Posted on 02/03/2006 10:23:55 PM PST by neverdem
For those who are studying aspects of the origin of life, the question no longer seems to be whether life could have originated by chemical processes involving non-biological components but, rather, what pathway might have been followed.
—National Academy of Sciences (1996)
It is 1828, a year that encompassed the death of Shaka, the Zulu king, the passage in the United States of the Tariff of Abominations, and the battle of Las Piedras in South America. It is, as well, the year in which the German chemist Friedrich Wöhler announced the synthesis of urea from cyanic acid and ammonia.
Discovered by H.M. Roulle in 1773, urea is the chief constituent of urine. Until 1828, chemists had assumed that urea could be produced only by a living organism. Wöhler provided the most convincing refutation imaginable of this thesis. His synthesis of urea was noteworthy, he observed with some understatement, because “it furnishes an example of the artificial production of an organic, indeed a so-called animal substance, from inorganic materials.”
Wöhler’s work initiated a revolution in chemistry; but it also initiated a revolution in thought. To the extent that living systems are chemical in their nature, it became possible to imagine that they might be chemical in their origin; and if chemical in their origin, then plainly physical in their nature, and hence a part of the universe that can be explained in terms of “the model for what science should be.”*
In a letter written to his friend, Sir Joseph Hooker, several decades after Wöhler’s announcement, Charles Darwin allowed himself to speculate. Invoking “a warm little pond” bubbling up in the dim inaccessible past, Darwin imagined that given “ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc. present,” the spontaneous generation of a “protein compound” might follow, with this compound...
(Excerpt) Read more at commentarymagazine.com ...
Because I have it on good authority that these things exist. :)
So your answer is that the soul and spirit do not exist? Do you know what is the generally accepted idea of what the soul is?
They are all L, because of template considerations. What the original template system was is not known.
There's no such thing as a spirit, it doesn't exist. A soul is a heavenly body.
First, you have yet to establish that "spirit" (which you haven't even defined) is a "separate" thing from the body that exists in "another realm". Perhaps it's an emergent property of neural processing.
You are also assuming that it arose or "fused" with "the first primitive life proteins". Why? It could have arisen or "fused" much later, in more complex organisms. Why do you presume that it was present in the first primitive replicator?
In any case, even if one assumes that it's somehow a "metaphysical" thing that exists "elsewhere" in some manner, it's still entirely possible that life "fused" with it via evolution. Here are the relevant portions of a post I wrote a while back on the subject:
If any part of your question hasn't been covered by that post, let me know and I'll take another stab at it. Also, please define "spirit" more specifically. Do you mean "mind", "consciousness", "soul", or what, exactly?I said that the mind-body/consciousness problem was the reason I reject evolution. The question here, it seems, is whether or not this is a rational position.
Right.
My position is that, when the "jury is still out", then almost by definition, there is not yet sufficient weight of evidence to (logically, at least) fully accept *or* reject the issue at question.
[I in no way asserted that we "will never know for sure".]
How would you know, for instance, that a monkey can think? That's the broad point.
Whether or not it could be done, that still doesn't mean that I "noted" it one way or the other, as you asserted -- I had not.
Actually, I think that eventually we probably will learn enough about consciousness to then have a clear "consciousness litmus test", by which we could examine a particular system (or monkey, or whatever) and determine whether it meets the objective requirements of what is needed in order for consciousness to take place.
Even if we don't, however, that's just one example of a way that the issue could eventually be resolved in theory. It's not as if there aren't scenarios by which it *could* be resolved.
Ok. I read a lot. I'll pick it up.
I think you'll find it pretty interesting.
Fair enough. But, pardon the pun, all of this is immaterial.
Okay, that was a good one...
You see, what my objection revolves around here is the consciousness. In all of the examples you cited above, there were material improvements, involving physical material. Until we can either prove that consciousness is nothing but electrical signals in the brain, the above arguments fall short. You are talking about physical improvements; if the mind is immaterial, a physical mechanism could not have produced it.
First, one could argue that the burden of proof works both ways. Might you first have to prove that consciousness *is* something beyond the physical before you use it as an excuse for jettisoning a theory (evolution) which has so much else supporting it? Is it proper to use your point that *perhaps* mind is immaterial to flat-out "reject" evolution? By that criteria, we could reject practically anything on *any* "what if" grounds. Example: "We can't prove that TVs and such don't actually work by black magic, so until we can settle that issue I reject this alleged field of 'electronics'". (I'm sure there are better examples, but hey, it's late.)
Second, and even more interestingly, you have yet another unproven presumption in your reasoning. You presume that "material" changes can not *cause* immaterial results. On what evidence do you base this presumption?
EVEN IF there might be some "ghost in the machine" that does the "real work" of consciousness, what's to say that it's not a *product* of some currently unknown *material* process or configuration? Think of the way that a material electric circuit produces an "immaterial" electromagnetic field in the space around itself when it is configured and charged in the right ways.
Why do you presume that evolution, in the comprehensive way that it performs countless "feelers" of trial-and-error over populations and generations and billions of years, might not actually be able to "stumble upon" a configuration of cells and chemicals and electrical impulses or patterns that could give rise to an immaterial manifestation of consciousness coupled to the brain as a "tranceiver" between sensory/motor signals and the "ghost in the machine"?
Note that evolution already managed to produce organs which sense or generate light, magnetism, and electricity, themselves more "immaterial" than the organs which manipulate them. Why not a "consciousness generator", even *if* consciousness is some sort of ethereal thing beyond mere bit patterns?
As a dualist (I presume), you already believe that there is a non-material consciousness which is somehow coupled to the material realm via some sort of connection to the very material brain and its sensory and motor nerves. You *already* believe that there's some sort of "link" between your presumed non-material mind and the material brain. Why, then, balk at the idea that one actually gives rise or generates the other, instead of simply forming a linkup?
If you're going to posit beyond-material components of human life, then you're likewise going to have to deal with the *full* implications of it, which includes the possibility that if there's a link between the material and the immaterial, then perhaps they're even more interactive than you first presume.
This leaves 4 possibilities:
1. Mind is only material, evolution produces only material changes.
2. Mind is more than material, evolution produces only material changes.
3. Mind is only material, evolution can produce material changes which have beyond-material reach.
4. Mind is more than material, evolution can produce material changes which have beyond-material reach.
You rejected evolution because, you say, case 2 is a distinct possiblity and has not been ruled out. But by the same argument, shouldn't you also refrain from rejecting it because cases 3 and 4 are distinct possibilites as well (and as consistent with your "there is more than just the material, but they can interact" postulate as your own #2) which likewise have not been ruled out?
[...]
Again, even if the evolutionary process is superior to directed design, both are material-only processes.
Again, that ain't necessarily so. Feel free to prove that it is. Feel free to rule out the notion that material changes could not form a configuration which can "link to" the immaterial realm and effect changes there, and/or hook up with pre-existing "souls" floating around there, if you will.
If consciousness is immaterial, neither design nor evolution could have produced it, regardless of which one is superior.
Again, see above -- you have yet to prove that presumption of yours; there are other plausible possibilities which you have fo far failed to rule out.
If you're going to postulate a non-physical realm, then you're going to have to demonstrate that it has the properties you imagine it does. Otherwise it's just fantasizing and defining the rules to your own advantage.
[Well, that's the one supported by the available evidence, certainly.]
But not vindicated by the available evidence.
Few things ever are. Science rarely deals in "proofs", only the preponderance of evidence.
Or were you making some other point which I've missed?
If you get in a car accident, the car may be damaged, but you're still at the wheel. Diminished capacity to operate the machine doesn't prove that there's no one operating it. BTW, how do you know for sure that the consciousness was extinguished totally in these experiments?
Well, it's certainly out on vacation at least when you've drunken yourself into unconsciousness. The point being that if "mind" were some immaterial process floating out in the ether which was simply hooked to sensory inputs and motor nerves via some link with the brain acting as an I/O device, then knocking your brain out of commission with alcohol or anesthetic or whatever would be expected to leave your "mind" fully awake but going, "dang, who turned out the lights?", sitting there frustrated like someone whose internet feed was on the blink. Instead, the mind itself fades out or becomes severely impaired. Try mentally composing an email while under a general anesthetic, for example. The mind itself, whatever it is, is profoundly affected by material changes to the material brain. And pretty much every mental state has been mapped to characteristic activity in particular parts of the brain. That's a bit hard to explain if the mind is off in the ether someplace, just "driving" the body like a man behind the steering wheel of a car. Furthermore, what about the way in which brain damage can profoundly affect memory? If the "mind" exists elsewhere, surely so do its memories -- memory is an extremely fundamental part of the mind. Or are souls amnesiacs once the body dies?
As I noted, these are my reasons for doubting purely non-theistic evolution.
As I noted, needs work.
Until the consciousness question is resolved one way or another, the kind of blind-watchmaker type evolution advanced by people like Richard Dawkins will remain unproved.
So will your presumption that evolution can't produce ethereal results via sufficiently configured arrangements of matter -- or that such is even necessary.
No, that's not my answer. I was pointing out the folly of attacking the science for not dealing with two things that you can't even demonstrate even exist in the first place, at least in the manner you assert.
I don't claim that they do or don't exist. But if you're going to take science to task for not dealing with them, you'd better be able to show that there's really something that needs to be dealt with. Otherwise *you're* the one who is more open to charges of "cocky authority" than those whom you accuse.
Do you know what is the generally accepted idea of what the soul is?
I know several, and I know that there actually is no "generally accepted idea" of what it is. Ask ten people, you'll get eleven different answers.
Feel free to describe your idea of it, though.
Thanks for putting a good deal of effort into that response. I was sincerely curious as to what 'your side' :) thought on the subject.
There's no such thing as an animating spirit. The spirit is all those things that are the product of sentience and intelligence. Sentirnce and intelligence are functions of the body, which is a biological machine. No animating force is needed for either the machine's formation, or it's life. The laws of physics are sufficient to do both.
For a hint of what this might be like, see Radio emerges from the electronic soup.
Researchers had used the principle of evolution (technically a "genetic algorithm") to try to evolve an oscillating circuit in a programmable array of transistors. (An oscillating circuit is one which generates and outputs a signal in the form of a sine wave.) It worked, sort of -- in the end the circuit evolved into one that output a sine wave, but instead of generating the oscillations itself, they discovered that it had evolved into a radio receiver that was picking up and relaying an oscillating signal from a nearby piece of electronics. This is actually rather a "creative" solution.
The relevance to the current discussion is that despite being in no way "directed" towards that solution by the researchers (indeed, they hadn't even thought of it when they were setting up the run), evolution had managed to stumble upon enough of a rudimentary radio circuit that it was able to "sense" the existence of a sine wave signal from "out there" (beyond the boundaries of the experiment itself) and develop a "hook up" to the "otherworldly signal" by refining the radio link and strengthening the reception of the desired waveform.
This is the sort of process I have in mind when I talk about evolution finding an organic way to "hook up" life to some "ethereal spirit" realm if indeed there is one and such a thing is necessary for consciousness/mind/soul/whatever you want to call it.
Of course, it could be a lot simpler than that -- mind/spirit/whatever may just be an emergent property of physical processes. Again, though, evolution would be able to "find" the combination of physical conditions which would enable this to take place. Evolution is *extremely* resourceful. (For several examples, see: Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Computation). In simple terms, it's the world's most massively parallel and gigantic game of trial-and-error. Every year it tries countless trillions of alternative possibilities. It's no surprise that it's constantly discovering new functional combinations of the components of life.
Yes, we're using different languages to describe different things, the commonality is our OCEANS. You see it as the pre-biotic medium and how you get from self replicating molecules to organic soup. I look at the more fundamental question of how our oceans first got here. They didn't come from the venusian type mantle(juvenile water), the O of H2O is quickly snarfed up by Si/Al/Mg(into SiO2/Al2O3/MgO)and you just get more ROCK(2/3rds of earth-mass is the mantle). They didn't come from a comet barrage from the Oort Cloud(384,000,000+ cubic miles fully in place 3.9 B years ago). Comets contain only about a cubic mile of H2O which requires 1 to 2 comets impacting the earth/year for each and every year of 500,000,000 years(4.4B to 3.9B)...nonsense. And yet the earth-moon double planet has this curious feature : sopping wet earth and bone dry moon, how come? Also, if you posit mini-comets continually bombarding the earth, the moon receives 5% of the system's meteorite-mass; that means it would have a pearly white(cloud top)albedo of constantly replenished cometary H2O. And yet the Apollo missions/samples prove that the lunar regolith hasn't had any water(chemistry)since 4.4B. A real Sherlock Holmes, the dog-didn't-bark-in-the-night mystery, yes? I-S means Impact-Splash, this currently hyped theory(as if it was revealed religion)that a mars directly impacted the proto-earth and splashed out the moon in orbit. It fails statistically and geo-chemically. .1 Earth mass impacting 1.0 Earth mass releases 10^31 J of kinetic energy, a GAMMA RAY burster; the entire terran surface gets hotter than the sun, NO water survives. Think of the SL0 comet train that impacted Jupiter in 1994. RC/RC means Roche Capture/Remnant Core, how the incoming large body "hit" the terran Roche Lobe, and was tidally shorn into a comma shape; the tidal bulge was taffy-pulled into a long stream of mini-moons/asteroids like SL9, and the head was SLOWED DOWN by greater cg to cg distance and less mass, and went into CAPTURED orbit. It then perturbed the hydrate-rich terran ring system out of orbit(6 deg inclination vs 23.5 deg)and onto the earth's surface as a layer of wet gravel. Then Gen 2:6 took over for .5B years. Does this make sense?
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O how cruel!
</creationism mode>
We archaeologists work by trowel and error... ===> Placemarker <===
Minor quibble - the main constituent of urine is water, not urea.
It was a great moment in chemistry, although it can be argued that urea is not an organic chemical, but a substituted carbon dioxide. I say that because the hydrolysis of urea to carbon dioxide and ammonia yields no energy.
Nonetheless it began a great effort by chemists to synthesize other biomolecules and is the first step in modern organic chemistry.
"Urea, I've got it"!!
Quibble on quibble. Not on college campuses: You don't buy beer, you rent it . (Rim-shot).
"Urea, I've got it"!!
Archimedes, please pick up the white courtesy phone.
Cheers!
Several interesting points here, and as usual, I have annoying questions.
The questions annoy me, and then I annoy you, you see. :-)
1. Where did you get the 5% number? I've often wanted to see someone set up a "planetary dynamics" simulation of the Sun-Moon-Earth-"incoming!" system, to see how the relative # of impacts on the Earth compared to the moon is affected by the fact that the Moon orbits the Earth and therefore for some proportion of the day, effectively "shields" the Earth from impact.
2. Following on number 1., what is the mechanism by which we see large craters on the portion of the moon facing the Earth? I mean, it's not like I see the moon rotating on its axis to expose different parts of its surface "outwards" over time...
3. Hey, you're right. Why no water? Does the smaller size and consequent lack of atmosphere have anything to do with it? BTW, what is the surface temperature of the moon on the sunlit side and at night? (See in an odd twist Isaac Asimov's Marooned off Vesta :
"Steam? At the low temperature of space?"
Steam--at the low pressure of space. In fact, it boils and freezes at the same time. I watched it.)
The missing molecular administrator was, in fact, Suga himself, as his own account reveals. The relevant features of the experiment, he writes, “allow[ed] us to select active RNA molecules with selectivity toward a desired amino acid” (emphasis added). Thereafter, it was Suga and his collaborators who “applied stringent conditions” to the experiment, undertook “selective amplification of the self-modifying RNA molecules,” and “screened” vigorously for “self-aminoacylation activity” (emphasis added throughout).
Finally, parts of the original article remind me of the great crevo-thread joke with the punchline,
...and God says, "NO! Get your own dirt!"
Speaking of which, where are the usual disclaimers that "evolution is not concerned with abiogenesis" ?? C'mon people, just because it's Super Bowl weekend doesn't mean we should slack off from the flamefests!
Cheers!
Nothing in the intervening years has suggested that these sour geochemists were far wrong. [About the early Earth environment being neutral or oxidizing rather than reducing.]
I have certainly seen it suggested and even evidence cited. I'm going to try to dig up what I'm remembering.
Berlinski seemed to be doing OK up to that point in the narrative in at least describing the history, but they always try to sweep something under the rug. Anyway, I've stopped reading and am going to go boot up my old machine.
1) How was it formed, 2) what is it made of, and 3) how far away is it are some of the questions that we can begin to answer.
1) How was the Moon formed?
There were at least five major ideas that were proposed as to the formation of the Moon.
Fission – The Moon split off from the Earth.
Capture – The Moon was captured by the gravity of the Earth.
Condensation – The Moon coalesced out of the same “stuff” the Earth did.
Colliding Planetesimals – Formed from colliding Planetesimals during the early formation of the solar system.
Collision – A body collided with the Earth causing a piece of the Earth’s crust to form the Moon from a resultant ring produced by that collision
The evidence points to the collision theory. First, the Moon does not have an iron core. This pretty much rules out that it coalesced from the same cloud of debris that the Earth did. Second, throughout the solar system, the oxygen isotopes have been found to be different. If the Moon were captured, it too would not match the Earth’s oxygen isotope ratio (which it does). Fourth, by looking at the angular momentum and energy required, the theory that the Moon spun off the Earth after the Earth formed does not hold up.
This leaves us with the Collision theory as the best model we have for the formation of the Moon. The resultant collision caused a ring of debris from the Earths crust to form outside the Roche limit. If it had not, tidal forces would have not allowed for the Moon we see today.
A more in depth discussion of tidal locking since the Moon is tidal locked to the Earth. The reason the Moon keeps one face to the Earth (Its rotation on its axis matches the period of its orbit) is it is tidally locked to the Earth. Here is a more in depth explanation. The total angular momentum of the earth moon system, which is spin angular momentum plus the orbital angular momentum, is constant. (The Sun plays apart also) Friction of the oceans caused by the tides is causing the Earth to slow down a tiny bit each year. This is approximately two milliseconds per century causing the moon to recede by about 3.7 centimeters per year. As the Earth slows down, the Moon must recede to keep the total angular momentum a constant. In other words as the spin angular momentum of the earth decreases, the lunar orbital angular momentum must increase. Here is an interesting side note. The velocity of the moon will slow down as the orbit increases.
Another example of tidal locking is the orbit period and rotation of the planet Mercury. What is interesting about this one is that instead of a 1:1 synchronization where Mercury would keep one face to the Sun at all times, it is actually in a 2/3:1 synchronization. This is due to the High eccentricity of its orbit.
There also can be more than one body “locked” to each other. Lets take a look at the moon Io. Io is very nearly the same size as the Earth’s moon. It is approximately 1.04 times the size of the moon. There is a resonance between Io, Ganymede, and Europa. Io completes four revolutions for every one of Ganymede and two of Europa. This is due to a Laplace Resonance phenomenon. A Laplace Resonance is when more than two bodies are forced into a minimum energy configuration.
There are also examples of tidal locking in the asteroid belt.
First, the asteroid belt has an estimated total combined mass of less than 1 tenth of the Earth's moon. Second, Jupiter has a profound effect on the asteroid belt.
Since Jupiter has a semimajor axis of 5.2 AU (I AU is the distance from the Sun to the Earth) it ends up with an orbital period of 11.86 years. Since the asteroids are not all at the same distance from the sun, there orbital periods will differ in a direct relationship to their distance from the sun. This will result in some of them having an orbital period of one half of Jupiter. This puts those particular asteroids in a 2:1 orbital resonance with Jupiter. The result of this resonance is gaps called Kirkwood's gaps.
The rub is why did not this asteroid belt form a small planet? The reason is the gravitational force of Jupiter. It perturbs the asteroids giving them random velocities relative to each other.
Another effect of both Jupiter and the Sun on the asteroid belt is a group of asteroids that both precede and follow Jupiter in its orbit by 60 degrees. These asteroids are known as the Trojans.
2) What is the Moon made of?
From here:
http://lunar.arc.nasa.gov/science/geochem.htm
“Primary elements: The lunar crust is composed of a variety of primary elements, including uranium, thorium, potassium, oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, titanium, calcium, aluminum and hydrogen. When bombarded by cosmic rays, each element bounces back into space its own radiation, in the form of gamma rays. Some elements, such as uranium, thorium and potassium, are radioactive and emit gamma rays on their own. However, regardless of what causes them, gamma rays for each element are all different from one another -- each produces a unique spectral "signature," detectable by an instrument called a spectrometer. A complete global mapping of the Moon for the abundance of these elements has never been performed.
Hydrogen and helium: Because its surface is not protected by an atmosphere, the Moon is constantly exposed to the solar wind, which carries both hydrogen and helium -- each potentially very valuable resources. One natural variant of helium, [3]helium, is the ideal material to fuel fusion reactions. When scientists develop a more thorough understanding of fusion, and can practically implement such reactions, the Moon will be a priceless resource, since it is by far the best source of [3]helium anywhere in the Solar System.”
This pretty much answers the question; are there valuable materials up there?
3) What is the distance to the Moon?
The mean distance to the Moon is approximately 238,800 miles.
Good point and thanks for posting the article. I predict all kinds of illogic will surface in this thread. ;) LOL!
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