To those unaware, the “Origin-of-Life Prize” is the brainchild of “The Gene Emergence Project” which is, in turn, a project of The Origin-of-Life Science Foundation, Inc. which is a 501(c)3 science and education foundation headquartered near NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD.
The prize is, of course, based on the consideration of submissions, “Origin-of-life specialists drawn from many universities and institutes in over forty countries will review already published peer-reviewed papers on a tiered basis.” On their rules for judging page, they elucidate (emphasis added for emphasis):
Judges of The Origin-of-Life Prize Include:
Below is the original list of judges, each of whom agreed to judge the Prize in writing, at least via email, but usually by signed hard-copy form letters which are still on file. Some of these judges have passed away over the last 13 years. We deliberately leave them on the original list to honor their prominence in the life origin community during their long careers. New judges are welcome to participate as long as they have no affiliation of any kind with the Foundation.So far, over the last dozen years of judging, no submission has been passed up to the second tier of judges by the first-tier of outside evaluators. This means that very few of the higher level judges have ever been asked to review a submission.
This is not the fault of the Foundation. We have no control over outside judges’ decisions. We regularly send submissions out to one or two higher level judges just to make sure that the lower-tier judges are not being too harsh. In some instances, we have sent what we felt were quality submissions out to 20 lower-tier judges rather than the required 10. Since the Prize was first announced in NATURE and SCIENCE, a total of only two thumbs-up votes have been received from outside judges.
The list of “Name . Country . Organizational Affiliation” include 189 personages.
Also, one could accept an Invitation to become an advisor:
The Gene Emergence Project welcomes qualified biochemists, molecular biologists, biophysicists, information theorists, artificial life and intelligence experts, philosophers of science, molecular evolutionists, astro/exobiologists, mathematicians, and many other researchers in origin-of-life related fields.
Yet, there is no use in providing their email anymore as after 12 years the experiment was a miserable failure as they note on their homepage under “Last updated November, 2013” (emphasis added for emphasis):
On October 26, 2013 the Governing Board of the Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc. voted to put on hold the Origin of Life Prize Program, and to temporarily suspend the Origin of Life Prize offer. Over the 13 years since The Origin of Life Prize was first announced in NATURE and SCIENCE, no submission has ever made it past the screening judges to higher-level judges. No submission has ever addressed, let alone answered, any of the questions below, for which the Prize offer was instituted. Most of these Prize-offer questions centered on: “How did inanimate, prebiotic nature prescribe or program the first genome?”
Life origin literature continues to circumvent and ignore this problem, if not deliberately sweep it under the rug. The Prize Program did much to raise consciousness and stimulate more consideration of the real problem of life origin – Prescription of future biofunction that was not yet selectable by the environment.
Here were the ignored and swept under the rug issues:
The Fundamental Questions for Life Origin Research – How did molecular evolution generate metabolic recipe and instructions using a representational symbol system? How did prebiotic nature set all of the many configurable switch-settings to integrate so many interdependent circuits? How did inanimate nature sequence nucleotides to spell instructions to the ribosomes on how to sequence amino acids into correctly folding proteins? How did nature then code these instructions into Hamming block codes to reduce noise pollution in the Shannon channel? What programmed the error-detection and error-correcting software that keeps life from quickly deteriorating into non-life? In short, which of the four known forces of physics organized and prescribed life into existence? Was it gravity? Was it the strong or weak nuclear force? Was it the electromagnetic force? How could any combination of these natural forces or force fields program decision nodes to prescribe future utility? Why and how would a prebiotic environment value, desire or seek to generate utility? Can chance and/or necessity program or prescribe sophisticated biofunction? Life is utterly dependent upon the steering of reaction sequences into biochemical pathways and cycles. Life pursues the goal of staying alive. All known life is cybernetic, meaning controlled. Life’s most prominent attribute is programming and tight regulation at every turn. Yet programming, prescription, control and regulation are all formalisms, not mere physicodynamic interactions. The programming of life is what makes life unique [1-3] Metabolism First models cannot sustain themselves as perpetual motion machines, even in open environments, without heritable formal instructions needed to circumvent locally and temporarily 2nd Law organizational and useful energy deterioration. Prescription and programming arise only out of Decision Theory, not Stochastic Theory. How did prebiotic nature program the first decision nodes? Only Choice-Contingent Causation and Control (CCCC) could possibly program a genome and epigenome. The peer-reviewed literature below provides valuable background information showing why life-origin theorists struggle to generate a model or theory that addresses any of the most important questions of life origin.
1. Abel, D.L., Is Life Unique? Life 2012, 2, 106-134 Open access at http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/2072/2071/2106.
2. Johnson, D.E., Programming of Life. Big Mac Publishers: Sylacauga, Alabama, 2010; p 127.
3. Abel, D.L., The First Gene: The Birth of Programming, Messaging and Formal Control. LongView Press-Academic: New York, NY, 2011; p 389 pages
The issue is that this was not some wacky Bible thumping young Earth creationist ploy to make evolutionists look bad. This was evolutionists hoping to further research and get answers but alas; the Origin-of-Life Prize never acquired a life of its own but taught us something about some scientists circumvent, ignore and deliberately sweep bothersome problems.
This is all part of that which was noted within the Scientific Cenobites series that is that much which passes for science is, in reality, interpretations of evidence based on worldview philosophies, schools of thought, bias for preferred theories and seeking to protect them, professional rivalries, assuring grants/funding, etc.
Within the Atheist and Darwinian Science and Story Telling series evidence was provided of just that, narrative story telling being passed off as science.
Upon a premise of worldview-philosophy-mythology some, such as Richard Dawkins actually claim that “religion” and/or “faith” is a “science stopper”; see Question for atheists: is “God did it” a science stopper?