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 ...
"We are at war for our survival against the Democrats/Communists and the Islamists and it is truly a battle to the death."
I was saying something similar to someone yesterday. I felt bad being so negative, but honestly, the intent of the enemy is evil, and people just do not want to accept it.
On an interesting side note. I was thinking about how the liberal media used changing semantics to alter peoples perceptions of various things. For example, "Bums" became "homeless", "blacks" became "african americans".
I was trying to think of what some of the recent attempts they are making to change public perception of things, Forexample, "Pro-Choice" being presented as "pro-privacy" that one is easy. "insurgents" for "terrorists", I am sure there are more subtle ones I am missing...
Really? Do you have any cites or sources to offer?
Yes and no.
The study of science leads to questions that are not specifically scientific. In other words, the phenomena under question is part of a world that is bigger than the conventions of naturalism. Specialization is safe; it permits one to ignore the point of overlap.
I have no doubt that judges of this sort plan to ban the philosophy of science as well.
> It is interesting to me that this ToE vs ID issue comes up simultaneously with the left's war on God, the church, Christmas, etc. It seems another leftist issue and front in the battle to change our culture to one more amenable to Communism
In that I would agree. Closet Leftists pretending to be right-wing fundies trying to replace science with obvious superstitious nonsense... it's an ingenious if diabolical strategy to discredit the conservative movement. I'm not generally given to conspiracy theories, but that's really the only one that explains the vociferousness of many supposedly conservative "creationists."
> I applaud your "faith" in science to solve that particular problem.
The guy who decoded the human genome is on his way to doing what you consider fanciful. The history of science has shown that unless somethign is agaisn tthe laws of physics, it'll eventually be done. And since there's nothing in the laws of phsyics stating that life cannot come from lifelessness, I have no doubt that it will eventually be done.
Everything wasn't created yesterday and my calibrated clocks keep good calibrated time to prove that everything wasn't created yesterday. BUT, my clock WOULD NOT look different from the day before yesterday or yesterday or tomorrow. How can something that already existed 2 days ago, be created YESTERDAY? I'd love to see the leap of logic.
What does a singular court decision based on one poorly crafted book have to do with deciding the fallacy of ID?
But there's something screwy about banning Darwin from science classrooms, simply because he was wrong.
What's your relativistic inertial reference frame? A perpetual calendar travelling at 99.99999999999% of the speed of light would mark out 6,000 years while 13.4 billion years elapsed here on Earth.
Very good! Unfortunately, darwinists may have trouble understanding this concept.
So you admit that you think "theory" should be redefined to admit astrology.
Interesting. Myself, I think that words mean things, and I don't want them redefined to accomodate anyone's PC, no matter who's pushing that PC.
Thanks, ks_shooter.
It appears that the judge is headed in this direction.
That the intellect is an aspect of the soul, which is the (Aristotelean) form of the body, and that the soul/form/intellect is a simple spiritual substance.
You did a wonderful job of keeping it simple. Thanks.
Highball,
You are performing a clever rhetorical two-step by equivocating on the definition of "science". For a theory to be "scientific" it much only be testable by scientific methods, it doesn't have to be correct. When the mood suits you, you use the term "science" to only include theories that have been shown to be correct. This approach leads to a paradox in which no theory could be examined by science until it was first proved to be correct.
The theory that galactic gravitation forces influence our destinies is with near certainty WRONG, but it does fall within the realm of concepts that can be scientifically tested. In that sense astrology IS science. It is just extremely likely that it is a INCORRECT scientific explanation. Behe's only point is that it is not an INVALID scientific explanation, only a bad one.
I'm doing no such thing.
Astrology is not falsifiable. It fails the test of the word "theory".
>>>Due to information complexity and interdependence, no living organism can ever spontaneously arise from lifeless matter which exists in a naturally occurring state, but life can be created. This statement can be tested and falsified.
This is much like the test for ID proposed by both Professors Behe and Minnich to grow the bacterial flagellum in the laboratory. In the trial, Professor Behe conceded that the proposed test could not approximate real world conditions and even if it could, Professor Minnich admitted that it would merely be a test of evolution, not design.
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