Posted on 12/22/2005 7:15:18 AM PST by Michael_Michaelangelo
WHEN Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he gave a convincing account of how life has evolved over billions of years from simple microbes to the complexity of the Earth's biosphere to the present. But he pointedly left out how life got started.
One might as well speculate about the origin of matter, he quipped. Today scientists have a good idea of how matter originated in the Big Bang, but the origin of life remains shrouded in mystery.
Although Darwin refused to be drawn on how life began, he conjectured in a letter to a friend about "a warm little pond" in which various substances would accumulate.
Driven by the energy of sunlight, these chemicals might become increasingly complex, until a living cell formed spontaneously. Darwin's idle speculation became the basis of the "primordial soup" theory of biogenesis, and was adopted by researchers eager to re-create the crucial steps in the laboratory. But this approach hasn't got very far.
The problem is that even the simplest known organism is incredibly complex. Textbooks vaguely describe the pathway from non-living chemicals to primitive life in terms of some unspecified "molecular self-assembly".
The problem lies with 19th-century thinking, when life was regarded as some sort of magic matter, fostering the belief that it could be cooked up in a test tube if only one knew the recipe.
Today many scientists view the living cell as a type of supercomputer - an information-processing and replicating system of extraordinary fidelity. DNA is a database, and a complex encrypted algorithm converts its instructions into molecular products.
(Excerpt) Read more at smh.com.au ...
Inasmuch as the esteemed judge does not know whether God is "natural" or not, his opinion from a scientific standpoint is pure bilge.
That's by court order too?
Um, no. Prokaryotic (sorry, misnamed the cell type the first post) cells are assumed to be the FIRST forms of life to exist on the planet; their chemistry is essentially unchanged. I'm not looking at 3 billions years at all; I'm looking at the first organisms, and I'm telling you flat out that the laws of chemistry prohibit the formation of the molecules required by those organisms outside the specialized environment of the cell.
Chemistry isn't evolution. Chemists don't wave their hands and pronounce "just so" stories about how this or that biological trait occurred. Chemists experiment, and the experiments and laws of chemistry resulting from those experiments prove that cellular organic chemicals cannot form outside the environment of a cell just as surely as the law of gravity proves that letting go of a hammer will cause it to fall to the ground.
Sorry, but there is no such law.
And that eye spot happened how....?
> And yet while the sequence of GTAC base pairs in a virus is essentially indistinguishable from a random sequence, only the sequence of genes, with few variations, found in the virus will result in an operational virus.
And why is this a problem? If the original DNA sequence - say, four base pairs long - was survivable and replicable, then it would survive. If it was not survivable, it would fall apart. Those that survived had the opportunity to add new information, mutate and evolve. Those mutations that hinder lead to the organism dying. There is no "mind" or "design" or "intent" required. Just random mutations and natural selection.
The logic is quite simple and elegant, even though I might not express it as well as others.
The same thing when someone claims to have invented yet another perpetual motion machine.
I'm like you. To many social conservatives suddenly dropped their opposition to something that didn't explicitly spell out creation for the weasel words intelligent design. Guess they thought they could sneak it in with a little political correctness.
I also have a problem with those that try to define Intelligent Design in a way so that it falls outside of the realm of Science.
Your beef is with the proponents of ID then. They are the ones who admit that in order for ID to be considered "science," the definition has to be broadened to include such disciplines as astrology.
> And that eye spot happened how....?
An eye spot is a collection of photo-senstive nerve cells... a single mutation away from a single lone photosensitve nerve cell. A photosensitive nerve cell is a single mutation away from a normal nerve cell.
Two mutations lead from an entirely blind critter to one that can tell lightt from dark.
And why? And how? Had it happened before? How many times? Where? So many questions. So much dogma.
Modern Geology isn't valid science, since I can't assemble a back-arc basin in my lab.
Modern Astronomy isn't a science, since I can't create a star in the lab.
astrology?
Huh. Well, ok.... you can stick your fingers in your ears, close your eyes real tight and go "La-la-la-la-la" all day, then.
Is this a correct statement? If so, why not just E=M?
Actually, the earth's axis wobbled from the bang just so many times until it figured out that survivability depended on stability. You know what I mean.
There's another discussion going on another Freep line here that would drive you nuts with all the crap on it too. Here's a quote from Chuck Colson in "How Now Shall We Live," "Creation is the first element of the Christian worldview, the foundation on which everything else is built. It is the basis of human dignity, for our origin tells us who we are, why we are here, and how we should treat one another." Darwin's theory of evolution can answer none of these fundamental human yearnings.
I am, perhaps, too cynical after seeing so many posts that express thinly veiled delight at the prospect of eternal damnation for non-adherence to the one true gospel of the "Second Reformed Assembly of the Revised Southwestern 17th Street Synod of the Retooled Orthodox Church of Rectified Inerrancy." : )
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