Posted on 02/03/2006 10:23:55 PM PST by neverdem
For those who are studying aspects of the origin of life, the question no longer seems to be whether life could have originated by chemical processes involving non-biological components but, rather, what pathway might have been followed.
—National Academy of Sciences (1996)
It is 1828, a year that encompassed the death of Shaka, the Zulu king, the passage in the United States of the Tariff of Abominations, and the battle of Las Piedras in South America. It is, as well, the year in which the German chemist Friedrich Wöhler announced the synthesis of urea from cyanic acid and ammonia.
Discovered by H.M. Roulle in 1773, urea is the chief constituent of urine. Until 1828, chemists had assumed that urea could be produced only by a living organism. Wöhler provided the most convincing refutation imaginable of this thesis. His synthesis of urea was noteworthy, he observed with some understatement, because “it furnishes an example of the artificial production of an organic, indeed a so-called animal substance, from inorganic materials.”
Wöhler’s work initiated a revolution in chemistry; but it also initiated a revolution in thought. To the extent that living systems are chemical in their nature, it became possible to imagine that they might be chemical in their origin; and if chemical in their origin, then plainly physical in their nature, and hence a part of the universe that can be explained in terms of “the model for what science should be.”*
In a letter written to his friend, Sir Joseph Hooker, several decades after Wöhler’s announcement, Charles Darwin allowed himself to speculate. Invoking “a warm little pond” bubbling up in the dim inaccessible past, Darwin imagined that given “ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc. present,” the spontaneous generation of a “protein compound” might follow, with this compound...
(Excerpt) Read more at commentarymagazine.com ...
They pathway that still needs explaining is why only one sense of amino acids in biology, when in nature there exits both the left and right sense?
YEC INTREP -
Some ideas on handedness of amino acids:
"Polarized Starlight and the Handedness of Life":
"Whereas amino acids produced by inorganic reactions are equally split between two mirror-image versions, the amino acids found in living things are almost universally "left-handed." The origin of this biological homochirality, as it is called, has been clouded in mystery, but a group of astronomers may have stumbled on the answer. They found that the light passing through large parts of the cosmos is sometimes circularly polarized in one direction. Such radiation can preferentially destroy one version of the amino acid molecules that form in space along with other complex organic compounds. A similar occurrence five billion years ago may have seeded the solar system and the early earth with a lopsided mix of amino acids, which would have favored one handedness over the other when life evolved from these organic molecules."
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/Login;jsessionid=aaa8nw704ncPt1?nextpage=AssetDetail&assetid=15751&fulltext=true&message=PageAccessDeniedMessage
More info:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlkop/lefthand.html
http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/ChemScience/Volume/2006/02/water_handedness.asp
Just passing the buck but how its it that light which can be generated in any polarization statically equal ends up predominately left hand circular polarization through large parts of the cosmos ?
I met Berlinski once, he is one smart cookie!
YEC INTREP?
Translate, please?
see his profile
May I invite you to my Freeper Profile page for a complete explanation, except for the "YEC" which stands for "Young Earth Creationist"
YEC = Young Earth Creationist
INTREP = Intelligence Report ?
Would you like to discuss that first .5 billion year period in the history of the earth-moon system? It is dimly understood and yet is the vital foundation for all that occurred thereafter, including the rise of lifeforms. One bit of nonsense you have to get past is this I-S theory, we wouldn't even BE here if a mars had directly impacted the proto-earth 4.4 B years ago. There would be no oceans of WATER on this third rock from the sun, earth would be a cooler fraternal twin of venus...and yet YOU have internalized, as a life form, the ocean's current as your blood system. It all goes back to the RC/RC event 4.4 B years ago...as a foundation event(gen 2:6 is a BIG clue).
It is courteous, and appreciated, to explain any and all abbreviations when they are first used.
A lot of us believe that a man has a spirit. Do any of you believe that or are you all a bunch of Atheists?
If you do believe that man has a spirit, then how did it 'fuse' in the 'primordial slime pit' with the first primitive life proteins? What random process 'created' the spirit?
Enquiringly minds want to know?
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
What is I-S, and RC/RC. On the subject of dextro and levo, also known as D and L, for people into therapeutic nutrition it is been believed for many years that D-alpha-tocopherol, the left (natural) form of Vitamin E is more effective than synthetic DL-alpha-tocopherol. Health food stores charge more for it too.
I, myself, am an Atheist, but a much larger percentage of evolutionaly biologists are not.
If you do believe that man has a spirit, then how did it 'fuse' in the 'primordial slime pit' with the first primitive life proteins? What random process 'created' the spirit?
Science cannot weigh a human soul. It cannot be seen, weighed, or measured in any way. Therefore it is outside of the realm of science to speculate on the existance or possible formation of the soul. Believers say that "God did it" and for a matter that is totally in the realm of belief, that is sufficent.
Just a 'small' technicality but soul and spirit are two different 'things'.
Ok, so why then does Science claim to know with such cocky authority, how some entity that consists of three parts, body, soul, and spirit, came into existence or was formed, when they are clueless (i.e. it's outside of their realm) on two out of the three parts? You would think they would humbly make statements like "We're way out of our league here, since we only can theorize on a small part of this entity...we don't have any tools that can deal with 2/3rds of what we're investigating... ".
You guys seem like good candidates for thoughts on #14 and #18.
Wait, first tell us why you are so cocky as to presume the independent existence of things called "spirit" and "soul"?
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