Posted on 06/25/2016 5:48:26 AM PDT by Rummyfan
Francis Crick, the man who gave us DNA, was born a century ago today - June 8th 1916, in Northamptonshire in the English Midlands. Here's what I had to say about him upon his death 12 years ago. This essay appears in Mark Steyn's Passing Parade:
Francis Crick is dead and gone. He has certainly not "passed on" - and, if he has, he'll be extremely annoyed about it. As a 12-year old English schoolboy, he decided he was an atheist, and for much of the rest of his life worked hard to disprove the existence of the soul.
In between, he "discovered the secret of life", as he crowed to the barmaids and regulars at the Eagle, his Cambridge pub, on a triumphant night in 1953. The opening sentence of his paper, written with his colleague Jim Watson, for Nature on April 25th that year put it more modestly:
We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Best comment: we share about 98.5 percent of our DNA with the chimp. But we also share about 75 percent of our DNA with the pumpkin.
A coffee cup is just ceramic. Its what goes in the cup that makes it a cup of coffee.
Its interesting, and vital, to understand the mechanics and chemistry of what it means to be human. In the end, though, our mortal shell is not what makes us human, its the spirit that inhabits it. That’s a little harder to define and explain, but it is what makes all the difference.
Steyn. A National Treasure.
Or, as Dr. James Watson put it, Crick became a little crazy when he started to realize that the discovery of the structure of DNA does not explain the origin of life at all.
I've had the fortune of seeing Dr. Watson speak twice. He is, IMHO, a better scientist than Crick, because when they won the Nobel prize, he continued his career of solid research. Crick, OTOH, went off on a bizarre tangent in which he was hypothesizing about life starting somewhere else and then being seeded here--which, even if true, would not answer the question of the origin of life.
Steyn. A undocumented National Treasure.
Better?
Something as small as DNA so intricately woven screams Intelligent Design.
His militant atheism was good-humored but fierce, “
It HAS to be fierce to drown out anything the operator doesn’t care to hear.
Crick’s hypothesis on the origin of life (from Steyn’s column): “If so, a higher civilization, similar to ours, might have developed from it at about the time that the Earth was formed... Would they have had the urge and the technology to spread life through the wastes of space and seed these sterile planets, including our own?”
That in fact is just an appeal to “intelligent design” (deliberate lower case), a point I have no end of fun pointing out whenever the intelligentsia begins to disparage Intelligent Design as yahoo superstition.
Crick was smart enough to realize a major leap of faith was required for one to assume blind chance could lead to DNA-based life over a span as limited as geological time; apparently he was unbothered by the intellectual leap implicit in assuming that his extraterrestrial sources of genetic material somehow had to come into being as well.
Thank you for your metaphor comparing complex me to a coffee cup! lol
Did you want that sugar, cream or black? :-)
Life without coffee is not life.
:)
What if we could get all our legal immigrants who were like Mark Steyn? I do not know where it would take us, but the journey would be pleasant, humorous and memorable.
Man and Uberman.
It is an appeal to panspermia, or more specifically in the case of Crick, directed panspermia. Panspermia like evolution has no purpose in explaining the origins of life, just how life or organic chemical precursors to life are "spread throughout".
Wiki has a page on both panspermia and directed panspermia.
Its a very old theory but in modern times it is attributed to Fred Hoyle.
The astrobiologists study this and that is a reason that NASA sends out craft to chase the comets or the EU actually landed a probe on a comet.
Jim Watson and Francis Crick either stole Rosalind Franklin’s data, or ‘forgot’ to credit her. Neither suggestion is true.
http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/post?id=3443527%2C5
Standing on the shoulders of giants???
An atheist funeral.... all dressed up and nowhere to go.
Spot on - but in my opinion, directed panspermia is just a subset of “intelligent design” as a conceptual construct - those directing the distribution of the DNA or primitive bacteria or whatever vector is used to spread life have to be intelligent, and have to have a particular goal in mind - the propagation of life forms as a designed consequence.
The key point is whether one appeals to “Intelligent Design” in the traditional sense (a physical system set up by a Supreme Being so as to guarantee the emergence of life) or some manner of directed panspermia, one is essentially casting doubt on the key postulate of traditional evolution - that organisms as complex as human beings can blindly emerge just through a series of completely random events.
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