Primordial Soup: Interview with Stanley Miller

An anonymous reader writes "Stanley Miller's classic 'primordial soup' experiments showed that 13 of the 21 amino acids necessary for life could be made in a glass flask. For its fifty-year commemoration, Miller is interviewed today and reflects on what Carl Sagan called 'the single most significant step in convincing many scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos.'"

Comments

Land Sharks

[Scoria]

showed that 13 of the 21 amino acids necessary for life could be made in a glass flask

Of course, certain products of his experiments often indicate that not all of them are necessary. These products are, of course, "intellectual property lawyers." :-)

I tried this experiment in high school...sort of

[Saint Aardvark]

I tried duplicating Miller's experiment in my last year of high school for my chemistry final project. I didn't have a way of zapping the gases, so I tried shining a UV lamp on them; I'd read about different versions of the experiment that had tried that with success. And I didn't have a way of evaporating and condensing the liquids, so I just poured 'em into a big jar and hoped the interface between liquid and gas, combined with whatever UV light made it through the glass, would make amino acids. And I didn't have a gas chromatograph, so I had to use a chemical...damn, don't remember what it was, but it turned purple in the presence of amino acids and is used to detect fingerprints on paper.

It hardly needs saying, but in a week I didn't make any amino acids I could detect. Nevertheless, I ended up getting a shockingly high mark because I'd written up every possible reason I could think of for the experiment failing: not enough time, not enough interaction between liquid and gas, not enough energy from the light, test wasn't sensitive enough, Miller had faked his results (ha!), etc. I was disappointed in the results, but pretty happy with my mark. :-)

Article Text

[Anonymous Coward]

Primordial Recipe: Spark and Stir
Date Wednesday, May 14 @ 00:48:06
Topic Extrasolar Life

No single experiment, according to Carl Sagan, has done more to convince scientists that life is 'likely abundant in the cosmos' than the work fifty years ago by then graduate student, Stanley Miller. This week celebrates his milestone publication, and Astrobiology Magazine interviewed him about his work and reflections today.
Primordial Recipe: Spark and Stir
by Astrobiology Magazine staffwriter

Fifty years ago on May 15, 1953, a University of Chicago graduate student, Stanley Miller, published a landmark two-page paper in Science magazine. He considered if amino acids could be made from what was known about the early Earth's atmosphere. Could the building blocks of life be cooked up?

"... some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity etc...", Charles Darwin, on the origins of life in tidal pools
Credit:Smithsonian

Miller began his paper:

"The idea that the organic compounds that serve as the basis of life were formed when the earth had an atmosphere of methane, ammonia, water and hydrogen instead of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, oxygen and water was suggested by Oparin and has been given emphasis by Urey and Bernal. In order to test this hypothesis..."

When Miller first presented his experimental findings to a large seminar, it is reported that at one point, Enrico Fermi politely asked if it was known whether this kind of process could have actually taken place on the primitive Earth. Harold Urey, Stanley's research advisor, immediately replied, saying 'If God did not do it this way, then he missed a good bet'. The seminar ended amid the laughter and, as the attendees filed out, some congratulated Stanley on his results.

Although Miller had submitted his paper in mid-December 1952, one reviewer did not believe the results and delayed its publication until May 15th. Later Carl Sagan would do many experiments varying the chemical percentages, but described the Miller-Urey experiments as "the single most significant step in convincing many scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos."
Early Earth: Flash in a Flask
Even today, only a few definitive things are known about what the Earth might have been like four billion years ago. It is thought that the early sun radiated only 70 percent of its modern power. No free oxygen could be found in Earth's atmosphere. The rocky wasteland lacked life. Absent were viruses, bacteria, plants and animals. Even the temperature itself is uncertain, since three schools of thought today maintain that the Earth could have been alternatively frozen, temperate or steamy.

Charles Darwin imagined life springing from a temperate world, with small ponds or runoff channels. Compared to diluted chemistry in a vast ocean, repeated evaporation and refilling have possible advantages, to find just the right concentrations somewhere so that biochemistry could begin. Glaciers, volcanoes, geysers and cometary debris potentially resupplied this primordial pond with both energy and more complex organic compounds. That is a scenario requiring relatively temperate starting conditions, and more extreme possibilities are also in the mix.

If the early Earth was a cauldron of volcanic activity, then seepage of acidic gases and heating might have circulated vital compounds to the surface. These vents may have been underwater, and precursors to biochemistry like acetic acid may have become reactive in combination with carbon monoxide. Alternatively, if the early Earth lacked any greenhouse of blanketing carbon dioxide, life could still have begun in a ball of ice. When combined with water, even a thin atmosphere of organics (formaldehyde, cyanide and ammonia) can create some building blocks of life (such as the amino acid, glycine). Thawing this 'snowball Earth' could then be triggered by a chance collision with large comets or meteors.

Terrestrial options for ea

Re:Article Text

[Anonymous Coward]

Just skip it if you don't like it.
Having the article in comments is very useful if the original site is unreachable.

Stanley

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy's name is Stanley Miller, and yet the article keeps referring to him as "Stanley."

By the way, in the Slasdot posting, why isn't the word interview linked to the story?

Miller's Aide

[Joe the Lesser]

Miller had an unknown aide during this project. He spent a lot of time working with the fledgling life forms as they formed a society and culture. They became to see him as a God, and worship him.

One fateful day, they managed to shrink the aide using a debigulator device, so he could lead their civilization. When he demanded they unshrink him, they were indeed astounded by the very notion of a re-bigulator device.

True story.

Re:Miller's Aide

[davesag]

A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man - jebediah springfield.

Re:Miller's Aide

[Johnny5000]

Embiggens is a perfectly cromulent word.

Pepto to the rescue

[tundog]

I stopped eating primordial soup because the amino acids keep giving me heartburn.

Re:Pepto to the rescue

[mblase]

I stopped eating primordial soup because the amino acids keep giving me heartburn.

You should have tried synthesizing some of those a-nicer acids instead. (boom-boom)

another interview

[AbdullahHaydar]

from October 1996: Exobiology interview

On a related note: exobiology vs astrobiology? which do people prefer? (The definitions are in the links)

Re:another interview

[CheshireCatCO]

"Astrobiology" is the term that is usually used in such circles. We actually discussed this the first day of graduate Astrobiology a couple of years ago. The term "exobiology" seems to have fallen by the wayside for whatever reason. (Possibly because "astrobiology" gives an immediate sense of what the field is, while "exobiology" leaves many people wondering "outside of what?")

Re:another interview

[Anonymous Coward]

How about some asstrobiology?

Re:I tried this experiment in high school...sort o

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't have a way of zapping the gases?
Your biochem teacher didn't offer to help?
At the very least, the school Van de Graaf generator might have helped.

I really hope you didn't put down "faked his results" as that would've shown shocking lack of research into the followups to his experiments.

Test not sensitive enough seems reasonable. Perhaps you could've looked up the concentrations he got, versus the sensitivity of your test.

High School Biology Class

[Schezar]

For two years, I bugged my Biology teachers to let my try the Miller experiment with the school's equipment. (Of course, I was the same one who wanted them to let me make a gauss rifle, a betatron, and potato gun...)

I remember being fascinated when I first heard of the experiment. It seemed so 'important,' despite the fact that they brushed right over it and no one else in my classes understood or cared.

Of course, now I'm in college, and I can try all of these things with my own equipment.

Re:High School Biology Class

[Eric Ass Raymond]

Of course, now I'm in college, and I can try all of these things with my own equipment

"It won't be long, mark my words. The time has come for the revenge of the geeks. Oh boy!"

Re:High School Biology Class

[rcw-work]

"Beware the fury of a patient man."

-- John Dryden

Miller-Ade

[Damek]

Mmmm... Miller-Ade...

Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids...

[leonbrooks]

...broke down as fast as they were made (in a carefully customised device, not in the wild), and were completely racemised at formation? Or that no evidence of a reducing atmosphere exists?

Just like every other fairy tale: exciting, adventurous, believable, and wrong.

Re:Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like every other fairy tale: exciting, adventurous, believable, and wrong.

And like your post, without proof to back up your claim, you too are wrong.

Re:Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids...

[Joe the Lesser]

Just like every other fairy tale: exciting, adventurous, believable, and wrong.

Yea, like that crazy thing about men landing on the moon.

Re:Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids...

[j0ehill]

Of course it didn't prove anything, but it was a first faltering step at least toward understanding how life might have originally began.

Aren't we now seeing some evidence that certain precursors to single cell life are formed around thermal vents on the ocean floor?

Carl Sagan aside, didn't Millers experiment rise above the level of fairy tale at the very least? Possible, but not probable, I agree, but it does have some significance in the search for an answer, at least to me as an armchair scientist.

Re:Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids...

[Anonymous Coward]

The significant thing is that Miller was able to produce amino acids in the first place. leonbrooks is using the classic fundamentalist creationist tactic of taking a scientific success and portraying it as a failure because the experiment did not meet 100% of the artificial requirements that he has generated for it.

This is the same thought process that causes them to say "Evolution can't possibly be true because there is a missing link between species A and species C," and then when species B is discovered, they say "Aha! Now you have even bigger problems, because there is no link between A and B, and B and C!" :-)

Re:Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids...

[GMontag]

Additional information here. (Yes, it still cracks me up whenever I read it)

Re:Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids...

[DavidPesta]

And like your post, without proof to back up your claim, you too are wrong.

Did you not read his post?

1. The amino acids broke down as fast as they were made.
2. Were completely racemised at formation.
3. No evidence of a reducing atmosphere exists.

Where did he fail to backup his claim?

Re:Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids...

[subtillus]

Word.
But, we this was the first step!

It got people thinking in the right way and I would say without hesitation that this is the Parent experiment of chemical evolution.

Recently some other people (see Bernstein et al. at NASA ames) have shown that some of these amino acids could have come from nebulous gases formed on ice crystals due to interstellar photochemistry.

multiple sources is the more modern way of thinking about all of it.

Re:Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids...

[Anonymous Coward]

Where did he fail to backup his claim?

Err, how about LINKS backing up his claim?

Re:Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids...

[tgibbs]

...broke down as fast as they were made (in a carefully customised device, not in the wild), and were completely racemised at formation? Or that no evidence of a reducing atmosphere exists?

These days, his contribution is regarded as being the first of a series of studies showing that the fundamental building blocks of life are readily formed under a wide variety of conditions.

Re:Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because nothing spells "truth" like an article on the internet.

Re:Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids...

[Black Parrot]

> Yeah, because nothing spells "truth" like an article on the internet.

At least an article on the internet can be evaluated on its merits, unlike a bold claim with no support whatsoever.

Re:Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids...

[pyr0]

From previous arguments I've had with you here on slashdot, I have surmised that you believe in creation, not evolution, and thus a young earth, etc. What I would like to know is what hardcore rock solid evidence do YOU have that YOUR ideas are not just like every other fairy tale? Seriously, I'd like to know. All I ever see you do is harp on any possible slight imperfection in science and use that as your evidence, which is completely circumstantial. In other words, where is the data that shows that life couldn't have begun from such amino acids in a natural primordial environment like the experiment suggests, and that evolution didn't occur. And if it exists, has it been published in a peer-reviewed, respectable scientific journal? Sorry to sound bitchy, but that's just how I feel about such thinking.

Also, you are wrong about no evidence for a reducing atmosphere. The existance of iron deposits known as banded iron formations is the evidence you need. These deposits are sedimentary in nature, meaning that the iron was accumulating underwater near the surface. Had the atmosphere at the time been oxidizing (basically oxygen rich), these deposits could not have formed since iron would have combined with the oxygen in the atmosphere to form rust basically (hematite, Fe2O3). Instead, these formations are magnetite (Fe3O4), which contains the reduced form of iron, Fe(III). This is why the occurence of banded iron formations decreases and eventually dissapears sometime during the proterozoic (1.8 to 2 billion years ago seems to stick in my head) once the atmosphere became oxidizing. A nice short, but good explanation can be found here.

Re:Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids...

[Bowling Moses]

..broke down as fast as they were made (in a carefully customised device, not in the wild), and were completely racemised at formation? Or that no evidence of a reducing atmosphere exists?"

I think you should take a look at the article. The "carefully customised" device is incredibly simple, consisting of 2 flasks, a hot plate, an electrical sparker, a water condesor, and some glass tubing. That's it. It could be further simplified to remove the heater, as all this does is to make more vapor available in the 2nd flask containing the sparker--you could envision a simpler setup that is put into a window so sunlight evaporates the solution to make it more available to the spark chamber (closed loop, naturally, so no gas actually escapes the system). Actually since then the whole thing would run at a lower temperature you could omit the condensor and the little bend in the glass tubing (the "trap") leaving you with a flask on the bottom with your solution, connected by a single length of glass tubing to a second flask on top with the attached two bits of wire and battery, the whole thing sitting in the window. Sunlight hits the bottom flask, causing evaporation which rises up to the top flask, which sparks, condensate builds up in the top flask and over time falls back into the lower flask or sticks to the interconnecting glass tubing. Slowly you would use up your initial reagents leaving you with a complex mixture with among its components a collection of biologically relevant molecules. Total list of materials for the apparatus: 2 flasks, two feet or so of glass tubing, say a foot of copper wire, and a car battery--even simpler than the original. l'm fairly sure this would work similar to Miller's initial experiment, albeit much slower mainly due to the lower temperature. You should remember that his experiment produced an abundance of multiple different biologically relevant molecules in only a week. The point is: this experiment is incredibly simple, not "carefully customized". All that it was meant to show was that under conditions that at the time were thought to be similar to those on a prebiotic earth you could produce a host of biologically important compounds from even simpler compounds thought to be abundant using energy sources that would be available: heat, light, lightning. At this the experiment, one of many under a great variety of conditions--see his website for a starting point--succeeds at marvelously. Others have already answered your other complaints so it is pointless to repeat their statements here.

Re:Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids...

[Mooncaller]

Concidering that the anti-evo crowd can not even find valid Biblical evidence to back up their beliefs, it is doubtfull that they would be able to find any valid physical evidence. It is understandable that most Christians would be ignorant of scientific matters. After all the general population is. But they should be experts in Biblical matters. If they can't find Biblical evidence, no one can.

Re:Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids...

[Anonymous Coward]

Methinks that the creationists have not been reading their bibles:

"And the earth brought forth life."

Why are they arguing?

Re:Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids...

[Madcapjack]

But they should be experts in Biblical matters. If they can't find Biblical evidence, no one can.

they don't need to know the bible very well to find 'evidence' for their beliefs. all they have to do is turn to a random page (especially a random page of the old testament of the book of revelations) and choose (randomly) a number of passages and presto! evidence! ( :

Re:Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids...

[fluffy666]

...broke down as fast as they were made (in a carefully customised device, not in the wild),

In the wild, we have this thing called 'an ocean'. UV does not penetrate much into it. You may also look up things like 'chemical equlibria'; but that would, no doubt, be too much like hard work.

Or that no evidence of a reducing atmosphere exists?

There is planty of evidence for a reducing early atmosphere; simply asserting otherwise does not make it so.

Re:Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids...

[leonbrooks]

wrong

Yea, like that crazy thing about men landing on the moon.

Actually, they didn't. A capsule named Eagle did. (-:

Speaking to your point, and not to your snide remark, go do some actual research on what Miller and co have been doing for the last few decades, and you'll discover that they have been steadily proving abiogenesis to be increasingly less possible. Which is exactly the oposite of what they set out to do. Oh, well.

Re:Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids...

[leonbrooks]

this was the first step!

And unfortunately also the last.

Duplicated His Results

[Greyfox]

I've duplicated his results in my refridgerator and now have some primordial soup in there. It's chicken noodle primordial soup and tastes great with fresh baked bread.

If this experiment was done today..

[MongooseCN]

Would the experimentor claim intellectual property rights to the amino acids he found? "Sorry you can't use those drugs, I own the rights to all life on this planet."

Re: If this experiment was done today..

[Black Parrot]

> Would the experimentor claim intellectual property rights to the amino acids he found? "Sorry you can't use those drugs, I own the rights to all life on this planet."

That's how we'll finally get rock-solid proof as to whether or not God exists. When Dr. Frankenstein has his monster stitched together and reaches for the switch, either a lawyer will rush in with a cease-and-desist or else not, and we will be able to determine the existence of an omniscient Creator from that fact alone.

Re:If this experiment was done today..

[Sanga]

Some one from slashdot would pitifully scream that there exists "prior art"

Re:If this experiment was done today..

[camusflage]

Too late. BT's already got a patent application in for a self-replicating system of organized amino acids.

Creationist Troll Alert

[turgid]

Most TRUELY academic scientists will tell you there seems to be "some" evidence of a creator or at the very least a "lottery for life".

Wrong! You are plain wrong. Sod off back under your bridge in Arkansas, troll!

Re:Creationist Troll Alert

[Anonymous Coward]

Least he has the balls to say it and apparently by his moderation totals on his previous comments page he's academic. How about backing your attacks up!

Re:Creationist Troll Alert

[turgid]

How about backing your attacks up!

For the last 150 year these views have been accepted scientific fact. I need not reiterate them here. That would be redundant, even though there are a substantial number of people reading this site who are brought up to be superstitious and do not get proper science lessons. Google is your friend.

Re:Creationist Troll Alert

[jhigh]

Because his opinion is that of a Creationist he's a troll? What are you 12?

Re:Creationist Troll Alert

[turgid]

He's entitled to his opinion. That's one thing. The facts, however, are completely different. He is wrong. Fact!=Opinion.

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[dubstop]

You're whining that the odds are too big, but it's guys like Stanley Miller that are trying to figure out exactly how big those odds are.

You might want to actually provide some facts as to why Carl Sagan was wrong, rather than make an ad hominem attack. Most truly academic scientists generally take a bit more convincing than just being told that, "The guy was an asshole, so he must be wrong."

Would it be possible,

[pecosdave]

to somehow make a "food pill" with amino acids? Would definately help in dealing with the fat America problem. I know there are non-Amino acid products in the food we eat that we need, but there could be some definate advantages in not having/lessened need to eat. Think "feeding the hungry for a week with a single can of super cola".

Re:Would it be possible,

[Joe the Lesser]

[fast announcer voice]May cause diarrhea, cramps, abominal pain, head aches, fever, gingivitis, allergies, stillbirth....[/fast announcer voice]

Re:Nice troll

[adzoox]

Actually he wrote it down in the book "Contact" and Jodie Foster used it in one of her "dramatic moments"

huh,,

[frodo from middle ea]

u know u can make an entire human baby in a test tube.

Re:huh,,

[Anonymous Coward]

No wonder you can't get a date

Re:huh,,

[frodo from middle ea]

ouch, that hurt.

Re:huh,,

[Carnivorous Carrot]

Look at the tubes on that one!

I thought all you needed was comets

[ArcSecond]

It was my understanding that there is more than enough organic chemistry in comets to seed the early earth with the necessary components. Or at least, it would be a significant fraction, since the early earth would have had a lot of collisions from interplanetary debris. We find lots of interesting chemicals in asteroids and comets.

I guess the question is to what extent did this seeding speed the development of life: would the chemistry have developed without a steady rain of complex molecules from the heavens?

(puts you in the mind of early myths of a Sky God impregnating an Earth Godess)

Re:I thought all you needed was comets

[zakezuke]

So, what you are saying is just as when I leave a 1/2 cup of coffee left uncleaned before I go on vacation, some obscure mold develops, a comit might be the galactic equilivent of someone who just needs to do dishes more often, and life can be percieved as a slime mold film that develops as a direct result of no one being around to clean up the organic trash?

Nice try Miller...

[salvius]

As a student of Biological Anthropology, I have had the oppertunity to take a history of biological anthropology in which Miller was mentioned. Interesting guy, but the theory is not supported any more except by the few staunchest researchers. In other words, this is pop science. It survives in text books (like many other evolutionary inaccuracies that nobody seems to be willing to update). In truth, the experiment did not conclude much. In short, the amino acid theory in reality did not produce very much at all. Still, Miller dared to try it, which is a feat in itself. Update those textbooks! Include him in the history section, but his theory is not much good anymore.

Re:Nice try Miller...

[Anonymous Coward]

obvious not s tudent of English ;) the the OPPERTUNITY to get a spell checker!

Re:Nice try Miller...

[spakka]

As a student of Biological Anthropology
...you aren't qualified to debunk a chemistry experiment.

Re:Nice try Miller...

[salvius]

Excuse me? Do you think that we do not chemestry? Biological Anthropology is a biological discipline, and, I am not sure how it is in the United States, or wherever you're hailing from, but here biologists take chemestry as compulsory.

Re:Nice try Miller...

[chmod000]

English is not his mother tongue. He's doing ok all the same.

Btw, forget spell checkers. They are oblivious to context, so they don't catch inappropriate homonyms. Learn to spell instead.

Re: Nice try Miller...

[Black Parrot]

> Excuse me? Do you think that we do not chemestry? Biological Anthropology is a biological discipline, and, I am not sure how it is in the United States, or wherever you're hailing from, but here biologists take chemestry as compulsory.

So, exactly how many semesters (quarters, whatever) of chemistry have you taken?

Re:Nice try Miller...

[Carnivorous Carrot]

> the theory is not supported any more except by
> the few staunchest researchers

That may be, but the point was to help shoot down the well-used religious "theory" that such chemicals were far too complex to happen naturally. Thus they, and we, must have been created by some god somewhere.

Thus it is a completely valid experiment, and very important, too.

Re:Nice try Miller...

[Bowling Moses]

In a paper printed in a scientific journal, understanding the experimental protocol and seeing if their results are valid and support their conclusions is nontrivial. The ability to examine and determine the veracity of someone else's experiment, results, and conclusions increases with experience. While today I consider myself to be quite good at it I don't feel that I was truly qualified or able to do this until perhaps into my first or maybe even until my second year of graduate school. Additionally, my (and anybody else's) ability to do this decreases the further afield I get. I do protein structure and biochemistry. I start running into some difficulty reading a paper on genetics or organic chemistry. It sounds like (a guess) your training is at a bachelor's level in a field that is peripherally related to biochemistry and still more distantly to organic chemistry--the field in which Miller's article I think more appropriately belongs to. That said, perhaps you feel that you are able to make statements as strong as you have made and maybe you'd be one of those very rare people who does have such a broad grasp. More likely is that your view is affected by something outside of Miller's paper.

Re:Nice troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Er, Jodie Foster was not in the book "Contact."

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[Schezar]

"Lottery = your chances in getting picked out the pool may be one in a million, but your chances of picking the right number on the right day and being that one in a million are impossible odds"

No. It's still one in a million. The odds determined here are that your number, one number out of a million choices, is randomly chosen as the winner. There are one million possibly outcomes. It doesn't matter which number you choose (multiple winners and real-world lottery bullocks like that aside).

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[Anonymous Coward]

And until the little green (gray, blue, orange, who cares) men show up, or at least until we find something extra-terestrial (by definition, not of Earth) on Mars, Ganymede, or the like, there will never be 100% proof.

The only thing we have right now is conjecture and probabilities. Probability would say that, yes we may be the only intelligent life forms in our arm of the galaxy. But you'd have to be awful damn arrogant to say we ARE the ONLY intelligent life.

I give the SETI people credit for the attempt; but, I don't believe that their project, because of it's limited scope, will bear fruit. They are only looking within the near 50-150 light years or so. Beyond that, the signals are too weak and the time-lag would make communication impossible beyond "Hey, we're over here."

where ?

[KingRamsis]

the single most significant step in convincing many scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos

I hate to disappoint you but you will not be drinking coffee with some green men anytime soon. I guess this story will be a classical debate between creationists and evolutionists, personally I think God made this vast universe as a gigantic theatre for us to perform. why waste all that space you may ask? a simple quick answer is because he can, when you examine how beautiful and enormous this universe you should conclude how mighty and great is the creator. And another thing if we are simply a product of some physical phenomena why are we concise? why are we self-aware ? and why there is no other life form which is radically different from us (for example not carbon based)? We me be able to clone a human, or genetically alter a creature to create a new species but we certainly can't give life to something dead. I challenge anyone to explain to me why we die? if you took a cell from the brain of a dying person, and from his heart, lung, and every organ you can sustain them way after the original person dies so what made his/her system shutdown globally? and for the atheist masses out there YES we have soul and I cant prove it as much as you cant prove the opposite.

Re:where ?

[Eric Ass Raymond]

I think God made this vast universe as a gigantic theatre for us to perform

Yes, and we are thoroughly enjoying the play written by your sadistic puppetmaster.

we certainly can't give life to something dead

Yet. Once people were dying of diseases that can be easily cured today. A stopped heart can be restarted, a damaged heart can be replaced. In near future we can grow new replacement organs. All this has required a lot of research. No thanks to religions. I don't see any reason why the creation of a sentient human being would be beyond our capabilities.

as much as you cant prove the opposite

Your logic sucks. You can't prove a negative. You can, however, prove positive. Yet no-one has been able to prove god. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

Re:where ?

[spiny]

>YES we have soul and I cant prove it as much as you cant prove the opposite.

so that makes it true then?

a pretty weak argument if you ask me.

by the way, i am God, i can't prove it, but neither can you disprove it.

awaiting the -1 flamebait,

i thankyou.

Re:where ?

[xutopia]

You are one of those people stubornly attached to the idea of God creating things. Who created God then? Did he create himself? If it is possible for a being to create himself then can't the universe simply have created itself?

Read Climbing Mount Improbable or The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins, The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan and to top it off A Brief History Of Time by Stephen Hawkings.

So long as people accept the idea of God in their life they will be plagued by lack of knowledge about the real truth. Atheism is the only true path. Religions provide lame excuses to explain all the stuff people are too lazy or scared to understand or accept. Yes people die, yes we feel lonely in this immensity but God is just a fabricated blanket of security because of our fright and our hope. If we used this drive for betterment rather than ignorance we'd all be better off.

Yes you have a concsiousness but that isn't a soul. Yes the universe is filled with beautiful things some of which are hard to fathom being created without design but evidence shows that these are just illusions of design.

Get reading so you are less ignorant of the universe you live in. Stop using God as an excuse for your limitations.

Re:where ?

[Eric Ass Raymond]

I don't see any reason why the creation of a sentient human being would be beyond our capabilities.

And before you smart-alecs reply, that should say: "artificial creation". Not the natural way.

Re:where ?

[Tyreth]

Yet no-one has been able to prove god. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

Correction: no one has pursuaded you that God exists. I have seen more than enough evidence to convince - ie, prove - that He exists. Just because you have not yet encountered it does not mean nobody has.

Extraordinary claim is that there is no God. Ordinary claim is that there is. This is all a matter of bias - everything you say can equally be reversed against your own position, so you should be careful what arguments you present.

I do agree that the original poster's idea that "you can't prove/disprove the soul" is good.

Re:where ?

[KingRamsis]

Yes, and we are thoroughly enjoying the play written by your sadistic puppetmaster
so did God start WWII ? actually most the disasters that descendent on the human race are man made.

In near future we can grow new replacement organs
no kidding ? no I don't want you to replace a heart I want you to make a dead ant alive again how about that?

I don't see any reason why the creation of a sentient human being would be beyond our capabilities.
stop thinking about human beings as if they were cars which you can rip apart and install new spare parts or hell make one from scratch not only this is inferior trivial thinking without insight but also insulting

Your logic sucks. You can't prove a negative.
ok fine I will use your logic... you can't create a human being.

Re:where ?

[davesag]

I challenge anyone to explain to me why we die?

ooh pick me, that's an easy one. Cells 'die' when they lose internal quantum coherence and are thus unable to take advantage of the inverse zeno effect. see the excellent book Quantum Evolution for a full discussion of this, or this specific extract from the book.

in this particular case my sig is wrong.

Re:where ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh huh,
If it is mother nature only, evolution, only the strong survive.
Life then has no intrinsic value and it is everyone for themselves.

Other than being lame, it doesn't offer any insight to why we humans are the only ones who are self aware.

Re:where ?

[spakka]

Extraordinary claim is that there is no God. Ordinary claim is that there is. This is all a matter of bias - everything you say can equally be reversed against your own position, so you should be careful what arguments you present.

So if I claim that Santa Claus exists, the burden of proof is on you to disprove it?
Let me guess - your god is special.

Re:where ?

[KingRamsis]

awaiting the -1 flamebait,
a different point of view != a flamebait

Re:where ?

[Anonymous Coward]

and for the atheist masses out there YES we have soul and I cant prove it as much as you cant prove the opposite.

So you can't prove it at all then?

Well thats good, I didn't particularly want you to. It also doesn't matter if I can't prove you don't have a soul; I'm not trying too. Besides which, proving a negative is impossible.

Believe what you like. I don't care, you're going to end up just as dead as I am in the end anyway. The funniest part is that you don't realise that. The sadest part is that you'll be too dead to notice that you were wrong. Oh well.

Re:where ?

[Tyreth]

No, your point is good. But as they say, it's the one who is making an extraordinary claim that needs extraordinary evidence. Atheism is by far the minority the world over, so I consider the burden of proof with them. I've seen ample evidence to prove God exists. I'd have to go through all that with you step by step - and you'd have to demonstrate to me each one how that particular evidence is in fact no proof of God. An arduous task no doubt.

Re:where ?

[KingRamsis]

Who created God then?
I can answer that because you are a limited person and will remain limited by design (all of us). to you everything must have a begining and an end but the God who put that rule is certainly an exception. no body created God because he was there before time itself and will remain after time itself ends.
So long as people accept the idea of God in their life they will be plagued by lack of knowledge about the real truth.
the idea of God will not stop you from exploring and learning.
evidence shows that these are just illusions of design.
this point is weak you can argue for years without reaching a final conclusion if it is a design or an illusion.

Re:where ?

[Anonymous Coward]

a different point of view != a flamebait

Hmmm. So you're new here then.

Re:where ?

[KingRamsis]

sounds like vodo science to me, ok to be fair it is certainly not mainstream science.

Re:where ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The burden of proof is on Atheists to disprove the existence of God? Look, I hate to break it to you, but you cannot prove a negative. I can not prove God does not exist any more than I can prove that Santa Clause does not exist. There can be no evidence to provide a basis of proof if the evidence cannot exist. For example I have not seen my wife this afternoon. Does this prove that my wife ceased to exist this afternoon?

Look, Christians are the guys claiming that something exists. If it exists, then there must be evidence to prove its existence. Atheists are simply asking for this proof, if they are asking at all.

I'll add that as an Atheist here in the U.K I really couldn't care wether you think that there is a God. Thats upto you, believe what you like, but why should I have to defend my beliefs any more than you?

Re:where ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuse me, but how do you know that humans are the only species which are self aware? In fact I'm pretty sure that almost every mammal is self-aware.

It's odd that you bring up the idea that life has no intrinsic value. Does the idea that you're life is pointless bother you? Why?

Re:where ?

[spakka]

No, your point is good. But as they say, it's the one who is making an extraordinary claim that needs extraordinary evidence.

Atheism makes no claims at all. It just rejects the various god-claims of others, due to lack of evidence.

Atheism is by far the minority the world over, so I consider the burden of proof with them.

You misunderstand how logical argument works. The person making the claim has to prove it. It may make you feel comfortable to believe what you think the majority believes, but this has no bearing on the truth or falsity of a proposition.

I've seen ample evidence to prove God exists. I'd have to go through all that with you step by step - and you'd have to demonstrate to me each one how that particular evidence is in fact no proof of God. An arduous task no doubt.

Post your single strongest piece of evidence.

Re:where ?

[Eric Ass Raymond]

stop thinking

You could have stopped right there, because that is exactly be the point all religions throughout the human history have made. Congratulations. You made your point.

human beings as if they were cars which you can rip apart and install new spare parts or hell make one from scratch not only this is inferior trivial thinking without insight but also insulting

I'm sorry if I'm insulting your sense of being so special. Well, actually I'm not. It's you who should stop thinking that the human race is the pinnacle of the animal kind (oops, did I insult you again by suggesting that humans are animals?). Religions and religious people have already had to give up the idea of Earth as the center of the universe. It's about time the silly notion that a god made us in his image.

crawling towards perfection.

There's plenty of improvements we can make ourselves - unless we are again held back by backward religous thinking.

Re:where ?

[Eric Ass Raymond]

Sigh... clicked on submit instead of preview.

stop thinking

You could have stopped right there, because that is exactly be the point all religions throughout the human history have made. Congratulations. You made your point.

human beings as if they were cars which you can rip apart and install new spare parts or hell make one from scratch not only this is inferior trivial thinking without insight but also insulting

I'm sorry if I'm insulting your sense of being so special. Well, actually I'm not. It's you who should stop thinking that the human race is the pinnacle of the animal kind (oops, did I insult you again by suggesting that humans are animals?). Religions and religious people have already had to give up the idea of Earth as the center of the universe. It's about time the silly notion that a god made us in his image.

I don't quite understand why you have a problem with the idea of human bodies as physical objects that can be ripped apart and fixed, because that's what we are. Fragile sacks of mostly water and utterly imperfect. Ask a doctor how well the human diaphragm, eyes and the pulmonary system actually perform in comparison to how they could have been built better. Not well. God didn't create us and evolution is clearly crawling towards perfection.

There's plenty of improvements we can make ourselves - unless we are again held back by backward religous thinking.

ok fine I will use your logic... you can't create a human being.

In time we will.

Re:where ?

[Tyreth]

I understand what you mean, and you are right. I guess what I'm saying is I already have proof more than adequate for myself. So you would have to prove that evidence as being false. That is what I mean by "extraordinary proof" - extraordinary proof that my evidences are wrong. I wasn't using the right words in this way, so yes you are correct.

I'll add that as an Atheist here in the U.K I really couldn't care wether you think that there is a God. Thats upto you, believe what you like, but why should I have to defend my beliefs any more than you?

Good, the only reason I bit is because you sounded like you were mocking us talking about sadistic puppetmaster, etc. Btw, you say "no thanks to religion", but many of the greatest scientists and their discovieries were by creationists (taken from a book):
Physics - Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin Chemistry - Boyle, Dalton, Ramsay
Biology - Ray, Linnaeus, Mendel, Pasteur, Virchow, Agassiz
Geology - Steno, Woodward, Brewster, Buckland, Cuvier
Astronomy - Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Herschel, Maunder
Mathematics - Pascal, Leibnitz, Euler

So please don't mock us or assume we can't contribute anything related to intelligence. You may find that many discoveries today are by creationists. I have read on how evolutionary assumptions have caused a lot of problems in the area of back pain - refer to Technical Journal Volume 15(3) 2001, pg 79 "Back problems: how Darwinism misled researchers". It was also Mendel who discovered the principles of inheritence, and the result of creationist assumptions that we can selectively breed plants for ultimate effect.

Re:where ?

[Tyreth]

Post your single strongest piece of evidence.

No thanks. At what might seem like a cop-out, I'll not engage in debates on specifics here on slashdot. It quickly deteriorates into a waste of time, and I'm sick of being called a believer in fairy tales before the idiot who's "discussing" with me understands what it is I believe.

However, if you are genuinely interested, and not just interested in a good debate, then e-mail me at tunip at tyreth.homelinux.org.

Re:where ?

[jhigh]

Atheism is the only true path.

So your creation is the result of a series of random, uncontrolled events. Therefore, your brain is the result of such random, uncontrolled events. How then can you possibly trust ANY thought that your brain has, including the idea that there is no God? That's like spilling a glass of milk and hoping that it comes out as a map of Alabama. Atheism is ridiculous, and it takes MUCH more faith to be an atheist than it does to be a Christian.

You want proof? Look at Saul, who later became Paul in the New Testament of the Bible. There is lots of historical evidence that Paul existed and that the accounts of his actions in the Bible are historically accurate. How is this proof, you ask? His changed life. He went from Saul, persecutor and slayer of Christians, to Paul, martyr for Jesus Christ and author of a large portion of the New Testament.

You can bash my faith, bash my religion, and tell me I'm foolish. You can tell me I'm naive and uneducated. You can tell every Christian on the planet the same thing. But what you can't do is take away my experience. I have met Jesus Christ in ways and places that your ignorance will not allow you to go. I feel sorry for you, I pray for you, and I weep for your soul. That's the real problem. If you're right, I'm out nothing. I've enjoyed my life and lived it the way that I wanted to. If I'm right and you're wrong, you lose. You spend eternity in hell and I live out eternity in heaven.

Atheists, Agnostics, etc are not really that way because they BELIEVE what they say. They're rejecting truth based on their own self-absorption. Given the above argument, you are either a) a complete idiot, or b) too selfish and fatalistic to consider eternity. Those are the only two options. Eternity is not something worth gambling with.

Yes, I know I'll get -1, Flamebait. As an aside, I find it pretty irritating that slashdotters can express any view except the Christian without being called a troll. If you post something that is pro-evolution you may have creationists argue with you, but that's about it. If a creationist posts something pro-creation they are called a troll...simply for expressing their view. It's immature and intolerant...and coming from people who are supposed to tolerant and think Christians are intolerant fascists...it's hypocrisy.

Re:where ?

[KingRamsis]

I'm sorry if I'm insulting your sense of being so special.
am I the only one here who thinks that the human race is special in anyway?
language skills? delicate hands that can craft tools? math ? less bodily hair?
and about stopping thinking please stop pushing words into my mouth, sure you can disect a human and document everything about the body and invent medicine and do whatever you want with the human body but you will be like a kid who is breaking the toy to find out what makes it tick. very exciting but you can never match the original knowledge of the creator who made.

Re:where ?

[Anonymous Coward]

you sounded like you were mocking us talking about sadistic puppetmaster

Well actually that wasn't me. Like I say, I don't care if you believe in God.

Re:where ?

[davesag]

well it's a theory, it's falsable, it's science. the idea that life is some mystical force is pure voodoo.

Re:where ?

[KingRamsis]

creationist posts something pro-creation they are called a troll
tell me about it...
where? Wednesday May 14, @02:16PM
Replies:6
Score:-1, Flamebait

Re:where ?

[Anonymous Coward]

So your creation is the result of a series of random, uncontrolled events. Therefore, your brain is the result of such random, uncontrolled events. How then can you possibly trust ANY thought that your brain has, including the idea that there is no God?

Yup. Life, the Universe and Everyhing is pretty much a series of random events. What I want to know is why you think that is a problem? Does it scare you?

By the way, think about what you just wrote. If the idea that there is no God is simply random, then that actually proves that there is no God now doesn't it?

But what you can't do is take away my experience.

No, and I personally have no wish to do that. You have met Jesus. Good for you!

You have to rememeber however, that ones experiences are ones own and are not "evidence" I once met a guy who claimed to have been chased by a 6 foot tall donut. Should you acknowledge that 6 foot tall donuts exist, based on this one persons experience?

I feel sorry for you

Why? Why is it that Christians feel the need to feel sorry for Atheists? I don't feel sorry for myself, why should anyone else?!

Look, as an Atheist I am perfectly happy to accept the following as my own personal beliefs

• There is no God
• Life is a series of random events
• There is no afterlife
• I'll be too dead to notice this, therefore I do not fear the concept of death
• There is no cosmological reward or punishment, although scociety will and does act of a judge of my actions
• Life is largely pointless. I live, I consume, I reproduce, I die. The only thing I can hope to do is to help to improve scociety in some small way, but no great deal if I do not.

There. I am happy with this state of affairs. I am perfectly comfortable with all of these concepts. Again, why do you feel sorry for me?

Re:where ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Atheists, Agnostics, etc are not really that way because they BELIEVE what they say. They're rejecting truth based on their own self-absorption.

As an Athiest I would just like to say "You can bash my faith, bash my religion, and tell me I'm foolish. You can tell me I'm naive and uneducated." and ask you how you even dare to call me an millions of others like me self absorbed? While it may make you comfy in your own little world to think that, maybe you'd care to back up that statement?

Thats why you'll get -1 Flamebait. It is because your post is Flamebait!

Re:where ?

[Tyreth]

Fair enough, sorry. I should have checked first :)

Re: where ?

[Black Parrot]

> So your creation is the result of a series of random, uncontrolled events. Therefore, your brain is the result of such random, uncontrolled events. How then can you possibly trust ANY thought that your brain has, including the idea that there is no God?

If it was all created by a puppetmaster, how could you trust it then either?

Did the lady in Texas who stoned her children a few days ago do well to trust her thoughts, to trust her ideas about God?

> You want proof? Look at Saul, who later became Paul in the New Testament of the Bible. There is lots of historical evidence that Paul existed and that the accounts of his actions in the Bible are historically accurate. How is this proof, you ask? His changed life. He went from Saul, persecutor and slayer of Christians, to Paul, martyr for Jesus Christ and author of a large portion of the New Testament.

And the people at Jonestown drank the coolaid.

How are the quirks of human behavior supposed to count as evidence for the divine?

> If I'm right and you're wrong, you lose. You spend eternity in hell and I live out eternity in heaven.

And if you're worshiping the wrong god you're just making the right one madder and madder every week. (With apologies to H. Simpson.)

> Atheists, Agnostics, etc are not really that way because they BELIEVE what they say. They're rejecting truth based on their own self-absorption.

How the FUCK do YOU know what motivates them?

> Given the above argument, you are either a) a complete idiot, or b) too selfish and fatalistic to consider eternity. Those are the only two options.

Given the above argument, you've never stopped to think things out very carefully.

> Eternity is not something worth gambling with.

So of course you make sacrifices to all the gods, to make sure your spiritual ass is covered.

> As an aside, I find it pretty irritating that slashdotters can express any view except the Christian without being called a troll.

It isn't expressing Christian views that gets people modded down or flamed, it's expressing the kind of asinine argument you invoked in your post.

Re: where ?

[Black Parrot]

> If it is mother nature only, evolution, only the strong survive. Life then has no intrinsic value and it is everyone for themselves.

Whereas if it's special creation then life has no intrinsic value and everything is just a toy for the creator, to be drowned in a snit if things don't go to suit him.

I'll take my chances with mother nature.

Re: where ?

[Black Parrot]

> Correction: no one has pursuaded you that God exists. I have seen more than enough evidence to convince - ie, prove - that He exists. Just because you have not yet encountered it does not mean nobody has.

Funny thing is, people have been having your experience throughout history, "proving" the existance of mutually incompatible deities all along the way.

> Extraordinary claim is that there is no God. Ordinary claim is that there is.

How you figure? Do you also say "Extraordinary claim is that there is no Invisible Pink Unicorn. Ordinary claim is that there is."? If not, why not? Just because you have not encountered the evidence to convince that the IPU exist, does not mean that nobody has.

Re: where ?

[Black Parrot]

> am I the only one here who thinks that the human race is special in anyway?

Zebras probably think zebras are special too. What of it?

> language skills?

Only somewhat more than chimps. (That may sound surprising, until you compare the difference between us and chimps to the difference between chimps and toadstools.)

> delicate hands that can craft tools?

Only somewhat more than chimps.

> math ?

Only somewhat more than porpoises.

> less bodily hair?

I presume that you think snails are even more "special" than we are, then?

> sure you can disect a human and document everything about the body and invent medicine and do whatever you want with the human body but you will be like a kid who is breaking the toy to find out what makes it tick. very exciting but you can never match the original knowledge of the creator who made.

Mighty big assumption, mighty small supporting argument.

Re: where ?

[Black Parrot]

> Atheism is by far the minority the world over, so I consider the burden of proof with them.

So it's a voting thingy? Whichever god is most popular is real, and if a new god becomes more popular next week the current one has to get off the throne and work on his PR campaign instead of ruling the universe?

Don't you ever stop to think before you post?

> I've seen ample evidence to prove God exists. I'd have to go through all that with you step by step - and you'd have to demonstrate to me each one how that particular evidence is in fact no proof of God. An arduous task no doubt.

Go for it. Science is an arduous task, but we're accustomed to careful examination of the facts.

Re: where ?

[Black Parrot]

> No thanks. At what might seem like a cop-out, I'll not engage in debates on specifics here on slashdot. It quickly deteriorates into a waste of time

It is a waste of time, for you at any rate, because you always lose the debate as soon as you go beyond your "trust me, I know God personally" argument.

> and I'm sick of being called a believer in fairy tales before the idiot who's "discussing" with me understands what it is I believe.

It's no shame to believe in fairy tales; I suppose most of us believe in one or the other. The idiocy lies in making up idiotic arguments to convince others and reassure yourself.

Re:where ?

[Dr. Manhattan]

...your brain is the result of such random, uncontrolled events. How then can you possibly trust ANY thought that your brain has, including the idea that there is no God?

You think you understand evolution, but you don't. Had you actually done any studying, you would know that evolution is composed of two parts: mutation (and gene duplication, chromosome duplication, etc.), which is random, and selection, which is definitely not random.

Grow up and read a science book. Futuyma's still a good start.

Look at Saul, who later became Paul in the New Testament of the Bible.

Of course, Saul got a personal visitation and miracle from Jesus himself. I ask for no more than what Saul of Tarsus got...

Re:where ?

[xutopia]

yeah the debate on that rages on. It is rather hard to define but I think we mean consciousness. In other words awareness of our awareness! :)

Re:where ?

[jhigh]

Again, why do you feel sorry for me?

Because if I'm right...there are consequences for your beliefs...grave ones.

Re:where ?

[Reservoir Penguin]

Do you have repeatable evidence? Otherwise your personal expriences with God are no more valuble than claims made by people who have been kidnapped by the aliens.

Re:where ?

[xutopia]

kinda funny that the one living in fear of god thinks he's happier in life than the one that doesn't believe in god.

I feel sorry for you and others like you. While I enjoy life for what it really is you live in fear of grave consequences.

Seems so contradictory that the almighty loves and forgives yet punishes people that don't want to play a ridiculous game of hide and seek. If god were to appear in front of me (wouldn't that be funny) I'd ask him to explain to me why he is so mean to us! Why can't he just play fair? He can see everything we do but we can't see anything he does.

I don't bash you but just feel sorry for you.

Re:where ?

[Noofus]

Nothing is special about the human race at all. At least in terms of physicality. Language skills, dexterious hands, etc evolved due to the fact that we have less bolidy hair, no natural weapons (claws), we are relaitvly small (compared to lions, elephants) and weak. So we needed to evolve a good brain, ability to provide for ourselves what we dont have (protective clothing instead of fur, knives instead of claws/sharp teeth, etc), and communicate so we can survive as a species.

If you want to make a good god argument, argue about conciousness. Why are we concious, what or who gave us conciousness, and how is it that 'you think therefore you are' is possible in a 'random' universe. If you want to find god, you should look inside your own mind, not to the physical world around you which can be easily explained by basic physics and chemistry.

Re: where ?

[KingRamsis]

Only somewhat more than chimps.
you are truly entertaining and funny, should I assume that I'm replying to a monkey?
I presume that you think snails are even more "special" than we are, then?
I was talking about mammals sigh...

Re:where ?

[xutopia]

First of all I don't reject truth because of self absorbtion. I reject assumptions based on nothing more than desires.

I once was a firm believer in things that were unproven and unproveable. Now I only accept to believe truth that I can have proof for. Mind you I don't go to extreme. If you tell me you went to the mall yesterday i'll believe you. If you tell me you met Jesus Christ I'll ask for proof because it's far out. If you were fasting, lacking sleep or hadn't talked to a human in 40 days I'd have reasons to think you had hallucination. Still if you had a proof for me I'd accept that and then I would believe as well.

I once believed in god (actually I wanted to believe more than I really believed) and if you look at the reasons you'll understand why they are so hard to not fall into.

As I was growing up in my faith I asked myself a lot of questions about life and death. Heaven was the perfect solution to death. It was such a nice concept that I just ate it up.

I also needed justice. God was just so he could take care of justice for those who got away. Ultimate justice was such a nice concept I ate it up too.

Solitude really sucks. Being alone really is hard on us social animals. Believing that god is always there for us and that angels look out for us just makes us feel really good. Having someone around was such a nice concept I ate it up.

I had questions that were unanswered about when the universe was created, why people die young or in accidents, why people get ill and others don't, why gorillas can't speak but we can, what love and hatred was. All these questions were hard to answer and certainly easier to just accept that god made it that way. Then I was stunned with the theory of evolution. How could that be? You mean that god didn't create us but were were the result of genes shifting?

As I became older I read a bit more. I had read the bible prior to the real revelations in my life. I found lots of wonderful things in there but none of them had rigor. It was all hope and desires packaged in a candy wrapped figure. I then read a few books by Stephen Hawkins, Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins. These brought new light to my beliefs and everyhing I ever believed in came crumbling down.

If you enjoy living in cotton candy world then believe in god. In the meantime people do unjust things in this life and if I'm right god will never do anything about it. If you really want to be a man and do something about this earth and your kids then stop believing that god will take care of justice for you.

In the meantime please do not tell us that atheists are self absorbed. They aren't sponges to every nice concept.

Re: where ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Naked Mole Rat. I rest my case, m'lud.

Re:where ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether existance of god/goddess/gods is a thing that gives hope, it has 0 influence on the fact whether such being(s) exist.

And as an atheist gone agnostic i'd like to hear your reasoning how we can know that god(s) dont exist?

Old arguement about invicible dragon in the carage doesn't cut it, unless you're going to accept that default condition for everything is "doesn't exist" and prove that it works both inside and outside universe (for a being(s) to be greater then universe it must be outside of it).

Re:where ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Btw, you say "no thanks to religion", but many of the greatest scientists and their discovieries
were by creationists (taken from a book): Physics - Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin
Chemistry - Boyle, Dalton, Ramsay
Biology - Ray, Linnaeus, Mendel, Pasteur, Virchow, Agassiz
Geology - Steno, Woodward, Brewster, Buckland, Cuvier
Astronomy - Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Herschel, Maunder
Mathematics - Pascal, Leibnitz, Euler

WHICH BOOK?

Some pro-creationist piece of claptrap?

Re:where ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. All of them were religious. To a creationist, this means that they were all creationists -- which I suppose is technically true, if by that you mean they believe that God created the universe. On the other hand, if you mean they believe that evolution didn't happen, that the Earth is ~10,000 years old, etc., then hardly.

Off the top of my head, Kelvin thought the Sun was ~100 million years old, because he's known for having a wrong theory of the Sun's power. Newton was a closet heretic who attacked the doctrine of the Trinity, the existence of the devil, etc. Galileo said that the Bible was to tell us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go (i.e., he rejected the Bible as a source of scientific value). And so on ...

Re:where ?

[KingRamsis]

f you want to make a good god argument, argue about conciousness. Why are we concious, what or who gave us conciousness
I did in my grand parent post

Re:where ?

[Tyreth]

I don't recall mentioning my personal experiences awith God as evidence.

Re:where ?

[xutopia]

I agree that something bringing hope doesn't make it true. That is why we should not just jump to the conclusion that God must exist simply because we'd like him to or someone says he does. Death, disease, questions that haunt us are all easier through God. Facing up to your problems is much harder and requires a lot more thought.

I cannot reason with you on ways to know wether or not God does exist. Fact is we cannot know. That is why people get all in arms just like in politics. We become attached to an idea and just run with it good or bad. It's a wired survival mechanism that we have and this we can prove or disprove.

Many of the things in the Bible are plain false. For example the laws about what we can and cannot eat saying that anything in the sea with fins and scales is good for us. The people that wrote that part of the Bible hadn't created the universe and everything inside it and if they did they would know about Fugu and other blowfish that have fins and scales but also have a very deadly poison. Pigs were infested with diseases back in that time that could kill us. The explanation as to why we shouldn't eat any is that they have hoofed feet and other visual things like that. Of course today we can eat pork and it doesn't kill us like it did before because today we understand bacterias and viruses. Once again religion shows that it just wants to control and is written by humans and all the errors that comes with humans. A God creator of all things, all-knowing, onmnipotent and omnipresent would know why the pig weren't good to eat and why not all fish is good for you.

I don't argue that God doesn't exist. I just say that it is way more probable that we invented him to make things easier for us. When you have a universal answer for everything it's easier to not bother with the hard questions.

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think he was whining ... and how do you calculate the incalculable? Anonymous Coward signature for this post: Read for Comprehension ...

Primordial Soup

[bugsmalli]

I'll take it with wanton sauce please.

Re:Primordial Soup

[Anonymous Coward]

Merciless and inhumane sauce?

My 2 cents

[arvindn]

I strongly feel that there are many planets harboring life in the galaxy. Consider this: what are the planets that we can directly observe to test for life? Clearly only those in the solar system. What have we found? It is thought to be a significant possibility that Mars had primitive life at some point in the past. Of course, the earth itself must be discounted because of the anthropic principle: if there weren't life on earth we wouldn't be around to ask the question. So out of a single observable planetary system we find one planet with the possibility of life. While this isn't statistically significant, it does makes it very unlikely that we are the only planet with life on it.

Re:My 2 cents

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew a geek once that had a very hot wife.. Does that mean all other geeks have a chance? While this isn't statistically significant, it does make it very unlikely that he was the only geek that had a chance....

Re:I tried this experiment in high school...sort o

[laughing_badger]

It really shouldn't be a shock that you recieved a high mark.

Education should provoke thought. Just training kids to pass tests is of no value. What you did, analysing your results and thinking about _why_ you got them shows far more 'talent' than someone who just repeated an experiment that is guaranteed to give good results.

Sigh! Rant over. It is just crushing to see very little evidence of people designing their science lessons to impart the ability to think, like the guy who wrote Clouds in a Glass of Beer did.

Re:I tried this experiment in high school...sort o

[archeopterix]

It hardly needs saying, but in a week I didn't make any amino acids I could detect.

My high school experiment results were quite different - I had to throw the jar into a volcano after the evolved organisms created a civilization and started working on a technology to break the jar and take over the Earth. At least that's what I wrote in my paper. My mark was also quite different, and needless to say I wasn't very happy with it.

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[salvius]

Actually, he was wrong. The experiment's controled variables from the onset changed the odds, but this was not reflected in his research. Furthermore, the odds of formation over disentegration are unfortunately impossible. This is NOT a supported theory today in the biological field. Miller was not an asshole; he was a bright guy, but the primordial soup is no longer the thoery most researchers support (there will always be a few, but there are still archeologists who swear by Atlantis).

Life Not So Common

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm more Christian than chemist, I'm afraid, but I'd thought that Miller's experiments were among the easier targets for creationists to dismiss. While Miller's experiments may yet offer clues for life's origin, later research demonstrates without question that the origin problem is much more complex than pop scientists like Sagan seemed to believe.

If life is that common, where is everybody?

Re:Life Not So Common

[spakka]

I'm more Christian than chemist, I'm afraid, but I'd thought that Miller's experiments were among the easier targets for creationists to dismiss

The conclusion of your linked article:

"Believers in Christ know that the Creator of life has already been revealed through the Bible. Even those who search for a creator other than God will, in fact, have the Creator of life revealed to them in the near future, for every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."

With reasoning like this, creationists find it easy to dismiss any evidence.

Re:Life Not So Common

[Anonymous Coward]

If life is that common, where is everybody?

They're zipping around the universe in faster than light ships, trading with each other. You know, just like we do!

You have a very poor understanding of the distances and physics involved in the universe. Where are they all? The same damn places as us! Stuck on too near to their planets, perhaps searching for radio signals that have taken thousands of years to get near them and are too weak to detect anyway.

Why is it that Christian "logic" dictates that God is real even though you can't see Him, yet it does not follow that alien life must be real even though we can't see it?

Re:Life Not So Common

[DavidPesta]

That article could have just as easily said,

"Believers in Atheism know that evolution has already been proven by science. Even those who search for an explanation other than evolution will, in fact, die and cease to exist and their attempts to find 'God' will be futile."

With reasoning like that, some evolutionists also find it easy to dismiss evidence.

Both sides of the issue have religious components. What we need are people who can be honest about what they think when they explore the issue. I believe there are intellectually honest people on both sides of the issue.

David Pesta

Re:Life Not So Common

[Anonymous Coward]

Believers in Atheism know that evolution has already been proven by science.

No it hasn't been proven, and no one has ever claimed that has been proven. In fact the only people who actually claim that are Creationists!

Re:Life Not So Common

[spakka]

That article could have just as easily said,

But it didn't. Evolutionists don't argue like that. They don't need to, because they have evidence. That's the point.

Re:Life Not So Common

[boatboy]

Why is it that Christian "logic" dictates that God is real even though you can't see Him, yet it does not follow that alien life must be real even though we can't see it? It doesn't say that. It says that the ways of seeing God are not always the same as the ways of seeing, say, a brick. This makes perfect sense when you consider what Christians claim God is - uncreated, super-natural, etc. You can't "see" love for your wife, or mom, or whoever, in an purely rational sense, yet you believe it exists (I assume). I could just as well bemoan your "logic" of loving your mom, even though you can't see or define love. That being said there is "evidence" you love your mom. By the same token, Christians do think there is evidence pointing to some aspects of God- Mandelbrot called his discovery of fractal patterns in nature the "fingerprint of God". Pascal and others had similar things to say about the apparent order in the universe. Things really appear- to many people- to be designed. Explaining the physical processes behind something doesn't negate this either- The fact that trees come from seeds doesn't make them seem any less "designed" in my mind. Or to use a more complex example, if quantum physics were to give us a theory of everything tommorrow, I would still wonder why everything worked that way. And I would credit God for creating it that way. The problem you've run into is fueled by ignorant Christians and ignorant non- (sometimes anti-) Christians. Christians fall into a "God-of-the-Gap" mentality and try to use God to explain just the unexplainable. They then say silly things like the "earth is flat," only to be prooven wrong and make a bad name for Christians. Non-Christians sieze on those instances and dismiss Christianity because it's "illogical", when in fact it is no more illogical that loving your mom. These two things create an environment in which it seems, to the ignorant Christian or non-Christian, that Christianity is opposed to Science. The fact is though, Christians have a vested interest in learning as much about the universe as possible, because they believe it to be created by the same Creator that created them. Which brings me to you last point: Christianity does not teach that life does not exist elsewhere. It very well may be that God chose to create life elsewhere in the universe. Again, some Christians may balk, but then there are also Atheists who would as well. The bottom line, and the right answer to the question, is "we don't know, but lets find out."

Re: Life Not So Common

[Black Parrot]

> > Why is it that Christian "logic" dictates that God is real even though you can't see Him, yet it does not follow that alien life must be real even though we can't see it?

> It doesn't say that. It says that the ways of seeing God are not always the same as the ways of seeing, say, a brick. ..and leaves us wondering whether God is real in the same way, say, a brick is real.

> Things really appear- to many people- to be designed.

And the sun appears - to almost everyone - to go around the earth.

[snip good stuff]

> The fact is though, Christians have a vested interest in learning as much about the universe as possible, because they believe it to be created by the same Creator that created them.

Some Christians do. Others conclude that they should despise knowledge of the universe.

Re: Life Not So Common

[boatboy]

and leaves us wondering whether God is real in the same way, say, a brick is real.
Just like you wonder if you really love your mom? But now you're arguing against a non-Christian proposition. God is not a brick, and doesn't operate according to the same rules that govern bricks. A Christian would say, no God is not real in the same way as a brick- He's more real. (hehe, something to ponder as you watch the Matrix)

And the sun appears - to almost everyone - to go around the earth.
And you appear to have posted on /. What's the point? Because people believed something false does not mean that everything people believe is false. That people (not just Christians, btw) in the past thought that the sun went around the earth does not disprove the existance of God. Scientists once thought flies spontaneousely arose from rotten meat. They were proven wrong. Does that disprove Science or just those particular, confused scientists? Scientists today, no doubt are telling us things that will be disproven 2,5, or 50 years from now. Does this mean we should dismiss all science? There's a logic term for this fallacy, but it escapes me now...

[snip good stuff]
thanks =)

> The fact is though, Christians have a vested interest in learning as much about the universe as possible, because they believe it to be created by the same Creator that created them.

Some Christians do. Others conclude that they should despise knowledge of the universe.
The others are wrong... Some Athiests conclude that the universe is absurd. I have to say I think I'd agree with them if it weren't for my pesky theism. =) But no doubt many athiests think it's important for us, as little clumps of carbon on a small rock in an average system in an average galaxy among 10^n galaxies, to understand as much as possible about the universe before we die. Point being it is illogical to dismiss a whole belief system for the errors (percieved and real) of some, even many, of its practitioners. The problem is many people, as a quick review of this thread will show, are hostile to Christians' "illogic", yet blind to their own.

Re:Life Not So Common

[aminorex]

You're looking at conclusions, not reasoning.
The evidentiary and rational basis for the
conclusion simply isn't in evidence, so it's
difficult to adequately critique it.

With reasoning like this, anti-creationists find
it easy to dismiss any differing viewpoint.

Re:Life Not So Common

[DavidPesta]

Evolutionists don't argue like that.

I know of atheists who are evolutonists and I have heard them argue like that. Granted, they don't become published when they do, but some do. The point I was making is that people on both sides of the issue can become quite religious, so pointing out the fact that some creationists are being religious does not make the entire creationist position invalid. The same can be argued about some evolutionists. Straw Man and Ad Hominem arguments should always be avoided. That's all I was trying to illustrate.

My problem is this: Creationists are often brought up in the media when they say stupid things. When they say something intelligent, that is also reported, but the ideas are discriminated against a priori because it does not support a naturalistic point of view. Evolutionists say stupid things also, which is rarely brought up in the media because evolution is the most accepted point of view among scientists and there is no need to report stupid things. What you end up with is a population of people who are exposed to creation being a stupid idea and evolution being the obvious explanation of our existance.

I'm not saying one point of view is better than the other, but I am suspicious that a legitimate voice is not being heard. People hate me for wanting a fair discussion and assume that I am a creationist, but that is what gives them away. ;)

Re:Life Not So Common

[Anonymous Coward]

When has a creationist said something intelligent? Now that would be news.

Re:Life Not So Common

[spakka]

Straw Man and Ad Hominem arguments should always be avoided. That's all I was trying to illustrate.

Do you even know what a strawman argument is? Here is an example:

That article could have just as easily said,

"Believers in Atheism know that evolution has already been proven by science. Even those who search for an explanation other than evolution will, in fact, die and cease to exist and their attempts to find 'God' will be futile."

With reasoning like that, some evolutionists also find it easy to dismiss evidence.

Look familiar?

Re:Life Not So Common

[Carnivorous Carrot]

> "Even those who search for a creator other than
> God will, in fact, have the Creator of life
> revealed to them in the near future, for every
> knee shall bow and every tongue confess that
> Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the
> Father."

I shan't kneel even in that case. While it might be in the nature of an infinitely powerful and perfectly good god to create beings, it does not follow that one puts them in a universe where they can rape, torture, and murder each other.

Worse, this perverted god, being all-knowing, experiences both the pain a raped and tortured four year old feels, as well as the bizarre anger/lust as the attacker ejaculates inside his dying body.

And I'm supposed to kneel to this god because it's morally and ethically imperative?

I think not.

Re:I tried this experiment in high school...sort o

[Saint Aardvark]

Zapping: No, not that I could think of. We didn't have a Van de Graaf generator; I would've loved it if we had. And I think I was interested in seeing if a simple setup like this would produce any results.

If my teacher had helped, it wouldn't have been my chemistry project, would it?

And no, I did not put down "faked his results." That pinging noise was your humour detector going off.

Primordial Alphabet Soup

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn stuff is so primitive it only has 'A's. You can only get a third of the way through spelling 'ASS' and forget about even trying 'POO.' It ain't gonna happen.

The reason most of these experiments fail...

[LM741N]

Is that they forget to add the red phosphorus and iodine to the mix.

Re:The reason most of these experiments fail...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod up! This is funny!

I love this experiment

[Cackmobile]

This is the experiment I use to argue with creationists. They always say where did life come from and I point them towards this.

THe thing with creationists is that they are always forcing evolutionists to defend their theory and if they can't they use the god by default argument which is basically if you can't explain something, there must be a god. Thats the sort of reasoning that the indigineous cultures used.

Next time you are talking to a creationist, make them defend there belief. Aks them where god came from or something similar.

Re:I love this experiment

[Tyreth]

I am a creationist and I have not come across a single evolutionist who understood our position yet. Argh. And I need to remind myself not to get into these discussions. Still, a few comments...

This is the experiment I use to argue with creationists. They always say where did life come from and I point them towards this.

See these posts:
One and two.

Next time you are talking to a creationist, make them defend there belief. Aks them where god came from or something similar.

I have defended creationism many times. I'll tell you where it ends up every time. The simple fact that the evolutionists arguing don't understand the creationist position. I'm not saying I'm better - I just have an unfair advantage. I was brought up in an evolutionist teaching society so I've been exposed to the theories I now reject. However, creationism is something new and foreign to evolutionists today.

As for where God came from, that is a stupid question. God created all things. He exists outside all things that were created, and one of those things was time. Without time the concept of beginning and end is absurd. Can we explain this? No. Do we need to? Of course not. It's outside our understanding, outside of everything we know. In fact, it is no different from asking an evolutionist where all the matter for the big bang came from. Evolution teaches that time was one such thing created then.

Re:I love this experiment

[Cackmobile]

Ok.Are u are a hardcore 'the earth was created in 7 days' christian or a god started the big bang type christian

Re:I love this experiment

[Tyreth]

Hardcore. Couldn't have it any other way :)

Re:I love this experiment

[tgibbs]

As for where God came from, that is a stupid question. God created all things. He exists outside all things that were created, and one of those things was time. Without time the concept of beginning and end is absurd. Can we explain this? No. Do we need to? Of course not.

Absolutely. It is as absurd to insist that God requires a creator as it is to insist that the Universe requires one. In either case, one must accept that something can exist without being created by something else.

Re:I love this experiment

[davesag]

The simple fact that the evolutionists arguing don't understand the creationist position.

Okay then, please set out the creationist position in terms we simple atheists can understand. please try and avoid circular arguments.

Re:I love this experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

So God created the heavens and the earth in 7 days, and created them so it looked exactly like they were created several billion years ago and have now cooled to 3 degrees Kelvin. He even went to all the trouble of making sure the black-body radiation from this faked explosion was perfect to within a few parts-per-million and then he buried some dinosaurs for good luck.

Pretty zany Guy, this God of yours, isn't he? You know, creating the Earth and all like that then doing his absolute damndest to make it look like he didn't.

Re:I love this experiment

[DavidPesta]

I personally take the position that it can be well shown that evolution is largely inconclusive. People can use it as a theoretical model to understand a lot of things, but I have kept my eyes on too many of the details to say it can be said true for sure. So, if evolution in its strictest sense does turn out to be false, the only alternative is creation. (Even God guided evolution can be thought of as a form of creation to a point.)

Outlining all of this thought with exhaustive examples would be well beyond the scope of this post. ;)

Re:I love this experiment

[Tyreth]

If you are interested to learn, the evidence is there. I can point you to the place where the most misunderstandings occur - and that's with inheritence. Evolutionists commonly quote examples similar to Darwin's finches as proof of evolution. They do not understand that these observations are explained equally well, or better, under the creationist model.

Either way, if you can't tell, I don't feel like getting into a debate on specifics unless the person is willing to actually consider what I say. Some people argue because they think they are right. Others are almost positive they are right, but willing to concede they may misunderstand and be wrong. That's my position, and I only want to discuss with others of a similar mind.

Re:I love this experiment

[Tyreth]

Don't you dare act like every other evolutionist I have ever debated with, or I'll be out of here in a second. I hate it when people make assumptions about what I am going to argue, and then go on to mock the assumed argument. Who are you to read my mind?

I agree that the heavens are several billion years old. The earth, however, is not. You probably think this is twisted. I assure you it is not. Read this book if you want to know how.

But you need to tell me in your next post whether you are going to keep acting childish, or whether you are interested in a real discussion. Then I will know whether to reply or not.

Re:I love this experiment

[xutopia]

well apparently it was in 6 days. I read the holy (as in plenty of holes) babble (I mean bible) and it says the earth was created in 6 days. The 7th was spent resting and looking at the wonders he had created (half ass done work if you ask me). God does not exist, he was created by us! :)

Re: I love this experiment

[Black Parrot]

> I agree that the heavens are several billion years old. The earth, however, is not. You probably think this is twisted. I assure you it is not. Read this book [amazon.com] if you want to know how.

Or save your money, skip the creationist bunkum, and read this instead, while you're waiting for Humpreys' twisty logic to make it to the pages of a peer reviewed journal.

Re:I love this experiment

[davesag]

I personally take the position that it can be well shown that evolution is largely inconclusive.

ROTFLMAO

Evolution is one of the most established theories there is. Every test designed to disprove the theory has failed. The theory that living things evolve is just a theory, like the theory that gravity acts between two physical objects is only a theory. On the other hand the theory that an almighty creator created everything is so specious if defied reason. It's not testable, it's not falsable, it's not scientific. It's the work of cranks and crazies from thousands of years ago who had nothing else to explain what they could see. The point of science is that all theories should be debunked, and debunkable. Theories that withstand efforts to debunk them are good theories, but still only theories. Theories that make predictions when are then verified by experiment are good theories.

And this talk of 'god guided evolution' is also just a crock. I mean if your god is so amazing then why does he need to guide evolution? for sport? he's omniscient and beyond such earthly pleasures surely.

no. if you overuse mouthwash the plaque causing bacteria will evolve to eat that mouthwash. if you take antibiotics the bacteria aflicting you will evolve resistance via the very well understood mechanisms of natural selection. the list of examples that support evolutionary theories is inexhaustable. why posit the existance of a god when it's just not needed to explain things and does not add in any way to our understanding of the world.

evolution even works in software. genetic programming, genetic algorithms, evolutionary computing - does god guide these?

you can even look at evolution in non-living systems. take for example the vinyl LP. faced with 'attack' by CDs and CD players, the LP and turntables, evolved from a recording medium into a musical instrument in their own right. did god have a vested interest in the survival of LPs? is god a DJ?

Your god bats for both sides. the god the poor iraqi's were busy praying to is the same god as yours. Those guys who flew planes into the WTC - same god driving their bus too.

Re:I love this experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't read your mind, I read your post. The one where you claimed to be a hardcore Christian. The one where you claimed to be a hardcore Christian specifically in answer to the question "are you a hardcore 'created the Earth in 7 [sic] days' Christian?".

Re: I love this experiment

[Black Parrot]

> I personally take the position that it can be well shown that evolution is largely inconclusive. People can use it as a theoretical model to understand a lot of things, but I have kept my eyes on too many of the details to say it can be said true for sure.

Please list some of the details that you think cast doubt on it, along with some insightful comments that will let us know whether you're talking about something you understand instead of just quoting creationist Web sites.

> So, if evolution in its strictest sense does turn out to be false, the only alternative is creation.

non sequitur

> (Even God guided evolution can be thought of as a form of creation to a point.)

God-guided chemstry, god-guided weather, god-guided planetary orbits, and god-guided nuclear fission make a lot of sense too.

> Outlining all of this thought with exhaustive examples would be well beyond the scope of this post. ;)

Providing supporting details is outside the scope of creationism altogether.

Re: I love this experiment

[Black Parrot]

> If you are interested to learn, the evidence is there. I can point you to the place where the most misunderstandings occur - and that's with inheritence. Evolutionists commonly quote examples similar to Darwin's finches as proof of evolution. They do not understand that these observations are explained equally well, or better, under the creationist model.

The problem is that you can explain any observation with the creationist model, since at heart it is an appeal to magic.

At least the scientific theories are dependent on the evidence.

Re: I love this experiment

[Tyreth]

Ooh, I was just about to reply then I noticed it was you Black Parrot! Hi, and bye.

Re:I love this experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

no. if you overuse mouthwash the plaque causing bacteria will evolve to eat that mouthwash. if you take antibiotics the bacteria aflicting you will evolve resistance via the very well understood mechanisms of natural selection. the list of examples that support evolutionary theories is inexhaustable.

It was my understanding that natural selection and evolution aren't as "hand-in-hand" as you say.. Natural selection works with microevolution, side-stepping "evolution". That just means after using mouth wash, more of the bacteria resistant to the mouth wash begin to flourish. There's no mutating bacteria in your mouth. That's like saying fungus and mushrooms "evolved" onto my lawn because the conditions were good for it to grow.

Re:I love this experiment

[davesag]

no please, i am all ears/eyes. I promise to pay full and serious attention to your arguments, and respond thoughtfuly. please I am keen to know how creationism better explains the unboundedness of nature, that humans and chimps share 97.5% of their dna, that we inherit traits from our parents, and other observable phenomena that to my eyes all scream of evolution, natural and sexual selection.

Re:I love this experiment

[Tyreth]

Oh, you think your position is so secure. "Every test designed to disprove the theory has failed". What are you talking about? Evolution is not scientific.

Tell me how you know the earth is so old (4.5 billion last time I heard). This is not a rhetorical question, I want an answer - and not about space. I'm talking about the earth.

Re:I love this experiment

[Tyreth]

Exactly. The immunity in the bacteria already existed - the mouth wash just wiped out all those who weren't immume.

I think that creationists try to avoid the term microevolution because it can be a confusing way to describe what we believe.

Re:I love this experiment

[Tyreth]

My e-mail account is tunip @ tyreth.homelinux.org

Re:I love this experiment

[Tyreth]

I am referring, of course, to your assumption that I believe the world *appears* to be old while in fact literally being young.

Re: I love this experiment

[Black Parrot]

> Ooh, I was just about to reply then I noticed it was you Black Parrot! Hi, and bye.

Hi. Don't like to discuss this topic with people who'll make you support your claims, do you.

Re: I love this experiment

[Dethpickle]

God-guided chemstry, god-guided weather, god-guided planetary orbits, and god-guided nuclear fission make a lot of sense too.

Personally, I use god-guided programming. And quite frankly, that dude sucks.

Re:I love this experiment

[davesag]

Okay I'll bite. First up you claim "Evolution is not scientific." As I have said before it's a theory. it's a theory that makes predictions that can be tested. Those tests are designed to falsify that theory. Thus it is scientific.

Next: I don't recall bringing up the age of the earth, but since you ask, there are many ways of measuring the age of geological structures, and thus the earth.

• radiometric dating. This method relies on the radioactive decay of an unstable type of atom (parent isotope) within the rock into another type of stable atom (daughter isotope). In a certain period of time, called the half-life, half of the parent isotopes will have decayed into daughter isotopes; in an additional, equivalent period of time, half of the remaining parent isotopes will have decayed, and so on. The length of the half-life, which can be measured, varies for different isotopes. By measuring the ratio of parent to daughter isotopes, the time that has elapsed since decay began can be calculated; this is equivalent to the age of the rock.
• fission track dating. Certain minerals in rocks contain small amounts of uranium which decay radioactively by the splitting apart of the atomic nucleus (nuclear fission). The two fission fragments produced are highly energetic and highly charged, and they produce a linear trail of radiation damage in the surrounding crystals of the rock. This trail is known as a fission track. Fission tracks can be enlarged by chemical etching until they can be observed and measured under a microscope. The number of tracks is proportional to the time since they started to accumulate, and to the amount of uranium in the rock. The amount of uranium present can be determined by irradiating the rock with neutrons to produce a second set of fission tracks. The ratio of the original tracks to the new ones gives a measure of geological age.
• amino-acid racemisation. The method relies on the fact that molecules of amino-acids, the building blocks of proteins, occur in two different forms that are mirror images of each other. These two forms are referred to as left-handed and right-handed. In living organisms, only left-handed amino acid molecules are present, but once the organism dies they slowly convert to their right handed form. Simultaneously, the right handed forms produced slowly convert back to left handed forms, until an equilibrium is reached (half left handed and half right handed), at which point the ratio remains constant. The time taken to reach equilibrium is known, so by determining the ratio of right handed to left handed forms it is possible to estimate the time elapsed since the organism died.

see the Museum of Victoria's site for more detail. You may also like to check out the Age of the earth FAQ, or that bastion of all wisdom - google.

Re:I love this experiment

[Dr. Manhattan]

I mean if your god is so amazing then why does he need to guide evolution?

Isaac Asimov had a short story about this. If an alien saw us playing pool, he'd be confused. "Why bother using that inefficient stick to poke a ball to knock the other balls into the pockets? You've got hands, why not just grab them and stuff them in the pockets?"

The proposal was that God used inefficient, roundabout means for its own amusement, like a "trick shot" in pool. The punchline was...

spoiler...

...when one character noted that we humans were developing computers and AI at roughly the same time as nuclear weapons. Perhaps we were being set up to make our successors and then clear ourselves off the stage...

Re:I love this experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

They do not understand that these observations are explained equally well, or better, under the creationist model.

Okay, what is "the creationist model"? (Meaning a scientific theory, I presume.) I haven't even seen creationists agree on that. Forget the discussion of whether it's right or not, please just state what the scientific theory of creation is.

Re:I love this experiment

[Junks Jerzey]

Evolution is one of the most established theories there is. Every test designed to disprove the theory has failed. The theory that living things evolve is just a theory, like the theory that gravity acts between two physical objects is only a theory.

No one with any sense debates that living things evolve. What some people debate is the theory that evolution is what guided life from single-celled organisms to, say, mammals. Going from evolution to the latter is a huge jump. Debating it doesn't mean you're a creationist, just that it takes a lot of simpleminded faith to cling to *any* kind of theory that explains hugely complex results in a few sentences. When the pro "life evolved from single celled organisms" people go ballistic arguing with creationists, it makes me wonder why the former are so single-mindedly fervent.

(Note: I am not a creationist.)

Re: I love this experiment

[DavidPesta]

Please list some of the details that you think cast doubt on it..

I want to avoid a complicated mess, so I will restrict myself to the presentation of irreducible complexity. We can discuss other areas later. Give me some time to write it up. (This takes time, that is why I said it was beyond the scope of this post.)

> So, if evolution in its strictest sense does turn out to be false, the only alternative is creation.
non sequitur
> (Even God guided evolution can be thought of as a form of creation to a point.)
God-guided chemstry, god-guided weather, god-guided planetary orbits, and god-guided nuclear fission make a lot of sense too.

I knew I was getting myself into trouble without explaining this better. First of all I didn't intend to separate the two sentances. Parenthesis are intended to supplement an idea in the previous sentence, so don't treat them as separate thoughts. Let me break what I meant down for you:
1. Either the supernatural intervened in the origin of things, or it didn't.
2. Evolution in its strictest sense, the way it is treated by mainstream scientists in the technical literature, is completely unguided and godless.
3. Creation can be defined as the origin of things from a guided process.
4. By definition, either 2 and 3 make up the entire universe of what is possible and they are mutually exclusive possibilities.
5. Therefore it is not non sequitur to say that 3 is the only alternative if 2 isn't true.
6. I take the blame for the misunderstanding. I failed to explain myself better.

> Outlining all of this thought with exhaustive examples would be well beyond the scope of this post. ;)
Providing supporting details is outside the scope of creationism altogether.

Yes, and it's not fair for you to assume that this is where I am coming from. I enjoy arguing evidence for evolution as much as I enjoy arguing evidence for creation. I believe people are intellectually dishonest if they don't treat all knowledge fairly, despite their personal religious discoveries. When I say that outlining this thought with exhaustive examples would be well beyond the scope of this post, I mean it. ;)

Re:I love this experiment

[Tyreth]

Next question then. All these theories are based on the known speed of a process. How do you know this process has been operating at that speed for all of history? Eg, potassium half-life. How do you know that has always decayed at the same constant rate the last millions of years?

Re:I love this experiment

[davesag]

Several years ago I worked on an a-life project in which a population of tiny colour eating 'photobots' is let loose upon various images. After running for a few days, eating, shitting, breeding and passing their genes on down to their offspring not only could you see clear evidence of speciation on the micro scale but also the whole colony, one it hit the upper limits of the resources of the host computer, would coalesce into one or very rarely two giant blobs - meta organisms in effect. the bugs in the middle had extremely short life spans and were essentially there to be harvested by the bugs that formed the outer wall of the blob. at the very periphery there were longer-lived bugs that served to find new food for the blob. slowly but surely the blob will move around, exploiting rounding errors to consume all the colour from the image and leave black in it's place. see http://www.davesag.com/motp scroll down and click on a picture to see this for yourself.

Re:I love this experiment

[meringuoid]

Well, one good reason is because if the underlying principles of nuclear physics had changed significantly over time, we'd notice the results in the stars. And you yourself admit that the stars are indeed as old as they seem - it's only the Earth you say is young, right?

Re:I love this experiment

[Junks Jerzey]

Several years ago I worked on an a-life project in which a population of tiny colour eating 'photobots' is let loose upon various images.

Neat idea!

Re:I love this experiment

[meringuoid]

I might add - the reasons we can expect decay rates to be constant throughout the history of the Earth are gone into in more detail in the talk.origins Age of the Earth FAQ, to which the previous poster referred you, and which you obviously did not read (to be fair to you, neither did I until after I made that last post :-)

Re: I love this experiment

[Black Parrot]

> No one with any sense debates that living things evolve. What some people debate is the theory that evolution is what guided life from single-celled organisms to, say, mammals. Going from evolution to the latter is a huge jump.

Actually, it's merely the concatenation of a whole lot of little jumps.

> Debating it doesn't mean you're a creationist, just that it takes a lot of simpleminded faith to cling to *any* kind of theory that explains hugely complex results in a few sentences.

That's the goal of all the scientists. The basic laws of nature tend to be very simple statements with enormously rich consequences.

> When the pro "life evolved from single celled organisms" people go ballistic arguing with creationists, it makes me wonder why the former are so single-mindedly fervent.

Here's the answer in my case: creationists are using pseudo-science to subvert science education and substitute religious mythology for it in the public school curriculum. I am vehemently against that, so I try to publicly refute any public bogus claim that I see a creationist make, for the sole purpose of ensuring that others who read it aren't beguiled by the bunkum.

Re: I love this experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

Your #4 is wrong.
You are saying 'EITHER evolution OR creationism but nothing else is possible'.
but you are not leaving room for a modified evolution.

Science leaves room for error! That is why you should drop this ignorant creation nonsense.
If evolution turns out not to work completely, there is probably some other natural process involved.
There is no need to posit a guiding hand.
That is what science is about. Keeping the knowledge that 'works' and throwing away the knowledge that doesn't.
Kinda like evolution if you think about it. :)
Don't worry; science will evolve to the point where it will explain life properly.

Re: I love this experiment

[Black Parrot]

> Oh, you think your position is so secure. "Every test designed to disprove the theory has failed". What are you talking about? Evolution is not scientific.

All you're doing is showing the better-informed part of the public that your denial of evolution is based on complete ignorance of what it is all about.

If you understood the theory of evolution at the "read one book on it" level you would be able to make a long list of conceivable falsifying observations.

> Tell me how you know the earth is so old (4.5 billion last time I heard). This is not a rhetorical question, I want an answer - and not about space. I'm talking about the earth

Try talkorigins.org for an introductory-level answer. Notice also that it was the first thing to pop up when I typed "age of the earth" into google and clicked the submit submit button.

Re: I love this experiment

[Black Parrot]

> Next question then. All these theories are based on the known speed of a process. How do you know this process has been operating at that speed for all of history? Eg, potassium half-life. How do you know that has always decayed at the same constant rate the last millions of years?

Because unlike the fantasy world inhabited by evolution deniers, scientists live in a world where claims have consequences. E.g., if radioactive decay rates are not constant within a very small margin, the universe would be a very different place. Ditto with the speed of light and all the other natural processes that creationists think they can diddle without any consequences other than changing the age of the earth.

And learn a bit about science before you go on a crusade of refuting it.

Re:I love this experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

is god a DJ? ... duh, of course he is!

Re: I love this experiment

[Black Parrot]

> > They do not understand that these observations are explained equally well, or better, under the creationist model.

> Okay, what is "the creationist model"?

It's "Whatever we observe, the explanation is that God wanted it that way for reason's we'll never understand."

Two species have similar DNA? God wanted it that way! Two species have unsimilar DNA? God wanted it that way!

Creationism isn't so much "wrong" as "inane".

Re: I love this experiment

[Black Parrot]

> I want to avoid a complicated mess, so I will restrict myself to the presentation of irreducible complexity.

You could save yourself some trouble if you knew how often the IC argument has been refuted, though I don't suppose it will hurt anyone if we go through it yet again...

> I knew I was getting myself into trouble without explaining this better. First of all I didn't intend to separate the two sentances. Parenthesis are intended to supplement an idea in the previous sentence, so don't treat them as separate thoughts. Let me break what I meant down for you:
1. Either the supernatural intervened in the origin of things, or it didn't.
2. Evolution in its strictest sense, the way it is treated by mainstream scientists in the technical literature, is completely unguided and godless.
3. Creation can be defined as the origin of things from a guided process.
4. By definition, either 2 and 3 make up the entire universe of what is possible and they are mutually exclusive possibilities.

And there's the non sequitur. Going by your definitions they are in fact mutually exclusive, but they are not jointly exhaustive. For example, there could be some other completely unguided/godless process that put the world in its current form. Refuting evolution wouldn't prove God any more than refuting God would prove evolution.

Re:I love this experiment

[Kaki Nix Sain]

Sounds neat. I would have liked to look, but I keep getting a "Bad Browser" message. :(

Re:I love this experiment

[Jhan]

So, retry the experiment using a single bacteria. Put it in a petri dish and wait until there are a few billion of them, then start the mouth wash treatment. You will get the same result.

Re:I love this experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried that on my last professor.
"If I didn't hand in my paper late, the only alternative is that it was handed in on time."
I failed that test.

Re: I love this experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

2. Evolution in its strictest sense, the way it is treated by mainstream scientists in the technical literature, is completely unguided and godless

In other words, evolution is a naturalistic process. But that doesn't mean that all naturalistic processes are evolution. Thus, "evolution" and "creation" are not the only two logical possibilities.

Re:I love this experiment

[spakka]

Either way, if you can't tell, I don't feel like getting into a debate on specifics unless the person is willing to actually consider what I say. Some people argue because they think they are right. Others are almost positive they are right, but willing to concede they may misunderstand and be wrong. That's my position, and I only want to discuss with others of a similar mind.

Well let's test this claim to openmindedness:

If Jesus were to appear and perform a miracle in front of me, I would abandon atheism. What evidence would persuade you to abandon your position?

Re:I love this experiment

[GlassHeart]

If you are interested to learn, the evidence is there.

The word "evidence", as it relates to a discussion like this, is an observation that actively points to the necessary existence of a Creator, not just a passive lack of other explanations.

Let's take the speed of light as an example. I don't know why it's so-and-so kilometers per second in vacuum. However, that doesn't mean I should conclude that a Cosmic Cop set a Universal Speed Limit, even in the absence of all other explanations. I'm not talking about 100% certainty, just the sort of "beyond reasonable doubt" that could put a man in prison.

So I'd like to hear the evidence you speak of. Evolution remains a theory because there is no evidence it is true, but there are many observations that are consistent with the theory.

Re:I love this experiment

[Carnivorous Carrot]

Actually, God or whatever, the question as to why does anything exist is very important.

Claiming god or the universe always existed is a cheat to get around this issue.

If the universe was created by a fluctuation in a probability field, i.e. out of nothingness, well, fine. But how did it come to be that a probability field and quantum rules were there? As someone once said, such a situation is a far cry from nothing.

Simply saying that God doesn't need a creator or always existed is just a simple, baseless assertion.

The philosophical problem is that neither position makes sense, existing forever, or being auto-created out of nothing.

Re:I love this experiment

[Carnivorous Carrot]

Evolution is so well grounded that we may conclude with virtual certainty that even if God created the universe and all the life, that evolution would immediately pick up from that point.

In other words, The Good Lord would have to actively keep evolution from mutating the species and their interactions over the eons.

Re:I love this experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. That could just mean the bacteria already has the resistivity built into it's genetic makeup.

Re:I love this experiment

[Carnivorous Carrot]

> And you yourself admit that the stars are
> indeed as old as they seem - it's only the
> Earth you say is young, right?

At this point, with a proposed ancient universe but a young earth with young life on it, one wonders how we could distinguish the creator of the earth and life on earth from an advanced alien culture.

Planetary-scale manipulation, assembly of matter from quarks, construction of cells, etc. in brute force fashion are all merely engineering problems. Difficult to be sure, but hardly worthy of the "infinitely powerful and infinitely smart" description, far and away.

Re:I love this experiment

[Carnivorous Carrot]

> If Jesus were to appear and perform a miracle
> in front of me, I would abandon atheism.

That wouldn't be enough for me. Jesus would have to appear and perform a miracle in front of James Randi and get him to abandon atheism before I would convert.

Re:I love this experiment

[tgibbs]

The philosophical problem is that neither position makes sense, existing forever, or being auto-created out of nothing.

One more possibility exists: given the possibility of time loops, God (or the Universe) could be self-created. But a circular explanation is not much more satisfying than an arbitrary assumption of eternal existence. And we still end up seeking a meta-explanation: how is it that the laws of nature allow such a thing?

Re:I love this experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

The philosophical problem is that neither position makes sense, existing forever, or being auto-created out of nothing.

No, both positions "make sense", in the sense that they're possible options. The question of why the laws are what they are is a different question, which doesn't preclude making sense of the question of whether the universe is eternal.

Re:I love this experiment

[Muhammar]

How you can explain the origin of God: Hard prayers makes you hear his voice in your head.

How He created the universe: We did not realy care at the time -- we hired him as a contractor.

Re:I love this experiment

[Carnivorous Carrot]

> One more possibility exists: given the
> possibility of time loops, God (or the
> Universe) could be self-created

Stephen Hawking came up with a similar argument. He pointed out it was mathematically possible to describe how the time dimension, as you got closer and closer to the big bang, rotated around (don't ask me) and became a spacial dimension. Thus our gut feeling that time always existed could be just as wrong as our concept of infinite cold, which actually only goes down to absolute zero.

Re:I love this experiment

[decapentaplegic]

No, not at all. You start with 1 bacteria which does not carry immunity. Let the bacteria reproduce for a while, then apply the selection. Some bacteria will survive using immunity that was NOT present in the orignial bacteria's genetic makeup. Alterations/mistakes/mutations (whatever you wish to call them) which arrise through very well understood processes will have generated new genetic makeups that will turn out to be advantageous in the new environment.

Re:I love this experiment

[Tyreth]

Your proposed situation in which you'd abandon atheism is unfair. Can we make it something more realistic? Like if someone were able to demonstrate to you that the earth is young, ~6000 years, and that evolution did not occur. Would that be enough?

I would abandon my position (Christianity) if you were able to demonstrate to me the reverse - that the earth is undoubtedly millions of years old and evolution did occur.

Re:I love this experiment

[Tyreth]

Please read this post.

Re:I love this experiment

[Tyreth]

It is well grounded in the sense that it is believed by most everyone - not by any weight of evidence for it.

I have read about evolution many times, and it becomes more abundantly clear that it has little evidence to support it's position. It may interest you to know that it was accepted as "what happened" before there was any proof - then the evidence was made to fit the theory. Much like protests of creationists starting with the Bible as their reference point.

Re:I love this experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

Your proposed situation in which you'd abandon atheism is unfair. Can we make it something more realistic? Like if someone were able to demonstrate to you that the earth is young, ~6000 years, and that evolution did not occur. Would that be enough?

I don't know about the other poster, but evidence against evolution isn't evidence for Christianity, or any other specific religion. It would increase the plausibility that some kind of deity was involved, but it wouldn't convince me of any particular deity.

I would abandon my position (Christianity) if you were able to demonstrate to me the reverse - that the earth is undoubtedly millions of years old and evolution did occur.

There's no such thing as "undoubtedly" in science. But it's already demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt -- just not beyond unreasonable doubt.

Re:I love this experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

It is well grounded in the sense that it is believed by most everyone - not by any weight of evidence for it.

I have read about evolution many times, and it becomes more abundantly clear that it has little evidence to support it's position.

Oh good grief. If you think there is "little" evidence for evolution, then it's quite clear that there isn't anything that you would realistically consider "good" evidence of evolution.

It may interest you to know that it was accepted as "what happened" before there was any proof - then the evidence was made to fit the theory.

There is never "proof" in science. If you meant "supporting evidence", that's nonsense: Darwin's work was based on a great deal of evidence, which has only grown stronger.

As for the claim that the evidence was manufactured, that's just a bald-faced lie. Put up or shut up before you start with the libel.

Re:I love this experiment

[Tyreth]

Oh good grief. If you think there is "little" evidence for evolution, then it's quite clear that there isn't anything that you would realistically consider "good" evidence of evolution.

You obviously have never examined the creationist position to see if what you believe is true. I have read a great deal on evolution, not a small amount. I know about the different dating techniques, the process of natural selection, and more.

Tell me I'm wrong about my assumption you've never examined creationism. Otherwise, I suggest you read up some on opposition to your philosophy before you are so quick to be sure that it is "well founded".

Re:I love this experiment

[Tyreth]

I don't know about the other poster, but evidence against evolution isn't evidence for Christianity, or any other specific religion. It would increase the plausibility that some kind of deity was involved, but it wouldn't convince me of any particular deity.

Evidence for the model described in the Bible is evidence for Christianity and our God. Or do you think otherwise, and why? It would do much to support the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but not much else (certainly not Hinduism, Buddhism or other such religions).

Re:I love this experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

Evidence for the model described in the Bible is evidence for Christianity and our God. Or do you think otherwise, and why?

I think otherwise, because I believe that a literal interpretation of the Bible is absurd and logically inconsistent. I don't believe in an allegorical intepretation either, but I also don't think it's a priori wrong.

It would do much to support the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but not much else (certainly not Hinduism, Buddhism or other such religions).

Even if you subscribed to Biblical literalism, I think it would do little to support the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Most religions weren't terribly specific on things like how old the Earth is. You do realize there have been hundreds of religions, right? Plus the very real possibility that no one has hit upon the True Religion (TM) yet.

But anyway, once you bring supernatural "explanations" into the discussion, you throw model-building out the window. I can equally well posit some other god who made a young Earth and independently created kinds, that mankind hasn't discovered yet. As far as the scientific evidence is concerned, it's an equally plausible hypothesis. But you want to leap from that evidence and claim it supports the existence of a benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient deity, whose son walked the Earth some 2000 years ago, etc. etc., and the evidence you're talking about simply doesn't support that -- you extrapolate beyond its validity.

Re:I love this experiment

[davesag]

sorry about that, I have updated the relevant javascript. it now works on ie, netscape, omniweb, safari and should probably work on other browsers that support java1.0 applets, javascript 1.2 and divs.

Re: I love this experiment

[DavidPesta]

You could save yourself some trouble if you knew how often the IC argument has been refuted, though I don't suppose it will hurt anyone if we go through it yet again...

I wasn't aware of any problems with the irreducible complexity argument, but just in case you are correct, I will look into it more before presenting it. I wouldn't want to mislead anyone.

As for the difference between creation and evolution, I suppose it is a just matter of definition of the terms. It is silly to debate that. 'Guided' and 'unguided' are mutually exclusive antonyms as far as I can tell.

Re:I love this experiment

[davesag]

If Jesus were to appear and perform a miracle in front of me, I would abandon atheism.

I'd want to see some photo id first. and having seen many a fine illusionist in my time, I'd still reject him as a fraud. I've seen plenty of weird shit in my life, a lot of it is stuff that can easily be explained via recourse to the supernatural, but it takes more effort to consider that there may be rational, natural explanations for these things. appeals to the supernatural are just lazy.

Re: I love this experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

I wasn't aware of any problems with the irreducible complexity argument,

Heh. Go over to talk.origins and ask about it.

Re:I love this experiment

[tgibbs]

Evolutionists commonly quote examples similar to Darwin's finches as proof of evolution. They do not understand that these observations are explained equally well, or better, under the creationist model.

Actually, they understand that perfectly. They also understand that absolutely any result can be explained by the creationist model, because there are absolutely no limits on what an incomprehensible supernaturally omnipotent entity might choose to do. So if a result is consistent with creationism, it means nothing. On the other hand, evolution imposes a lot of limits. Creationism would allow, for example, for every single organism to have a different genetic code. Evolution requires that it be the same. So it is far more meaningful when a result can be explained by evolution than when it can be "explained" by creationism.

Re:I love this experiment

[Tyreth]

I'm sorry, but you really don't understand. There are limits on the creationist model. If you've encountered a few christians who say "God did it" to give the appearance of an old earth, or whatever, then please don't take that as an example of the authoritative creationist position.

You will find that the creationist explanation for the finches is ultimately superior to the evolutionary one - it fits the data perfectly, like a glove. And to fit like a glove it must have both expectations and limitations.

But it's just proving my point fabulously. No one has yet explained how the creationist can explain the finches. All they offer are reasons like yours - that creationists will appeal to magic. And so my initial contention is vindicated - that evolutionists don't understand the creationist opinion.

Re:I love this experiment

[fluffy666]

No one has yet explained how the creationist can explain the finches.

Ok, then. Explain them.

Re:I love this experiment

[tgibbs]

I'm sorry, but you really don't understand. There are limits on the creationist model. If you've encountered a few christians who say "God did it" to give the appearance of an old earth, or whatever, then please don't take that as an example of the authoritative creationist position.

So what, specifically, are the limits on the ominipotence of a creator, and on what theoretical basis were these limits derived?

You will find that the creationist explanation for the finches is ultimately superior to the evolutionary one - it fits the data perfectly, like a glove. And to fit like a glove it must have both expectations and limitations.

It is very easy to craft a theory to fit data when you already know the data. This is retrodiction, not prediction. The finch data is of historical importance in the development of evolutionary theory, but it is not a prediction of that theory and from a modern standpoint is not particularly strong evidence for the theory. The strong evidence in favor of evolution is the things that the theory predicted that were not known in advance--the commonality of the genetic material and genetic code among all organisms, the patterns of genetic sequence similarity among differnt species, etc., etc. To my knowledge, creationism has never come up with s single valid prediction. For evolution, the list is too long to enumerate.

But it's just proving my point fabulously. No one has yet explained how the creationist can explain the finches. All they offer are reasons like yours - that creationists will appeal to magic.

Creationism is inherently an appeal to a supernatural creator. The appropriate term for any supernatural explanation of a phenomenon is "magic."

Whether creationism could come up with an after-the-fact explanation of the finches might have been of interest to somebody back in the 19th century, but science has moved on since then.

Re:I love this experiment

[Tyreth]

I tire of these conversations. If you want to get serious and look at these questions in depth from a creationist perspective, then my e-mail address is tunip at tyreth.homelinux.org.

If you want to try and tell us things we know aren't true (such as creationism not having had a single valid prediction), then don't bother. I've had altogether too many evolutionists who think they understand our position (their summary is "an appeal to magic/omnipotent creator to explain apparent contradictions") but are not interested in discovering if what they believe is true or not.

Re:I love this experiment

[Tyreth]

No evolutionist has. I am amazed at how many claim they understand our position, yet this most fundamental portion of the creationist model they don't even know.

It's like me trying to argue that evolution is logically impossible without having any idea of the processes that are claimed to have it occur (eg, not knowing that according to evolutionary theory traits rose through genetic mutations that were then selected).

I'm not explaining it - I want to see if any evolutionists who say they know the creationist model (the 6000 year old literal 7 day creationist) really do.

Re:I love this experiment

[tgibbs]

I tire of these conversations. If you want to get serious and look at these questions in depth from a creationist perspective, then my e-mail address is tunip at tyreth.homelinux.org. If you want to try and tell us things we know aren't true (such as creationism not having had a single valid prediction), then don't bother.

Actually, I went through a period a few years back where I investigated creationism in some detail. I had the notion that even if creationism was wrong, they might have identified some real problems with conventional theory, and there might actually be something to learn there. It turned out to be a complet waste of time. All I found were fallacies and falsehoods, repeated over and over years after they had been shown to be wrong. I came to the conclusion that creationists were engaged in ideology, not science. They didn't care about whether a claim was true or false, so long as they could use it to score debating points. So when you suddenly find the conversation "too tiring" when asked to provide even one correct prediction of creationism or explain the theoretical foundations for such a prediction, or indeed engage in any kind of debate more substantive than simple contradiction, I can only conclude that nothing has changed.

Re:I love this experiment

[Tyreth]

I'm sorry, I find it "too tiring" when asked to provide even one correct prediction? When I said if you e-mail me I will tell you some? That doesn't make sense...

And if you studied creation in some depth, can you tell me how creationism explains Darwin's finches?

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[dubstop]

how do you calculate the incalculable?

Who says that it's incalculable, and where's the evidence to back that up? My point was that it's easy enough to sit back and say that something's impossible, but it takes a bit more effort to try and figure out whether it's (maybe just remotely) possible.

Say that again with a straight face!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're saying there's measurable odds in picking the right number on the right day? You need to work for political polling in the next election, they'd love that skewed remark as an interview answer.

Evidence please!

[Pentagram]

If you're claim things like that, then lets have a reliable source please. A google for "stanley miller" racemized gives 5 results, all for Creationists' pages.

broke down as fast as they were made

What does this mean? Do you mean that they existed for zero time (impossible?), that their breakdown process lasted as long as their creation process (meaningless?), that as more amino acids were created an equal number broke down (not much of a criticism?)

Re:Evidence please!

[DavidPesta]

A google for "stanley miller" racemized gives 5 results, all for Creationists' pages.

Dude it's in the scientific literature too. Creationists pick up on it and put it on their sites.

Re:Evidence please!

[meringuoid]

broke down as fast as they were made

What does this mean? Do you mean that they existed for zero time (impossible?), that their breakdown process lasted as long as their creation process (meaningless?), that as more amino acids were created an equal number broke down (not much of a criticism?)

My guess is that the experiment reached an equilibrium concentration of amino acids, and the creationists think that this is somehow a problem :-)

Re:Evidence please!

[aborchers]

You left out the "misinterpret it" step between "pick it up" and "put it on their sites".

I don't have any beef with religion, or with looking for unity between science and same (as a skim of some of my previous threads will bear out) but the creationists on the Web (I assume, perhaps wrongly, that they are representative of the lot) seem to be mostly just parrots of other creationists, out to justify their belief system by citing misunderstood or misrepresented science.

A coworker of mine who is nominally a creationist actually contacted one of them (the one that's registered about a hundred domain names of evolution-related subjects, I can't recall the name/organization right off) to get citations to original research. No results. Apparently, all the "evidence" cited on his hundreds of pages of creationist Web sites were just claims he'd picked up from other creationist texts. He couldn't connect one of them to scientific work that wasn't easily disabused of its creationist interpretation, in many cases by the original authors.

The most laughable example for me was that he couldn't even define coriolis effect, though he had claimed its existence disproved evolution. Is this the quality of scholarship we are to expect from "creation scientists"?

Re: Evidence please!

[Black Parrot]

> > A google for "stanley miller" racemized gives 5 results, all for Creationists' pages.

> Dude it's in the scientific literature too. Creationists pick up on it and put it on their sites.

Perhaps so, though in such a case it should be easy for you to go to your favorite creationist site, fetch the citation for the original claim, and post it for us.

But in my experience what usually happens is that creationist sites quote each other in endless circles, and no one knows where a claim originally came from. I find very frequently that when I'm trying to track down a claim a creationist makes I can find scores of creationist Web sites that make the same claim, all in exactly the same words, and none of which give the slightest hint of who originated the claim.

And of course, when creationist do give a scientific source for their claim the gurus at talk.origins usually only take a matter of minutes to point out that its a misquote or a misrepresented context.

Creationists don't do too well in the area of supporting a case with citations... just as they don't do too well in any of the other things that make science work.

Re:Evidence please!

[Sgt York]

If the mix wasn't racemized, I would seriously think he had falsified the data. The amino acids were made chemically, not biologically. Any chiral compound made chemically will be racemic. (All but one of the amino acids are chiral)

It should be no surprise at all that the mixture was racemic. The reason only Creation "scientist's" websites say anything about it is because they are the only ones that think it has any relevance.

As for breakdown, they did break down quickly, that was in the original publications of the experiment.

The "break down as quickly as they are made" is a half truth. At the gas-liquid interface, this is true. The amino acids did break down very rapidly. However, a fraction of the products became dissolved in the liquid soon after formation, and were preserved. This caused a gradual buildup of product.

Re: Evidence please!

[DavidPesta]

Well, that is true. There is a good reason for it. Most creationists aren't scientists, nor are they good philosophers, and they are trying to defend the existance of God. (They shouldn't be hated and they aren't evil, just not very bright, yet trying the best they can to spread good to the world.) Good arguments get diluted and the best sources may become hard to find. The mistake is made to assume that these good arguments don't exist, and that happens just as often. As soon as I finish posting on slashdot I will look for citations from scientific literature about this and show you.

Re: Evidence please!

[Anonymous Coward]

> > > A google for "stanley miller" racemized gives 5 results, all for Creationists' pages.

> >Dude it's in the scientific literature too. Creationists pick up on it and put it on their sites.

> Perhaps so, though in such a case it should be easy for you to go to your favorite creationist site, fetch the citation for the original claim, and post it for us.

===

From the mouth of Stanley Miller himself, in this interview:
http://www.accessexcellence.org/WN/NM/ miller.html, which, btw, was the first hit I got by doing a google for "stanley miller racemic results".

"All of these pre-biotic experiments yield a racemic mixture . . .".

Granted, it's not a citation of the original claim, but seeing as it's Miller himself, I didn't care to bother doing any more research.

Re:Evidence please!

[Anonymous Coward]

> It should be no surprise at all that the mixture was racemic. The reason only Creation "scientist's" websites say anything about it is because they are the only ones that think it has any relevance.

Until a workable explanation (reproducible if it's to be "science") can be presented, it's a relevant question. Otherwise all that can be said is "once there was a racemic mixture of D- and L-shaped non-life, and then 'poof', there was L-shaped life". That's as bad (philosophically/scientifically), maybe worse, as saying "God did it."

Perhaps the "reason only Creation 'scientist's' websites say anything about it" is because evolutionists still don't have a solution and would rather not draw attention to the problem. This is just human nature; "can't explain a problem? don't draw attention to it."

Re:Evidence please!

[Anonymous Coward]

Otherwise all that can be said is "once there was a racemic mixture of D- and L-shaped non-life, and then 'poof', there was L-shaped life". That's as bad (philosophically/scientifically), maybe worse, as saying "God did it."

A quite plausible hypothesis is spontaneous symmetry breaking, where the earliest self-replicator (which was one or the other, and in this case happend to be L) took over. Exponential growth is a powerful thing.

No, we don't know yet whether it happened that way, but as a proposal, it's still a lot better than "poof" or "Goddidit".

Re:Evidence please!

[Anonymous Coward]

> A quite plausible hypothesis is spontaneous symmetry breaking, where the earliest self-replicator (which was one or the other, and in this case happend to be L) took over.

In other words, there was a spontaneous jump from a racemic mixture of "building bricks" ("poof") to a relatively very complex self-replicating organism that wasn't racemic.

Until it's demonstrable and repeatable, it's no better than saying "Goddit".

Re:Evidence please!

[Sgt York]

There are much better candidates for this line of reasoning. You should chose battles that don't make you look so petty.

Oh, excuse me. You're posting as AC. I guess you don't care if you look petty.

There is no logical reason for L being chosen. There is, however, a logical reason for one being chosen. It is more efficient to have machinery geared to only use one type, so it is advantageous to pick L or D. A hypothetical organism that sprouted up that could use both would be at a disadvantage once the substances became abundant. One was "chosen" arbitrarily.

because evolutionists still don't have a solution and would rather not draw attention to the problem. This is just human nature; "can't explain a problem? don't draw attention to it."

There are good explanations for this, as stated above. And the reasoning behind it is as good as any logical conclusion can get. Little time is spent on this subject because the reasoning is so sound. It fits perfectly with the Evolutionary theory.

Re:Evidence please!

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, there was a spontaneous jump from a racemic mixture of "building bricks" ("poof") to a relatively very complex self-replicating organism that wasn't racemic.

Nonsense. There was no spontaneous jump in complexity. The first replicators weren't hugely complex.

You also make the transition to non-racemic biochemistry sound mysterious, meaning you missed the point. The point was that the first replicator happened to use either one or the other by random -- which one doesn't matter, but it happened to be L. Then, since it was a replicator, L came to dominate all later life, since that's what the first replicator used.

Re:Evidence please!

[Anonymous Coward]

The original poster asked for evidence. So far, all I've heard is that there are hypothetical logical explanations.

But the question remains:
Where's the evidence?

Where's the empirical, testable, repeatable, experiments that go from a racemic mixture to a non-racemic self-replicating organism?

Logic's fine. Hypotheses are fine. Sound reasoning is wonderful. But they are not evidence.

Without evidence that this can occur, it's just a "so-so" story. "Poof." "God did it." "Little green men seeded life on Earth." "Solar radiation in the form of neutrinos bombarded a random collection of L-form amino acids when Venus was in the House of Aquarius."

I'm not saying here that evolutionists are wrong and creationist are right. What I am saying is two things:
1) The question of how we went from a 50-50 mix of most, but not all, of the necessary amino acids to a self-replicating organism composed of only L-form a.acids is a relevant question.
2) Logical, reasonable hypotheses of how we accomplished this necessary transition are not the same thing as actual empirical evidence that those hypotheses are correct, or even possible.

Re:Evidence please!

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's the empirical, testable, repeatable, experiments that go from a racemic mixture to a non-racemic self-replicating organism?

There haven't been any experiments that have produced self-replicators yet. But that doesn't mean that our hypotheses are on the level of "Goddidit", either.

Without evidence that this can occur, it's just a "so-so" story.

You mean a "just-so" story, and no, it isn't. If you assume that original self-replicators existed at all, it's very unlikely that there would have resulted a stable 50-50 mixture of both enantiomers -- this follows from the existence of replicators, and the mathematics of population evolution.

Logical, reasonable hypotheses of how we accomplished this necessary transition are not the same thing as actual empirical evidence that those hypotheses are correct, or even possible.

That's true, but a "logical, reasonable hypothesis" isn't the same thing as "poof" or "godddidit", either.

Re:Evidence please!

[Anonymous Coward]

> You mean a "just-so" story,

Oops; you're right.

> "...a "logical, reasonable hypothesis" isn't the same thing as "poof" or "godddidit"...".

When we're talking about a historical event, whether it's a murder, or a lightning strike, or a spontaneous generation of Life, unless there's evidence to corroborate the explanation for the phenomenon, the explanation is only as valuable as "poof". The opposing counsel may come up with an explanation that's just as logical and reasonable that is diametrically opposed to the first explanation. That's why a lot of folks tend to think life came from outer space. To them, that explanation is more logical and reasonable than the idea that Milleresque amino acids gave rise to Life here on earth. And a third group finds a Creator God to be more logical and reasonable than the first two ideas. And a fourth group finds it more reasonable and logical to believe that there's no such thing as reality, and what you perceive as reality is just me having a dream. And so on and so on.

Without evidence, it's all just "poof". Everybody has their religious beliefs (even if they're based on naturalism). To move from the realm of "poof" into the realm of science, you gotta be able to repeat the demonstration, not just explain how it might possibly have happened according to your religious framework.

All that's being asked for is the evidence that corroborates the explanation, not the explanation itself.

As mentioned above, there are all sorts of explanations of how we went from non-Life to Life, one of which is the amino acid-to-Miller idea. But without empirical evidence, all of the explanations are merely "poof".

The reason many folks look to space as the origin of Life is probably because they find the current explanations of the origin of Life on earth to be too much "poof" and not enough evidence.

Evidence, not possible scenarios, is all I ask for.

Re:Evidence please!

[Anonymous Coward]

When we're talking about a historical event, whether it's a murder, or a lightning strike, or a spontaneous generation of Life, unless there's evidence to corroborate the explanation for the phenomenon, the explanation is only as valuable as "poof".

Based on what we can predict a replicator would do if it arose, this is a plausible scenario, not just "poof". Just like we can make predictions about what would happen in two populations based on evolutionary theory -- substitute "self-replicator" for "organism". No, we don't know that it happened that way, but for the Nth time, this is not anywhere near the same as an unfounded assertion. You apparently don't consider predictions from population biology to be applicable "evidence", but I do. Is it as good as direct evidence? No. Is it better than "poof"? Yes.

The opposing counsel may come up with an explanation that's just as logical and reasonable that is diametrically opposed to the first explanation.

Okay, come up with an equally plausible explanation for what happened when the first self-replicator based on an amino acid appeared, that led to a static mixture of enantiomers.

If all you're going to respond with is "plausible hypotheses are just `poof' without evidence", don't bother -- I've already stated that I think that's nonsense, so in that case we don't have anything more to talk about.

Re:Evidence please!

[Anonymous Coward]

> Okay, come up with an equally plausible explanation for what happened when the first self-replicator based on an amino acid appeared, that led to a static mixture of enantiomers.

But that's "begging the question", both that the first self-replicator arose here on earth from a racemic mixture of amino acids, and that your explanation is plausible.

You think it is plausible. So do lots of other folks, including some big names in the sciences. But some other folks, including some big names in the sciences, don't find your explanation to be plausible. So they turn to ideas such as life being seeded on earth by extraterrestrials (seems like a "poof" idea to me, and maybe to you, but not to them). Or they turn to the idea that only D-shaped forms of amino acids formed in the core of comets, and they provided the spark of Life (again with the "poof"). Or they turn away from naturalism and adopt the idea of a Creator God (once again, "poof"). I'm sure that all three camps can spin lovely stories explaining how their ideas would work, but without evidence, they're just story-telling.

It sounds like you're mostly objecting to my use of the term "poof". Instead, I'll just say that it's an interesting, but unsubstantiated, story.

Re:Evidence please!

[Sgt York]

I go back to the first, and most important, statement in my post.

There are good candidates among Evolutionary theory for this line of reasoning. This is certainly not one of them. Arguing along this tact makes you look petty.

Post as something other than AC and I will address your questions more directly. I'm tired of arguing with someone with so little confidence in their tactics that they will not show their face.

Goodbye.

Re:Evidence please!

[leonbrooks]

broke down as fast as they were made

What does this mean? [...] as more amino acids were created an equal number broke down

Something like that.

(not much of a criticism?)

Actually, an essential criticism. If the conditions under which they form also destroy them, there is little chance for them to aggregate into more complex forms. And as it turns out, amino acids sit in something of a binding-energy local minimum, which would tend firstly to preserve them and secondly to mitigate against the formation of (say) proteins. DNA or even RNA are still a very, very long way up that particular energy mountain.

Good point... thanks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks, that was a good counter arguement, eventhough I didn't try to make the points I was accused of making "creationism" and "only life here" more "and or" and "validity"

I had an idea as soon as I posted it I would get flamebait, eventhough I hate the negative moderation.

I do give space exploration and astronomy big kudos even more so BECAUSE of my arguements. Lots of great advances have been made due to SETI reasearch and space/life expoloration missions.

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[Brian Boitano]

yeah, but what if the numbers on the lottery ticket you bought match last week's numbers, but not this week's numbers??

Re:I tried this experiment in high school...sort o

[ComputerizedYoga]

funny ... I tried something similar .... couldn't find any legitimate valid sources for an english paper I had to write in high school, so I combined a healthy dose of BS with an even healthier dose of good ole-fashioned humor.

However, unlike your teacher, mine had a sense of humor. I was pretty happy with the results, she gave me an A and said it was the most enjoyable paper that anyone in the class had turned in. Really changed my view of writing too.

Then, I spose that's also the difference between science and art, or maybe just between high school and the real world, or something. :-p

Re:I tried this experiment in high school...sort o

[paiute]

The chemical was ninhydrin. Reacts with primary amines to give a purple spot on TLC.

Glass is a good blocker of UV. That's why one uses quartz cuvettes to determine the UV spectra of solutions from ca. 400 down to ca. 200 nm. I suspect this is where the good high-energy UVs that might have given you some chemical reactions are.

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[sam_handelman]

"Contact" [geocities.com] gave him a little recognition only because the movie was made believable (and bias I might add)

What? Are you suggesting that the movie Contact, which was a fun movie, but also new age UFO-cult pop drivel, led to Carl Sagan being more respected among SCIENTISTS?

Contact was BIASED? It's a work of fiction! What shortcomings of impartiality did you detect?

Most TRUELY academic scientists will tell you there seems to be "some" evidence of a creator

Well, Carl Sagan, it is true, is not as highly regarded for his own, unique, scientific contributions as one might believe watching PBS.

However, he had mountains of respect compared to anyone who pointed to anything specific and said it was evidence for the existence of a creator. It is perfectly well regarded in respected circles to quote Einstein "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists", particularly if you are being harassed by religious nuts about your own beliefs - volunteering such sentiments in a TRUELY ACADEMIC setting is the mark of a crackpot, however.

To say that any particular observed phenomenon is evidence, however indirect or minor, of some sort of supernatural providence which exceeds our capacity to understand is the mark of a TRUELY desperate religious nut - not a TRUELY academic scientist.

Lottery = your chances in getting picked out the pool may be one in a million, but your chances of picking the right number on the right day and being that one in a million are impossible odds.

I'm a bioinformatician - you may be attempting to communicate something valid, but what you say is nonsense. If your odds of getting picked in a lotterry are one in a million, and you enter the loterry once, you have a one in a million chance of winning the loterry. If you have to enter the single, right loterry, and there are a million of them, the odds are one in a trillion (a million squared.) In any case, not "incalculable."

If you enter the loterry every day for a billion years and have a chance of winning each time, even vanishingly small odds

Furthermore, while it is true that the odds of life arising around any given star may be extremely small, even over a billion year timespan - Sagan's point remains valid, there are about a SEXTILLION (that's ten ^ 21) stars in known universe.

The reason that we don't have enough information to calculate the odds of life arising on an earth-like planet is because we don't have enough information. The one earth-like planet we observe, the Earth, has life on it, but we're here, so our single observation is hopelessly biased.

On the other hand - unless they are "TRUELY academic" - most scientists feel that life arose as a purely chemical process, from chemical laws which were the same at that time as they are today.

Now, we don't yet know all of the steps that need to occur in order for life to arise. However, even given our broad ignorance, we can conclude that you need organic monomers of some kind (assuming organic life such as ours - an entirely seperate question) is Step 1.

Whatever the probability of success of steps 2...n, the more likely you are to succeed at Step 1, the more likely the entire process is to succeed.

Stanley Miller showed that there conditions, conditions not inconceivable on a young, earthlike planet, under which the formation of these molecular monomers is highly likely.

Therefore, the entire series of steps becomes more likely. Groundbreaking work.

Not a single scientists has been able to prove 100% that life exists elsewhere, only propoganda and conjecture.

Entirely true. We may very well be alone in the universe. However, our best estimate is that we are not. Conjecture, yes, propoganda - only in so far as all scientific endeavor is propoganda against superstitious beliefs.

A baby frog maybe...

[John3]

A large flask maybe, but I don't think you can fit a human baby in a test tube.

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[meringuoid]

yeah, but what if the numbers on the lottery ticket you bought match last week's numbers, but not this week's numbers??

Then you've picked the wrong numbers.

Why is this so hard to understand? There are 49x48x47x46x45x44 = 110,068,347,520 possible strings of six lottery balls. Divide by 6! because the order in which they appear doesn't matter. That's 13,983,816 possible sets of lottery numbers. You have picked one of these. Therefore, your chance of winning the lottery on any given draw is one in 13,983,816.

Of those 13,983,816 possible combinations, one is this week's winner, another is last week's winner, another is next week's winner: in fact, every winning lottery draw in history was one of those 13,983,816. But that makes no difference at all. You know that one and only one combination will be the winner. You pick one, and if it's the right one, you win. That's all there is to it.

It takes intelligence

[Nino the Mind Boggle]

From what I recall (and a quick Google search), there is a big problem with Miller's experiment: the "environment" that Miller created was nothing like the environment of pre-biotic earth, becaus Miller's "atmosphere" was oxygen free, but geological evidence indicates that free oxygen has always been present on earth.

Also Miller had to create a "trap" to collect the amino acids being formed to protect them from breaking down again. What would the comparable "natural" trap be?

Finally, the mix of both D and L aminos in Miller's soup presents a major problem. Living cells only use L amino acids. D aminos and proteins are toxic.

So it seems to me that what Miller demonstrated is that creating amino acids requires an intelligent mind controlling the process.

Re:It takes intelligence

[Ill_Omen]

As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter how much you 'control the process'. All you have to do is show that the process occurs. The universe is really really big and 4 billion years is a long long time. If something *can* happen, given that much time and space you'd have a hard time convincing me that it *won't* happen.

Re:It takes intelligence

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes all the difference in the world. You aren't a student of natural science, are you?

Re:It takes intelligence

[tgibbs]

From what I recall (and a quick Google search), there is a big problem with Miller's experiment: the "environment" that Miller created was nothing like the environment of pre-biotic earth, becaus Miller's "atmosphere" was oxygen free, but geological evidence indicates that free oxygen has always been present on earth.

Miller's was the first of a series of experiments demonstrating that the building blocks of life are readily formed under a wide variety of conditions.

Also Miller had to create a "trap" to collect the amino acids being formed to protect them from breaking down again. What would the comparable "natural" trap be?

The problem here, once again, is that there are so many ways that this could happen that it is hard to guess which was most important. Binding to clays, convection currents shuttling compounds between reactive and protective environments, various types of spontaneously formed membranes, etc. etc.

Finally, the mix of both D and L aminos in Miller's soup presents a major problem. Living cells only use L amino acids. D aminos and proteins are toxic.

Not necessarily. Early life could well have used both. But once you go to "assembly line" production of proteins, it makes sense for life to standardize on one or the other, just as we use mostly right-handed screws. Left-handed nuts can be (and are) used, but for most purposes they add unnecessary complexity, and they are "toxic" if you you pick up a left-handed nut when you are expecting a right handed one.

Re:It takes intelligence

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes no difference. Every experiment is inherently artificial. The trick is to spot the unimportant details that you can ignore.

For example, Galileo proved that bodies moving in their natural tragectories on Earth, like cannonballs, move in curves, not straight lines. He did this by dipping ball bearings in ink and rolling them over inclined surfaces covered in paper. They left curved tracks behind. Does this prove nothing about cannonballs just because cannonballs are not usually dipped in ink prior to firing?

Re: It takes intelligence

[Black Parrot]

> From what I recall (and a quick Google search), there is a big problem with Miller's experiment: the "environment" that Miller created was nothing like the environment of pre-biotic earth, becaus Miller's "atmosphere" was oxygen free, but geological evidence indicates that free oxygen has always been present on earth.

No, the existence of iron ore shows otherwise. It precipitated out of the seas when oxygen started building up in the atmosphere; in an oxydizing atmosphere there could never have been enough iron in the oceans to for the massive deposits we actually find.

BTW, I learned this a while back by spending a very little time with google. Make sure you're not getting all your "facts" from creationist Web sites.

> Also Miller had to create a "trap" to collect the amino acids being formed to protect them from breaking down again. What would the comparable "natural" trap be?

Out of my league, so I'll let someone else answer.

Though of course an obvious 'trap' is "life", e.g. if some of the AAs were incorporated into some kind of primitive self-replicator.

> Finally, the mix of both D and L aminos in Miller's soup presents a major problem. Living cells only use L amino acids. D aminos and proteins are toxic.

One hypothesis is that the earliest life formed by polymerization on a quasi-crystaline base such as clay, which could show a preference to one orientation over the other.

Another hypothesis is that both orientations were once used by life forms, but that the luck of the draw meant one crowded the other out. (You get that kind of thing in hereditary systems; a long time ago Scientific American had an interesting article about how surnames dissappear from populations over time due to differential breeding rates and essentially random factors.)

> So it seems to me that what Miller demonstrated is that creating amino acids requires an intelligent mind controlling the process.

Ignoring the problems with the claims you base that conclusion on, that is a major non sequitur. It is tantamount to saying "I rolled my car over yesterday, proving that cars can't be rolled over due to natural causes."

Re:It takes intelligence

[let_freedom_ring]

I'll admit, it's a cool experiment but let's not exaggerate what it means. True, he managed to synthesize some usefull proteins but he did not synthesize a life form, let alone a self-replicating life form.

Re:It takes intelligence

[RatBastard]

but he did not synthesize a life form

True, but that wasn't his point. He was trying to show that the building blocks of life could be created by natural and understandable processes. And his experiment did just that.

Re:It takes intelligence

[Anonymous Coward]

" True, he managed to synthesize some usefull proteins"
No, he didn't. If you don't know the difference between amino acids and proteins you certainly are not qualified to comment on anything that Miller did.

Re:It takes intelligence

[Sgt York]

Also Miller had to create a "trap" to collect the amino acids being formed to protect them from breaking down again. What would the comparable "natural" trap be?

Standing water. He set up a trap to reduce the timescale. The reaction took place at the gas/liquid interface; reacted product that dissolved quickly would be preserved. Some fraction would always become dissolved, no matter how inefficient the process. Add 2-3 centuries and you have a substantial buildup. Miller just sped things up a bit with the trap.

Finally, the mix of both D and L aminos in Miller's soup presents a major problem. Living cells only use L amino acids. D aminos and proteins are toxic.

Not toxic, just useless. And this does not present any problem, major or otherwise. Any chemical process that generates chiral molecules (like amino acids) will give amixture of buth types. It is expected, and assumed.

As for the atmosphere, there is no convincing evidence (that I have heard) either way.

Re:It takes intelligence

[tgibbs]

It's unlikely that anybody will every create a life form by a Miller-type experiment, unless the probablility of life forming spontaneously is far greater than even the most enthusiastic proponents imagine. Moreover, it might be very hard to recognize a primodial life form. You could have one of Stuart Kauffman's sets of reciprocally catalyzing polymers (Stuart A Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution) or one of Cairns-Smith's replicating clay layers (A. G. Cairns-Smith, Seven Clues to the Origin of Life) in your soup and not even know it. And those are just the ideas that people have thought about.

Re:It takes intelligence

[let_freedom_ring]

Fair enough, but this experiment is frequently sited as proof positive that life was formed naturally.

You have to admit that there are many more steps that would be necessary to form even the most primitive self-replicating cell. The amino acids would have to form proteins and proteins require DNA/RNA in order to perform usefull functions. DNA has a pretty delicate structure, it is unlikely to last very long by itself. I know that people have some speculations but we haven't come close to producing life from natural compounds.

Re:It takes intelligence

[Anonymous Coward]

Fair enough, but this experiment is frequently sited as proof positive that life was formed naturally.

I call shenanigans. Name one such citation.

Re:It takes intelligence

[Mooncaller]

I sure don't know where you have gotten your information, but its mostly inaccurate. Any free oxygen in the prebiotic earths atmosphere was chemicaly insignifigant. Almost all free oxygen was quickly incorporated into metal oxides, e.g. rust. There is a huge body of geological evidence for this. D proteins are not "toxic", they are just chemicaly insignifigent.

What variations of the Fox-Miller experiment PROVE is that amino acids could have been produced by mechinisms present in the prebiotic earth. They do that quite well. They are not intended to demenstrate anything else. The earth is a big place. A lot of mechinisms are at work. A lab is a small place ( unless it is Dexters). Only a limited set of mechinisms can be investigated at one time. In other words, some other mechinism was at work that provided preferential treatment for L proteins. Note that once Amino Acids from proteins, they become more stable. The more complex the protein, the more stable they become. This is a positive feedback system. All it takes is for one factor to be present that increases ever so slightly, the chances of some L amino acids to form a protein. Unfortunatly some things can not be easily duplicated in a lab.

You Creationist wacos realy piss me off. Who are you to define what mechinisms, the Most High God, is allowed to use in accomplishing His works. Why do you people find it sooo hard to beleive that He might have actualy used the laws of physics, that He CREATED, to form life. And don't get me started on, "Well the Bible says this, and the Bible says that..." In all probability, I know the Bible better then you. I sometimes catch gruff from members of my church over the issue of evolution. Its all realy in good fun and we usualy stop befor any argument gets outa hand. My church family knows my sincerity and respect the my diligents in studying the Word of God. The also acknowlege that my understanding of Theological matters is very solid. That is because when I read the Bible for edification, I do so under the guidence of The Holy Spirit, even if that means I must trash some of my most cherished preconceptions. This is one of the reasons Jesus sent the Holy Spirit. Needless to say, I have heard all of the anti-evolution rhetoric and can easily blast any argument.

Now its time for the bomb shell. The main source of the anti-evolution arguments is the "Society for Creation Studies". They use intimidation, manipulation, and misiformation to farther their cause. Their name is even a lie. They are not pro-Creationists, they are anti-evolutionist. Last time I checked, these are the tools of Satan and his minions. I am very suspicious of anyone who uses Satans methods. You should be to. BTW, some of thier arguments effevtivly deny the Power in the Blood of Christ!!!

Satan does not work to control the world. The worlds his aready. On the other hand he is deeply involved with trying to control the Church. The main job of the Church is to spread the Word of God, and the good news of salvation through Jesus, the Christ of God. The enemy has put huge damper on this mission. Ask any non-Christian /.er about Christians. They will invaribly say that they are
ignorant and uneducated because they deny scientific fact, so how can they be trusted about anything else?

This is enough for this rant. I think it is obvious that I could go on aout this subject at length. I might do a fuller write up later ( not as a post!).

Re: It takes intelligence

[Mooncaller]

The standard Fox-Miller experiment uses heat to produce steam that is condensed collected and reintroduced into the "reaction" area through siphoning. It is a minutatur version of what happens with volcanic heating of water in nature. How this is supose to invalidate the experiments, is beyond me. It is just like most of the anti-evolution arguments; geared to ignorant Christians ( to keep them in line) and not anyone who knows any real science. As for your clay hypothesis, I designed and built an experiment, while in high school. It utilized kayolin ( alumina-silica). The point was not handedness, but to produce sugars (via Strecker synthesis). I think a modification of what I desinged might be usefull for investigating isomer ratios. Its quite funny that I remember my experiment so well. I did the thing in 1976 or so. In another post, I describe a feedback mechinism. All it needs is a provible method of assembiling protiens with a preferential orientation that is likely to have been present in the prebiotic earth. For your last point. It is truely amasing that some people are so buisy looking for miracles in the chain of events that yielded us, that they miss the biggest miracle of all. That is that the rules of the universe are such that they allowed us who are capable of wondering about those rules.

Re:It takes intelligence

[tgibbs]

Fair enough, but this experiment is frequently sited as proof positive that life was formed naturally.

I've never heard it cited as such. There is no such thing as "proof positive" in science. Theories can only be disproved, not proved. However, Miller's experiment confirmed an important prediction of the theory: if life formed spontaneously, then the fundamental building blocks of life must also be capable of being formed spontaneously.

The amino acids would have to form proteins and proteins require DNA/RNA in order to perform usefull functions.

Actually, this is not true. Many proteins perform useful functions all by themselves. Proteins can even form other proteins without the intervention of DNA or RNA. What DNA and RNA provide is a mechanism for "assembly-line" production of large numbers of different proteins. Moreover, RNA by itself can perform many of the functions of proteins. So it is possible to envision plausible schemes in which life started with proteins, with the whole DNA/RNA business added on later, or in which life started with something like RNA, with proteins being a later invention. Or both could have happened, with the present form of life being a fortunate hybrid.

DNA has a pretty delicate structure, it is unlikely to last very long by itself.

Also not true. DNA is quite stable and has even been recovered from fossils.

I know that people have some speculations but we haven't come close to producing life from natural compounds.

No, spontaneous generation of life is probably a sufficiently infrequent event that it is unlikely ever to be reproduced in a lab. And the first form of life was probably so different from modern cells that we might not recognize it even if we did manage to create it.

Re: It takes intelligence

[blitz77]

[No, the existence of iron ore shows otherwise. It precipitated out of the seas when oxygen started building up in the atmosphere; in an oxydizing atmosphere there could never have been enough iron in the oceans to for the massive deposits we actually find.

BTW, I learned this a while back by spending a very little time with google. Make sure you're not getting all your "facts" from creationist Web sites.]

Make sure that what you read is up-to-date. Most scientists now believe that it was not reducing.

"However, most of the scientific community now believes that the early Earth's atmosphere was not reducing. Instead, scientists beleive the atmosphere was full of oxidants, such as CO2 and N2. An oxidizing atmosphere is essentially neutral, and does not permit organic chemistry to occur." --http://www.chem.duke.edu/~jds/cruise_chem/Exobio logy/PBearth.html
As for your banded iron formations evidence, in many of these formations there are also less oxidized forms underneath (eg magnetite below hematite).

Nowadays there are alternate theories-for example, thermal vents, panspermia, frozen ocean (3 billion years ago the sun was 30% less luminous; Jeffrey Bada estimates that a 300m thick layer of ice would have covered the earth).

[Another hypothesis is that both orientations were once used by life forms, but that the luck of the draw meant one crowded the other out. (You get that kind of thing in hereditary systems; a long time ago Scientific American had an interesting article about how surnames dissappear from populations over time due to differential breeding rates and essentially random factors.]

Sure, now if both were once used, and given that genetic information coded for some D forms, why could they not continue using them? A just-so story of the genetic material converting into coding for all L?

Re:It takes intelligence

[leonbrooks]

The universe is really really big and 4 billion years is a long long time.

Not big enough and not long enough by many thousands of orders of magnitude. Also, Miller demonstrated an imperfect part of one small but necessary step; the many other steps required have not been demonstrated, most of them have not even been hypothetically explained.

If something can happen, given that much time and space you'd have a hard time convincing me that it won't happen.

No, don't tell me, let me guess... that's got more to do with your preconceptions than with the actual calculations involved?

In other words, you want it to be so, and in that light rational analysis doesn't stand a chance. Sounds like religion to me.

Re:It takes intelligence

[leonbrooks]

What variations of the Fox-Miller experiment PROVE is that amino acids could have been produced by mechinisms present in the prebiotic earth.

Not quite. What they prove is that some of the simpler aminos could have been formed in conditions then presumed to have been extant early in Earth's history. Subsequent research has shown (links in other people's answers above) that the presumed conditions never existed. It also turns out that many aminos are likely to form because they represent a local energy minimum. Taking the next step is more than a little harder, as is coming up with a source for those necessary aminos which don't ever form under simple conditions.

Note that once Amino Acids from proteins, they become more stable.

Even given that this extra stability is significant (e.g., that the conditions destructive of aminos are somehow not as destructive of proteins) how is this to be achieved? In real life, the vast majority of proteins are naturally assembled only by living organisms.

You Creationist wacos realy piss me off. Who are you to define what mechinisms, the Most High God, is allowed to use in accomplishing His works.

I think you meant "whackos"; Waco is a place in Texas.

I don't think it's fair to say that Creationists define any divine mechanisms, let alone set limits on what God could use in carrying out His creative work. However, this passage...

as by one man [Adam] sin entered into the world, and death by sin (Romans 5:12)

...doesn't leave room for any death (at least human death) before Adam, which neatly eliminates evolution as a prospect. There are many other passages confirming both that principle and other principles which are exclusive of various parameters upon which evolutionary theory depends. What it comes down to is this:

Do you believe that man is cleverer than God? If so, man made God and can dictate the terms under which He operates; if not, why take the prognostications of men before the pronouncements of God?

Even if you reject all of the above, relying on an initial miracle (of conditions) or many small miracles (tweaking evolution) makes no more sense from a materialist perspective (which is what you're trying to adapt your supernaturalist faith to) than relying on an obviously interventionist miracle along the lines of "God spoke... and it was."

Re:It takes intelligence

[Anonymous Coward]

Not big enough and not long enough by many thousands of orders of magnitude.

In other words, you're talking out your ass. Nobody knows how to calculate "the probability that life evolves", let alone you.

The only calculations floating around are the laughably naive ones proposed by creationists, which incorrectly assume that every interaction is random -- ignoring the whole point of evolution, which is processes like natural selection and self-organization.

Re:It takes intelligence

[let_freedom_ring]

"Actually, this is not true. Many proteins perform useful functions all by themselves"

Ultimately proteins do everything but in modern cells the DNA adds the intelligence to determine what type of proteins and how many of them to produce for the current circumstances. Are you suggesting that we can have a prolonged period of time where proteins reproduce other proteins without DNA guiding this process? Do we see this today? Regarding the possibility of RNA being the first self-replicator I don't think that producing amino acids is a usefull precursor for that (I could be wrong, I'm going to re-read my Isaac Asimov book on genetics tonight), or at least the jump from amino acids to RNA would be much greater than the jump from amino acids to proteins.

Also not true. DNA is quite stable and has even been recovered from fossils

You are talking about DNA that was first housed in a living organism coated with protective proteins and then fossilized in amber. I meant that you wouldn't find the stuff floating around untended in the ocean or in a pre-biotic soup.

Re:It takes intelligence

[tgibbs]

Are you suggesting that we can have a prolonged period of time where proteins reproduce other proteins without DNA guiding this process? Do we see this today?

There are certainly modern examples of proteins producing other proteins, but they are very much the exception. We are much in the position of a naive observer viewing a modern auto factory. Finding that the construction of cars is heavily robotic and controlled by computers, such an observer might well conclude that the invention of the automobile must have occurred subsequent to the invention of computers and manufacturing robots, since they are so clearly fundamental to automobile manufacture. The ribosome is a sort of robotic assembly line for efficient production of the large number of proteins required by modern complex forms of life. That doesn't mean that life started that way.

Regarding the possibility of RNA being the first self-replicator I don't think that producing amino acids is a usefull precursor for that (I could be wrong, I'm going to re-read my Isaac Asimov book on genetics tonight), or at least the jump from amino acids to RNA would be much greater than the jump from amino acids to proteins.

The RNA-first idea is not the only theory. RNA has the advantage that there is potentially a simple method of reproduction. On the other hand, it's much easier to come up with ways to get spontaneous formation of polypeptides than RNA, and it is possible to envision a self-reproducing metabolism based entirely around polypeptide catalysis, with no need for nucleic acid. Once you have polypeptides around to catalyze things, it's easier to get nucleic acids. Or perhaps RNA and proteins evolved independently and eventually developed a symbiotic relationship.

You are talking about DNA that was first housed in a living organism coated with protective proteins and then fossilized in amber. I meant that you wouldn't find the stuff floating around untended in the ocean or in a pre-biotic soup

DNA is readily recovered from bodies that have been rotting in the ground for years. As I said, it is quite stable. And it might well be even more stable in a prebiotic soup, because it wouldn't have to deal with enzymes specifically designed to degrade DNA.

Re:It takes intelligence

[fluffy666]

Subsequent research has shown (links in other people's answers above) that the presumed conditions never existed.

Of course, they don't have to form on earth.. They can form in space. They can also form on earth without the lightning/UV requirement.

Taking the next step is more than a little harder, as is coming up with a source for those necessary aminos which don't ever form under simple conditions.

That depends on what you think the next step is. After all, a specific-sequence protein, even if it manages to form by chance, is useless; only when a transcription mechanism exists which can generate the protein will it be useful.

However, a simple peptide coat for an Fe/Ni-S reaction center would be a useful early step, as both would arise spontaneously. Proteins matching such a description are shared amongst *every* organism (ferrodoxins), which suggests a very early origin.

Re:It takes intelligence

[let_freedom_ring]

"DNA is readily recovered from bodies that have been rotting in the ground for years. As I said, it is quite stable. And it might well be even more stable in a prebiotic soup, because it wouldn't have to deal with enzymes specifically designed to degrade DNA."

I thought that water was a problem for DNA, that it would tend to separate the sugar from its bases and that is why the cell tends to limit access to its DNA. The cases of DNA preservation that I am aware of involve a net drying out, am I wrong here? In fact you can have bacteria and virus' sitting around as powder. What kind solution is DNA friendly? Is that type of solution likely to make up pre-biotic oceans? In any case interesting stuff.

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[waldo2020]

creationist moron needs spell checker - TRUELY!

How significant is this?

[DavidPesta]

The production of amino acids on the early earth is neccessary for spontaneous generation, but amino acids are extremely simple compared to proteins and cellular structures. One would expect amino acids whether the spontaneous generation of life happened or not.

Saying that the existance of amino acids on an early earth proves spontaneous generation is almost like saying the existance of carbon and water on a planet proves the existance of life on that planet. Inconclusive!

David Pesta
B.S. Biochemistry

Re: How significant is this?

[Black Parrot]

> Saying that the existance of amino acids on an early earth proves spontaneous generation is almost like saying the existance of carbon and water on a planet proves the existance of life on that planet.

No ones says it "proves" anything, except that amino acids can be made from lifeless matter.

But consider how differently we view the building blocks of life now than our ancestors viewed them 500 years ago, because of experiments like this.

Re: How significant is this?

[DavidPesta]

No ones says it "proves" anything, except that amino acids can be made from lifeless matter.

Are you sure that's all they are saying?

The slashdot article said, "For its fifty-year commemoration, Miller is interviewed today and reflects on what Carl Sagan called 'the single most significant step in convincing many scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos.'"

It looks like they are going much further than saying "amino acids can be made from lifeless matter."

Re:How significant is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

The production of amino acids on the early earth is neccessary for spontaneous generation, but amino acids are extremely simple compared to proteins and cellular structures.

Feh. You just lack vision. Today I walked from my house to the supermarket, next week I'm going to walk from Nebraska to Hawaii.

Re: How significant is this?

[Black Parrot]

> > No ones says it "proves" anything, except that amino acids can be made from lifeless matter.

> Are you sure that's all they are saying? The slashdot article said, "For its fifty-year commemoration, Miller is interviewed today and reflects on what Carl Sagan called 'the single most significant step in convincing many scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos.'" It looks like they are going much further than saying "amino acids can be made from lifeless matter.

I don't see the word "proves" anywhere in that quote. And the fact that the major building blocks of life AWKI can be built from lifeless matter is exactly what convinces most scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos.

Science works under the assumption that nature behaves the same elsewhere as it does here, so it follows that in a big universe, interesting stuff that happens here will also happen elsewhere, with high probability.

Re: How significant is this?

[DavidPesta]

I don't see the word "proves" anywhere in that quote.

I never said the word "proves" either. Instead of picking apart the english language, focus on my premise: They are taking this way further than they should.

And the fact that the major building blocks of life AWKI can be built from lifeless matter is exactly what convinces most scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos.

Carbon is a major building block of life. Would the discovery of carbon on the earth and in the rest of the universe convince most scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos? There is a much larger step in complexity between amino acids and functional proteins than between carbon and amino acids, and I am talking many orders of magnitude. So it is not much different to get excited about finding carbon than it is to get excited about finding amino acids. So I say that it shouldn't convince them of anything. At most it should be an interesting footnote. I thought good scientists were skeptics.

Science works under the assumption that nature behaves the same elsewhere as it does here, so it follows that in a big universe, interesting stuff that happens here will also happen elsewhere, with high probability.

True, everyone should accept that assumption. Where science goes wrong is this. It starts with the assumption that the metaphysical doesn't exist and should not be considered in their investigation. That in and of itself is not a problem, as long as they are clear about that assumption when they give their conclusions. But they don't do that. The process of scientific investigation cannot lead to a conclusion that defies naturalism. Any clues that do are discriminated against by default. Naturalistic science is non-falsifiable, just as much as any other religion. It becomes another foolish "my god is better than your god" debate, except that most people are brainwashed into thinking that the scientific conclusions are made by an unbiased source. Any challenge made to the establishment of naturalism is automatically invalid because those creationists are just religious and trying to defend their god. But so are the naturalists, sometimes without realizing it! ;D

Re: How significant is this?

[DavidPesta]

About my discussion of naturalism above, that is not flamebait. I have seen and heard time and time again evolutionists agree that naturalism is non-falsifiable. But they continue to use it anyway because it suits them. And that is their prerogative.

Re: How significant is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where science goes wrong is this. It starts with the assumption that the metaphysical doesn't exist and should not be considered in their investigation. That in and of itself is not a problem, as long as they are clear about that assumption when they give their conclusions. But they don't do that.

Umm, most grown-up scientist-type people assume that people understand what science is when they give their conclusions. Supernatural hypotheses cannot be considered in a scientific investigation, insofar as they are not falsifiable.

If it's not possible to prove that the supernatural exists, it's not possible to disprove naturalism. But that doesn't mean that there is a flaw in science.

Naturalistic science is non-falsifiable, just as much as any other religion.

Naturalism vs. supernaturalism is a metaphysical stance, and in that sense non-falsifiable. But specific naturalistic theories certainly are falsifiable.

In principle, supernatural theories can be falsifiable too, if you want to put constraints on what the supernatural agent can/will do. But the only time people do that is when they know a priori that the constraints will be compatible with the evidence, making the reasoning circular. (e.g., "Of course we should see animals closely related, because God wanted blah blah blah" ... but this kind of reasoning never seems to help us predict things that we haven't seen before.)

What happens when you include an omnipotent agent into your theory? Then literally anything is possible -- there is no data that can't be accounted for ("God made it that way"), and nothing new can be predicted (both A and not-A can be accounted for, depending on God's whim).
You don't have a theory. "God did it" is a non-explanation, as far as illuminating our knowledge of anything.

Re: How significant is this?

[junkgrep]

---Carbon is a major building block of life. Would the discovery of carbon on the earth and in the rest of the universe convince most scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos?---

But that's not what's being said. What's being said is that prior to this experiment, no one even knew that ammino acids could be created in (simulated) natural-like conditions. The experiment showed then that this could actually happen. That doesn't prove that life happens that way, but it does vastly improve our estimation of the likiood of finding life elsewhere in the universe.

---It starts with the assumption that the metaphysical doesn't exist and should not be considered in their investigation.---

No no no. This is nonsense anyway, since ROCKS are as much "metaphysical" as anything else would be. But science is not a metaphysical seive, it is a testability/falsifiability seive. "Naturalism" has nothing, inherently, to do with it. That's just some militant atheists' joneses. I dare you to even define "supernatural" in a way that isn't just a form of "not natural," which itself is worthless, because we don't know what "natural" even is. (how can we define a set when we don't know all it's contents or even the similarities between all it's contents or even if there ARE any other sets?)

"Supernatural" explanations aren't tolerated not because they ruled out: but because they break the rules of inquiry. They claim to explain things, when all they do is give a name to things we STILL don't understand any better than when we honestly admitted our ignorance. They often aren't testable. They are often consistent with ANYTHING (making them even more worthless) because they can be ad hoced once they encounter any disproof.

No: if there exists "supernatural" things, then they exist, and are the same as "natural" things in that respect, and should not be treated as a separate category. If a God exists in any meaningful way, then it should be amenable to science to the degree that it interacts with the rest of existence. Because science should not be a route to a philosophy of materialism, but simply a route to testable explanation, wherever that route leads.

Re: How significant is this?

[DavidPesta]

Where science goes wrong is this. It starts with the assumption that the metaphysical doesn't exist and should not be considered in their investigation. That in and of itself is not a problem, as long as they are clear about that assumption when they give their conclusions. But they don't do that.

Umm, most grown-up scientist-type people assume that people understand what science is when they give their conclusions. Supernatural hypotheses cannot be considered in a scientific investigation, insofar as they are not falsifiable.

Good point, I think most good scientists do have this well understood. But the vast majority of people do not really have this issue understood I'm afraid. And the media does not make it clear because they are usually run by this crowd.

If it's not possible to prove that the supernatural exists, it's not possible to disprove naturalism. But that doesn't mean that there is a flaw in science.

I agree completely, as long as science isn't used to mislead the public. But people get the strong impression from science that it disproves supernatural reality. Non-falsifiable findings cannot do that. The public needs to be educated about this better.

Naturalism vs. supernaturalism is a metaphysical stance, and in that sense non-falsifiable. But specific naturalistic theories certainly are falsifiable.

True, but all naturalistic theories that I have seen to prove evolution are non-falsifiable, at least at our level of technology and time to record evolutionary change. Any hope to overcome this problem is a matter of faith in the future of science to deliver. I fail to understand why this faith is better than faith in the supernatural. I see them on equal par if I were to remain philosophically honest. Incidently, if it is correct that all theories to explain naturalistic evolution are currently non-falsifiable, then it remains correct to say that naturalistic evolution is unproven so far.

In principle, supernatural theories can be falsifiable too, if you want to put constraints on what the supernatural agent can/will do.

And that shifts the premise and allows discussion that is otherwise forbidden. That is a very interesting study. ;)

But the only time people do that is when they know a priori that the constraints will be compatible with the evidence, making the reasoning circular.

Also true that this happens to an overwhelming degree, but I have found it a mistake to say that this is always the case. I regularly see some predictable and invokable things that naturalists would find hard to explain without calling me an outright liar. (Of course calling me a liar doesn't convince me of anything as long as I am confident of the functionality of my senses and the sanity of those around me who are present.) But to say, "There is some natural explanation for it which we cannot figure out yet" is no different than saying, "There is a supernatural explanation for it which we do not understand."

What happens when you include an omnipotent agent into your theory? Then literally anything is possible -- there is no data that can't be accounted for ("God made it that way"), and nothing new can be predicted (both A and not-A can be accounted for, depending on God's whim). You don't have a theory. "God did it" is a non-explanation, as far as illuminating our knowledge of anything.

That is, unless it were possible to learn the supernatural constraints that you mentioned and put them into practice. In that case, something useful can come of it.

Very good honest post, I can totally relate with everything they said. Too bad it was anonymous. This person should get slashdot points. ;)

Re: How significant is this?

[DavidPesta]

You may have missed my point about the carbon analogy, but that's okay. I really liked what you had to say about the definition of natural and supernatural, and how are you supposed to distinguish between them anyway? One question though..

Because science should not be a route to a philosophy of materialism, but simply a route to testable explanation, wherever that route leads.

Do you honestly believe that modern science is not establishing a route to a philosophy of materialism? From what I can see it is for the most part. Just some thoughts. ;)

Re: How significant is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

But people get the strong impression from science that it disproves supernatural reality. Non-falsifiable findings cannot do that. The public needs to be educated about this better.

That's true. It leads to a science/religion dichotomy that doesn't need to exist. Science by its very nature limits itself to which hypotheses it considers. That doesn't mean that it considers all possible hypotheses. (On the other hand, the self-limitation of science doesn't imply that supernaturalism explains anything outside the scope of science.)

all naturalistic theories that I have seen to prove evolution are non-falsifiable, at least at our level of technology and time to record evolutionary change.

I don't know what you mean. You can't prove any theory correct, evolution or otherwise. You can only amass an increasing body of evidence that is consistent with a theory.

Are you just saying that there are gaps in our understanding, that are currently only fulfilled by guesswork? True enough, but that's true of pretty much everything in science, and always will be.

Any hope to overcome this problem is a matter of faith in the future of science to deliver.

I dislike the use of the term "faith" here; I'd say "belief". To me, faith is something that you just accept, regardless of evidence, whereas belief is a provisional assumption you make, knowing that it may be wrong.

I fail to understand why this faith is better than faith in the supernatural.

I think it's a matter of convervatism. (Occam again.) Why postulate a vastly powerful and knowledgable entitity, when simple laws -- that we might already know -- have sufficed so often in the past. Occam, I guess. That's not to say that the simpler hypothesis is necessarily right; that can't be known. But it's such a huge, huge leap to extrapolate the existence of an entity that is far beyond everything in the universe, just to explain something unknown.

Also, historically, we have so many cases of people proposing supernatural explanations for things that later turned out to have better natural explanations. But you don't tend to see the opposite: natural explanations that are replaced with better, supernatural explanations.
You just see supernatural explanations that stand on their own.

I see them on equal par if I were to remain philosophically honest.

Philosophically, we can't know one way or another. But it's possible to argue that naturalism has a better track record, and thus should be accorded a greater degree of credibility.

Incidently, if it is correct that all theories to explain naturalistic evolution are currently non-falsifiable, then it remains correct to say that naturalistic evolution is unproven so far.

Like I said, no theory is ever "proven" in science.

I regularly see some predictable and invokable things that naturalists would find hard to explain without calling me an outright liar.

I mean predictable in the sense of new predictions: predictions of phenomena not yet observed. That eliminates the circularity that occurs when you introduce a hypothesis to predict something that you've already seen happen.

(Verifiable predictions are also preferable. While I might legitimately believe something based on personal evidence, I shoudn't expect anyone else to believe it unless they can access the evidence themselves.)

But to say, "There is some natural explanation for it which we cannot figure out yet" is no different than saying, "There is a supernatural explanation for it which we do not understand."

Yes, in the sense that bot

Re: How significant is this?

[junkgrep]

My point was that, yes: the discovery that carbon was common in the rest of the universe should at least be grounds to up our estimation about the possibility of life in the rest of the universe.

---Do you honestly believe that modern science is not establishing a route to a philosophy of materialism? From what I can see it is for the most part. Just some thoughts. ;)---

I do believe it. The neat thing about science is that it's essentially just the (old school, i.e. John Locke) liberal idea that no one gets a final say, and no one gets any special authority: all ideas must face eternal and diverse criticism. That idea has a way of transcending, in practice, any other philosophical gurflummery that people try to attach to it. Because it's essentially just a social mechanism for decentralizing the production of truth, not a philosophy in and of itself.

And as I noted before, I don't think, even if people think they ARE establishing some philosophy of materialism, that they are ultimately doing anything. The fact remains: if there are any "supernatural" things that interact with the rest of reality in any meaningful way, then they will inevitably become part of "materialism" anyway, exposing the emptiness of the distinction.

Furthermore, there are plenty of intelligent science theorists and scientists who are careful NOT to confuse what they call "methodological materialism" with "metaphysical materialism." By the former, they mean just that science as a method can only deal with what it can test: stuff it can interact with. But they realize that the lack of interactibility and detectability in the here and now doesn't necessarily prove anything about what is or isn't out there. It just isn't ripe for explanation until we CAN get some hard data on it.

Even there, I think we're using words that are far too complicated. What we need to focus on are some straight binaries. Exist/Not exist. Known/Unknown. "Material/Not Material" is useless in this regard, especially because if something is non-material, then it is essentially unknown by default. But if it is unknown, then we also can't know whether or not it is material or not either (we don't even really know how we would tell, even philosophically)! So all non-material things live in the realm of the unknown, and the only sorts of things that even can become known are previously unknown material things (like quarks). That makes the distinction essentially meaningless: we should just stick to "known/unknown" and be done with it, rather than trying to classify different "sorts" of existence, when we don't even know what that even means.

Re: How significant is this?

[tgibbs]

Would the discovery of carbon on the earth and in the rest of the universe convince most scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos?

It is certainly an important piece of evidence in support of that proposition. Turn it around--if carbon were rare, don't you think scientists would conclude that life is probably rare, also?

But some would like more evidence than that. Showing the basic building blocks of life are readily formed certainly adds additional evidence on top of the ubiquity of carbon.

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[tgibbs]

Most scientists will tell you the Carl Sagan coined phrase "If just one in a Billion, then one in that billion...." isn't plausible.

Actually, in my experience, most scientists have enough knowledge of statistics to know that it is plausible. Indeed, if the universe is infinite (as current astrophysical evidence suggests), then it doesn't matter how small the probability is. If it is possible at all, then it will happen somewhere.

Serious question: WHats the longest this has

[Unknown Poltroon]

been run for? I mean, has anyone set up a big tank o' goo, shocked it and shone uv light in it for several years, to see what develops? COuld life actually evolve(theoretically, i know statisticlly, it wont happen) in such a circumstance?

Re:Serious question: WHats the longest this has

[Noofus]

I think they need to be careful that the vat doesnt get contaminated. And with the pevalance of life on this planet, and the warm gooeyness of the vat container, I am sure a bacterial colony would just love to get in there.

I wonder if its possible to do the experiment without contamination. Correlary to the Heisenburg principle - If we observe this experiment, presumably by dipping a probe in there to see if we can find life, we would alter the experiment. In all likelyhood even if we irradiate the probe, UV pulverize anything that was on it, there will still be traces of some bacteria that would introduce contamination into the system. I am not sure we would relaly ever be able to determine if the life we found was an evolution of amino acids to protienes to cells, or a contamination of natural earth organisms.

On a similar note - if we find bacteria on mars, there is a good chance its some hearty earth species that hitched a ride on the probe :\

Re:Serious question: WHats the longest this has

[Idarubicin]

In all likelyhood even if we irradiate the probe, UV pulverize anything that was on it, there will still be traces of some bacteria that would introduce contamination into the system. I am not sure we would relaly ever be able to determine if the life we found was an evolution of amino acids to protienes to cells, or a contamination of natural earth organisms.

Nah, we're actually pretty good at brutally sterilizing scientific and medical tools. As long as your equipment is designed with easy cleaning in mind, introducing contaminants shouldn't be able to happen.

Also, we needn't worry about being tricked by a false positive--if anything recognizably modern grows, we'll know it is contamination.

The only trouble now is finding someone who wants to fund this experiment for a few million years--evolution is a very slow process.

Creationists...

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, Creationists don't take this theory seriously, because why would there be a glass flask on prehistoric Earth in the first place?

Re:Creationists...

[jhigh]

Actually, Creationists would wonder where you got that flask from?

Re:Creationists...

[Anonymous Coward]

God put it there!

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[Planesdragon]

So, the chances are actually incalculable. Lottery = your chances in getting picked out the pool may be one in a million, but your chances of picking the right number on the right day and being that one in a million are impossible odds. Then you have the odds of actually claiming your prize and meeting the eligibility/legitimacy of the prize.

Odd. I could swear that there are people who've actually won the lottery... a couple hundred in America, I wager, which puts them at just about 1 in a million. ;)

Statistic impossibilities mean "don't plan on it happening to you," not "it'll never happen to anyone."

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a single scientist has been able to prove 100% that life DOESN'T exist elsewhere, only propoganda and conjecture.

I guess that leaves us with a fucking possibility then.

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[davesag]

Amino acids, planet size, PRECISE planetary evolution, distance from a sun, atmosphere, OTHER life, moons and magnetic/gravtational forces all contribute to life existing.

yep and all quite neatly explained by Lee Smolin's theory of Cosmological Natural Selection. See his book The Life of the Universe. No god needed here, nor any rampant anthopocentricism, just physics and evolution. And remember kids, evolution evolved out of blind iteration.

Recent developments in RNA World Work

[HidingMyName]

RNA worlds model a higher level of assmbly where amino acids are constructed into RNA. RNA worlds are assumed to also be a necessary (but later) step in the Origin of life. One problem with the approaches used is that historically they used to require lockstep state transitions, but recently Wright and Joyce developed a continuous approach, which allows transitions to occur at overlapping time.

Ironically....

[Tsali]

All 21 chemicals can be found in a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken...

Obviously Wrong

[ebuck]

Racemic mixtures are not decompsed anything. They are mixtures of "mirror-image" molecules. A completely racemized mixture is one with equal numbers of "left" and "right" members. Presence of both will not prevent you from using one or the other.

Look at you set of hands, one is racemic "left" and the other is racemic "right". You have a completely racemized mixture of hands. This does not deny you use of your left hand.

If amino acid procduction is industrial, usually you get (depending on the process) a mixture of the two racimic (D and L) formations that an amino acid can take. They are mirror images of each other.

Why is this important, well on planet Earth, almost all amino acids involed in life are of type L. (Metorites and non-living processes contribute the majority, if not all, of the D racemes discovered today)

Why only L-amino acids? Today we do not "know" with 100% certainty, but the theory is a living system, for whatever reason, started producing L-amino acids, which unbalanced the ratio. Other living systems (or perhaps the same one) which harvestd these L-amino acids survived and thrived in this L-amino acid rich environment while those that required D-amino acids may have never existed or may have died out due to competition.

Re:I tried this experiment in high school...sort o

[aborchers]

When in university physics lab, my partners and I did a sequence of rocketry experiments including thrust curves for the engines, design of a fuselage, wind tunnel testing, and ultimately launch and altitude triangulation.

Our wind tunnel results conducted with a full motor showed decent stability. However, with a spent motor to simulate conditions in the unpowered flight segment, they showed considerable instability in the vessel. It was, however, extremely light (designed to maximize altitude for a given motor, basically it was a nosecone and fins on a motor) and the miniature wind tunnel was another student project which was poorly sealed and, we reasoned (despite our thorough application of duct tape) quite turbulent, so we didn't put too much faith in those observations.

The initial launch was a total disaster. Barely clear of the guide rod, the thing became a tumbling menace, spiraling out of control before burying its nose in the dirt just a few meters from the pad.

A caffiene-filled night later, we had identified the problem. As mentioned, we were designing to tight tolerances to maximize altitude for a fixed engine. We had minimized surface area to minimize drag, keeping center of pressure behind the center of gravity. The only problem was, we designed with a fully-fueled engine, and once the fuel began to burn and exhaust out, the clay nozzle of the engine rapidly became the most massive component, shifting the center of mass rear of the center of pressure. Turns out that wind tunnel was right.

We all got As for the analysis of our failure. After finals, we slapped some oversived fins (designed for center of mass conditions in unpowered flight) on that sucker and got it up about 1/3 mile.

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[Ill_Omen]

I remember hearing the 'odds are so long it must have been design' argument from my 7th Day Adventist uncle and being pretty convinced. Then the lottery came to my state. The odds of winning were insane... you had to pick 6 numbers between 1-50. The published odds were like 1 in 14 million or something like that. No should ever bet on those odds.

But then I started to notice something fascinating... people were winning. In fact, it became big news when more than two weeks went by that no one won. Turns out, a whole bunch of people play the lottery. Enough to make the odds of the lottery being won *by someone* pretty close to 1 to 1.

Now the odds of life developing at random are probably greater than 1 in 14 million. But I invite you to look at the sky on a clear night. Start counting the stars. Then try to comprehend how much time 4 billion years is (I can't). Try to figure out the odds that makes an event *unlikely* to happen given that many players and that much time.

4.5 billion years or so...

[Anonymous Coward]

Although it seems to me Miller's "life creation process" is a lot less likely to be true than some of the later theories that life began around geothermal vents under the sea.

That's a lot more stable environment to allow complex reactions to repeat themselves than one where a few gazillion volts of lightening zap a bowl of soup in a tidal basin that continually dries out and is pounded by waves.

Look! Blue-green algae! ZZZAAAPPP! No it's not.

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[turgid]

This is slashdot. Don't expect rational discussion or intelligent commentary. You'd be amazed at how many self-righteous Creationists there are around.

Reply to several posts

[paiute]

Replies to several different posts (sorry for the lack of attribution): /Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids... /broke down as fast as they were made (in a /carefully customised device, not in the wild), /and were completely racemised at formation? Or /that no evidence of a reducing atmosphere exists?

Amino acids tend not to break down much. They are exceedingly stable once made. Those that happened to wander back into the electric current might have suffered, but the majority would have stayed safely in solution. The chemical reaction was proceeding in the gas phase; the products were sequestered in the water.

The products are racemic amino acids. Several plausible hypotheses have been put as to how it happened that the L amino acids became predominate: circular dichroism in natural radiation, preferential decompostion of D 14C labeled amino acids, etc.

We don't know all that much about the exact composition of the atmosphere at every time in the earth's history, but the fact that high-energy processes can give amino acids from simple precursors trumps all nit-picking. /Also Miller had to create a "trap" to collect the /amino acids being formed to protect them from /breaking down again. What would the comparable /"natural" trap be?

The natural trap would be water. High energy events are always happening in the atmosphere (lightning, UV rays, cosmic rays). Lighting blasts convert nitrogen to nitrates. Roughly 10% of the nitrate in soil comes from nitrogen transformed by lightning, and the nitrates are trapped by water. The point to take home from the Miller experiment is that the small, high-energy intermediates formed by these processes can combine to form biologially complex building blocks. /As a student of Biological Anthropology, I have /had the oppertunity to take a history of /biological anthropology in which Miller was /mentioned. Interesting guy, but the theory is not /supported any more except by the few staunchest /researchers. In other words, this is pop science. /It survives in text books (like many other /evolutionary inaccuracies that nobody seems to be /willing to update). In truth, the experiment did /not conclude much. In short, the amino acid /theory in reality did not produce very much at /all

This is just wrong. The conclusion drawn from the results of the experiment was revolutionary. It is of at least on the scale of Wohler's synthesis of urea, a biochemical, from "dead" cyanogen and ammonia.

Re:Reply to several posts

[T5]

In the last 50 years many, many scientific discoveries have been made that invalidate the Miller experiment. For instance, studies performed by NASA in the 1980's pertaining to the composition of ancient Earth's atmosphere debunk the Miller experiment's hypothesis that the atmosphere was composed largely of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen. They found that the atmospheric composition was dominated by nitrogen and carbon dioxide, with very little of Miller's hand-picked concoction present.

The Miller experiment will go down in history as another irrational jump to conclusions based on a less-than-adequate scientific understanding to promote certain political needs in the scientific community in an attempt to prove macroevolution. I suspect that the only reason it's still promoted is political. It certainly isn't because it's good science. Decry the "nit-picking" all you wish, but the truth of the matter is that Miller's experiment, albeit revolutionary for the 1950's, is far from what modern science would ascribe as (1) reflective of the conditions of primeval earth and (2) extremely unlikely to occur even in the best of circumstances in the wild.

Re:Reply to several posts

[Otter]

Interesting guy, but the theory is not supported any more except by the few staunchest researchers. In other words, this is pop science. It survives in text books (like many other evolutionary inaccuracies that nobody seems to be willing to update). In truth, the experiment did not conclude much.

I'm not qualified to pass judgment on the merits of his argument (and you provided a nice defense of it) but my experience is that the quote is a perfect description of how Miller's work is perceived in the evolutionary biology field today. It's treated far less enthusiastically by researchers than it is in high school textbooks, rightly or wrongly.

Re:Reply to several posts

[TenDimensions]

In the last 50 years many, many scientific discoveries have been made that invalidate the Miller experiment.

Which are talked about extensively in this article as well as a link from within this article here: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article5.html

They found that the atmospheric composition was dominated by nitrogen and carbon dioxide, with very little of Miller's hand-picked concoction present.

This is not a secret within the scientific community, but it does not negate the fact that his actual contribution to science was demonstrating that certain inorganic elements could be transformed into organic molecules through a simple process. Whether or not those were the exact conditions on early Earth is a bit irrelevant since the major breakthrough was the inorganic to organic transformation.

The Miller experiment will go down in history as another irrational jump to conclusions based on a less-than-adequate scientific understanding to promote certain political needs in the scientific community in an attempt to prove macroevolution.

Yep, they're going to discard his work just as quickly as they're going to discard Darwin's.

Decry the "nit-picking" all you wish, but the truth of the matter is that Miller's experiment, albeit revolutionary for the 1950's, is far from what modern science would ascribe as (1) reflective of the conditions of primeval earth and (2) extremely unlikely to occur even in the best of circumstances in the wild.

Check out the URL I provided above. Like I said, the major contribution of Miller's experiment was the transformation is possible through completely natural means. While the details as it pertains to early Earth may be wrong it still doesn't preclude a dozen or so other possibilities that are now open to speculation as a result of his work. You may disagree with macroevolution all you want, but Miller's contribution was in showing how certain organic building blocks could form through a natural process - sound science by any definition.

Re:Reply to several posts

[paiute]

In the last 50 years many, many scientific discoveries have been made that invalidate the Miller experiment. For instance, studies performed by NASA in the 1980's pertaining to the composition of ancient Earth's atmosphere debunk the Miller experiment's hypothesis that the atmosphere was composed largely of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen. They found that the atmospheric composition was dominated by nitrogen and carbon dioxide, with very little of Miller's hand-picked concoction present.

The conclusion of the experiment is not that the atmosphere must have been a certain composition under certain conditions - it is that high-energy processes can lead to complex biological precursors. In contrast to your statement that Miller's work has been invalidated, the opposite is true. Replication of interstellar conditions, UV radiation on ice containing H2O, CO2, CO, CH3OH, and NH3 gave 16 amino acids along with some furans and pyrroles. Activated N2 reacts with carboxylates to give amino acids in a non-reducing atmosphere. Etc. See Miller's own paper in 1988: Molecular Origins of Life (1998), 59-85. Editor(s): Brack, Andre. Publisher: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK that lists 96 references that extend and support his hypothesis.

The Miller experiment will go down in history as another irrational jump to conclusions based on a less-than-adequate scientific understanding to promote certain political needs in the scientific community in an attempt to prove macroevolution. I suspect that the only reason it's still promoted is political. It certainly isn't because it's good science. Decry the "nit-picking" all you wish, but the truth of the matter is that Miller's experiment, albeit revolutionary for the 1950's, is far from what modern science would ascribe as (1) reflective of the conditions of primeval earth and (2) extremely unlikely to occur even in the best of circumstances in the wild.

You are hung up on the nits. The bottom line is: high-energy processes can give biochemicals from small inorganic precursors.

Re:Reply to several posts

[TheSync]

The importance of the Miller-Urey experiment is that it lead science to recognize that there are ways to create what seem to be fairly complex organic molecules in a simple way.

While their atmosphere/ocean model may be chemically the "wrong way," but as you mentioned, it inspired many experiments looking into alternative atmospheric conditions, energy sources, catalysts, etc.

Before the Creationists jump into the fray....

[mblase]

...could someone tell us if and how the remaining 8 essential amino acids can be formed?

Re:Before the Creationists jump into the fray....

[xutopia]

I guess we have to experiment more to figure that one out.

If we (humanity) had just said that God created amino acids in the first place we may have never tried this experiment.

We wouldn't know that 13 amino acids can spring from next to nothing.

Re:Before the Creationists jump into the fray....

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm also curious -why- the 13 amino acids are created. Why does that certain soup allow it to happen that way?

Re:Before the Creationists jump into the fray....

[xutopia]

"It is possible of course, that not all them were available in the primitive soup, and that some were synthesized by cells once they evolved. This would require the appearance of biosynthetic pathways, and the more complex they are, the more clear it becomes that they could have not appeared until the genome was sufficiently complex to encode for the proper catalysts." - Miller

Re:Before the Creationists jump into the fray....

[Anonymous Coward]

Minute skin particles from the elephants and the turtle.

Truth

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I would trust a link to a respected scientist's site, a citeseer reference, hell, even a New Scientist story or BBC report.

Even a geocities page would give me more confidence than a /. comment.

Re:Truth

[DavidPesta]

I guess what I interpreted to mean, "You didn't back up your claim" was different than what you thought that meant. He did back up his claim, he just didn't provide any references to it. Hope that clears it up. ;)

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[Anonymous Coward]

that's why i keepy buying lottery. and they told me lottery is tax on people who don't understand math. ha.

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[sstory]

If you're going to scream-capitalize words, at least spell them correctly, creationist.

Re:I tried this experiment in high school...sort o

[Anonymous Coward]

"Semen + sea-people = seaciety"

You can't prove a negative?

[raygundan]

Actually, I seem to recall that the way that hypotheses operate is by being proven wrong. Empirical evidence can stack up for years in favor of a hypothesis, but a single test that shows it doesn't work under one of the given conditions disproves it.

I will refer you to this site, which has a handy breakdown of the scientific method for you. Note in particular the bit that says "Experiments are useful in disproving hypotheses. Hypotheses cannot be proved."

The God argument is a problem for scientists *precisely* because it's not disprovable. (Note that that does not mean it's true by default, it means that there is no way to test whether or not it is true.)

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[Christianfreak]

Why argue about this? The Bible is not a science book the creation story was written the way it was because ancient people who read it nor those that wrote it understood amino-acids.

I'm a Christian, I've moved on from this argument because it doesn't matter how we got here, what matters is that God did it and why and how we are supposed to live now. Doing otherwise puts God in a box and limits him by religion (and that IMHO is wrong).

Re:Primer Poste !!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

shouldn't that be Primordial Poste?

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, there are also many self-righteous Evolutionists here. And self-righteous religious people, self-righteous non-religious people, Linux bigots, Windows bigots, Mac bigots, bad spelurs, grammar nazis... you get the idea. And the moderators are all on crack. We're all doomed.

Re:I tried this experiment in high school...sort o

[fzammett]

Sort of off-topic, but then again, sort of on...

I remember a philosophy class I took my first year of college... The final exam was the professor putting a chair in the middle of the room and then telling us "write in no less than 1,500 words why the chair exists".

Well, I sat there for about an hour not being able to come up with anything reasonable to put down. So, finally I gave up...

I wrote on the paper: "What chair?!?" and handed that in.

I got an A+.

You'd need a sulfur source.

[Sans_A_Cause]

To get Methionine and Cysteine, you would have to have a sulfur source, which Miller didn't have in the original experiments.

Early life

[mlush]

What did early life think when it crawled out of the primordial soup?

Who pushed me in?????????

Re:I tried this experiment in high school...sort o

[TeknoDragon]

Miller had faked his results (ha!), etc.

Grew up in the south? :D

With the public school system as it is in many places I'm not suprised that such an answer would get you high marks.

We were always told that abiogenesis was impossible and that the Miller experiment failed to show that it was possible to create life from a basic "primordial soup".

The first time I heard about this experiment

[fzammett]

I remember it very clearly... It was 10th grade biology. My teacher mentioned the experiment and I remember very vividly that I was so taken aback by what he was saying. It seemed so immensely important and profound, and yet no one else in the class seemed terribly interested. I was simultaneously excited and sadened.

Excited because I'd learned of something so seemingly important, and sadened because no one else seemed to see the importance of it.

That was also the year I saw the first images of atoms, that one where they had written the letters IBM with Xenon atoms. That was another tremendously shocking experience.

Is it just me or does the vast majority of the general population no longer see the importance of pure science? Are we so accustomed to amazing developments and incredible pieces of technology surrounding us all the time that things like these just don't impress us any more?

Seeing atoms SHOULD amazes us. Learning of the building blocks of life being created from scratch in a jar SHOULD boggle our minds. Yet so many people shrug things like this off and don't see the fundamental nature of them.

Ok, now I'm just sadened!

Re:The first time I heard about this experiment

[xutopia]

I sometimes feel the same way.

IANAL

[Anonymous Coward]

You couldn't patent the chemical combination... only the process of making them. But sometimes the presence of chemicals is proof you used such a process. The result is the same.

Re:IANAL

[Sgt York]

Damn...let's hope no one patents the process...maybe we can find some prior art?

Re:IANAL

[Anonymous Coward]

> maybe we can find some prior art?

And nobody realizes what a hillarious joke this is. Shame on you all.

Why are we limiting ourselves...

[Iscariot_]

... to thinking that all life forms must be similar to what we see on our planet.

It all reminds me of a story by Terry Bisson that was part of a series called "Alien/Nation".

Basically, it's a conversation between life-forms that in no way resemble anything we've seen on earth.

Here's the story.

Miller is defunct

[searleb]

For more information on Miller and prebiotic Earth, here is a quotation from an Angew. Chem. review article by Kay Severin called Hot Stones or Cold Soup? New Investigations on the Endogenous Origin of Organic Compounds on Earth (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed 2000, 39, No. 20). It pretty much sums up the Miller reactions, why they're wrong, and what people think now:

"The most famous experiment ... was carried out almost fifty years ago by Stanley L. Miller, at that time a PhD student in the group of Harold Urey in Chicago. Miller was able to show that electric discharges in an atmosphere of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water led to the formation of significant amounts of various amino acids. Experiments of this kind were repeated in numerous variants. If reducing gases were employed mixtures of organic compounds of low molecular weight could be detected in many cases. This has led to the popular idea that the primordial ocean resembled a nutritious soup.

"But the possibility that earth once had a reducing atmosphere is questioned. A well known argument against it is the high photolability of methane and ammonia. Because a shielding layer of ozone was missing a high concentration of these gases is believed to be unlikely. Furthermore, several other results point to a neutral atmosphere of CO2 and N2. Given the fact that the atmosphere was based on an unproductive mixture of CO2 and N2 the nutritional value of the primordial ocean drops significantly.

"An alternative scenario has been propagated for several years by [Gunter] Wachterhauser. Instead of a primordial soup he favors hot minerals as the place where organic molecules were initially built as life subsequently emerged. Especially sulfur-containing minerals like pyrite are proposed to have acted as an energy source and catalyst both under the extreme conditions found in hydrothermal or volcanic vents."

Basically, primordial soup syntheses (like Miller's reactions) are out and hot rock syntheses are in. These hot rock procedures have much much much lower yields, but people are slowly figuring out how to build amino acids through them. For instance, people, headed by Wachterhauser, have figured out how to carbon fixate (condense) carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide into organic building blocks for amino acids. For instance, in early 2000, Chen and Bahnemann were able to convert CO2 and water to small organics (acetaldehyde, ethanol, acetic acid) at high pressures and temperatures. Similarly, people have figured out how to take amino acids and convert them into peptides under high temperature and pressure situations.

However, to date no one has been able to actually make an amino acid through these techniques. As a result, the proof that amino acids were delivered by comets or meteorites (true fact, this is not an x-file) and now space dust, becomes much more appealing. Once the building blocks arrived on Earth, these hot rock syntheses could have taken over.

Creationism

[FuzzyDaddy]

I never understood the American Christian obsession with creationism and biblical literalism.

The creation story in the bible takes up the first couple of chapters of the first book. (Biblical chapters are very short!). The rest of the bible is legal code, moral code, and history. Clearly, the main thrust of the bible is not to explain our physical world, but our moral world.

Re:Creationism

[djeaux]

Blame it on the Keswick Conventions & writers like A.B. Simpson (1843-1919) who opined:

It is very sad and humbling to see the tendency of . . . those who, if they do not reject the Bible altogether, will compromise its supremacy and question its infallible authority. The Bible is either everything or nothing. Like a chain which depends upon its weakest link, if God's Word is not absolutely and completely true, it is too weak a cable to fix our anchorage and guarantee our eternal peace.

In short, the fundamentalist Christian position is that if one single bit of the Bible is demonstrated not to be totally & literally true, then the entire document is entirely & irrevocably false.

How this took off in the agrarian backwoods of 19th Century America, fed by illiteracy, xenophobia & irrelevant authority, is a whole 'nother story.

But in the 21st Century, I attribute a lot of it to intellectual flabbiness & an overwhelming tendency for people to let others do their thinking for them.

Re:Creationism

[Anonymous Coward]

> The creation story in the bible takes up the first couple of chapters of the first book. (Biblical chapters are very short!).

Not all of them. Some are very short; some are very long; most are somewhere between those two extremes :-)

> The rest of the bible is legal code, moral code, and history. Clearly, the main thrust of the bible is not to explain our physical world, but our moral world.

But looking at the Bible as a single Volume, there's an overarching theme. Before Adam & Eve's sin, there was no death or disease.

The Creator told them that they could eat any vegetation except the fruit of one tree (which is unspecified but was probably not an apple), and that if they were to eat that fruit, then "dying they would die". Apparently Eve misunderstood that they weren't even to touch the fruit, and the Deceiver conned her into eating it, probably after demonstrating that nothing bad happened when she touched it, so the Creator "must have been wrong/lying".

At any rate, when Adam & Eve ate the fruit, the result, either triggered by some built-in mechanism in the physical world, or by God's resulting curse, or by a combination, is that death and disease and blood-sucking habits of formerly non-irritating mosquitos and formerly beneficial bacteria degenerating into killer bugs became "natural".

In other words, what we refer to as "Nature" today is unnatural. The "natural" state of the world is paradise.

God formed himself a body, inhabited it, allowed himself to be executed, and in some mysterious way that I don't comprehend, somehow "reformatted" the Cosmos in preparation for a return to the original paradise (although for some reason, again that I don't comprehend, He's postponed the consummation of that "reformatting").

Without the Genesis story of Paradise, followed by Fall, there is no reason for God's self-sacrifice, and the promise of a future Restoration makes absolutely no sense. If death has always been around, before Adam's sin, then death is not the result of sin. And if death is not the result of sin, then the eradication of sin won't result in the eradication of death.

Without Genesis, Jesus' death & resurrection are meaningless.

To claim that "the main thrust of the bible is not to explain our physical world, but our moral world" is to misunderstand the Bible, which relates the physical world directly to the moral world.

thats a false-positive result.

[Anonymous Coward]

Its called "ninhydrin", and it gives a blue color with all primary amines. Therefore, your test is more likely a false positive for a primary amine and not an amino acid.

A much reliable test would be to actually characterise the products by running a collumn on it.

That obnoxious sound you hear...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the sound of three thousand axes being ground in an enclosed area.

Agreed

[Johnny Mozzarella]

It is a far leap from amino acids to life. I am still baffled by those who think that life just happens. The Earth's atmosphere today is much more hospitable to life but we still do not see amino acids coming together and organizing into complex proteins or anything resembling life. This can't even be done in the laboratory.

It is contrary to the 2nd law of thrmodynamics.

I don't believe in spontaneous generation. The odds of it happening are beyond astronomical.

Re: Agreed

[Black Parrot]

> It is a far leap from amino acids to life. I am still baffled by those who think that life just happens.

Most of us actually think that it happens as a result of the laws of the universe that give us interesting stuff like gravity and chemistry, which draw atoms together in large masses and do interesting things with them.

> The Earth's atmosphere today is much more hospitable to life but we still do not see amino acids coming together and organizing into complex proteins or anything resembling life.

Our present atmosphere would immediately oxidize any primitive precursor to life. (And if the atmosphere happened to miss it, existing life would eat it.)

> This can't even be done in the laboratory.

Neither can volcanos, cold fronts, and continental drift, but they still happen anyway.

> It is contrary to the 2nd law of thrmodynamics.

You have no clue what the 2LoT says.

> I don't believe in spontaneous generation.

Neither do scientist. Though I suspect you actually meant to say "abiogenesis", which is something else altogether, and which both scientists and creationists believe in (their only dispute being over the mechanism).

> The odds of it happening are beyond astronomical.

And we've got a beyond-astronomical universe full of places to roll the dice.

Re:Agreed

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a far leap from amino acids to life. I am still baffled by those who think that life just happens.

Read Kauffman's At Home in the Universe for discussions of self-organization and abiogenesis.

The Earth's atmosphere today is much more hospitable to life

To the precursors of life? Not necessarily.

but we still do not see amino acids coming together and organizing into complex proteins or anything resembling life.

Who said that amino acids ever organized into complex proteins on their own? Perhaps they were externally organized into complex proteins via a self-replicator, like RNA. (Check out RNA world scenarios.)

This can't even be done in the laboratory.

So what? Are you under the impression that everything that can be done in nature, can be done in the lab? Maybe -- if you had an a lab the size of the Earth and wanted to wait a billion years.

It is contrary to the 2nd law of thrmodynamics.

Where did you read that, a Chick tract?

The 2nd law doesn't state "order can't come from disorder" or whatever nonsense you think it says.

I don't believe in spontaneous generation. The odds of it happening are beyond astronomical.

Really? How did you calculate the odds?

Kauffman thinks the odds of abiogenesis happening are about 100%, and he has calculations to support it. (Admittedly, they are extremely idealized, but let's see if you can produce anything.)

Re:Agreed

[RatBastard]

It is a far leap from amino acids to life.
This is true. and no one is saying that amino acids jumped up and formed life the second there were enough to matter. Life took time to form, a LOT of time.

I am still baffled by those who think that life just happens.
Life doesn't "just happen". It takes the right ingredients, energy and time. Possibly millions of years of time.

The Earth's atmosphere today is much more hospitable to life
No, it's not. Oxygen is a poison. Life has adapted to the presense of oxygen in the atmosphere. Oxygen activley destroys the basic building blocks of life when not protected.

but we still do not see amino acids coming together and organizing into complex proteins or anything resembling life.
And we never will on Earth. The atmosphere is all wrong for it. And we will have to wait a long time to see it. It's not like waiting for your cheese to get moldy.

This can't even be done in the laboratory.
For the reasons listed above. And creating life is a hell of a lot more complex than just creating amino acids. In the steps to creating life, this is on the same level as buying one adjustable wrench in the construction of the Empire State Building.

It is contrary to the 2nd law of thrmodynamics.
Really? How? Life is not a closed system. It requires energy from an outside source. The Sun provides the power that lets life go on.

I don't believe in spontaneous generation. The odds of it happening are beyond astronomical.
All you need is a positive non-zero probablity for something to eventually happen. We have no idea how amny times life almost formed and then died before it finally succeeded. Even with one chance in one-hundred million, if you have millions, and maybe billions of years for something to happen, it just might. And it only has to succede once.

Re: Agreed

[Anonymous Coward]

> Neither can volcanos, cold fronts, and continental drift, but they still happen anyway.

Errr, you can simulate all of those. Go to a steel mill and what steel being made. There's a thin layer of crust on most cooling steel that breaks apart and comes together. Look at the convection of any really thick liquid. You'll notice that some parts push fresh liquid to the surface (i.e. volcanoes) and some parts push it down (fault lines). You can also similar cold fronts using these liquids.

And if our present atmosphere can oxidize life instantly, why didn't it before? If there was no water before, no oxygen, and no ozone to protect simple protiens from being destroyed, how could life possibly form?

I'm not saying that it's impossible (as an agnostic, I know I don't think it's possible to know), but I am saying is that Miller's Experiment says nothing about how life formed on earth.

Re:Agreed

[gacp]

It is a far leap from amino acids to life.

Damm right. Quite a different ballpark. Miller's work---not to critizize it, just to clarify---is not biology at all. He proved nothing about life, only about planetary chemistry.

Life took time to form, a LOT of time.

This is mere cheap speculation to a myth. There is absolutely no indication of this, none. For all we know, life arose in 5 min. Indeed, the little evidence that there is point to a rapid emergence of life. I believe that life just `snapped' together as pretty much as soon as the conditions were right. Indeed, I believe that probably life originated many times over on Terra, but that previous lifes were obliterated because conditions were too violent still.

This can't even be done in the laboratory.

Weapons-grade speculation. AFIK and as I understand life (molecular autopoiesis), no one ever really tried. Miller's cooking in a flask is just biochemistry, that's not good enough [terrifid biochem but biochem and not more]. You need to provide conditions for molecular autopoiesis to emerge, and Miller never tried. I believe it could be done [but I hope no one is fool enough to try!]

I don't believe in spontaneous generation. The odds of it happening are beyond astronomical.

Now we have weapons-grade bullshit. Life, as other kinds of self-organizational processes, is not unlikely at all. At least there is nil proof for that, and a bloody lot of circumstancial evidence pointing to the contrary.

but we still do not see amino acids coming together and organizing into complex proteins or anything resembling life.

But we do see things very similar to that. E.g. viruses [which are NOT alive] pull that kind of trick every nanosecond.

The Sun provides the power that lets life go on.

Only partially true. Many Terran living systems are powered by geothermal processes and not the Sun, as probably were the original ones.

Finally, please, if you are going to debate with Creationists, do it with facts, not with myth.

Re:I tried this experiment in high school...sort o

[Anonymous Coward]

Give that instructor praise, apples, and as much cash as you can muster up. It is so
refreshing to see an instructor who encourages critical thinking in their student, its not
enough to know that we know something you must also know how we know it, it is the
lack of the latter in our schools that has created a nation in which many people think the
sun revolves around the earth.

-troy

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[Anonymous Coward]

This is slashdot. Don't expect rational discussion or intelligent commentary. You'd be amazed at how many self-righteous Creationists there are around.

Not to mention devout evolutionists.

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[Black Parrot]

> You're whining that the odds are too big, but it's guys like Stanley Miller that are trying to figure out exactly how big those odds are.

One of creationists' biggest misunderstanding about science is the idea that scientists believe that stuff like abiogenesis "just happens" at some zillion-to-one odds. In reality, scientists are just like creationists in that when they see something that they intuitively recognize as improbable in a completely random universe, they want to know how the odds were beat. But creationists and scientists immediately part ways at that point, with the creationists immediately jumping to the "goddidit" conclusion, and the scientists examining the phenomenon (like Miller did) to discover how things actually work.

Devout evolutionists?

[turgid]

Creationists believe what they believe because they want to, on faith for religious reasons. They are devout.
Evolutionists believe in evolution because that is what the observed evidence demonstrates. It is a matter of fact, not faith. They are not devout.

Get your facts straight.

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[Black Parrot]

> I give the SETI people credit for the attempt; but, I don't believe that their project, because of it's limited scope, will bear fruit. They are only looking within the near 50-150 light years or so. Beyond that, the signals are too weak and the time-lag would make communication impossible beyond "Hey, we're over here."

It may also be the case that species that are foolish enough to broadcast their existence to the void have a shorter life expectancy than those that don't, as a direct result of those broadcasts.

Given how well we humans get along here at home, how well should we expect unrelated intelligent species to treat each other?

Re:I tried this experiment in high school...sort o

[680x0]

I also tried the experiment (and, alas, got no indications of amino acids produced). The best part, though, was explaining what was going on to my teacher:

Teacher: So, you're going to pass a spark through a mixture including hydrogen and methane?

Me: Well, yes, but there's no oxygen, so it can't burn or explode.

Teacher: I think I'll watch you turn it on from behind this desk.

:-)

VOUS L'ECHOUEZ!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ce n'est pas la premiere commentaire! Je fais de la flatuence dans votre direction generale! Votre mere etait une hamster, et votre père aiment puanteurs comme des baies de sureau !

VOUS L'ECHOUEZ!

Re:VOUS L'ECHOUEZ!

[ajs318]

Putain de merde, ou je me trouve? C'est bon. Mais pourquoi tu dis "faire de la flatulence" comme cela? Je suggeste dire "laisser souffler un petit vent" ou meme "faire chanter le trou de cul"? Non, c'est plus grossier. Eh bien .....

Re:VOUS L'ECHOUEZ!

[Anonymous Coward]

redundant. You guys suck. Why can't you have a discussion without some French in it? Do you enjoy them so much?

Imagine

[WetCat]

A Beowulf cluster of those...

Probably will be just a beowulf.

OK, how about this? make POLIO from raw materials

[deathcow]

This article amazes me. These people literally assembled a lifeform (or does a virus not count??) from the raw materials.

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[Anonymous Coward]

(-1, Troll) indeed. See you in meta-mod!

Dumb question

[Anonymous Coward]

I know nothing about this, but what reason do sicentists have to beleive that these amino acids or their compounds exist elsewhere in the universe? I'm always surprised by experiments which purport to prove omnipresence of life based on what we find on earth, which we suspect to have life. Even if we could extrapolate that minerals required to form amino acids exist elsewhere, what about other factors, such as the axial tilt, elliptical orbit, ozone, oxygen, abundant water, meteor belt, etc which combine to form life here? I'm not doubting, I'm just curious.

Re:OK, how about this? make POLIO from raw materia

[Idarubicin]

These people literally assembled a lifeform (or does a virus not count??)

Nope, a virus does not count. A virus can't replicate itself without commandeering the cellular machinery of a real lifeform (a bacterium, for example. Or a human being. Or something in between.)

A virus is just a strand or few of DNA or RNA in a simple protein wrapper. The fact that the group in the article could assemble one is still a monumental accomplishment, but we're a long way from being able to put together a living creature from scratch. (Cells are really complicated things, with a lot of tiny parts.)

Re:OK, how about this? make POLIO from raw materia

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, depends on how much you want to consider that to be 'raw' materials. They pre-assembled a DNA strand.

Re:I tried this experiment in high school...sort o

[dogfart]

I had to use a chemical...damn, don't remember what it was, but it turned purple in the presence of amino acids and is used to detect fingerprints on paper.

Ninhydrin. Cool stuff. Completely colorless but turns bright purple in the presence of amino acids. A great prank was leaving trace amounts on someone's pen or something...

No surprise you got a high mark. Experiments that fail are very important in science, and understanding why they may have failed helps inform further research. The important thing about science is explaining why, not "winning the lottery"

Not Defunct

[RatBastard]

He's not defunct. His point was that the building blocks of life - complex organic molecules - can be formed from inorganic molecules. And he was right, and still is right.

The actual mechanism might not be what we thought it was then, but that is irrelevant.

Does the fact that gravity may function by means of gravatons invalidate the work of Isaac Newton?

Re:Not Defunct

[searleb]

AB: What is your current opinion on the need for a primitive reducing atmosphere for pre-biotic life to take hold 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago?

SM: I have not found an alternative to disprove the need for a primitive reducing atmosphere.

This statement, taken directly from the topic article, shows exactly how defunct Stanley Miller is. There was no reducing atmosphere. 70 years ago Oparin and Urey thought there was. The review article I quoted illuminates the doubt that is currently being shed on the reducing atmosphere theory. A reducing atmosphere contains high energy molecules (NH3 and CH4) that condence with relative ease into stable organic molecules because the start with so much extra energy. An oxidizing atmosphere contains low energy molecules (N2 and CO2) that do nothing chemically!

The work quoted in topic article was completed 50 years ago and was based on the assumption of a primitive reducing atmosphere. Since then Miller has sticked to his guns- all of the work he's done since has similarly been under the assumption of a reducing or nutral atmosphere. In reality, we currently believe that primitive earth actually had an oxidizing atmosphere which is wholely unreactive. Wachterhauser's and Sagan's work is much more up to date with current beliefs. All Miller really means to us now is a spark to get people thinking about prebiotic chemistry (50 years ago)- his individual ideas are dinosaurs.

Check his web page

[yet another coward]

He has a page at UCSD. He has managed to synthesize other important biological bricks such as purines, pyrimidines and sugars. He parlayed his initial success into a career of exploring mechanisms for life origins.

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[JimFromJersey]

> So, the chances are actually incalculable.

This is one of the problems I have with creationists. You assume that, without a diety to guide creation, everything is random, so that the odds become incalculable. The problem is that it isn't random. Only certain chemicals will react with each other, once that reaction occurs subsequent reactions become even more limited. It is entirely possible that within the first pico-seconds, the rules of physics (or maybe the math that defines the rules), made intelligent life inevitable.

> Amino acids, planet size, PRECISE planetary evolution, distance from a sun, atmosphere, OTHER life, moons and magnetic/gravtational forces all contribute to life existing
Only life as you define it, even then, our planetary evolution has not been precise. What does having a moon have to do with anything?

> Not a single scientists has been able to prove 100% that life exists elsewhere, only propoganda and conjecture.
The same can be said for all religons.

Re:OK, how about this? make POLIO from raw materia

[DavidPesta]

Well, this is closer to biological engineering from a creative human force. And it wasn't done from raw materials. Here is what the article says,

"Using genetic code as the recipe and carbon-containing chemicals as ingredients, researchers have made infective poliovirus entirely from scratch. This is the first time that a working biological entity has been made using chemistry alone...They put this synthetic virus genome into "cell juice" - a mixture of protein-building molecules and catalysts - and watched the virus assemble itself."

All the mechanisms for virus production were in the test tube. It is funny that the article says that they made the virus " entirely from scratch". It certainly is great research though.

Twit.

[Grendel Drago]

You know, there may still be someone on the planet who hasn't heard this one, but I wouldn't bet on him reading slashdot.

Don't pretend that a well-known anecdote is your own creation. That's just... crass.

--grendel drago

Re:I tried this experiment in high school...sort o

[Vagary]

Bullshit.

It's all about working backwards...

[taradfong]

...from what you believe. If one wants to believe that chance and pure science resulted in what we are today, one can find a way to do so, by believing that the universe's matter spontaneously appeared as proposed by Hawking, and that somehow our earth was precisely as close to the sun as it has to be (slightly either way and we wouldn't be here), and that lightning struck the right soup (despite that these experiments no longer stand up to scrutiny), somehow bringing order from disorder (flying in the face of everything else in our entropically increasing universe) in the perfect, chemically left-handed way, and that given enough time (and people have shown that indeed, we have not had enough time!) mutations combined with competition led to not only improvements but revolutions in life forms leading up to a singular, particularly unique human being. On the other hand, if you believe in a loving universal creator, you will see the hand of a brilliant designer at work in our world. It will make sense to you how animals somehow know what food not to eat, why 'Occam's Razor' doesn't apply leading us to an entirely plant and insect based world, and you won't be suprised that constellations have ancient names whose origin is unknown yet points to Biblical prophecy. As you can probably guess, I fall in this latter category. It's not because the church told me so, and it's certainly not because I don't like science, it's because God told me so. I have also learned that evidence nor arguments will not sway people from one way to the other. As an engineer, this is sad, since I naturally gravitate towards this approach. Though yes, I enjoy reading about how more and more even secular scientists are 'out of ideas' on explaining away God, and reading honest looks by Christians and the same (e.g. The Case for Faith), I don't expect many people to change their beliefs because of it. People will not (and cannot, really) release their core denial of a creator, that is, unless the creator helps them and they let the help in. I know how difficult this is to accept for most people, but all I can say is to give it a shot, stripping away everything non-God apart from it (which leaves you really with the (gasp) Bible...). And then, you may finally see how silly it is to think that electrified chemicals and enough time led to the creation of the singular ball of pure creational brilliance in our universe.

Re:It's all about working backwards...

[Anonymous Coward]

If one wants to believe that chance and pure science resulted in what we are today, one can find a way to do so, by believing that the universe's matter spontaneously appeared as proposed by Hawking, and that somehow our earth was precisely as close to the sun as it has to be (slightly either way and we wouldn't be here), and that lightning struck the right soup (despite that these experiments no longer stand up to scrutiny), somehow bringing order from disorder (flying in the face of everything else in our entropically increasing universe) in the perfect, chemically left-handed way, and that given enough time (and people have shown that indeed, we have not had enough time!) mutations combined with competition led to not only improvements but revolutions in life forms leading up to a singular, particularly unique human being.

Ironically, your reasoning is backwards. You mix in all these "somehows" to make it look as if naturalism is ludicrous. However, that's only true if you assume that a unique human being was the intended outcome of all of this. If you don't, then it doesn't matter whether the steps that led to us were likely or unlikely. If we weren't designed, we were an accident.

By the way, most of your statements are wrong. Nothing flies in the face of the second law of thermodynamics, nobody has proven that there hasnt't been enough time for evolution to occur, nobody thinks that lightning is the only way abiogenesis could have occurred, there is nothing remotely unusual about left-handed amino acids becoming dominant, etc.

On the other hand, if you believe in a loving universal creator, you will see the hand of a brilliant designer at work in our world.

If you postulate an omnipotent designer, then everything "makes sense", because no matter what the universe is like, you can "explain" it by saying "the creator decided to make it that way". That's why the design hypothesis is so useless: in "explaining" anything, it actually explains nothing. It makes no predictions and cannot be falsified.

I have also learned that evidence nor arguments will not sway people from one way to the other. As an engineer, this is sad, since I naturally gravitate towards this approach.

Snicker. I've found that creationists are almost always engineers. Smart enough to want to try to reason about the world, but not smart enough to do so succesfully -- otherwise, they'd be scientists, not engineers.

Case in point: you're not smart enough to understand the laws of thermodynamics. The increase of entropy does not forbid the spontaneous arisal of order. Order arises all the time due to natural processes. All thermodynamics says is that the net entropy of the universe always increases. It doesn't say that entropy everywhere always increases; local decreases can occur at the expense of increases elsewhere -- in fact, that generally happens whenever you have a transfer of energy. Look at crystallisation, refrigerators, endothermical chemical reactions.

Classical engineer fallacy: you know enough to consider yourself wise, but not enough to realize that you aren't.

Re:It's all about working backwards...

[cens0r]

somehow bringing order from disorder (flying in the face of everything else in our entropically increasing universe)

Second law of theromodynamics:

• All physical processes create entropy (microscopic disorder).
• The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease, ie- entropy can be created but not destroyed.

This means the entropy of a living organism can decrease, because a living organism is not a closed system. Since it is an open system, entropy can leave and enter. Entropy doesn't have to be destroyed- just moved. Food, water, and energy enter and leave your body all the time, thus making it an open system.

Also keep in mind that complexity is not the destruction of disorder or the creation of order. In fact, there is more disorder in complex systems. There is far more entropy in a nuclear power plant than there is in an ice cube, and a pretty snowflake has much more complexity than the drop of water from whence it came.

know how difficult this is to accept for most people, but all I can say is to give it a shot, stripping away everything non-God apart from it (which leaves you really with the (gasp) Bible...). And then, you may finally see how silly it is to think that electrified chemicals and enough time led to the creation of the singular ball of pure creational brilliance in our universe.

The act of true "intelligent design" is minimalist. In real-life engineering (which being an engineer I'm sure you're aware of), the best designs incorporate the least complexity required to accomplish a given task. The biosystem, on the other hand, is not minimalist. It is ridiculously complex with enormous, unnecessary duplication. Did you know that the human eye is wired backwards, thus reducing visual acuity and creating a blind spot? Squid and octopus eyeballs are wired properly, but they're on a different branch of the evolutionary tree. Why didn't we inherit their design instead of ours? Why would we and all other vertebrates be stuck with a bad eyeball design? Could it be that we're stuck with "legacy hardware" because we evolved along a different branch? Or is it just coincidence that God made the same mistake thousands of times in all the species which happen to belong to one particular family of animals, while he didn't make that mistake once in any of the species belonging to a different family of animals? I don't see an brilliance in the design of our universe.

If there was a creator the only thing he/she/it ever did was define the laws of physics and then press play. The brilliance being that the one unified law would allow all of the universe and life to come about, and being omnipitent the creator would know this in the beginning.

Re:It's all about working backwards...

[Anonymous Coward]

Snicker. I've found that creationists are almost always engineers. Smart enough to want to try to reason about the world, but not smart enough to do so succesfully -- otherwise, they'd be scientists, not engineers.

Creationists, or terrorists. I first noticed this with the guy who shot Rabin - and started paying attention to terrorist backgrounds. It's scary.

Bin Laden? Former engineer.
Mohammed Atta? 8 years of engineering.

But I think you're wrong when you say they're not "smart enough". It's more that they are
a) not trained to reason about the world and
b) stuck in the 1950's vision of the engineers as the architects of the modern world.

One could speculate on links to Asperger Syndrome, but I won't sully the honourable name I'm posting under further.

Re:It's all about working backwards...

[Madcapjack]

and that somehow our earth was precisely as close to the sun as it has to be (slightly either way and we wouldn't be here), and that lightning struck the right soup

ok first of all, by your arguement by probability, someone who won the lottery shouldn't believe it because its so improbable. Second of all, if we give a low probability to all the conditions necessary for life to occur, why shouldn't life occur it the conditions necessary for it do occur? if there was only one planet in the galaxy which by chance had the right conditions for life, and a living being said, "it is too improbable that life could have been an accident" and if it in fact was an accident, the speaker is obviously wrong even though a probability arguement is often a reasonable argument to make. However probability arguments usually do not say things do not occur, but that they are unlikely to occur. but when you see that something unlikely has occured, do you say it didn't happen? nope.

somehow bringing order from disorder (flying in the face of everything else in our entropically increasing universe) i think that you need to review thermodynamic theory. The theory states that the total energy and order of the system will move to disorder, but not that local events cannot move in the opposite direction. For that matter, review basic chemistry. Local imputs of energy (the sun) can create local spots that reverse this process of entropy. when the sun dies, this solar system won't have so many of those spots left, but until then...

Re:It's all about working backwards...

[xutopia]

what if that God that told you so is part of your imagination. After all it only appears as a voice or a feeling in your head so it's not too far fetched. It didn't appear in front of you or sit down next to you in the bus did it?

If you want to believe in something your imagination can create and ask your imagination for answers surely your imagination will answer things for you. But you are not living in truth.

Re:It's all about working backwards...

[taradfong]

== what if that God that told you so is part of your imagination.

== If you want to believe in something your imagination can create and ask your imagination for answers surely your imagination will answer things for you. But you are not living in truth.

I don't want you to think that I get private, literal messages in my head from God. My messages from God come from the Bible, and they're confirmed with how following it changes my life and the lives of others. I have never seen anything else *permanently* fix people of their problems and vices. That to me is proof enough.

But there is more proof; consider that the Bible's cohesive message (the pathetic fall of man, the love of God, and redemption of mankind through Jesus == God Himself) was written over thousands of years, by dozens of different authors living around the globe (Egypt, Rome, Greece, Iraq, Iran, etc), of different cultures, and that most of the authors *humiliate*, not glorify themselves (e.g. Peter's 3 denials). Who else other than God could have guided all these authors to talk about the same principles, with the same underlying messages and prophecies fulfilled by Christ?

And at least in the New Testament, most of the authors were executed for their beliefs - and yet psychologists say it is impossible for someone to willingly die for a fraud.

I'll close with one last thought. To find the way to the next 'world' you will need someone from there to help you. You cannot escape eventual death on this world, nor find a way off of it using only the things that come from this world. The good news is that Someone wants nothing more than to help you.

Re:It's all about working backwards...

[taradfong]

ok first of all, by your arguement by probability, someone who won the lottery shouldn't believe it because its so improbable. Second of all, if we give a low probability to all the conditions necessary for life to occur, why shouldn't life occur it the conditions necessary for it do occur?

I am with you. It is indeed impossible to compare how lucky I am with some hapless being on a planet that wasn't perfect like ours because he does not exist. But this goes back to my original point. If one adopts the belief mechanism that since the universe is huge, and since anything can happen given enough time, well then I can draw a line from oblivion to myself and feel confident about it.

On the other hand, if you take the belief mechanism that our wonderful world was designed, I too can work backwards and draw my line from oblivion.

And just as you choose a car, and buy accessories for it, you can get accessories for the belief system - there are any number of books or people that would talk all day about either one.

i think that you need to review thermodynamic theory. The theory states that the total energy and order of the system will move to disorder, but not that local events cannot move in the opposite direction

You are absolutely correct. An AC makes my room colder, but not only does the heat from the room go outside, but so does extra heat created in the process of pumping the heat out. If I pour a bag of red and blue marbles into one bowl, I can sort them, but at the expense of the disorder created in breaking down energy to do so. Still, everything in the universe besides earth is entirely passive. Suns burn until they run out of energy, rocks float around and break things.

Don't get me wrong, I love astronomy...but to think that somehow, having certain chemicals combined with genetic mutations could bring order from disorder - and eventually the supreme masterpiece of the earth, where a fly's design is a miracle of nature? I just can't make myself believe this any more than I could believe that shaking a bag full of watch parts for a million years could ever result in a whole watch. Even with lightning!

Re:It's all about working backwards...

[taradfong]

I enjoyed your thermo thoughts and am with you; my point is, the rest of the universe is passive. Things float around and hit each other. Suns burn until their energy runs out. Compared to earth - heck compared to a housefly - the universe make me yawn.

The rest of your argument strikes me the same as if you criticized an Indy 500 car for having no radio [or having a blindspot ;^) ], or wished airplanes had no redundant systems, or disdained a plastic pen because it wasn't made from optimally strong carbon fiber. Minimalism means boiling a problem to its essentials and devising the simplest solution. Well, creating self-metabolizing self-replicating living creatures with sensory perception is going to require some complexity, including redundancy and design tradeoffs.

The human body is an amazing, wonderful thing. We are getting no closer to creating thinking computers. Find me a robot with the mobility, strength and weight that even comes close. All this, and we can render energy from an immense variety of foods and reproduce. How many machines run for 100 years, much less those that see the abuse and variance in environment and use model as we do?

How much more wonder does one need to see to believe we are designed? Is God in your blindspot?

Re:It's all about working backwards...

[cens0r]

I just don't see the human body as being well designed. Me being an engineer can see many flaws in it. The same kind of flaws that occur when constantly adapting a device to do new tasks. For instance look at the Pentium IV chip. If some one had no knowledge of any of the previous x86 chips, one would say that it it a horrible design. But if you know the history, you'll undertand why it is designed the way it is and how it evolved into that.

I bet many machines could easily run for a hundred years if we let them... the problem is why let them when they're obsolete in 10 years.

I have no problem accepting that there could be a creator. I don't believe any human is capable of completly comprhending the begining of the universe unless they factor in a creator. The concepts of no time, no dimensions, etc. just don't work in our minds. What I have a problem with is the idea of the creator that religion portrays. Which leads to people using religion and faith to argue against things like physics, biology, and chemistry. Evolution happened. It might not have happened in exactly the same manner that we think it did, but it was pretty close.

It's all about working backwards...

[taradfong]

...from what you believe.
If one wants to believe that chance and pure science resulted in what we are today, one can find a way to do so, by believing that the universe's matter spontaneously appeared as proposed by Hawking, and that somehow our earth was precisely as close to the sun as it has to be (slightly either way and we wouldn't be here), and that lightning struck the right soup (despite that these experiments no longer stand up to scrutiny), somehow bringing order from disorder (flying in the face of everything else in our entropically increasing universe) in the perfect, chemically left-handed way, and that given enough time (and people have shown that indeed, we have not had enough time!) mutations combined with competition led to not only improvements but revolutions in life forms leading up to a singular, particularly unique human being.
On the other hand, if you believe in a loving universal creator, you will see the hand of a brilliant designer at work in our world. It will make sense to you how animals somehow know what food not to eat, why 'Occam's Razor' doesn't apply leading us to an entirely plant and insect based world, and you won't be suprised that constellations have ancient names whose origin is unknown yet points to Biblical prophecy. As you can probably guess, I fall in this latter category. It's not because the church told me so, and it's certainly not because I don't like science, it's because God told me so.
I have also learned that evidence nor arguments will not sway people from one way to the other. As an engineer, this is sad, since I naturally gravitate towards this approach. Though yes, I enjoy reading about how more and more even secular scientists are 'out of ideas' on explaining away God, and reading honest looks by Christians and the same (e.g. The Case for Faith), I don't expect many people to change their beliefs because of it. People will not (and cannot, really) release their core denial of a creator, that is, unless the creator helps them and they let the help in. Curious? Ask God for help, he won't turn you down.
I know how difficult this is to accept for most people, but all I can say is to give it a shot, stripping away everything non-God apart from it (which leaves you really with the <gasp> Bible...). And then, you may finally see how silly it is to think that electrified chemicals and enough time led to the creation of the singular ball of pure creational brilliance in our universe.

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[Anonymous Coward]

How am I creationist or even a Christian from my post. I said it could also be a lottery (which is "if this, then this, then maybe this)

I appreciate all the comments here that were insightful and read/responded to my post for comprehension.

I do have one question? If you disagree with me and I was on topic and you respond more than ANY OTHER post posted on Slashdot today, does that not make the post interesting.

I also wish people would stop making this forum a FAR LEFT ANTI CHRISTIAN forum. In no way affiliated myself with religion. Read it again and you will see. (I am a god fearing Christian though) People here mod religious/conservative posts like the KKK would mod Martin Luther King. (If he posted, had something insightful to say, a racist would still mod him down.) In order to debate creation and god and politics you have to know the other side, I post that other side.

You sure you are praying to the right god?

[arcite]

Hmmmm so how can you be so sure you are praying to the right god? I mean maybe the Aztec god Coatlique created the world... or was it the Egyption god of creation, Ptah, or how about Gaulish, the Celtic god of creation. Maybe they are all wrong and the earth is actually suspended on the back of a turtle.

Re:You sure you are praying to the right god?

[Carnivorous Carrot]

> Maybe they are all wrong and the earth is
> actually suspended on the back of a turtle.

I.e. It's turtles all the way down.

Or, as befitting today, maybe we're in a virtual world, and it's turtles all the way up!

Re:You sure you are praying to the right god?

[Tyreth]

This is a question between different religions, and not at all relevant to the discussion of evolution and creation.

I have reasons for praying to the God of the Bible over these other gods, but not important to mention here.

They could make millions!

[arcite]

Remember seamonkeys? With a little "tweaking" I am sure they could package this 'creation in a flask' and sell it. For the low low price of $29.95, it could bring out the Omnipotent Overlord in everyone!

Chance has limits

[taradfong]

All you need is a positive non-zero probablity for something to eventually happen. We have no idea how amny times life almost formed and then died before it finally succeeded.

Not quite. There are limits to chance. There is a number which represents the number of electrons in the universe. If something has odds of 1 in that number, it is considered impossible.

The 'monkeys on typewriters ending up with war and peace' flies in the face of reason, IMHO, and yet it is a crutch and fundamental pillar of evolutionary theory, attractive because one can always simply require the disbeliever to roll the dice a trillion more times or so.

For those who think I'm rationalizing equally with my limited 100 year lifespan perspective, consider this: they have never discovered fossilized remains of an inter-species mutation; e.g., a creature evolutionarily between A and B. With all the dice rolling and obvious failures along the way, one would expect to find a whole lot of these, no?

And, the earth has not had an infinite amount of time to roll the dice. It is of finite age. Recent work shows the earth as 5 billion years old, not counting for the time it required to cool. Fossil evidence shows life emerging 400 million years ago. This is not enough time to go from scratch to our planet's situation today. Even if you took all the carbon in the universe, put it on the earth, allowed it to react at the most rapid rate possible AND left it for a billion years, the odds of ending up with one functional protein are 1 in 10exp60.

Re:Chance has limits

[DavidPesta]

If something has odds of 1 in that number, it is considered impossible...fundamental pillar of evolutionary theory, attractive because one can always simply require the disbeliever to roll the dice a trillion more times or so.

This is an interesting point. No matter how unlikely something becomes, it always becomes possible because there could have always been more time, maybe the universe is infinitely old, maybe there are infinite universes, etc. The issue becomes philosophical, not scientific. It takes faith to consider the possibility of an infinite universe just as much as it takes faith to believe that some god did it. Neither have scientific evidence. Both are used to explain the unknown into a point of view. Both require faith, so which faith is better and why? That is what this is all about.

Re:Chance has limits

[RatBastard]

Not quite. There are limits to chance. There is a number which represents the number of electrons in the universe. If something has odds of 1 in that number, it is considered impossible.
But life is not as random as that. What we know about the formation of organic molecules seems to show that they will form almost every time they are given the chance. Given the right ingredients (some of which we know, some we don't), the right conditions (which we are learning to be varied beyond what we ever imagined), enough energy and time, and organic molecules will form. There is organic matter (not life, certainly, but still organic matter) iin the heads of comets. If organic matter can form there, it must be able to form almost anywhere that doesn't actively destroy it.

The 'monkeys on typewriters ending up with war and peace' flies in the face of reason
According to a recent article that idea doesn't work anyway. Monkies aren't random. They have goals and agendas and they would rather beat the computer to bits and urinate on the keyboard than type anything.

However, chemistry isn't random, either. It follows rules and these rules stack the dice in our favor.

For those who think I'm rationalizing equally with my limited 100 year lifespan perspective, consider this: they have never discovered fossilized remains of an inter-species mutation; e.g., a creature evolutionarily between A and B.
Really? We've never found an animal that looks like a mix of a lizard and a bird? Never found anything that looks like a mix of a man and an ape? Never found a fish with fins capapble of acting like legs?

We've found a tremendous number of creatures that look like a mix of different forms. What we haven't found is an animal that looks like an ape with a human head, or a human with an ape's head. But evolution doesn't work like that, anyway.

And furthermore we have to consider the completeness of the fossile record. How many T-Rex skeletions have we found? 30? T-Rexes lived on this earth for three to five million years and we've only found thirty or so skeletons. How many T-Rexes lived and died and didn't become fossils? Then consider the lowly trilobite. We've found tens of thousands of their fossils. But trilobites lived for over 250,000,000 years and lived in shallow seas, the perfect place for fossils to form. How many indevidual animals must live before there is a chance that one of them will die in a place that will allow their bones to be fossilized? How many of these fossils survive the churning of the earth's crust? How many of those are actually found?

The fossil record is the best catalog we have of what once wandered the earth, but it is by no means complete.

Recent work shows the earth as 5 billion years old, not counting for the time it required to cool. Fossil evidence shows life emerging 400 million years ago.
While the earth is 4.5 - 5 billion years old, life is far older than 400 million years. Estimates place life at at 3.5 billion years old. Life has had a LONG time to go from primitive forms to more complex forms.

Re:Chance has limits

[Anonymous Coward]

they have never discovered fossilized remains of an inter-species mutation; e.g., a creature evolutionarily between A and B.

Huh?? All fossils are intermediate betwen older species and newer ones.

Fossil evidence shows life emerging 400 million years ago. This is not enough time to go from scratch to our planet's situation today.

How do you know?

Even if you took all the carbon in the universe, put it on the earth, allowed it to react at the most rapid rate possible AND left it for a billion years, the odds of ending up with one functional protein are 1 in 10exp60.

(Proteins are formed from amino acids, not pure carbon.)

Please show the details of this "calculation".

You're assuming that evolution is totally random. It is not. There is natural selection and self-organization all over the place. Note also that you are assuming proteins were formed by amino acids just randomly sticking to each other, ignoring the role of RNA or other self-replication molecules to mediate the reaction. Autocatalyzing chemical networks are a powerful process -- see Kauffman's work.

Re:Chance has limits

[arevos]

Even if you took all the carbon in the universe, put it on the earth, allowed it to react at the most rapid rate possible AND left it for a billion years, the odds of ending up with one functional protein are 1 in 10exp60.

And your source for this is? This FAQ does a good job at pointing out why assertions like this aren't correct. In a nutshell, reactions don't happen randomly. When you combine certain chemicals, you get certain results. Miller's experiment shows that at least some of the chemicals needed to form life can be easily created, so might that not suggest that the formation of life (or, rather, a self-replicated molecule of some kind) is more likely than you suggest?

Personally, I suspect that the probability of life forming on a planet with conditions like that of the early Earth, given the timespan and energy about, is rather quite likely.

Furthermore, you say:

For those who think I'm rationalizing equally with my limited 100 year lifespan perspective, consider this: they have never discovered fossilized remains of an inter-species mutation; e.g., a creature evolutionarily between A and B. With all the dice rolling and obvious failures along the way, one would expect to find a whole lot of these, no?

Eh? This is rather a case of moving the goalposts to suit your arguments! For instance, people claimed after Darwin that there was no connection between chimps and humans, and then fossil remains of Homo Erectus were discovered in 1891. So what about the inbetween steps? Well, there's Homo Heidelbergensis in 1960 and Homo Habilis a few years later. You could ask for the inbetween stages between, for instance, Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus (Homo Antecessor, discovered in 1996), but surely you must realise by now that we could play this game forever. We've found species C inbetween A and B, but usually that just provides the pseudo-scientific creationists with more fuel; where's the species between A and C, or C and B?

Secondly, there is no 'inter-species' creatures. Either a creature is labelled as one species, or another. Furthermore, fossils are extremely rare, being items which usually don't form, so it's no wonder the fossil record is far from complete.

Re:Chance has limits

[junkgrep]

---The 'monkeys on typewriters ending up with war and peace' flies in the face of reason, IMHO, and yet it is a crutch and fundamental pillar of evolutionary theory, attractive because one can always simply require the disbeliever to roll the dice a trillion more times or so.---

If your only idea of how evolution or the various theories of abiogenesis work is just "rolling the dice" then you're already tripped yourself up. The whole point to both these theories is that there are some natural MECHANISMS that produce organized results. Not just chance assembleges at all: it's the particular principles of chemistry, and later, genetics, that actually induce certain things under certain conditions, leading to other inducements, often in a feedback loop.

---consider this: they have never discovered fossilized remains of an inter-species mutation; e.g., a creature evolutionarily between A and B.---

Oh for goodness sake: did you think you could dazzle the boards with such a well-refuted lie? Even the very suggestion shows that you are not hip to the way in which evolutionary theory destroyed the very idea of "kind" whereby we could say that a creature is "between" two "other" kinds. Our idea of "kind" is simply our eagerness to pretend that what we see today represents a bunch of stable and eternal Platonic forms from which any deviation from is some sort of mutant. But ALL species alive today are potentially intermediate forms to something in the future, and their ancestors WERE intermediate forms between them and something even earlier. Worse, the idea of "intermediate forms" is doubly misleading, because it implies that any given direction is "going somewhere," transitioning between one discrete thing and a new, pre-defined goal. But the theory of evolution is NOT suggesting that in the least. There is no discrete goal that something is somehow knowingly "transitioning" towards.

Even if all that were not the case, we DO have plenty of fossils which demonstrate the sorts of big-scale "transistional forms" that you're asking about (ones that just happen to strike us as grossly "in-between" two sorts of creatures we are comfortably familiar with today because they share certain large and obvious features: but in reality, are ONLY "in-between" from our present perspective, not in any real sense). Talk origins has a whole listing of them.

Re:Chance has limits

[nanoakron]

Fossil evidence shows life emerging 400 million years ago.

*BEEP* Wrong!

Try more like 2.5 to 3 *billion* years ago.

http://www.wmnh.com/wmel0000.htm

And that's just the first thing that turned up under Google.

-Nano.

Re:Chance has limits

[tgibbs]

Not quite. There are limits to chance. There is a number which represents the number of electrons in the universe. If something has odds of 1 in that number, it is considered impossible.

Wrong. That number is not the number of electrons in the entire universe (which current astrophysical data suggests may be infinite). It is the number of electrons in the part of the universe that we can see from here, sometimes referred to as the "accessible" universe. As you look off in the distance, you look backwards in time, because light has a finite speed. So there is a maximum distance that you can see, corresponding to the time since the Big Bang. That doesn't mean that there are no electrons beyond that point; only that any light that they have emitted could not have reached us.

Re:Chance has limits

[young-earth]

You stated

But life is not as random as that. What we know about the formation of organic molecules seems to show that they will form almost every time they are given the chance. Given the right ingredients (some of which we know, some we don't), the right conditions (which we are learning to be varied beyond what we ever imagined), enough energy and time, and organic molecules will form. There is organic matter (not life, certainly, but still organic matter) iin the heads of comets. If organic matter can form there, it must be able to form almost anywhere that doesn't actively destroy it.

The issue here is that to form life takes very specific combinations, not just combinations. To have a biochemically reproducing system with sufficient accuracy to allow natural selection to be effective takes something of overwhelming improbability. To make goo does not. Chemisty is indeed nonrandom; that erects further barriers to abiogenesis. Such as the tendency of ordered things towards disorder in the absence of an organizing force. Since you're arguing for a non-directed abiogenesis, you must posit no organizing force. Without that, things break down, and time leads to degeneration of the precursors, not to their accumulation.

Otherwise, the packaged foods industry would be in big trouble. Billions of times a year, a jar of peanut butter is opened by someone in the world. Never is a new life form found in that act. Those billions of experiments, by your reckoning, should have produced something by now. The right chemicals for life are all there, but nothing happens.

You further stated that there have been fossils found which are of

... a fish with fins capapble of acting like legs?

Presumably you're talking about the Coelacanth. This is indeed a marvelous example of problems with old-earth dating scenarios (you know, the "fossils date the rock, but the rock dates the fossil" circular reasoning issue). The Coelacanth has been found quite alive and unchanged from its fossil record in the Indian ocean. However what was supposed to be fins in transition to legs is nothing of the sort (see here for details, or just google around). Yet it is still used as an index fossil for 70-400 MYA.

And yes it's very interesting that few T Rex skeletons have been found in the fossil record, while the trilobyte is relatively ubiquitous. Kind of like there were a giant flood, which would have buried bottom-dwelling sea creatures first and most efficiently. That also explains why there are trilobytes on top of Mt. Everest. But you probably don't believe in a worldwide flood either.

Actually some of the best evidence for a very young earth are things like the declining energy in the magnetic field of the planet (including the non-dipole moments), and the amount of He in the atmosphere and in deep rocks.

Re:Chance has limits

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue here is that to form life takes very specific combinations, not just combinations.

To form life that's exactly like we know it may require specific combinations. But if you define life to be a self-sustaining chemical process, then there can be many ways that life could have arisen, other than the way it happened to on Earth. Read Kauffman's work on autocatalytic networks.

To have a biochemically reproducing system with sufficient accuracy to allow natural selection to be effective takes something of overwhelming improbability. To make goo does not.

Really? Present the probability calculation. Kauffman's work, for instance, suggests that autocatalytic networks are almost inevitable given nothing but a sufficient diversity of chemicals, and some time. (I believe he has also estimated the time necessary for a given diversity.) I personally don't think we know nearly enough to be able to say with confidence what the probability was. But it's far from obvious that it was "overwhelmingly improbable".

Chemisty is indeed nonrandom; that erects further barriers to abiogenesis. Such as the tendency of ordered things towards disorder in the absence of an organizing force. Since you're arguing for a non-directed abiogenesis, you must posit no organizing force. Without that, things break down, and time leads to degeneration of the precursors, not to their accumulation.

This is wrong. The whole point of natural selection is that it is an extremely powerful organizing force. There is also self-organization (which ties into the above-mentioned work by Kauffman).

Otherwise, the packaged foods industry would be in big trouble. Billions of times a year, a jar of peanut butter is opened by someone in the world. Never is a new life form found in that act. Those billions of experiments, by your reckoning, should have produced something by now.

Don't be ridiculous. Peanut butter doesn't have a sufficiently complex chemical mix, nor physical conditions similar to the arisal to life on the early Earth; opening a jar of peanut butter has nothing to do with what might produce life. (Not to mention that "billions of times a year" is "essentially never", for the chemical processes we're talking about -- compare how many reactions take place in a single test tube.)

This might be the most absurd strawman argument I've yet seen from a creationist.

This is indeed a marvelous example of problems with old-earth dating scenarios (you know, the "fossils date the rock, but the rock dates the fossil" circular reasoning issue). The Coelacanth has been found quite alive and unchanged from its fossil record in the Indian ocean. However what was supposed to be fins in transition to legs is nothing of the sort (see here for details, or just google around). Yet it is still used as an index fossil for 70-400 MYA.

This is also false.

And yes it's very interesting that few T Rex skeletons have been found in the fossil record, while the trilobyte is relatively ubiquitous.

There were a lot more trilobites then there ever were T-Rexes, and conditions were often better to preserve them.

Kind of like there were a giant flood, which would have buried bottom-dwelling sea creatures first and most efficiently.

Actually, you would expect the heavier organisms to sink to the bottom first. However, it is not true that bottom-dwelling sea creatures are always on the bottom.

That also explains why there are trilobytes on top of Mt. Everest.

The top of Everest

Re:Chance has limits

[young-earth]

Firstly, you're using the definition of life as essentially steady-state chemical reactions. That's awfully far from what most reasonable individuals would consider life. If you are open to investigating details on the probability of life arising, look here.

The point of the peanut butter illustration was perhaps a bit abstract, but still a key point. Inside that jar are amino acids, nucleic acids, sugars, carbohydrates, fats; basically a choice collection of key chemicals of life (that's why it's nutritious). Your claim therefore " Peanut butter doesn't have a sufficiently complex chemical mix ... [for] the arisal to life on the early Earth..." is somewhat inaccurate. The chemicals are there.

If you have anything of an open mind and are willing to look beyond the highly variable quality found on talkorigins, please read the detailed refutation of Barnes' work on the magnetic field here.

Re:Chance has limits

[Anonymous Coward]

Firstly, you're using the definition of life as essentially steady-state chemical reactions. That's awfully far from what most reasonable individuals would consider life.

To a scientist, that's what life is. On the other hand, creationists define life to be "whatever is complicated enough that we can pretend it couldn't have happened".

If you are open to investigating details on the probability of life arising, look here.

Nobody knows how to calculate that -- not creationists, and not real scientists either. All the creationist "calculations" simply make specious arguments involving the probability of random chemicals hitting together, which totally ignores all of the NON-random processes going on.

Kauffman makes a simplified model that does take into account the self-organizational properties of real chemical networks, and gets a very different answer. The truth is likely somewhere in between, but I'd bet on the truth being closer to how chemical networks actually behave, and not on some strawman that ignores both the diversity of the chemical mix and the advantages of selection.

Peanut butter doesn't have a sufficiently complex chemical mix ... [for] the arisal to life on the early Earth..." is somewhat inaccurate. The chemicals are there.

Having the basic building blocks isn't good enough. The sheer number of different chemicals is what's important. This is what Kauffman's work is about. The peanut butter example is completely facetious. There is no opportunity for two random chemicals to freely interact, opening a jar of peanut butter does not produce any substantial reaction, and a measely billion jars of peanut butter is nothing.

If you have anything of an open mind and are willing to look beyond the highly variable quality found on talkorigins, please read the detailed refutation of Barnes' work on the magnetic field here.

Don't try to B.S. me about magnetic fields. You don't have to read past the first paragraph of your link to know its wrong: it outright states that it is extrapolating a given rate of decay for the field. Even if the field is decaying now -- and it doesn't even matter whether it is -- it is simply false that the field has been steadily decaying over the history of the planet. We can determine the magnetization from rock samples, and we know that the magnetic field has been oscillating back and forth in magnitude for quite some time, not decaying.

Re:Chance has limits

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. You want to move from the "variable quality" talk.origins site, to the uniformly poor quality creationresearch.org site.

Re:Chance has limits

[young-earth]

Your claim that life is steady-state chemical reactions is, quite frankly, amazing and amusing. By that definition, many high school chemistry labs create life frequently. It is most effective to just leave your claim alone, as it's self-refuting.

Your statement

Don't try to B.S. me about magnetic fields. You don't have to read past the first paragraph of your link to know its wrong: it outright states that it is extrapolating a given rate of decay for the field. Even if the field is decaying now -- and it doesn't even matter whether it is -- it is simply false that the field has been steadily decaying over the history of the planet.

is quite fascinating in that were I to say "radiometric dating is suspect because it assumes constant rate of decay over time" you'd be all over me for that non-uniformitarian suggestion. Yet you make such a statement (clearly you have not read Humphreys' article or you'd see that he deals quite well with your objection) about magnetic fields while casting aspersions in the process.

Please at least read and comprehend the article before you dismiss it. Or at least admit you're too closed-minded to do so.

Re:Chance has limits

[Anonymous Coward]

Your claim that life is steady-state chemical reactions is, quite frankly, amazing and amusing. By that definition, many high school chemistry labs create life frequently.

I didn't say steady-state, I said self-sustaining. There is no known set of self-sustaining chemical reactions, other than life.

were I to say "radiometric dating is suspect because it assumes constant rate of decay over time" you'd be all over me for that non-uniformitarian suggestion.

If radiometric decay were not constant over time, we'd know it -- it has implications for stellar evolution and such. Additionaly, there are non-radiometric ways of ascertaining ages, which corroborate well with radiometric dating methods.

Yet you make such a statement (clearly you have not read Humphreys' article or you'd see that he deals quite well with your objection)

I did read Humphreys' article, and no, he does not deal with this objection -- nowhere does he address the actual geological evidence. We have a record of what the Earth's magnetic field actually did, as encoded in magnetic materials in the geologic record.

In the section where Humphreys discusses polarity reversals, he is addressing a claim that the field reversed polarity but did not change in magnitude. Whether the Earth's field did or did not change in magnitude upon reversing polarity is irrelevant to the question of whether a uniform decay rate can be extrapolated over the history of the Earth.

Humphreys does not give empirical evidence to justify this assumption -- though he mentions a "geomagnetic theory", details unspecified, which he says predicts a continuous decrease. Well, that's nice: he thinks that there's a continuous decrease. However, he does not actually demonstrate that this theory is correct; all he does is match against recent data. More importantly, he does not address the actual evidence that indicates that the Earth's field has not been steadily decaying over time.

Please at least read and comprehend the article before you dismiss it.

Please at least read and comprehend the article before you cite it. Oh wait, that's not creationist MO.

Re:Chance has limits

[Anonymous Coward]

By that definition, many high school chemistry labs create life frequently.

And so what if that were true? That's only "amusing" if you equate life with something miraculous. The first life was undoubtedly very simple: life today is more complex, because the earlier forms no longer exist.

However, I wouldn't object to defining life as a chemical network that not only auto-catalyzes, but contains self-replicating molecules. It wouldn't surprise me if this may eventually be accomplished in 21st century high school labs.

Creationists like to shift the goalposts, though: they won't accept anything less than a fully functioning cell as "life", so as to make it impossible to ever demonstrate abiogenesis in the lab. (And if anyone did happen to demonstrate it, they'd just claim that it required the intervention of a designer -- you can't win.)

Re:Chance has limits

[Anonymous Coward]

P.S. Definitions aren't things that are "proven" or "refuted".

Re:Chance has limits

[young-earth]

You claim that life started as something very simple. Yet natural selection could not operate on something that was incapable of nearly perfect replication, as otherwise the inherited positive characteristics would not be replicated with sufficient fidelity for accurate selection. It's the core of the insurmountable barrier - there has to be a near-perfect quality of reproduction for natural selection to be operative, yet to get there requires such a vast amount of organization and information that it cannot happen via stochastic processes. Your belief that we may see in this century self-replicating molecules made in HS chem labs merely points out that centuries of effort by intelligent forces can bring about something that won't happen spontaneously. Thanks for making my point.

Re:Chance has limits

[young-earth]

You state

all he does is match against recent data

which is more than Dalrymple or anyone else has managed to do. In fact Dalrymple, Barnes, et al. have all based their work on the energy going from the dipoles into non-dipoles, that being the source of increase and decrease in what they claim are cycles of the field in the past. What Humphreys shows is, based on a century or so of evidence, a continuous decrease in the overall energy in the field. That very directly contradicts the models of Dalrymple and Barnes - their point is that the energy is moving between dipole and non-dipole portions of the field, and they are proven now to be incorrect. Your statement about the geologic record is partially based on a billions of years assumption; if you release that assumption, the record is in fact consistent with Humphreys' paper.

What is up with people who have nothing to say

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of the problems with people who have nothing to say. You assume that, everything you have to say is interesting, so you like to blurt out meaningless lines and hand out mod points like they were hickory switches. The problem is that nobody cares about your posts. Only certain people get a rise out of it, once they get a rise, they think they are joining some anti right mantra here at Slashdot. It is entirly possible that within the first few posts that you disagree and you make an insightful counterpoint.

That was what your post says to a newcomer to this thread. If I had points I'd mod the parent with all 5 Interesting.!

Bull Shit

[Anonymous Coward]

I replicated this experiment as a High School Chemistry project twice, once in 1959 and again the next year in 1960 (Van Horn High, KC Mo). I used an inverted flask for the gasses, heated a small test tube placed through the stopper in the bottom of the flask electrically for water vapor, and provided "lightning" in the form of a sparking gap within the flask (neon sign xformer, through a cap). Ran it a week both times. Both times so many amino acids were produced that the fluid that collected looked like thick strong tea. It blew away the ninhydrin test! I kept both of these fluids for years, actually almost 25 years, before discarding them and they were STILL a thick primordial soup after that length of time.
Don't believe me? Try it yourself!

How the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

is this a troll/flamebait? You are seriously telling me that a person who is supposedly able to re-create an experiment that creates AMINO ACIDS from basic components would not have the ability to make a simple God-damned spark? I think the person is full of shit.

Moderators, please pull your heads out of your asses for one minute and think about this... me: "You can integrate by parts, buy you can't solve '2 + 2 = ?', is this correct?" Saint Aardvark: "Yep."

organic interstellar clouds

[peter303]

Amino acids and other organic compounds are found in some of the instellar dust clouds around the galaxy. Astronomers think these are formed by the interactions of C-N-O-H atoms over eons of time, but other explanations are possibily. NASA scientists have successfully done a space-analogue of the mIller experiment. Life soup is everywhere!

Once again, time to play...

[Anonymous Coward]

FUN!
WITH!
BABELFISH!

For all you slashdotters out there who don't speak Freedom, or are too lazy to look it up on babelfish yourself, I'll be your translator today. First, the grandparent.

Ce n'est pas la premiere commentaire! Je fais de la flatuence dans votre direction generale! Votre mere etait une hamster, et votre père aiment puanteurs comme des baies de sureau !

VOUS L'ECHOUEZ!

Babelfish spits this out:

It is not the premiere comment! I make flatuence in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster, and your father like stinks like elderberries! YOU FAIL It!

It seems to be a standard "YOU FAIL IT" gag based off of the mock-french failed first post attempt. All geeks should recognize this as a snippet of the French Knight's monologue in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail".

Now to the parent.

Putain de merde, ou je me trouve? C'est bon. Mais pourquoi tu dis "faire de la flatulence" comme cela? Je suggeste dire "laisser souffler un petit vent" ou meme "faire chanter le trou de cul"? Non, c'est plus grossier. Eh bien .....

Babelfish gives us:

Whore of shit, or am I? It is good. But why you say "to make flatulence" like that? I suggeste to say "to let blow a small wind" or same "to make sing the hole of bottom"? Not, it is coarser. Eh well.....

Notice the hilarious mangled phrases like "Whore of shit or am I?" and "Eh well". I can't tell whether the parent thought that "to make flatulance" was more or less coarse than the phrases selected!

And that's how you play...

FUN!
WITH!
BABELFISH!

You've been a wonderful audience, thank you, good night.

Contaminants and probes

[TeaDaemon]

Why bother taking the probe out at all?

Surely it'd be easier and more elegant to design a reaction vessel with probes/sampling ports built in. You could then seal the apparatus at the start of the experiment an have a fair degree of confidence that it would stay sealed until you ended the experiment.

If you want a simple experiment into keeping things sterile and uncontaminated, google for Pasteur's experiments with swan-necked flasks. These were originally designed to disprove the theory that bacteria and moulds (and indeed worms, beetles, etc) would spontaneously form and begin multiplying in dead organic matter. Very simple, very elegant, and proves the point very nicely.

CREATIONISM ALERT!!!

[meehawl]

RUN!!! Don't walk, to the nearest exit.

Re:Carl Sagan was missing Billions and Billions of

[AviatorJack]

>>It is entirely possible that within the first pico-seconds, the rules of physics (or maybe the math that defines the rules), made intelligent life inevitable.

Sure, but that's not science. Many things are possible that have not happened. What if perhaps the Creator of the rules and the pico-seconds would prefer to be credited with the creation?

is god a DJ?

[pyrrho]

yes.

(+0 Sig Comment)

[pyrrho]

>It's sure starting to look like Syria is queued up for the next liberation.

and now, if someone spills beer on you in a bar you say, "Hey buddy, let's take this outside where I can drop a little liberation on your ass!"

Re:I tried this experiment in high school...sort o

[young-earth]

There's a very good reason it would not work for you, one that is why Miller's experiment is not very useful. Hard UV (which you probably didn't have due to HS safety concerns, and which would have been blocked by the glass most likely anyway) would have dissociated the NH3 fairly rapidly.

That leads to a basic problem with the Miller-Urey experiment: their assumption was no free oxygen (they assumed a reducing, not an oxidizing, atmosphere). Free oxygen would completely mess up the reactions, so they excluded it from the experiment.

But without O2, there would be no O3 (aka ozone) in the upper atmosphere. That would mean that lots of hard UV would be coming into the lower atmosphere. That hard UV would dissociate any NH3 around, and without the ammonia, the experimental conditions would not have a good source of nitrogen, as N2 is so tightly coupled that it's close to inert under the conditions they were using.

So the experiment, while interesting, was pretty useless. With O2, it wouldn't work. Without O2, there would be no NH3, and it wouldn't work. Joseph Heller wrote a book about that basic concept once, called "Catch-22".

Re:I tried this experiment in high school...sort o

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried this experiment in hich school too. In 9th grade when I was going to a private school that actually encouraged students to do things. As for no being able to make a spark, it's easy. I used some wire, an ignition coil from a car, a couple lantern batteries, a reed switch from a pinball machine, and a matchstick glued to the spinning wheel of an old walkman. I also had no idea how to work with gasses so instead of methane I used ethanol, Everclear specifically [190 proof]. As for what came out at the end, I have no idea. Thin layer chromotography isn't easy to do in your garage.

Re:I tried this experiment in high school...sort o

[Muhammar]

This is not necessarily so.

1. For fotolysis of ammonia, one needs a hellotof UV - very strong source. Not likely to happen.
2. Ozone is not the only UV absorber known to man - the most common kind is complex organic molecules. We do not have much of complex organic compounds in air nowadays (except for Mexico City, Peking, LA and Fresno valley) but those aerosols or volatiles could have shielded UV in the early days of Earth.

Re:OK, how about this? make POLIO from raw materia

[Carnivorous Carrot]

Whether a virus is life or not is kind of splitting hairs.

By the definition of a parasite, it certainly fits.

Whether we should think of them as life or not should probably depend on whether they are the result of some kind of true life, like a simple bacteria, that evolved downward, or they are the result of some random chemical reaction that then began picking up steam from evolution.

Re:I tried this experiment in high school...sort o

[young-earth]

If there were aerosols or volatile organics, they would also interfere with the experiment in significant ways, particularly if they were of a concentration sufficient to block UV.

Photolysis of NH3, over the time periods considered, is sufficiently rapid with unshielded sunlight (i.e., ozone layer-free sunlight) that it would render the experiment moot.

Dramatic confirmation

[tgibbs]

What some people debate is the theory that evolution is what guided life from single-celled organisms to, say, mammals. Going from evolution to the latter is a huge jump.

It is worth noting that when the theory of evolution was formulated, nobody knew anything about how inheritance worked, much less DNA, yet from the theory, one could derive the hard prediction that every organism, from microorganism to man, must use the same fundamental mechanism of inheritance. The discovery of DNA and the common genetic code of all organisms stands as one of the most dramatic and compelling confirmations of a theory's predictions in the history of science.

Oh yea of little FAITH

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for so clearly and concisively demonstrating the great heresy that is literalistic creationism. Your faith is so weak that you would view the demonstration of an Earth older than what one small branch of literaloid christianity's interpretation of what the Bible says is the age of the Earth that you would renounce your, well, what passes for your "faith." You would take this spiritually and intellectually bankrupt branch's "inerant" interpretation of the Bible (but only when convenient, no no it's okay to mix fabrics of wool and flax, no rabbits don't chew their cud, eat pork it's good for you, Revelations is actually about the end of the world not pressures facing the Roman-era Church, a hot fish in the navel really means a hot fish in the navel, isn't that sensual) or more accurately a fallible man named Ussher's declaration of a ~6000 year old Earth over the assumption that a) God is wise, b) God's universe is orderly and follows the Laws that He Himself laid down in the Beginning, c) God is not some petty trickster decieving those who search for understanding of His great Creation. Instead you have thrown your lot in with the lying creationists who decided that pride is a virtue, deceit is moral, and try to hide His wonderous Creation from those who seek it out. I pray that you get down on your knees and beg forgiveness for your sins from the Almighty Lord your God and renounce your heresy, Pharisee.

Sagan vs Miller

[leonbrooks]

Carl Sagan aside, didn't Millers experiment rise above the level of fairy tale at the very least?

Miller had the guts to actually go out and try it to see what happened. That's actual hard science rather than just pontification. You've gotta salute the man for that.

However, he did that original experiment - and many followup experiments - to prove a specific ideological point. Not only did he fail to prove the point<1>, he's steadily establishing with ever greater precision and completeness that even under the most optimistic of assumptions and with the most carefully crafted of experimental rigs, life does not form spontaneously, and nor do any significant precursors to it. It would be significant if he could even establish a substantially homochiral collection of organic molecules using only bulk chemicals and believable conditions, but his work has steadfastly shown that to not be at all achievable. Rationally, Miller now needs to let go of his ideology, and won't.

<1> the original sense of the word "prove" meant "test to destruction", and in that sense Miller did "prove" his point.

Re:Sagan vs Miller

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many theories of abiogenesis beyond what Miller works on, you know.

Clay's your pigeon

[leonbrooks]

What would the comparable "natural" trap be?

Porosities in clay have been proposed (and again later in the theoretical process as prosthetic "cell walls"), but they don't close the gap to any significant extent.

Aside from the reducing atmosphere, and racemisation, there's also the concentration of chemicals needed and the intrusion of pollutants. Anything like UV radiation or lightning would be pretty disruptive as well. The list goes on.

Bare trap

[leonbrooks]

an obvious 'trap' is "life", e.g. if some of the AAs were incorporated into some kind of primitive self-replicator.

Just to make sure I understood you: in order to get self-replicators we need to conserve amino acids as they form. How do we do this? Why, of course! We use self-replicators.

What can I say? "D'oh" seems to cover it all. (-:

A few missing qualifiers

[leonbrooks]

These days, his contribution is regarded as being the first of a series of studies showing that the fundamental building blocks of life are readily formed under a wide variety of conditions.

True.

Many basic blocks are still missing, and you can't do much with a pile of blocks anyway.

Most people think in terms of building a Lego lifeform, now that the blocks are available, but even building a "simple" lifeform from these bricks is somewhat akin to building a Gibraltar Bridge out of Lego (with all of the long ones missing and half of the existing pieces having the dots and dents the wrong way out, just to add insult to injury). Many others think that if you build DNA, you build life, but this is kind of like thinking that if you can just fab a raw Athlon wafer (by accident, out of sand) you've got a super-computing cluster on your hands. On top of this, life is dynamic.

A big jolt of required perspective is almost always absent when describing putative "building blocks of life". It would be fairer to say that Miller has discovered how to put some of the dimples on building blocks naturally, or perhaps that he's shown how some of the plastics of which those bluidling blocks are made could form under natural conditions.

Re:A few missing qualifiers

[tgibbs]

Many basic blocks are still missing, and you can't do much with a pile of blocks anyway.

Of course, the earliest form of life probably did not use all of the "blocks", and of course, the term "block" is just a metaphor. It can be misleading if you take it too literally, because bricks lack a fundamental capacity of the "building blocks" of life: the ability to spontaneously assemble themselves into chains under a variety of conditions, which in turn have the abilty to catalyze the assembly of other chains.

Most people think in terms of building a Lego lifeform, now that the blocks are available, but even building a "simple" lifeform from these bricks is somewhat akin to building a Gibraltar Bridge out of Lego (with all of the long ones missing and half of the existing pieces having the dots and dents the wrong way out, just to add insult to injury).

To think in terms of building even the simplest modern form of life is indeed akin to imagining that the history of bridge building began with the construction of something of the size and complexity of the Bridge of Gibraltar, using primitive tools and materials. This is a fundamental error. The fact is that there are no simple modern forms of life. The life forms that we sometimes loosely refer to as "simple" are probably more correctly regarded as "stripped down," in the sense of a modern high-performance racing car. It won't tell you much about what the first motorized vehicles looked like, or how they worked.

Re:A few missing qualifiers

[Anonymous Coward]

The first "life" wasn't any more complicated than a self-replicating molecule, and subsequent life didn't immediately jump to cellular life. You imagine these huge discontinuities in order to make things look implausible, but that doesn't mean that they were there.

Gotta hand it to you

[leonbrooks]

Look at you set of hands, one is racemic "left" and the other is racemic "right". You have a completely racemized mixture of hands. This does not deny you use of your left hand.

Your analogy is broken, or possibly just incomplete. Think of using ordinary scissors with your left hand, to get some idea. In nature, a wrong-handed molecule can, by binding incorrectly, bollox up an otherwise useful organic molecule. It is essentially operating as a poison. For a relatively harmless example, invertase binds to sites normally reserved for substances like sucrose. This provides exactly the same taste as sucrose, but the resulting combination will not digest. Harmless examples are relatively rare.

Re:Gotta hand it to you

[tgibbs]

In nature, a wrong-handed molecule can, by binding incorrectly, bollox up an otherwise useful organic molecule. It is essentially operating as a poison.

The earliest forms of life probably used both d and l amino acids. There is no such thing as correct or incorrect binding in nature. There is just binding. The consequences of binding may be beneficial or harmful, depending upon other factors, but binding is just binding. Organisms evolve to deal with the compounds that are present in their environment. Grow a microorganism in the presence of a d-amino acid for awhile, and it will evolve to use it, exclude it, or degrade it. So modern organisms have trouble dealing with some d-amino acids because they are not around any more, not because they are inherently inimical. And they are not around because life, probably at a fairly early stage, evolved to standardize on a particular chirality. Early life probably used both, but with the evolution of the ribosome--a programmable protein family--there was a strong selective force for standardizing on a particular chirality.

Christian?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to judge you my friend, but I found the parent to be nothing about Christianity, but since you bring it up ....

Beleiving that the Bible isn't scientific and factual ... then you are NOT a Christian. The Bible explains DETAILED health and nutritional information (to avoid sickness, disease, and even social otrasizing) All of which to this day are factual. There are multiple evidences of a great flood, there are evidences of a star/astronomical phenomenon about the time of Jesus' birth. And we know today that virgin births ARE possible. Explain specifically what isn't scientific in the Bible to YOU as a Christian ...

The Bible was written for ancient people to understand in "current" times true, but written in such a way that it was timeless.

Re:Christian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Beleiving that the Bible isn't scientific and factual ... then you are NOT a Christian.

Ah, the One True Christian, I mean Scotsman fallacy.

Most people consider a Christian to be someone who believes in the divinity of Christ, as reported in the Bible. Treating the Bible as a science text doesn't enter into it, and most Christians regard the Bible as allegorically, not literally true. As Galileo famously said, the Bible is to tell us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.

Thermodynamic

[tgibbs]

It is contrary to the 2nd law of thrmodynamics. This has to win the award as the single stupidest argument against evolution. The second law merely says that it takes energy to create order. Do we have energy? Hellooo. Look up in the sky. Do you see that bright thing up there?

Essentials of the argument

[young-earth]

You argue that time did wonders, I argue that the LORD God did.

So this distills down to: you (and evolutionists in general) believe life was created by your god, which is time. I (and young-earth Bible Believers in general) believe in the LORD God who created your god (time) and space and matter and physical laws and life.

As Dave Moore puts it: "I'd rather believe in a big God and have small problems that believe in a small god and have big problems".

Re:Essentials of the argument

[Anonymous Coward]

I notice you completely ignored all the refutations of your asinine arguments. I'd figure that you'd learn something from that, but I'm sure you'll be back with more asinine arguments in the future, having failed to learn anything about the science you quote-mine from creationist web sites.

P.S. Nobody believes time is a god, and I neither believe in a small god nor have big problems. But keep up the smug quotes: they only show you for the fool you are.

Re:Essentials of the argument

[young-earth]

The refutations you seem to have missed are above. You claim you don't hold time to be your god, yet you entrust time to be the agent to bring about the miraculous: abiogenesis. At least be honest enough to admit where your faith is - there is no experiment you can conduct to show abiogenesis in action (the Miller-Urey absurdity being one particularly weak and useless attempt). Given that there is no experiment you can conduct to show abiogenesis occuring, you can only extrapolate and claim that if a to b happens, then A to Z happens, obscuring the nature of the intervening steps.

An alternative of who your god might be is from Kauffman (cited above several times) who said of natural selection

we might as well capitalise [it] as though it were the new deity.

Re:Essentials of the argument

[Anonymous Coward]

The refutations you seem to have missed are above.

Uh huh. You ignored the refutations your drivel about Coelacanths, trilobites, fossil deposition, helium deposition, etc.

You claim you don't hold time to be your god, yet you entrust time to be the agent to bring about the miraculous: abiogenesis.

You're the one who thinks it's "miraculous", not me.

At least be honest enough to admit where your faith is - there is no experiment you can conduct to show abiogenesis in action

No, there isn't, but this has nothing to do with faith.

Given that there is no experiment you can conduct to show abiogenesis occuring, you can only extrapolate and claim that if a to b happens, then A to Z happens, obscuring the nature of the intervening steps.

Yes, it is an extrapolation. So what? People may credibly believe unproven things based on evidence.

An alternative of who your god might be is from Kauffman

Yawn. Don't think you can piss me off by claiming I worship this god or that.

Gooses

[leonbrooks]

And of course, when creationist do give a scientific source for their claim the gurus at talk.origins usually only take a matter of minutes to point out that its a misquote or a misrepresented context.

Said gurus couldn't even tell the difference between Darwin and Hitler when pressed to do so by one of their opponents, why trust them for more subtle reasoning? (-:

But perhaps more important, throw Apollos, the baloney detector at any one of their pages and see what happens. Apollos is a good deal more specific and exemplified than Carl's more, er, primordial detector. G'wan, print it out and go do a few pages, you know you want to!

The third option

[leonbrooks]

So, if evolution in its strictest sense does turn out to be false, the only alternative is creation.

non sequitur

Cop out.

If it doesn't follow, you need to specify at least one more alternative.

Very appealing magic

[leonbrooks]

At least the scientific theories are dependent on the evidence.

In principle. In practice they gloss over an enormous range of inconvenient facts, pander to the personal biasses of the experimenters, and sneak in teleology at every opportunity. In short, they implicity appeal to magic as well, the only serious difference being that thier proponents are not being as honest (starting with themselves) about it.

Meanwhile, the attitude "they invoke magic, so they're not useful" is at best a bloody silly one. Materialist scientists and engineers regularly deal with factors which they don't understand or can't accurately measure, and these investigators don't throw their hands up in despair (mock despair, in your case, since if you suck people in with that attitude, it saves you having to confront those inconvenient facts), they simply apply standard error mesaurement techniques.

Creationism doesn't consist of "goddunnit, amen" any more than your Materialism consists of "time-and-chance dunnit, amen". It consists of doing perfectly ordinary science, taking as axiomatic the scientific parameters outlined in various parts of the Bible instead of taking as axiomatic the holy canticles of Materialism.

Many if not most of the scientists who defined and laid the foundations of modern, western science were Creationists, and several of the leaders in their fields today are Creationists. Serious business. You don't have to agree that Creationism is the best approach to science, but please don't be daft enough to rubbish it so childishly.

Picking from amongst "fairy tales"

[leonbrooks]

Had the atmosphere at the time been oxidizing (basically oxygen rich), these deposits could not have formed since iron would have combined with the oxygen in the atmosphere to form rust basically (hematite, Fe2O3).

This has been addressed elsewhere in this /. story and /. already has sufficient dupes, so I won't address it again.

what hardcore rock solid evidence do YOU have that YOUR ideas are not just like every other fairy tale?

First, let's make sure that we're reading from the same page: you're asking me to compare my brand of Christianity with other religions, which you call "fairy tales". Since Materialism is as much a religious PoV as Buddhism or Jainism, not only is it a "fairy tale" but I'm also going to include that in the comparison. Also, nobody was there with a video camera, so all evidence is going to be more or less indirect. But more on that point later.

On the question of origins, there are four basic approaches (modulo some mind-bending fringe philosophies which make The Matrix look simple and tame):

1. No creation ("we have always been here"); herein perennialism (note: I don't know if there is any such word, nor do I care, it only needs to be obvious and unique within context);
2. Creation not addressed (e.g. Pantheon sprang one way or another from previously existing material/gods); herein indeterminatism;
3. Creation happened long ago ("once upon a time"); herein gradualism;
4. Creation happened recently; herein catastrophism.

While the steady-state and cyclic camps within Materialism do represent perennialism, I'm going to guess that you don't suport them, and not bother to address them (other than to say that there are many indicators which should be showing up if the universe truly were that old, and they aren't, and that some Materialist scientists are ruling out the cyclic theories).

Indeterminatism is by its nature not addressable. This simply leaves many religions out of the debate, which IMESHO is a valuable distinguishing point that disqualifies those religions due to lack of necessary authority. It should be noted that "I know we're here and I can't see any evidence of God but think evolution is a blind alley so I don't know how we got here but Creationism ain't it" perspective is a dilute form of indeterminatism. A stronger form of my invented term would be "cop out".

Gradualism is easy to speak against in many ways, but I'll keep it brief because this is not the interesting section.

One simple example: the continents. These would wear down absolutely flat within about 10 million years, leaving us a few kilometers underwater (see, the dolphins do win in the end!); if you propose to make up the difference with orogeny, first off there ain't nearly enough of it to make a difference, and second off you also need to explain why the contients, having been completely recycled at least 400 times since the formation of Earth, aren't almost entirely homogeneous instead of being, as they are, possessed of a significant amount of internal structure. AFAIK there is no suitable sorting mechanism or anything resembling a candidate. The homogeneity, by the way, is a de novo piece of reasoning; if it appears anywhere else it's a coincidence.

Another by-the-way, examples of large-scale rapid erosion like the Grand Canyon or Washington Badlands don't need to happen very often throughout history to provide a drastic shortening of that ten gigayears, and even given that timescale we should see evidence of a lot more of these features than we do, probably a handful for every hypothetical ice age.

Catastrophism splits into two camps, naturalistic (a la Velikovsky) and supernaturalisti

Re:Picking from amongst "fairy tales"

[pyr0]

"This has been addressed elsewhere in this /. story and /. already has sufficient dupes, so I won't address it again."

It's been a little while since I've looked at this thread since I've been gone for about three days now, and I don't feel like picking through it again so I'm not sure where the "dupes" as you put them are. However, you can't deny the fact that the presence of reduced iron deposits suggests the atmosphere at the time was *not* oxidizing. It's basic chemistry, and in case the laws of physics have changed since then, chemical reactions worked the same then as they do now.

Now, I don't know where you get your info from on the rates of orogeny and such, but let me cite an example. Currently, the Himalayas are being uplifted at a rate of 1cm per year. This is measurable, so it's cold, hard, can't-get-around-it data. As the page says, in 1 million years, that is 10 *kilometers* worth of uplift. To explain the inevitable question of "why aren't they higher then?", when you account for the weight of such a body of rock depressing the crust and for erosion, that's why they aren't higher.

You speak of the Washington badlands and the Grand Canyon as points of very rapid erosion. You are only right about Washington. The explanation is very straightforward: there was a large glacial lake (Lake Bonneville) much like the current great lakes (but it was much bigger) that basically "broke through the dam" so to speak, releasing it's contents into the Snake and subsequently Columbia rivers. In the case of the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River existed beforehand, and during uplift of the Colorado plateau, the erosion of the river kept pace, eating down through the rocks. Now obviously, you don't believe that this could happen, as I think I argued with out about this before. However, let's think about this logically. *If* all the strata in the Grand Canyon were laid down by a catastrophic flood (throwing out the fact that in such a flood you would have turbulent flow and you couldn't get the vast number of differing rock types in sequence as they are), then why is there an angular unconformity? Did the flood waters decide to stop, wait for a those rocks to be lithified and tilted, then continue on and lay down the rest of the rock layers? If the flood waters were depositing a certain rock type at any one point in time, whey is it not possible to correlate all those formations all across the USA, or even the world? When did the basin and range extension that created the great basin that Lake Bonneville eventually filled cut through these rocks forming the fault blocks that make up the basin? The ancient wave-cut, shore terraces can still be seen in many places in Utah and Nevada...I know because I've seen them. Let me summarize the screwed up order of events you are proposing. 1) Great flood occurs. 1a) Sediments are deposited as a result, Grand Canyon is cut, etc. 2) Faulting cuts these rocks afterwards. In fact a branch of the Hurricane fault intersects the canyon at Lava Falls (basaltic volcanism has been closely associated with these faults). However, the reason there was a basin for a lake to fill up in the first place was the faulting, seeing as there are wave cut terraces within the basins formed by the faulting. There doesn't even have to be an age argument here...we're just talking order of events, right?

Now, I know you posted lots of stuff about different religions, but that's not really my point (not directly anyway). My point is that there is good scientific evidence to support the age of the Earth at 4.6 billion years old. I know you also don't believe in radiometric dating, so it's hard to argue that point. It's like last weekend my fiancee and I had a meeting with her pastor (Missouri Synod Lutheran...yuck) whom is going to marry us in just over a month. I actually got into an argument with him about the age of the Earth, because I felt like he insulte

A link I forgot to post

[pyr0]

Check out this. It goes along with my discussion of catastrophic floods in my other reply to you.