Posted on 06/13/2006 9:42:31 AM PDT by flevit
Somewhere on Earth, close to 4 billion years ago, a set of molecular reactions flipped a switch and became life. Scientists try to imagine this animating event by simplifying the processes that characterize living things. ...... Shapiro, however, thinks this so-called "RNA world" is still too complex to be the origin of life. Information-carrying molecules like RNA are sequences of molecular "bits." The primordial soup would be full of things that would terminate these sequences before they grew long enough to be useful, Shapiro says. ........ The researchers propose in this month's issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution that this stripped-down geochemical cycle was what the first organisms used to power their growth. "This cycle is where all evolution emanated from," Ferry says. "It is the father of all life."
Shapiro is skeptical: Something had to form the two proteins. But he thinks this discovery might point in the right direction. "We have to let nature instruct us," he says.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
> How is it that science can speak on the origins of life?
Read the article.
This was after molecules evolved fingers but before molecular opposable thumbs.
Wow!!! All this time I thought it was as simple as a word from God. (sarc off)
I guess it's really dumb, ignorant, and intellectually amiss to dare believe "God" actually created life, like it states in a book over 5000 years old? I mean a book that has made claims which never have been proven false is just a place where it would be too convient to start? Eventhough, with the discoveries of science proving the books claims, It's just too bad elitist scientist can't drop their piotic ways and look toward the claims for the origins of life.
The battle between two religions continues.
Rarely have so many people made so many ignorant criticisms of something so vague. "It's impossible to tell what they're saying, but I know it's gotta be stupid!"
It would help if I had access to this journal, but I don't.
That's the business of research. There is plenty of hard work and sometimes false starts. On the other hand, too often religious faith is intellectual laziness paraded as a virtue.
Well, yes it is, and totally intellectually dishonest in some cultish religions...like, evolution.
Ping-a-ding!
I expect that if we could know every step in the sequence from nonlife to life, the transition would be so smooth that nobody would agree on exactly when the threshold was crossed. It would be like pinpointing when when the Romans stopped speaking Latin and switched to Italian.
No, that's not the point. The point is to reflexively trash any research that has anything to do with natural origins of life. This could be the most complex, detailed theory that successfully explains multiple questions about the makeup of life, for all we know. Yet sight unseen it gets bashed as if it's just wild speculation.
If you think there is no scientific validity to research into the basis of life and that people who are interested in such have a complete disconnect from reality, I'd say you have a complete disconnect from reality.
This would be on the fifth day, then?
No, day 3. Genesis 1:11 "...Let the earth sprout vegetation..."
The creatures of the air and sea are created on day 5. Land creatures on day 6.
It took God six days to create the Earth, but it took Chuck Norris but a snap of his fingers to create God.
Well, I believe it involves forming a hypothesis on the mechanisms involved and then testing to see whether those mechanisms work.
Does primordial soup promote tooth decay?
No, but it does cause stomach ache and rectal spasms.
The most painful thing is reading that and then blowing coffe out your nose....
Simmered slowly in a crock pot, with some celery and a bay leaf, primordial soup isn't half bad. Good source of essential amino acids, too.
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