novel angle?  
Can you tell me to help me focus my reading?  Because if I had to bet on 
it, I'd put my money on "no one."

Anthony