[PatrickHenry]

Everybody be nice. And try to avoid jokes about Reagan and Death Valley Days.

[PatrickHenry]

PING. [This ping list is for the evolution side of evolution threads, and sometimes for other science topics. FReepmail me to be added or dropped.]

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[DallasMike]

Guess that's why I'm so bright and my skin is soft and white.

[VadeRetro]

And try to avoid jokes about Reagan and Death Valley Days.

There went a lot of this thread's potential! Especially for us old farts who really remember Ronnie touting 20-mule-team Boraxo^TM.

[Cicero]

It's taken about 50 years to find a barely possible way in which Miller's suggestion about how life arose spontaneously from the protoplasmic soup could possibly have worked. And after 150 years they're still trying to find a single instance that would confirm Darwin's theory of general evolution.

Talk about religious faith in an impossible dream.

[Momaw Nadon]

[The Electrician]

Benner and his team showed that formaldehyde, with other interstellar compounds, could form ribose and other sugars when treated in the presence of base materials such as lime, a material used to adjust the pH level of lawns, among other things. Lime was effective, but the ribose decomposed soon after it was formed.

Perhaps a chemist can help answer a question that this raises. These scientists were careful to use formaldehyde because it has been detected in interstellar space. But then they treat it with lime. Normally, lime is created from limestone. Isn't limestone created by the actions of living things such as shellfish? Does lime occur naturally, too? If so, is it stable enough to remain in that form, or would it rapidly turn into some other compound? If lime does not occur naturally, are they postulating that it may have occurred naturally 3 billion years ago? Otherwise, aren't they relying on the occurrance of a byproduct of life to explain the emergence of life?

[js1138]

Everybody be nice. And try to avoid jokes about Reagan and Death Valley Days.

So if this guy's so smart, who made the 20 mule team to tote the borax?

[sergeantdave]

A 20 mule team brought life to Earth. I saw pictures of it.

[LiteKeeper]

built on a famous experiment done 50 years earlier by Stanley Miller that is found in many textbooks.

Miller's tests were absolute failures. There are so many problems wiith his experiments that there is no way they could even be consider as pointing to a solution to the origin of life.

YEC INTREP

[nmh]

Oh, absolutely - LIFE comes from a dead object ! Thanks, I needed a laugh to start the day.

[GreenHornet]

This shoots down my theory that life on Earth sprang from a can of Comet Cleanser.

[DannyTN]

"We are not claiming that this is how life started," Benner stressed. "We are saying that we have demonstrated a recipe to make a key part of life without any biochemical machinery."

And if an explosion occurred next to this rock that has a flat edge projecting from it, then it could have caused the rock to turn resulting in a screw being driven into my automobile.

I am not claiming that this is how autombiles started," DannyTN stressed. "I am saying that I have demonstrated a recipe to make a key part of my autombile without any biochemical machinery.

[WildWeasel]

Sea Monkeys from Boraxo?

[Bernard Marx]

try to avoid jokes about Reagan and Death Valley Days.

That's really very funny. But Reagan would have been the first to admit that he was probably that old.

[DennisR]

"We are not claiming that this is how life started," Benner stressed. "We are saying that we have demonstrated a recipe to make a key part of life without any biochemical machinery. The more recipes of this type that can be found, the more clues we have about how life could have actually gotten started on the primitive Earth."

Your government dollars at work. I used to respect people who were called "scientists." No more. And I'm an engineer!

[<1/1,000,000th%]

This announcement provides a key step toward solving the 3-billion-year-old mystery of how life on Earth began.

Isn't this a 4.55-billion-year-old mystery???

[Sloth]

[Poohbah]

Everybody be nice. And try to avoid jokes about Reagan and Death Valley Days.

OK, so we have abiogenesis creating the 20 Mule Team.

[Scenic Sounds]

What do you make of this?