Silly sci-fi
Speaking of IS vs COULD in science...

The IDers at Evolution News are arguing with a Darwinian named Helen Hansma.

Hansma is proposing the silliest and couldiest idea I've ever heard. It builds on several favorite axioms of the modern Darwinians and adds a completely impossible physical supposition.

She proposes that life developed from non-life in mica sheets underwater. Apparently there's a way to use layers of mica to 'pump up' energy, and the modern Darwinians always base everything on energy consumption.

Professor Hansma pioneered the origins model postulating that the motion of mica sheets along the ocean floor could have driven chemical reactions energetically uphill, resulting in higher-energy molecules. In her letter, she challenges my evaluation of the power limitations on “natural engines” by asserting that the mechanical energy of the mica sheets could have provided sufficient energy to sustain some pathway to the first cell.

In the obvious first fucking place, life is the exact opposite of energy efficiency. Life is the most extravagantly ANTIefficient process of all, when measured simply as energy input vs energy output.

Second, the boundary between life and non-life is a boundary between ORDER and CHAOS, not a border between higher and lower energy. Organization is a completely distinct variable that can't be measured. (Entropy and information are narrowly defined 'examples' of organization, not basic measures.)

Third, mica sheets don't float around in the ocean. Mica is formed as part of igneous rock under extreme pressure, something like diamonds. There's no natural process that would separate it, and it's not found in the oceans now.

Mica is a wonderful material. It's beautiful in a gem-like way, with translucent depths and pearlescent reflections. It was widely familiar 80 years ago. Stoves and furnaces used mica for windows to see whether the flame is lit, and it was a major part of vacuum tubes and capacitors before 1970. It's a nearly perfect insulator for both heat and electricity, so it was the ideal material for 'framing' in vacuum tubes and for dielectrics in capacitors.

I couldn't find any decent pics online so I made one.


This doesn't capture the unique reflection/refraction of mica, but at least it shows how the mica was used in tubes.


Unlike gems, mica is fragile. It crumbles easily. You don't want to bend it much. In stoves and tubes and capacitors the mica was mounted to avoid bending.

Fourth, there are several ways of 'pumping up' energy that involve capacitance. Mica is an excellent dielectric, but it doesn't naturally 'pump up' energy unless it has been formed into the dielectric of a capacitor, and even then the mica isn't the pumper. The entire complex circuit is the pumper. What's worse, these pumps don't give you extra energy. They just trade amps for volts, like a lever trading force for distance, and there's inevitably some loss in the process.

Mechanical energy between the sliding sheets? This is wordsalad. If there's enough wave action to slide the sheets around, they will crumble in a few minutes and won't be sheets any longer.

Even if this pumping could raise the energy of chemical reactions (how????), it wouldn't last long enough in one piece to evolve and naturally select.

This idea belongs with perpetual motion. It sounds plausible if you've never dealt with the real thing, but anyone who has worked with actual mica knows it's impossible.

= = = = =

Small Happy Ending: Mica is still used and sold for windows in various kinds of heaters.

Labels: AI point-missing, Happy Ending

  ¶ 5:21 AM