Posted on 08/15/2005 7:01:06 PM PDT by gobucks
Project begins amid arguing over teaching evolution. Harvard University is launching a broad initiative to discover how life began, joining an ambitious scientific assault on age-old questions that are central to the debate over the theory of evolution.
The Harvard project, which is likely to start with about $1 million annually from the university, will bring together scientists from fields as disparate as astronomy and biology, to understand how life emerged from the chemical soup of early Earth, and how this might have happened on distant planets.
Known as the "Origins of Life in the Universe Initiative," the project is still in its early stages, and fundraising has not begun, the scientists said.
But the university has promised the researchers several years of seed money and has asked the team to make much grander plans, including new faculty and a collection of multimillion-dollar facilities.
The initiative begins amid increasing controversy over the teaching of evolution, prompted by proponents of "intelligent design," who argue that even the most modest cell is too complex, too finely tuned, to have come about without unseen intelligence.
President Bush recently said intelligent design should be discussed in schools, along with evolution. Like intelligent design, the Harvard project begins with awe at the nature of life, and with an admission that, almost 150 years after Charles Darwin outlined his theory of evolution in the Origin of Species, scientists cannot explain how the process began.
Now, encouraged by a confluence of scientific advances — such as the discovery of water on Mars and an increased understanding of the chemistry of early Earth — the Harvard scientists hope to help change that.
"We start with a mutual acknowledgment of the profound complexity of living systems," said David R. Liu, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard. But "my expectation is that we will be able to reduce this to a very simple series of logical events that could have taken place with no divine intervention."
The theory of evolution has been both fascinating and religiously charged since its very beginnings, because it speaks directly to the place of people in the natural order. In another era, the idea that humans are the close cousins of apes was seen as preposterous.
Today's research of origins focuses on questions that seem as strange as the study of "ape men" once did: How can life arise from nonlife? How easy is it for this to happen? And does the universe teem with life, or is Earth a solitary island?
At Harvard, the origins of life initiative is part of a dramatic rethinking of how to conduct scientific research.
Many of science's most interesting questions are emerging in the boundaries between traditional disciplines such as physics, chemistry, and biology, yet universities are largely organized by those disciplines. Harvard's president, Lawrence Summers, is a proponent of the view that universities must develop new structures to encourage interdisciplinary science. And new science laboratories based on this are at the center of the plans for a sprawling new campus.
The Harvard origins initiative is on a short list of projects being considered for this campus, along with the widely discussed Harvard Stem Cell Institute, which aspires to bring together biologists, chemists, doctors, and others.
The only causes under consideration are Natural.
But aside from this, consider the dictum,"More is in vain when less will serve". This clearly mandates that life processes, including their origin, should be explained according to lesser causes. This is a feat not accomplished, to be sure, but much less in Newton's time than ours, and in the General Scholium, at the very end, he indicates how life processes might be explained by physical principles, by the action of an "electrical and elastic spirit".
True, he does not speak directly to origins, but if we are committed to a physical explanation of the existence, operation, and reproduction of life, how is it that we abandon physicality at some arbitrary point in the past to explain its origin?
What is the MSM? I have seen this on FR a lot but can't figure out what it means.
But is has yet to be shown that less (i.e. natural) will serve. Until that point is reached, the statement does not apply.
This clearly mandates that life processes, including their origin, should be explained according to lesser causes.
I would add the important addendum: IF POSSIBLE.
As for Newton's statement "for Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes," a supernatural cause for the may not be superfluous but necessary.
a supernatural cause for the origin of life the may not be superfluous but necessary.
Consider Newton's commitment to a physical account of life processes at a time when virtually nothing that we accept as familiar fact - even chemistry - was known. It seems ridiculous, after the actual secret of life - long sought - has been discovered,( I refer to DNA and the genetic code,) to revert to supernaturalism to explain it's ORIGIN. Especially when we have evidence of the evolution of life processes according to physical law over hundreds of millions of years of earth history.
Here you are ignoring the main point that it is only NATURAL causes that are under consideration in the first place, as Newton clearly stipulates.
He specifies a choice between "more" and "less" only within the realm of natural explanation. An escape to supernatural explanation is "right out". That's like hitting the hyperspace button.
later pingout.
DNA and the genetic code is no more the secret of life than a computer chip and programing code is the secret of computers. These are merely the instrumental causes of a higher designer.
Especially when we have evidence of the evolution of life processes according to physical law over hundreds of millions of years of earth history.
What we have evidence of is a sequence of diverse species. How these diverse species came about, despite claims to the contrary, has not yet been explained by natural causes.
Natural causes might be the only proper subject of the natural sciences, but this does not mean that they are the only explanations of the truth. Logic would imply that there might be truths that are beyond the ability of the natural sciences to discover.
This can be directly refuted by noting that there are millions of separate species propagating themselves, according to physical law, via DNA and the genetic code, whereas there are no such computers or computer chips. Computers, in actual fact, are propagated by human manufacture, whereas life propagates itself, and has evidently done so for ... how many years ?
I say hundreds of millions of years. Where do you draw the line?
The genetic code is analagous to a digital computer in a biological world that works analogously.
So, do you want to stipulate that the blue-green Algae were specially created by some process to be described by you, and that life evolved henceforward according to physical law?
That is exactly the kind of "science" Harvard will be doing.
ping
Yeah, and you would still have a bunch of untested claims. Either you test and research, or you sit on your ass navel gazing. You and Limbaugh may be satisfied with the latter, but most people aren't.
And how is basing anything on Divine intervention science? How do you test for such?
Rush is a science department, Rush needs no "peer review".
main stream media
thanks for the ping!!
And even though I posted the article, being pinged to it is fine by me :)!
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