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 ...
Processing observations does not require a "code." The observations processed are not "codes." Photons hitting a photoreceptor and being turned into electrical energy are not imparting any "code" to that receptor. Photons hitting a photoreceptor in the eye and being turned into electro-chemical cascades are not utilizing any "code."
How do you know?
>>>due to information complexity and interdependence, no living organism can ever spontaneously arise from lifeless matter which exists in a naturally occurring state. It is both testable and falsifiable.
How do I test it and how would it be falsified?
Nice spin. I don't have to show the non-existence of a code (that would be trying to prove a negative). I only have to show it is not necessary (which I've done). If you assert such a code (a positive assertion) it is your duty to show evidence for it.
As I have stated in earlier threads, the experimentation supporting or disproving my hypothesis are ongoing without regard to my propositions.
Scientists are interested in creating life. If life is ever assembled from lifeless matter, it will support my hypothesis. If, in this attempt, a mechanism is discovered whereby simple life forms self organize within a naturally occurring environment, it will falsify my hypothesis. Of course, it does not necessarily have to happen in a lab, but as an example it could.
>>>Scientists are interested in creating life. If life is ever assembled from lifeless matter, it will support my hypothesis. If, in this attempt, a mechanism is discovered whereby simple life forms self organize within a naturally occurring environment, it will falsify my hypothesis. Of course, it does not necessarily have to happen in a lab, but as an example it could.
So this is a test of evolution, not ID. If a mechanism is discovered whereby simple life forms self organize within a naturally occurring environment, this does not disprove ID (as the designer could have been behind these mechanuisms), it merely lends support to evolution (actually biogenesis). On the other side, suppose scientists are able to show wiith certainty that this cannot be done. This in no way proves that there must have been a designer to control the process. It merely disproves the theory of abiogenesis.
How do you read "too much" into the DNA molecule? It carries the blueprint for every protein, and the instructions on how and when they are to be formed. That is one of the most bizarre statements I have ever read on FreeRepublic!
The evidence to which you refer cannot be evidence for the things you claim it to be evidence for, since the very same evidence would be present if everything you said was false and the world was created yesterday.
-A8
It is simply a string of chemicals that has, over time through the process of selection, evolved to produce the necessary proteins required of the co-evolving organism. There is nothing magical about the process, nor is there any "code" involved. It's simply chemicals and their affinities for one-another.
You have got to be kidding!
Strings of amino acids, 100 to 400 molecules long, are formed not just once, but over and over again, based on the sequence of nucleotides in the DNA. That doesn't happen by CHANCE.
Go back to the biology books. Noone disputes the essential role of DNA in the formation of the building blocks of life.
No one said it happened by chance. I did say it was the result of the process of evolution selecting the appropriate proteins. There is nothing magic about this, regardless of your desire to see it that way.
Evolution can't "select" anything...and your process is nothing but chance.
Peter Noone, of Herman's Hermits? "Selecting" does not imply anything other than the best fit for current conditions (anything else is a creationist strawman). As for the "starting sequence," it did not spring full blown as Athena from Zeus's head (as some creationists evidently postulate). It evolved as a successful self-replicating molecule. It needn't have started at its current length; it could have started with only a few nucleotides in the pre-biotic environment and bootstrapped from there.
If you postulate an intelligent designer, you need to show evidence of such. I do not need to disprove your assertions, I simply need to show such an entity is not necessary.
Showing evidence for something is a far cry from proving its necessity. The evidence for code in physical matter resides in the capacity for human intellect to apprehend its existence.
You have evidence of this, where?
If you postulate an intelligent designer, you need to show evidence of such. I do not need to disprove your assertions, I simply need to show such an entity is not necessary.
There is information, despite your unwillingness to acknowledge same, in the DNA. You have not shown, by any stretch of the imagination, that the "entity" is not necessary. There are certain minimums for life, and replication...and they are quite complex. You are, in essence, attributing the "original state" to some sort of "black box" status. And evolution is clueless in trying to explain it.
There is no available evidence that the world was created yesterday. Science's interest ends there.
Apparently, you do not realize that this scientific evidence to which you refer is equally compatible with an infinite number of possibilities: the world was created yesterday, the world was created two days ago, etc. Positivistic science cannot prove which one of those possibilities was actual. If you say that there is no evidence that the world was created yesterday, you are saying that among all the infinite possibilities compatible with the evidence, the evidence does not point to yesterday any more than it points to any other time in the past.
-A8
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