7/13/2004: Baited bull

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by spudcon

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey
SNIP

"That's the thing about self-replication. If it's possible, and the universe is big enough, it WILL happen."

That's a big IF, scientifically speaking. Any evidence of non organic molecules coming to life?

Technically, "organic" roughly means "has carbon", so evidence of non-organic compounds forming life would be even more interesting than organic ones.

Of course, evidence (not proof) of non-life becoming life is that there is life now, and evidence for it becomes simpler and scarcer the further back you look in the geological record, and if you go far enough back, the Earth was in a state where life was probably impossible.

There is also evidence that various components of life can arise naturally, and various steps that are hypothesized as being likely in the formation of life are possible.

And there's also the fact that the leading "competition" to the idea of abiogenesis is "maybe it was magic!"

[Gravdigr]

Originally Posted by monster

::wonders why the 6.5-year resurrection::

Why not?

[spudcon]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

Lots of might haves, maybes, hypothoses and theories, still no evidence.

[Spexxvet]

Originally Posted by spudcon

Lots of might haves, maybes, hypothoses and theories, still no evidence.

At least as much as there is for a magical creation.

[morethanpretty]

Originally Posted by spudcon

Lots of might haves, maybes, hypothoses and theories, still no evidence.

Oh yeah, where is all of the evidence for your belief that "God did it"?

Its a flat out lazy belief. In times past it was understandable to attribute natural phenomena that humans didn't understand to God/Supernatural because we didn't have widespread education and scientific process. Nowadays though, its inexcusable. If I don't know how a chair is made that doesn't mean I think God made it just because I don't know the answer.

[spudcon]

The point is that Darwinists claim that they are right and Creationists are wrong because Darwinists are using scientific method. They aren't. Show me a duplicatable experiment that can prove life sprung from primordial goo. The question then becomes which "magic" you have as your religion.

[Undertoad]

Show me a duplicatable experiment that can prove life sprung from primordial goo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%...rey_experiment

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by spudcon

The point is that Darwinists claim that they are right and Creationists are wrong because Darwinists are using scientific method. They aren't. Show me a duplicatable experiment that can prove life sprung from primordial goo.

Abiogenesis is a separate proposition from evolution. Evolution has been confirmed repeatedly using the scientific method.

As for abiogenesis, many of the requisite steps have been confirmed using the scientific method (see UT's post). There are steps we haven't confirmed, and there may be steps we will never know. And, even if we do demonstrate a possible path for abiogenesis, we very probably will never know exactly what path actually did happen on Earth. But this is a big part of where the scientific method differs from religion:

The question then becomes which "magic" you have as your religion.

No, part of science is to not assume that "I don't know yet" means "it was magic".

[morethanpretty]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

Abiogenesis is a separate proposition from evolution. Evolution has been confirmed repeatedly using the scientific method.

As for abiogenesis, many of the requisite steps have been confirmed using the scientific method (see UT's post). There are steps we haven't confirmed, and there may be steps we will never know. And, even if we do demonstrate a possible path for abiogenesis, we very probably will never know exactly what path actually did happen on Earth. But this is a big part of where the scientific method differs from religion:
No, part of science is to not assume that "I don't know yet" means "it was magic".

I don't know how clouds form in the sky...it was magic!

[spudcon]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%...rey_experiment

Still, no evidence. Miller's "Mars jars" only prove that chemistry works. The original chemicals and minerals on earth back then could have formed steel, but there aren't any bicycles evolved from them. A few organic compounds do not make even the simplest life forms.

[Undertoad]

That's the whole thing: steel would never become life, because it's not a complex enough molecule!

What they've done is show that the basic building blocks of life could form. Not steel (precisely!) but the same components, the amino acids that form proteins, that make up you and I.

[xoxoxoBruce]

There is no steel in nature. God came to Bessemer in a Sheffield whorehouse, explaining how to mass produce steel, and make England rich.

[spudcon]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

That's the whole thing: steel would never become life, because it's not a complex enough molecule!

What they've done is show that the basic building blocks of life could form. Not steel (precisely!) but the same components, the amino acids that form proteins, that make up you and I.

I understand, but my analogy with bicycles still stands. Complex or simple elements, just because there was iron, carbon and heat in the prmordial ooze doesn't mean bicycles evolve, any more than amino acids in the ooze means that monkeys and people can evolve from it. As Clara Pella once said, "Where's the beef?"

[Spexxvet]

I think it's more likely than god making a bicycle out of mud.

[Undertoad]

Geologists have no direct evidence for mountains, either, because the process of building a mountain is slow and we've never seen it directly. All we can do is examine what happens now, slowly, to try to understand how earth could move and shape over a period of hundreds of thousands of years.

We see earthquakes, we see erosion, we examine the types of rocks and how they are formed. Aha, says the geologist, these rocks could only be formed by volcanic activity; these rocks over here could only be formed by centuries of thousand pounds of pressure. This river erodes silt for centuries. And then there arises an explanation for the mountain and the valley.

And voila, the explanation is proven elsewhere. The scientist looks at western coast of Africa and the eastern coast of South America, and says, hey it sure looks like those two match up perfectly, like jigsaw puzzle pieces, and we notice this in other parts of the world too; what's up with that? Well the explanation for the mountains matches the explanation for the puzzle pieces, and matches everything we see today happening really, really slowly. The independent findings match and now the evidence becomes stronger.

Aha, says Darwin, these birds are almost exactly alike, but the slight differences they have are interesting. What's the explanation? Well, it turns out that all evidence, all explanations of all changes in every living being on the earth match Darwin's idea. The underlying explanation of why you have dark hair if your parents have it is genetics, and the process of genetics matches Darwin precisely. He didn't know a thing about it; but decades after he lived, it confirms everything.

So now the bar is set pretty damn high. In order to explain mountains without bringing in plate tectonics, you're going to have to explain why all the geologic processes we see today happen in some other way. In order to explain why evolution didn't create every single living being on the earth, you're going to have to explain why our DNA contains a blueprint for every living being, how combining our DNA creates near-duplicate beings, how chimp DNA differs from human DNA by a very small percentage (but one that would arise in about 5 million years if genes change at the same slow rate of changes we see in modern life.)