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 ...
In short, Darwin's in hell, and those who accept the theory of evolution as the best current explanation for biological development and diversification are also doomed to eternal suffering and damnation -- right? : )
There is a special radiation that emits from the sun every billion years - it is speculated this is what caused the original mutations and cooked up life. I saw on a documentary the other day that a group of scientists were travelling to a private space station to study a pending radiation burst that they believe is similar to the previous life giving burst of radiation billions of years ago. Tragically they mistimed the event and were subjected to the radiation and the shielding on the space station didn't help them at all - but now they have cool new powers. It was a neat documentary.
I didn't read his way too lengthy decision, but I was thinking of the couple cases where I.D. was okayed by the Federal courts to be mentioned in science classes as an alternative 'possible theory'.
Again I'm going by memory of what I've heard & saw on the O'Reilly Factor and can't cite specific cases. IIRC one instance involved an "I.D." sticker that was placed on HS science books.
One thing that the ID debate can do, IMHO, is shake up the status quo in which it is too easy to "imagine" how this or that complex system "could" have evolved and get evolutionary biologists working on providing hard data for their models.
Simple compared to a eurkayrotic cell perhaps. Besides, virii are irrelevant to evolution, since they cannot reproduce independently; they're parasitic.
It's not even really an argument of simple vs. complex, it's an argument of the laws of chemistry preventing the formation of the required chemicals outside of a living organism.
Unlike biological evolution, chemistry is an empirical science, focused in experimentation.
We understand the laws of chemical formation quite well (electron affinity, orbitals, activation energies, etc.)
When you look at the organics that are required by life, you find that they require complex catalysts, which also require catalysts, which require specialized environments, and that many of these chemicals are unstable outside the specialized environment of the cell.
You can stir the prebiotic chemicals all day in an organic soup, and they won't form ADP, DNA strands, transport proteins, gateway membranes, etc. The chemicals involved simply won't form. To maintain so is laughable. It's like saying that if you mix Helium and Oxygen together long enough, you'll eventually get Helium-Oxide. Ain't gonna happen.
Spontaneous generation is the perpetual motion machine of biology, only they're still trying to tell you you can build one.
Nothing could be simpler than an incurable idiot. Even viruses are more complex.
Because so little is knowable and provable in the scientific sense about the origins of life, this is usually a really short chapter in biology, anyway. It'd be a pretty sophisticated bio class that would have a chance to discuss "RNA World".
>>>My point is that testable hypotheses is not a requirement for scientific discussion.ID is a thoery, spagettification is a thoery, etc...
ID is not a scientific theory.
From the judges ruling.
Since the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, science has been limited to the search for natural causes to explain natural phenomena. This revolution entailed the rejection of the appeal to authority, and by extension, revelation, in favor of empirical evidence. Since that time period, science has been a discipline in which testability, rather than any
ecclesiastical authority or philosophical coherence, has been the measure of a scientific idea’s worth.
In deliberately omitting theological or “ultimate” explanations for the existence or characteristics of the
natural world, science does not consider issues of “meaning” and “purpose” in the world. While supernatural explanations may be important and have merit, they are not part of science. This self-imposed convention of science, which limits inquiry to testable, natural explanations about the natural world, is referred to by philosophers
as “methodological naturalism” and is sometimes known as the scientific method.
Methodological naturalism is a “ground rule” of science
today which requires scientists to seek explanations in the world around us based upon what we can observe, test, replicate, and verify.
Science is a particular way of knowing about the world. In science, explanations are restricted to those that can be inferred from the confirmable data – the results obtained
through observations and experiments that can be substantiated by other scientists. Anything that can be observed or measured is amenable to scientific investigation. Explanations that cannot be based upon empirical evidence are not part of science.
This rigorous attachment to “natural” explanations is an essential attribute to science by definition and by convention. From a practical perspective, attributing unsolved problems about nature to causes and forces that
lie outside the natural world is a “science stopper." Once you attribute a cause to an untestable supernatural force, a
proposition that cannot be disproven, there is no reason to continue seeking natural explanations as we have our answer.
ID is predicated on supernatural causation. ID takes a natural phenomenon and, instead of accepting or seeking a natural explanation, argues that the explanation is supernatural. Further support for the conclusion that ID is predicated on supernatural causation is found in the ID reference book to which ninth grade biology students are
directed, Pandas. Pandas states, in pertinent part, as follows: Darwinists object to the view of intelligent design
because it does not give a natural cause explanation of
how the various forms of life started in the first place.
Intelligent design means that various forms of life began
abruptly, through an intelligent agency, with their
distinctive features already intact – fish with fins and
scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc.
P-11 at 99-100. Stated another way, ID posits that animals did not evolve naturally through evolutionary means but were created abruptly by a non-natural, or supernatural, designer.
ID aspires to “change the ground rules” of science and lead
defense expert Professor Behe admitted that his broadened definition of science, which encompasses ID, would also embrace astrology. Moreover, defense expert Professor Minnich acknowledged that for ID to be considered science, the ground rules of science have to be broadened to allow
consideration of supernatural forces.
Comforting words, I'm sure, but not very true.
ID is actually an hypothesis resulting from empirical observations and experiments in microbiological systems, and as such it is quite falsifiable. I would highly recommend you read Darwin's Black Box.
Creationists have glommed onto ID because it allows for God, but the hypothesis itself is God-neutral.
'Thinking computers' will never exist, because thought is an essentially non-material or spiritual phenomenon, and therefore cannot in principle be re-created materially.
Thought deals in universal ideas abstracted from sense experience.
MODERATE REALISMThis system reconciles the characteristics of external objects (particularity) with those of our intellectual representations (universality), and explains why science, though made up of abstract notions, is valid for the world of reality. To understand this it suffices to grasp the real meaning of abstraction. When the mind apprehends the essence of a thing (quod quid est; tò tí en eînai), the external object is perceived without the particular notes which attach to it in nature (esse in singularibus), and it is not yet marked with the attribute of generality which reflection will bestow on it (esse in intellectu). The abstract reality is apprehended with perfect indifference as regards both the individual state without and the universal state within: abstrahit ab utroque esse, secundum quam considerationem considerattur natura lapidis vel cujus cumque alterius, quantum ad ea tantum quæ per se competunt illi naturæ (St Tomas, "Quodlibeta", Q. i, a. 1). Now, what is thus conceived in the absolute state (absolute considerando) is nothing else than the reality incarnate in any give individual: in truth, the reality, represented in my concept of man, is in Socrates or in Plato. There is nothing in the abstract concept that is not applicable to every individual; if the abstract concept is inadequate, because it does not contain the singular notes of each being, it is none the less faithful, or at least its abstract character does not prevent it from corresponding faithfully to the objects existing in nature. As to the universal form of the concept, a moment's consideration shows that it is subsequent to the abstraction and is the fruit of reflection: "ratio speciei accidit naturæ humanæ". Whence it follows that the universality of the concept as such is the work purely of the intellect: "unde intellectus est qui facit universalitatem in rebus" (St. Thomas, "De ente et essentia," iv).
The question then becomes whether the difference between the Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire and Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota is significant.
The shape of a snowflake is dictated by the physical characteristics of the water from which it is made. By what physical characteristic is the shape of the DNA molecule in the heart of a virus dictated?
LOL
We are on the same page. The second carbon based unit you posted I find very appealing to my eye, than the first two!
I see where you're going, but evolutionary biologists have been providing that hard data for well over a hundred years now....and have gone into the world of evolutionary genetics (following evolution through genetic DNA trees). AND, as a scientist, I can't stand it when people call Intelligent Design (which I have no problem with y'all believing) a "theory", when it is only an unproven and unprovable HYPOTHESIS, not a theory.
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It drives me crazy when people write crap like this.
It didn't strike me as it did you. I thought he meant Darwin didn't know the answer and therefore it was not part of his theory. I suppose only the author knows what he meant by his statement but I saw it as benign.
Mt St Helens when it blew up in the 80's, layed down over 200 feet of "strata in a few hours.
The evolution theory of "science" dates fossils by the strata they are found in and they date the strata by the fossils they find there.
Both are dated by the theory of evolution!
Some science!
More misunderstandings in this one that I have seen all in one place lately.
For the flood, try this link. It shows how little evidence there really is for a global flood, and how one has to twist and contort science to pretend otherwise: Problems with a Global Flood, Second Edition, by Mark Isaak.
Mt. St. Helens laid down significant strata only in a very small area. Despite what the Creation websites say, there is no evidence in that eruption for a global flood. Or in the Channeled Scablands in nearby central and eastern Washington either.
Fossils are not dated by "circular reasoning." There are many methods of radiometric dating; you have superposition of strata; and you have the fauna and flora in those strata. (I think you have been spending too much time on the creation sites and not enough studying actual science.)
There is a lot of good information in PatrickHenry's List-O-Links. You might give it a try.
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