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 ...
Define "information."
That cells from a single source evolved by natural means into man and mushroom is the theory of evolution, and is what's being taught in schools.
Does "transmitted data" suffice?
Define "transmitted data." Indeed, define "data."
Then again describing DNA as a database and using the phrase "encrypted algorithm" is highly misleading. Anyone with a basic idea of databases or encryption could go away with a false understanding of how DNA works.
They would have been better off hearing that DNA is a molecule which consists of a string of bases.
There's no point using an analogy if it just misleads. Of course I suspect that is kind of the intention though. The analogy is simply to make DNA seem more like a computer, and therefore infer that it was designed.
DNA is the medium, but it's the message that matters.
What about sunlight?
It turns out ElectricStrawberry cannot even prove that the world wasn't created yesterday.
The answer of Western philosophy at least since Descartes has been that we can trust the evidence of our senses because God does not deceive.
And how do we know that there is a God who does not deceive? Which cognitive faculties should we use to determine that there is a God who does not deceive, so that we can trust the deliverances of our cognitive faculties?
If you don't trust that explanation, I recommend that you ask [act?] as if it does
What started off as a bold assertion concerning what science can prove is reduced to a recommendation that we act as though science proves things.
-A8
I see you snipped the "favorite argument of college freshmen" part of my post, among many others. I think I've covered the basics. Feel free to re-read the parts you missed.
And how do we know that there is a God who does not deceive?
We don't. If God does not deceive, we can trust our senses. If there is no God and ours is a purely materialistic universe, we can trust our senses. If we are in a universe ruled by a capricious trickster god, we cannot trust anything, and live in perpetual uncertainty.
What started off as a bold assertion concerning what science can prove is reduced to a recommendation that we act as though science proves things.
I was recommending that, if you doubt the reality of the material universe, you not step in front of what appears to be a bus to test your hypothesis.
I hereby retract that recommendation.
It is not. Evolution is a mechanism by which one form of life becomes other forms of life. It does not weigh in on where or when or how or in how many places life came to exist. That is outside its sphere.
and is what's being taught in schools.
Then either something erroneous is being taught in those unspecified schools or you misunderstand what is being taught. I have no personal knowledge which is which, but I know which way I'd bet if I had to.
that which is apprehensible by reason or sense.
The most important empirical principles relating to the concept of information have been defined in the form of theorems. Here is a brief summary of them:
1. Information cannot exist without a code.
2. Code cannot exist without a free and deliberate convention.
3. Information cannot exist without the five hierarchical levels: statistics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics and apobetics.
4. Information cannot exist in purely statistical processes.
5. Information cannot exist without a transmitter.
6. Information chain cannot exist without a mental origin.
7. Information cannot exist without an initial mental source; that is, information is, by its nature, a mental and not a material quantity.
8. Information cannot exist without a will.
Whether or not an argument is the favorite of someone does not refute the argument. That's why I ignored that comment.
We don't. If God does not deceive, we can trust our senses. If there is no God and ours is a purely materialistic universe, we can trust our senses. If we are in a universe ruled by a capricious trickster god, we cannot trust anything, and live in perpetual uncertainty.
So either can trust our senses or we cannot. Great. That was real helpful.
As long as you can't scientifically prove that the world wasn't created yesterday, you have no grounds for claiming that you can scientifically prove the truth of the theory of evolution. (I'm not picking on evolution; I'm pointing out the problem with positivistic scientism.)
-A8
The theory of evolution is that all life sprang from a common ancestor and evolved via natural mechanisms. What exactly do you think it is?
Then either something erroneous (that cells from a single source evolved by natural means into man and mushroomis) is being taught in those unspecified schools or you misunderstand what is being taught.
Well!! A chance for peace, love and harmony. I'll tell you what. You start posting on these boards that WE MUST NOT TEACH IN OUR SCHOOLS THAT CELLS FROM A SINGLE SOURCE EVOLVED BY NATURAL MEANS INTO MAN AND MUSHROOMS and I'll hold your coat and cheer you on. I'll back you 100 percent. Go for it.
> But there's something screwy about banning Darwin from science classrooms, simply because he was wrong.
Darwin was wrong in some things, as were Kepler, Galileo, Einstein and Newton. But on the larger matters of what these people were famous for, they were (and remain) right.
No sweat.
The problem with understanding evolution is that it is a complex process, like history. You cannot (not yet, anyway... Hari Selden hasn't shown up) express history as a set of equations; you can only look at generalities and trends. But the fact that you can't express, say, the war of 1812 as a series of numbers does not mean that the war didn't happen. Same with evolution.
> The theory that just given enough time and randomness that life will form is like given the letters of the alphabet and letting a random generator create words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters that eventually you will have all the works of William Shakespeare. RIGHT?
Wrong. There are an infinite number of possible outcomes. Many will be pure gibberish, like a Howard-Dean-on-acid speach. But there is a smaller set of outcomes that *won't* be gibberish. The fact that none of the outcomes are Shakespeare is irrelevant. A small subset of an infinite set is a very large number.
"Some virii are quite simple."
> Compared to what?
Other virii, and certainly to bacteria.
"Other virii, and certainly to bacteria."
Considering we don't know how even simple virii function, I'm not sure that "simple" is an appropriate description.
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