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 ...
I've posted my own paranoid version: The DUmmies are on FR salting the site with quotes to be mined at a later date (like next November).
I'd really like to know DI's funding sources. Soros, anyone?
It can't be anyone who wishes the GOP (or the USA) well
This is not true. Autotrophs another reference
And, by your definitions of "information" (specifically, numbers 6, 7 and 8) DNA does not convey information, as there is no initial mental source, nor is there any will involved. Of course, I also consider your definition of "information" to be creationist bunk, but it is your definition, so that is what we worked with.
Nope, you're missing the point.
So, an autotroph (self + needs) produces its own food. An autotroph gets its nutrition without the help of other life forms. Autrotrophs do not require other life forms to get the carbon they need because there is plenty of carbon dioxide available in the environment.
See the diagram here
Here's a discussion of a bacterium that can use organic food, but doesn't have to.
Merry Christmas!
Less esoterically, just hink of a lichen on a rock. It gets sunlight and moisture, and also some minerals from the rock. but where does it get any organic food?
BTW, you two related?
Merry Christmas!
The fact that I have memories of this interminable debate are evidence that the universe has existed for at least a couple of days.
Positivistic science cannot prove which one of those possibilities was actual
Science cannot answer epistemological questions. It can, applying Occam's razor, come up with an explanation that best fits the available evidence with the fewest guesses and assumptions. If you choose to doubt that the sun has risen in the east for billions of years and will do so again tomorrow, that's up to you.
The bacterium you mentioned are not known to be able to survive without ingesting organic material. They can simply go for extended periods without, metabolizing that which they've stored...not unlike a very simplified version of a bear hibernating.
Could you please provide some sources for this claim?
These people seem to disagree:
Lichens will grow almost anywhere that a stable and reasonbly well-lit surface occurs. This may include soil, rock, or even the sides of trees. A lichen may absorb certain mineral nutrients from any of these substrates on which it grows, but is generally self-reliant in feeding itself through photosynthesis in the algal cells. Thus, lichens growing on trees are not parasites on the trees and do not feed on them, any more than you feed on the chair you sit in. Lichens growing in trees are simply using the tree as a home. Lichens growing on rocks, though, may release chemicals which speed the degradation of the rock into soil, and thus promote production of new soils.
Or check this:
...The isolate was a microaerobic-to-anaerobic chemolithoautotroph capable of using molecular hydrogen as the sole energy source and carbon dioxide as the sole carbon source...
and one more:
Nitrosomonas europaea is a bacterium that can derive all its energy and reductant for growth from the oxidation of ammonia to nitrite. The cell's demand for carbon has to be met almost entirely by the fixation of carbon dioxide. Additional mineral salts complete the cell's nutritional needs. Although this bacterium can incorporate small amounts of organic compounds into cellular biomass (19, 20, 59, 60), there is an obligate requirement for oxidation of ammonia and assimilation of inorganic nutrients to support growth. As such, this bacterium is a member of a small group of bacteria known as obligate chemolithoautotrophs.
Couldn't resist Thiobacillus ferrooxidans
"T. ferrooxidans can be grown on elemental sulfur using ferric iron as an electron acceptor." No mention of any organics needed or used.
(Google can be addictive) Streptomyces thermoautotrophicus sp. nov., a Thermophilic CO- and H2-Oxidizing Obligate Chemolithoautotroph
this guy can live on car exhaust!
"S. thermoautotrophicus could grow with CO (td = 8 h), H2 plus CO2 (td = 6 h), car exhaust, or gas produced by the incomplete combustion of wood. Complex media or heterotrophic substrates such as sugars, organic acids, amino acids, and alcohols did not support growth. Molybdenum was required for CO-autotrophic growth. For growth with H2, nickel was not necessary."
And even if this were the case, it still argues against the basic theory of evolution. Surely, if this were a possibility, it would be a trait of the most advanced life forms on the planet as it would guarantee survival in hostile conditions.
First, who's saying bacteria aren't the most advanced lfeforms? They've been here longer than anyone else, and can survive in the wierdest places.
Actually, it's more of an argument against design. Why?
It's easy to imagine designing something with all sorts of redundency and backup systems. It might, in retrospect, have been better to have symbiotc nitrogen-fixers and chemotrophs in our gut, instead of E. coli and his (ahem) buds. Or symbiotic phototrophs. However, it's not at all clear what the downside of this would be: if we had leaves, that's a lot of extra mass and surface area to carry around that's only needed when hunting and gathering are bad.
But in ToE, we're a function of what we're descended from.
Features can be lost: unlike almost all other mammals, great apes (including us) have lost the ability to make vitamin C. Evidently there was enough in some ancestor's diet that it didn't get scurvy. Not having lost this would promote survival at sea, but the designer didn't plan for this.
Nice discussion, but it's past my bedtime.
Merry Christmas!
Douglas Adams, who was a great wit on many levels, compared Man to a puddle that finds itself in a pothole. "What a miracle," thinks the puddle, "that I should find a pothole in my exact shape!"
Hypothesis: The designer enabled the development of more complex organisms by "seeding" simpler ones with unnecessary-to-them genes that would only be useful later on as the complexity of organisms increased.
Test: Demonstrate that there is a "natural" explanation for these genes to have developed.
Hypotheses: The designer created the first form(s) of life.
Test: Prove life can be created without intervention.
Merry Christmas everybody.
v.
May the God that created this world continue to bless it.
How do you scientifically prove that your clocks were here 2 days ago?
I made a notation in my FDA regulated labratory notebook number "LN-2004-043". Any other asinine questions that go nowhere? Go ahead. Prove that everything was created yesterday. Hell, prove anything.
It turns out ElectricStrawberry cannot even prove that the world wasn't created yesterday.
By saying "yesterday", you're not only being ambiguous in that "yesterday" is not a scientific term that "scientists" would use....and you're leaving yourself an "out" by not defining "yesterday." Hell, I existed 2 days ago, I existed 1 day ago, and I exist today. How much more proof do you need? You're arguiung the inarguable in that I could not have been created yesterday if I existed BEFORE yesterday. Everything I know existed 2 days ago and that alone proves that it all couldn't be created yesterday. Funny thing about proving negatives, some of them are absolutely asinine at face value and don't need proving. Go ahead. Prove that the world was created yesterday.
...or do you really just have nothing to say?
It's very simple, Evolution couldn't have possibily be a factor. It's never been proven and it's absurb to think one species completely changed it's DNA to become another. Maybe a variation of a species like different kinds of frogs, insects, or reptiles. But for a fish to become a lizard, an lizard to become a bird.....or an ape to become a human is almost laughable......it's impossible. For many reasons............even Einstein proved to his dismay that a God existed. That is also a bit of trivia that many don't know about.....but all factual and documented. Although that is another thread, "The existence of a God". But, God didn't use evolution to form what we have today.......the others just became extinct. The animals formed today were formed by his will......I would think that a God that could create a universe from nothing, just might be able to create whatever he wanted to in life as well.
Us, Humans with our puny little 4 dimensional capabilities, and with only 10% of "brain use" could not begin to understand the full picture. We are trying to explain the concepts with only our very very limited knowledge. Like pre-historic man might try to explain a TV he sees for the first time. He can only use the concepts that he knows to describe the magic of a TV. We are exactly the same.
Tom
Tom
Intelligent Design is the only way. We try to reason with very puny brains. We don't have the capability to understand the vastness of God. We can only explain to a point and then it becomes cloudy even for scientists. They have no idea how old the universe is...they have no real idea how it was formed but by the Big Bang from the ground work established by Einstein.
In short, two things have surfaced. One, Evolutionist and those in search of ET life/intelligence etc....share a hope and many of the "young-creationist", the fear that if the Universe is billions or years old, could could somehow "self-assemble" and develop into intelligent beings by only natural processes. You know the lightening, methane gas......enzymes, hormones or whatever...:)) It his was true, life could and probably does exist elsewhere in the entire Universe.......However! For many reasons, science tells us that the premise cannot be true. The entire 17 billion year age Universe is actually inadequate to explain life by natural processes.........
The second issue of Einstein discovering life..well, he had a reaction to his own theories and equations. These may possibly acknowledge the threat of an encounter with God. Simply said, before he actually published his inferences about the Universe based on his theory of general relativity, he searched for a way to change the equations or shall we say modify the equations in any way that would permit a static universe with "bodies" that rotated around each other. However, it didn't work out that way, he discovered that the universe was expanding and.......decelerating. Thus supporting and proving the Big Bang. Meaning, the universe had a one point origin or beginning......So, even Atheist and Agnostic have to agree that something just doesn't happen from nothing or on it's own. So, Einstein gave up and according to his journals, accepted the necessity for a beginning and eventually to the presence of a "superior reasoning Power". He never did accept the doctrine of a personal God. It is thought that from researchers that have read his Diary that he had a deep bitterness toward the clergy of that time, and priests in particular. He also had the frustration associated with an inability to understand the paradox of God's omnipotence and man's responsibilty for his choices or "free will"....I could give the exact quote from his journal if anyone is interested, but I thought that I would pass on this tidbit of info......
It's already been tested and proved correct......fact....
He might not lie...but he can be mistaken. Remember, early on scientist thought that the Earth was flat, later the Universe was only 4-6 Billion years old, that the electric light was impossible, he was mistaken to believe in Evolution.....or could have an agenda. Even Einstein changed his own theory to make the Universe static, until he was corrected by another scientist...and had to change it back to the original formula to reflect an expanding and decelerating universe.....
I’m certainly no scientist, but I have done some research on the subject matter. It’s not something that just one source will tell you. To begin, in 1905 Einstein began to publish important papers in theoretical physics, particularly on the special theory of relativity, which synthesized the law of the conservation of the mass with the law of the conservation of energy into an equivalence in terms of the speed of light squared: E=mc2.
The three-dimensional coordinates of space and the one of time were also joined into the four-dimensional continuum of space-time. He also published "The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity" in 1916. Using the space-time continuum concept, he postulated that gravity is not a force as much as a field shaped by bodies of mass. His theory was proved correct when he accurately predicted that even light from stars would bend when passing near the sun; this was measured and verified by Arthur Eddington during a total eclipse in 1919.
Now, relative to the point, to the assertion by a poster….
”Atomic energy has absoluly nothing to do with the theory of relativity Energy = Mass times (186000 MPS squared).”
Einstein's famous formula E=mc2 indicates that a very small amount of matter may be converted into a tremendous amount of energy. In July 1939 Leo Szilard told Einstein about the work under way which showed that through nuclear fission a chain reaction might be started. This was a shock to Einstein. Four and a half years earlier he had discounted the likelihood of releasing energy from a molecule, saying,
"It is something like shooting birds in the dark in a country where there are only a few birds."10 Now he immediately realized the danger if Germany were to get uranium from the Belgian Congo, and he agreed to contact the Belgium government through his friend, Queen Elizabeth.
On August 2, 1939 Einstein wrote to President Roosevelt explaining how nuclear chain reactions in a large mass of uranium could generate large amounts of power and radium-like elements. In fact, in the immediate future, a powerful enough bomb could be built to destroy an entire port. He pointed out that the best uranium is found in Canada, the former Czechoslovakia, and especially the Belgian Congo, and he had heard that Germany had stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines. He added that the son of the German Under-Secretary of State was attached to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut in Berlin, and they were repeating some of the American work on uranium. The letter, with a memorandum by Szilard, actually was not delivered to the President by Sachs until October 11. President Roosevelt immediately appointed an Advisory Committee on Uranium. Later Einstein considered the writing of this letter the one great mistake of his life; at the time he felt justified because of the danger that the Germans would make atom bombs. This was the extent of Einstein's role in nuclear energy; he did not know an atomic bomb had been developed by the United States until he heard of the Hiroshima blast.
Finally, relative to a young universe...there is no real evidence of a young universe other than what the Bible says or should I say how we are interpreting it. God's six days is not our six days......The evidence suggests it is a very old universe.....and creation by one God.....
Tom
Placemarker
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