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To: wyattearp
Wyatt, abiogenesis is an unfalsifiable proposition. To falsify the claim that life came from non life you would have had to witness every chemical reaction since t=0+.

Miller's experiment was a failed attempt to falsify biogenesis. You see the difference?

By your standards, chemical evolution (abiogenesis) can not be science if in fact your standard for judging science is falsifiability.

Perhaps you should rethink just what sceince is and isn't.

1,068 posted on 07/28/2006 6:06:36 PM PDT by jwalsh07
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To: jwalsh07
By your standards, chemical evolution (abiogenesis) can not be science if in fact your standard for judging science is falsifiability.,

If you'll pardon my intrusion, this is a category error.

A scientific theory, according to Popper's naive falsifiability, should be falsifiable. However, is 'abiogenesis' a scientific theory? I would argue that it is not. It might be a research program. Physics is indubitably science, but it is not falsifiable.

1,072 posted on 07/28/2006 6:14:55 PM PDT by HayekRocks
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To: jwalsh07
Miller's experiment was a failed attempt to falsify biogenesis. You see the difference?

No, it wasn't. I'll quote directly from a textbook, as I clearly didn't explain it well enough:

"In the 1920s, Russian chemist A. I. Oparin and British scientist J. B. S. Haldane independently postulated that Earth's early atmosphere had been a reducing (electron-adding) environment, in which organic compounds would have formed from simple molecules. The energy for this organic synthesis could have come from lightning and intense UV radiation. Haldane suggested that the early oceans were a solution of organic molecules, a "primitive soup" from which life arose. In 1953, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, of the University of Chicago, tested the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis by creating laboratory conditions comparable to those that scientists at the time thought existed on early Earth. Their apparatus yielded a variety of amino acids found in organisms today, along with other organic compounds. Many laboratories have since repeated the experiment using different recipes for the atmosphere. Organic compounds were also produced in some of these modified models."(Campbell & Reese)

(Synthesis of Organic Compounds on Early Earth), Biology, 7th Edition, Campbell & Reese, 2005, pp 513-514, Pearson Education Inc.

By your standards, chemical evolution (abiogenesis) can not be science if in fact your standard for judging science is falsifiability.

That is not a standard for judging science, it is one of many standards for testing a theory. Abiogenesis is not unfalsifiable because "you would have had to witness every chemical reaction since t=0+". That is a totally absurd statement.

For Abiogenesis to be fully accepted, scientists are going to have to show experimentally how it could have occurred. There have been a number of experiments demonstrating abiotic synthesis of amino acids, cell walls, polymers, etc. However, there are a lot of pieces to a life form, and there still isn't enough to validate the theory.

1,081 posted on 07/28/2006 6:30:52 PM PDT by wyattearp (Study! Study! Study! Or BONK, BONK, on the head!)
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