Re: Origin - the wrong word?

From: "g" <gillaw...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
When a baseball is pitched by a pitcher in a baseball game, WHEN does the
pitch "originate?" Is it at the time the pitcher wills himself to make the
pitch? Is it the moment the pitcher goes into his "windup?" Is it the
moment midway between the beginning of the windup and the release? Or is it
all the above, and more? ...
Perhaps we could all agree that, for a pitch to occur, several things ALL
have to happen, and in a particular sequence. And POST HOC, we can say
that the windup was a part of the pitch, only as a result of our having duly
noted that the ball actually got released.

I don't like baseball, but I like your metaphor. We can't really be
sure a pitch occurred until the ball arrives somewhere near the batter,
as opposed to the pitcher faking a pitch but instead throwing to first
base to try to catch a runner who has taken a lead toward second. But
once the ball approaches the batter, we can say for sure that the pitch
already occurred.

Imagine a space alien was watching Earth because it had lots of
Miller-Urey chemistry going on and the alien society thought maybe life
might arise here. So the space alien takes samples in several places
around the ocean about once every year or so. Year after year nothing
special is observed, just the usual mix of primitive chemicals and
racemic amino acids etc. Then suddenly one year every CC of ocean water
from several different locations *each* contains over a million copies
of one specific chemical that had never been noticed before. This
chemical is tested and found to catalyze its own production out of the
other cruft that is around anyway. Aha, life has originated on planet
Earth. Now looking back at the previous year's samples, five or ten
copies of that replicator can be found already, too few copies to
notice with Avagadro's quantity of other stuff around if you don't know
what to look for, but after the fact we can say that life had already
gotten started back then but hadn't yet replicated to immense quantity
yet. Looking back two years, not a single instance of that replicator
is found in any of the samples, so it must have spontaneously happened
"by chance" sometime between two years ago and one year ago. Or maybe
it happened more than two years ago, but not a single instance of the
replicator molecule happened to make it across the ocean into any of
the samples that were collected two years ago. We can define some
arbitrary moment when life began, even if we don't have measurements
arbitrarily close together in time to allow us to measure precisely
when that moment was when life began.

Back to baseball: We have video of the pitch that has already occurred.
We play back that video in stop action and check each frame in detail
to find the moment when the wind-up started. We find one frame (and ten
more immediately after it) when the wind-up was definitely in progress.
Before that, we find three frames where the position of the pitcher's
arm doesn't make it clear whether the wind-up has started or not. All
frames before those show clearly no wind-up yet started. So even if we
define the start of the pitch as being when the wind-up started, we
can't pin down closer than three frames (one tenth of a second) when it
was. But still we know the pitch must have started, because it wasn't a
pitch then shortly after it was a pitch so it must have started
sometime between those two moments.

Can we all agree that as soon as there were a billion copies of the
same replicator, life had already started, and in principle if we could
trace the original of each of those copies back in time, and we find
they all came from a single instance of that replicator, then the
moment that one original instance popped into existance was the moment
life started? (And if upon tracing back we find not one but *two*
originals of that replicator, each responsible for about half of the
billion copies, that's so astronomically improbable that we'd have to
say goddiddit, or panspermiadiddit, or ...?)

.

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