>>12410613His stuff is kinda eh, it's not super up to date on the cutting edge of biochem and genomics research. It just sounds like another way to dress up the "muh missing link" argument. He even brings up body plan issues which have been quite comfortably worked out in quite a few species at this point. We can prove arbitrarily specific mechanisms for producing ordered structures in life, we can physically determine the emergence phenomena on systems with energy flow. But each time we will be hot with a "you haven't explained how it's possible for this quark to hang out with this one". He does nanotech so I get his position but it's once mired in the difficulties in trying to do things from an analytical instead of holistic perspective. Everyone tries to assign purpose or drive to evolutionary processes and abiogenesis; when all that it really is is a self-perpetuating reaction that got out of hand.
Although I did ask a friend a similar question to yours the other night. What does it mean if we learned empirically how the universe was formed? Like we did the math and the laws of physics all line up so that when nothing is in our universe it spontaneously explodes into something. We know for certain how our livable universe exists. Our conversation settled on "not much".
As a critique of your original point, you can apply the historical question idea to almost any idea that exists. Technically all phenomena observed or not are historical by nature; even if one were to apply the scientific method in an attempt to determine the cause of that historical phenomena. So, in my view, like an interesting piece of broken glass it makes a neat thing to look for but is not inherently a useful categorization.
