maichem wrote:News to me...apparently abiogenesis is discredited. Can someone please enlighten me as to why a dictionary is making this claim
Such an inaccuracy ruffles my feathers since people hold dictionaries up as if they are in biblical light.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/abiogenesisa•bi•o•gen•e•sis [ey-bahy-oh-jen-uh-sis, ab-ee-oh-] Show IPA
noun Biology.
the now discredited theory that living organisms can arise spontaneously from inanimate matter; spontaneous generation.
zoon:
As you say, this is in what is supposed to be a reputable dictionary, based on the Random House 2011 dictionary. I think they might fairly be accused of quote mining T.H.Huxley, who is stated in that entry to have invented the word in
an essay in 1870.
T.H.Huxley (1870) wrote: And thus the hypothesis that living matter always arises by the agency of pre-existing living matter, took definite shape; and had, henceforward, a right to be considered and a claim to be refuted, in each particular case, before the production of living matter in any other way could be admitted by careful reasoners. It will be necessary for me to refer to this hypothesis so frequently, that, to save circumlocution, I shall call it the hypothesis of _Biogenesis_; and I shall term the contrary doctrine--that living matter may be produced by not living matter--the hypothesis of _Abiogenesis_.
Huxley does spend most of the essay going through the evidence against spontaneous generation, the idea that life is still commonly generated from dead matter. I hadn’t realised how much this was taken for granted until the seventeenth century:
T.H.Huxley (1870) wrote:The proposition that life may, and does, proceed from that which has no life, then, was held alike by the philosophers, the poets, and the people, of the most enlightened nations, eighteen hundred years ago; and it remained the accepted doctrine of learned and unlearned Europe, through the Middle Ages, down even to the seventeenth century.
In 1870, a few people still argued that spontaneous generation might happen, but Huxley concludes that the evidence is very strongly against it:
T.H.Huxley (1870) wrote:
But if, in the present state of science, the alternative is offered us,--either germs can stand a greater heat than has been supposed, or the molecules of dead matter, for no valid or intelligible reason that is assigned, are able to re- arrange themselves into living bodies, exactly such as can be demonstrated to be frequently produced in another way,--I cannot understand how choice can be, even for a moment, doubtful.
Huxley then moves on to the point which the compilers of Dictionary.com seem to have conveniently (for creationists) omitted. He is very clear that abiogenesis probably did happen in the distant past, that ordinary chemicals came together to form living things over long periods of time, and in conditions which were very different from those of today:
T.H.Huxley (1870) wrote:
But though I cannot express this conviction of mine too strongly, I must carefully guard myself against the supposition that I intend to suggest that no such thing as Abiogenesis ever has taken place in the past, or ever will take place in the future. With organic chemistry, molecular physics, and physiology yet in their infancy, and every day making prodigious strides, I think it would be the height of presumption for any man to say that the conditions under which matter assumes the properties we call "vital" may not, some day, be artificially brought together. All I feel justified in affirming is, that I see no reason for believing that the feat has been performed yet.
And looking back through the prodigious vista of the past, I find no record of the commencement of life, and therefore I am devoid of any means of forming a definite conclusion as to the conditions of its appearance. Belief, in the scientific sense of the word, is a serious matter, and needs strong foundations. To say, therefore, in the admitted absence of evidence, that I have any belief as to the mode in which the existing forms of life have originated, would be using words in a wrong sense. But expectation is permissible where belief is not; and if it were given me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time to the still more remote period when the earth was passing through physical and chemical conditions, which it can no more see again than a man can recall his infancy, I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from not living matter. I should expect to see it appear under forms of great simplicity, endowed, like existing fungi, with the power of determining the formation of new protoplasm from such matters as ammonium carbonates, oxalates and tartrates, alkaline and earthy phosphates, and water, without the aid of light. That is the expectation to which analogical reasoning leads me; but I beg you once more to recollect that I have no right to call my opinion anything but an act of philosophical faith.