Posted on 01/11/2009 2:16:04 PM PST by Free ThinkerNY
One of life's greatest mysteries is how it began. Scientists have pinned it down to roughly this:
Some chemical reactions occurred about 4 billion years ago — perhaps in a primordial tidal soup or maybe with help of volcanoes or possibly at the bottom of the sea or between the mica sheets — to create biology.
Now scientists have created something in the lab that is tantalizingly close to what might have happened. It's not life, they stress, but it certainly gives the science community a whole new data set to chew on.
The researchers, at the Scripps Research Institute, created molecules that self-replicate and even evolve and compete to win or lose. If that sounds exactly like life, read on to learn the controversial and thin distinction.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
So the great scientists are FINALLY able to APE the creator - let’s just see how far all those li’l ole molecules get in their “competition”. The way the world is now to which they fight to evolve, they’ll probably just kill each other off and get it over quickly!
>> My argument was that the fact an intelligent entity did the experiment does not mean intelligence is part of the process. <<
Yeah, actually it kinda does. The way the article is written makes it sound as if they’ve demonstarted some great breakthrough in the spontaneous generation of life, while in fact, all they’ve done is shown that little pieces of living matter retain some of the characteristics of life outside their natural context. Ya know goldfish hearts keep beating after the goldfish is dead?
I hate to be pedantic but there is no logical connection between absence of information and a positive result of any kind.
The way the article is written makes it sound as if they’ve demonstarted some great breakthrough in the spontaneous generation of life, while in fact, all they’ve done is shown that little pieces of living matter retain some of the characteristics of life outside their natural context.
It is another wall that lets us see the next hill. It is an important breakthrough but it does not purport to say anything other than what is reported -- that it is giving us more information on what may have happened. To backtrack several billion years is pretty significant, scientifically.
So you also believe that attempting to learn about the Universe is trying to replace God?
It could be worse — they could read poetry at us.
At last, intelligent design proven and demonstrated in a lab!
It’s easy, the whole theory hinges on conditions that existed 3.8 billion years ago, according to scientists and their theory of how life arose from non-life around this time. Natural conditions today are not that of what they were 3.8 billion years ago. And they won’t ever be those conditions ever again. You can never prove it.
And the experiment itself is proof that a guiding intelligence is required to get this to work. Nobody has ever found this occurring in the world on its own because the conditions don’t exist anymore. The conditions have to be engineered. If they did find a place (which they won’t, you can’t turn the clock back 3.8 billion years) we’d have heard about it night and day for a solid week.
And the experiment itself is proof that a guiding intelligence is required to get this to work.
Again, the same fallacy. If you can never prove something then you cannot surmise anything from that. If can not prove non-intelligence, you cannot prove intelligence. You can't prove anything.
You defeat your own arguments before I even have to deal with the scientific errors in your statements.
And when you get into "proof" you get into philosophy, not science.
Please see my post 5 and other posts about the fallacy of that interpretation.
Fine, instead of ‘proof’ I will call it ‘evidence’. I could also call it ‘fact’. Because it is a fact.
If consciousness is at the DNA level, then why is it we can detect consciousness by detecting brain waves?
Do you know what a scientific fact is? Because it is different from a colloquial fact, which is just as subjective as "proof" and subject to philosophical interpretation.
>> It is another wall that lets us see the next hill. It is an important breakthrough but it does not purport to say anything other than what is reported — that it is giving us more information on what may have happened. <<
Yeah, it’s also the 17,320,119th time the media has claimed to have just about created life in a laboratory. Mind you, in this case, it’s at least far more interesting than the time they set up “plausibly natural” conditions to synthesize uracil and reported for a solid decade that “the building blocks of life” had been created in a lab.
>> Creationists and their critiques of evolution have yet to produce any scientific evidence to counter the theory. All they have is religious apologetics. <<
Uh, no. The problem is that creationism has its own serious scientific issues: The world seems to be billions of years old, and creationism doesn’t do a very good job of explaining that.
As far as debunking evolution: How could it be debunked? Evolutionary biology hasn’t begun to explain how it COULD happen, let alone demonstrate how it DID happen. We haven’t seen one species shown to transform “horizontally” into another species, let alone how one species evolves “upward” from a simpler creature to a more complex one. For all the years of proclaiming life being created in a test-tube, all we’ve got is some uracil (not even the RIGHT nucleotide) in a testtube, and now a demonstration that RNA can be induced to self-replicate.
Many to most of the scientists who became the early members of Darwin Central were banned from this site. Most were banned for supporting the theory of evolution.
Somebody figured out that evoloserism and conservativism weren't compatible??
No, they figured out that science and conservativism are compatible.
Science is a lot of fun, even though it is hard work. You should try it some time, Ted.
Almost only counts in horseshoes.
A little skepticism is perfectly acceptable. In fact,it is necessary in science. That is why findings need to be peer-reviewed and stand up to merciless attacks.
As long as someone doesn't say "well, the fact that a human did so-and-so means an intelligent agent (for whom the human stands in) was responsible for the effect being seen," which is, of course a non sequiter, then you can pooh-pooh the results all you want.
But if those results can be replicated and then lead to OTHER results, then you have to look at the entire body of research in this area -- not just this latest stepping stone.
I am not abiogenesis expert -- frankly even the idea of trying to reproduce this experiment is so far above my head that I can't even see the soles of the shows of the experimenters. But I do understand the methods being used and how they are applied. And, until someone scientifically knocks this down, I think it adds to the sum knowledge of the one of most esoteric life science areas.
As a final thought -- can you scientifically attack this research and its findings? Or is this just curmudgeonly cane waving?
I am glad to be back. And I deserved my time away (although it was a bit long). I promise to not insult, not demean, minimize the sarcasm (difficult but I think I can do it), and keep the discussion to facts and logic.
I do hope those of you who represent theology do the same.
And I do hope you will admit to being Ted. It would be quite duplicitous of you not to.
Almost only counts in horseshoes.
Electricity preceded the electric light bulb. An accident in a Petri dish LED TO, but was not, modern antibiotics.
Cancer -- and many other life-threatening diseases --treatment has advanced from simple and drastic chemotherapy (and its analogies) to more sophisticated treatments tat prolong good life for many years.
So, do you want to discount the early almosts that lead to pretty much every scientific technology we use today? Ever hear of the Babbage Calculating Machine? You sorta needed that almost for all modern computing, including the Internet which provides the medium for your post. Is that almost not enough for you? Or Newtonian Theory? Do you think that almost, which led to the more accurate Einstein Theory, unacceptable?
Sorry to use a little overkill, but you might want to rethink your statement in a more scientific context.
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