Posted on 02/03/2005 2:07:26 PM PST by Michael_Michaelangelo
ping
Freeman Dyson ... didn't he help build Skynet?
Whereas the objective should be a search for the truth, we get instead another patch for the rotting darwinian rubber inner tube.
ROFL. So this will be the next sorry excuse for evolution? "Well, evolution wasn't happening in the beginning, and we don't have evolution now, but for awhile there we sure did! And if you don't believe it, why, you're just a crazy nut!"
If all the darwinist responses on all the c/e threads could be compressed into one paragraph, that would be it.
Is that an empty can of primordial soup I see there? :)
It's all the great evolutionary predictions of the past 150 years.
Microbiol Mol Biol Rev. 2004 Jun;68(2):173-86.
A new biology for a new century.
Woese CR.
Department of Microbiology, University of Illinois, 601 S. Goodwin, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. carl@ninja.life.uiuc.edu
Biology today is at a crossroads. The molecular paradigm, which so successfully guided the discipline throughout most of the 20th century, is no longer a reliable guide. Its vision of biology now realized, the molecular paradigm has run its course. Biology, therefore, has a choice to make, between the comfortable path of continuing to follow molecular biology's lead or the more invigorating one of seeking a new and inspiring vision of the living world, one that addresses the major problems in biology that 20th century biology, molecular biology, could not handle and, so, avoided. The former course, though highly productive, is certain to turn biology into an engineering discipline. The latter holds the promise of making biology an even more fundamental science, one that, along with physics, probes and defines the nature of reality. This is a choice between a biology that solely does society's bidding and a biology that is society's teacher.
FRegards, MM
The 19th century as a whole had a reductionistic world view, if for no other reason than because of the outlook of classical physics. Physics at that time saw a fundamentally reductionistic world, in which ultimate explanation lay completely in the properties and interactions of atoms: to know the positions and momenta of all of the fundamental particles at a given point in time was in principle to know their positions and momenta at any other point in time, past or future. Nothing added, nothing subtracted; just the endless deterministic jumble of bouncing atomic balls in a directionless time (33). Biologists of the 19th century were no exception to the reductionist zeitgeist, but theirs tended to be an empirical, analytical reductionism, not a metaphysical one: one would be hard put to explain evolution and the problem of biological form in reductionist terms alone.Given the temper of the times, the entry of chemistry and physics into biology was inevitable. The technology that these sciences would introduce was not only welcome but very much needed. Also, biology was now well enough scientifically understood that it began to appeal to physicists. But the physics and chemistry that entered biology (especially the former) was a Trojan horse, something that would ultimately conquer biology from within and remake it in its own image. Biology would be totally fissioned, and its holistic side would be quashed. Biology would quickly become a science of lesser importance, for it had nothing fundamental to tell us about the world. Physics provided the ultimate explanations. Biology, as no more than complicated chemistry, was at the end of the line, merely providing baroque ornamentation on the great edifice of understanding that was physics—the hierarchy physics chemistrybiology is burned into the thinking of all scientists, a pecking order that has done much to foster in society the (mistaken) notion that biology is only an applied science.
In the last several decades we have seen the molecular reductionist reformulation of biology grind to a halt, its vision of the future spent, leaving us with only a gigantic whirring biotechnology machine. Biology today is little more than an engineering discipline. Thus, biology is at the point where it must choose between two paths: either continue on its current track, in which case it will become mired in the present, in application, or break free of reductionist hegemony, reintegrate itself, and press forward once more as a fundamental science. The latter course means an emphasis on holistic, "nonlinear," emergent biology—with understanding evolution and the nature of biological form as the primary, defining goals of a new biology.
Society cannot tolerate a biology whose metaphysical base is outmoded and misleading: the society desperately needs to live in harmony with the rest of the living world, not with a biology that is a distorted and incomplete reflection of that world. Because it has been taught to accept the above hierarchy of the sciences, society today perceives biology as here to solve its problems, to change the living world. Society needs to appreciate that the real relationship between biology and the physical sciences is not hierarchical, but reciprocal: physicsbiology. Both physics and biology are primary windows on the world; they see the same gem but different facets thereof (and so inform one another). Knowing this, society will come to see that biology is here to understand the world, not primarily to change it. Biology's primary job is to teach us. In that realization lies our hope of learning to live in harmony with our planet.
"Freeman Dyson: noted Creationist whackjob"
What someone will inevitably say or post here in the next few minutes....(toe tapping).
He cites Woese's article in this context:
It is easiest to think of synthesis of the first simple peptides as taking place independently of coding, giving rise to a comparatively limited number of short peptides of fixed or even random sequence. Specification of amino acids by RNA sequences most likely emerged later, requiring coevolution of the ribosome and its tRNAs (Noller 1993; Schimmel and Henderson 1994) ultimately leading to our present, protein-dominated form of biology. Most difficult to explain is this final phase of evolution of the ribosome, the emergence of coding, which gave rise to "one of the great evolutionary saltations...that would generate a truly enormous new, totally unique evolutionary phase space" (Woese 2004).
Noller's abstract is:
It is widely argued that protein synthesis evolved out of an RNA world, in which catalytic and other biological functions now carried out by proteins were performed by RNAs. However, it is not clear what selective advantage would have provided the driving force for evolution of a primitive translation apparatus, because of the unlikelihood that rudimentary polypeptides would have contributed sufficiently useful biological functions. Here, I suggest that the availability of even simple peptides could have significantly enlarged the otherwise limited structure space of RNA. In other words, translation initially evolved not to create a protein world, but to extend the structural, and therefore the functional, capabilities of the RNA world. Observed examples of substantial structural rearrangements in RNA that are induced by binding of peptides and other small molecules support this possibility.
There is hope. Some of these guys are thinking outside of the box. Refreshing, thanks.
Thanks for the ping MM!
"Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them."
Why, oh why does this sound so much like a biological argument for Communism?
This argument makes no logical sense. You may be able to make the case that human beings are no longer undergoing biological evolution because we are making a conscious effort to preserve weaker members of the species, but you can hardly claim the same thing for fish. The same evolutionary forces that worked on them for 10 million years are still working on them today, and we should be still seeing a certain percentage of species, genus, class, order, family, etc. formation within the biosphere at any given moment in time.
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