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To: donh
you: Both tasks are safely beyond the computational capabilities of finite beings

(Me) In otherwords, it has fallen as a science.

(You) Oh brother. Nooo...now pay attention class--massive computational attempts to look back in history, as proof, has little to do with science, and the obvious failure of such attempts, should they be made, would have no impact whatsoever on science.

You are playing games with words here.

Science, reasons by induction on available evidence,

You have that part right. Now, the odds of undirected abiogenesis are at 1 out of 10^2,000,000,000. You want to say it hasn't fallen as a science? While researching life by accident remember to set time aside for turning lead into gold.

Which is why randomly supposing that prokariotes are the start of life, and basing your "computations" on that to dismiss abiogenesis is an appallingly obvious fool's errand.

So we agree that randomly supposing that prokariotes are the start of life has fallen as a science. Or are suggesting there is another hypothesis out there for the accidental occurrance of life?

580 posted on 06/12/2002 9:01:53 PM PDT by Tribune7
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To: Tribune7
So we agree that randomly supposing that prokariotes are the start of life has fallen as a science. Or are suggesting there is another hypothesis out there for the accidental occurrance of life?

What have I just been saying? There are plenty of hypotheses presently extant just now regarding how prokariotic life might of had substantial precursors, even pre-cellular precursors. No one has offered anything even remotely resembling a proof that any of them might not, in fact, be the actual case.

What's essential is self-reproduction with constrained modification & self maintainance in some kind of energy capturing chemical cycle. One could say that, at base, you are just a citric acid cycle with mostly useless energy-consuming doo-dads attached. Nobody writ on a stone tablet somewhere that you had to have protein, DNA, or even RNA, or even a specific location with a phosphorus-based hydrophobic/philic skin around it to get the ball rolling.

And, certainly, nobody as demonstrated that there must be a huge miracle somewhere along the way to get from that to Mozart--and without said demonstration, unmasterable complexity arguments are not going to be any more persuasive for scientists than the fossil gap argument, which is the same sort of fundamental refusal to understand that reasoning by induction on samplings is how science operates, and that merely pointing out that science isn't all knowing is not an adequate way to refute a scientific hypothesis.

588 posted on 06/13/2002 2:09:36 PM PDT by donh
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To: Tribune7
massive computational attempts to look back in history, as proof, has little to do with science, and the obvious failure of such attempts, should they be made, would have no impact whatsoever on science.

You are playing games with words here

No. I am making the same point here that I just made above. Unmasterable complexity arguments without a state-space & a selection criteria most of the science community buys into, is so much brain-drizzle--not a scientific proof of anything.

590 posted on 06/13/2002 2:26:32 PM PDT by donh
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