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The question even Darwin avoided
The Sydney Morning Herald ^ | 12/22/05 | Paul Davies

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 ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Extended News
KEYWORDS: crevo; crevolist; darwin; intelligentdesign
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To: NC28203
This rigorous attachment to “natural” explanations is an essential attribute to science by definition and by convention.

Inasmuch as the esteemed judge does not know whether God is "natural" or not, his opinion from a scientific standpoint is pure bilge.

101 posted on 12/22/2005 8:36:54 AM PST by Fester Chugabrew
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To: highball
ID is not a scientific theory

That's by court order too?

102 posted on 12/22/2005 8:39:18 AM PST by cornelis
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To: bobbdobbs
You are looking at life after 3 billion years of existance. Your "impossiblility" hypothesis is pure speculation about steps and stages you have no evidence for one way or the other.

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.

103 posted on 12/22/2005 8:39:41 AM PST by frgoff
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To: JamesP81
that there is a scientific law stating that spontaneous generation does not occur, that is, life doesn't come from things that aren't alive

Sorry, but there is no such law.

104 posted on 12/22/2005 8:40:01 AM PST by blowfish
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To: orionblamblam
The diagram below shows a simple eye spot.

And that eye spot happened how....?

105 posted on 12/22/2005 8:40:38 AM PST by Casloy
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To: mvpel

> 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.


106 posted on 12/22/2005 8:41:08 AM PST by orionblamblam (A furore Normannorum libra nos, Domine)
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To: orionblamblam

The same thing when someone claims to have invented yet another perpetual motion machine.


107 posted on 12/22/2005 8:41:17 AM PST by frgoff
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To: Coyoteman
Your link to "Wedge Strategy" doesn't work. I'm not sure if it just went on the fritz today or has been long a "doesn't reside on this server" issue for a long time.

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.

108 posted on 12/22/2005 8:41:18 AM PST by joesbucks
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To: ks_shooter
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.

109 posted on 12/22/2005 8:42:20 AM PST by highball ("I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have." -- Thomas Jefferson)
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To: orionblamblam
There is no "mind" or "design" or "intent" required. Just random mutations and natural selection.
110 posted on 12/22/2005 8:42:41 AM PST by cornelis
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To: Casloy

> 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.


111 posted on 12/22/2005 8:43:10 AM PST by orionblamblam (A furore Normannorum libra nos, Domine)
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To: Sybeck1
What went "Bang"?

And why? And how? Had it happened before? How many times? Where? So many questions. So much dogma.

112 posted on 12/22/2005 8:43:31 AM PST by Bernard Marx (Don't make the mistake of interpreting my Civility as Servility)
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To: Fester Chugabrew
Following this logic:

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.

113 posted on 12/22/2005 8:43:50 AM PST by blowfish
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To: highball

astrology?


114 posted on 12/22/2005 8:45:07 AM PST by cornelis
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To: frgoff

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.


115 posted on 12/22/2005 8:45:24 AM PST by orionblamblam (A furore Normannorum libra nos, Domine)
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To: NC28203
The team found that the formula predicting that energy and mass are equivalent is correct to an incredible accuracy of better than one part in a million.

Is this a correct statement? If so, why not just E=M?

116 posted on 12/22/2005 8:45:25 AM PST by Mind-numbed Robot (Not all that needs to be done needs to be done by the government.)
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To: Aquinasfan
'Thinking computers' will never exist, because thought is an essentially non-material or spiritual phenomenon, and therefore cannot in principle be re-created materially.

Indeed. There is a group of computer scientists (can't remember what their theory is called, though) that have pretty much come to the same conclusion: that self-awareness is not a function of sufficiently sophisticated hardware, but is something that lies outside of science, or at least outside of known science. Basically, they believe the spark of self-awareness is a function of having a soul or something like it, something that cannot be replicated.

Of course, those of you who know me, know that I believe that we do have a soul given to us by the Most High God. A computer doesn't.

The only possibility I can see for 'thinking' computers, is to replace a computer's central processing unit and memory storage with a collection of neurons, essentially a cloned brain. I'm not sure if such a thing is even possible, and if it were, if it would work as expected (which I have serious doubts about). Furthermore, if someone did do it and it worked as expected, then I think that the resulting 'machine' would hardly qualify as a computer anymore.
117 posted on 12/22/2005 8:45:51 AM PST by JamesP81
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To: Bernard Marx
How many times?

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.

118 posted on 12/22/2005 8:46:16 AM PST by cornelis
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To: HEY4QDEMS

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.


119 posted on 12/22/2005 8:46:37 AM PST by conservative blonde (Conservative Blonde)
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To: JamesP81
A generous and kind-hearted interpretation.

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." : )

120 posted on 12/22/2005 8:47:57 AM PST by atlaw
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