TY - JOUR AU - Kokić, Tonći PY - 2018/03/25 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Weakness of the Scientific Hypotheses about the Origin of Life JF - Filozofia Nauki JA - FN VL - 26 IS - 1 SE - Artykuły DO - 10.14394/filnau.2018.0001 UR - https://fn.uw.edu.pl/index.php/fn/article/view/880 SP - 9-21 AB - <p>This paper makes a case for the weakness of the scientific hypotheses about the origin of first life&nbsp;(hereafter OoL). There is no consensus on when, where, and — most importantly — how and why&nbsp;life emerged on Earth. There are significant impediments to the scientific explanation of OoL, at&nbsp;least in relation to the accepted (meta)heuristic postulates of scientific study of OoL and&nbsp;(meta)theoretical postulates that hypotheses must satisfy to be recognized as true explanations&nbsp;and not just-so stories. Following these rules and methodologies did not help to bridge the gap&nbsp;between the most complex inorganic components and the simplest living entities. The main arguments&nbsp;for the weakness of the scientific hypotheses about OoL are: (i) there is no scientific hypothesis&nbsp;that successfully explains OoL, and (ii) there is an evident experimental failure of the&nbsp;attempts to (re)create life from inorganic components. The long-term resistance of the problem&nbsp;and the weakness of the hypotheses about OoL stem from the commitment to the ontology of repeated&nbsp;occurrences and/or from inappropriate epistemological-methodological tools used to explain&nbsp;the transition from inorganic to simple life forms (exclusively by means of the “language”&nbsp;and methodology of physical-chemical sciences). Accordingly, either the scientific study of OoL&nbsp;rests on a mistake or science must reduce the scope of phenomena that can be scientifically explained.</p> ER -