Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Offer 'Overwhelming' Evidence Terran Life Began in Space
An anonymous reader writes "Using data from recent comet-probing space missions, British scientists are reporting today that the odds of life starting on Earth rather than inside a comet are one trillion trillion (10 to the power of 24) to one against. That is, we're not originally from around here. Radiation in comets could keep water in liquid form for millions of years, they say, which along with the clay and organic molecules found on-board would provide an ideal incubator. 'Professor Wickramasinghe said: "The findings of the comet missions, which surprised many, strengthen the argument for panspermia. We now have a mechanism for how it could have happened. All the necessary elements - clay, organic molecules and water - are there. The longer time scale and the greater mass of comets make it overwhelmingly more likely that life began in space than on earth."'" jamie points out that the author of this paper has many 'fringe' theories. Your mileage may vary.
That's where God lives.
The great anthropologist Dr. Douglas Adams already showed that we did not originate here. In fact, we were passengers on the 'B' Ark that crash-landed here. Our ancestors come from an ancient civilization called Golgafrinchans. It is a shame that Dr. Adams's work is so widely ridiculed as a "humorous" bit of "fiction" in wider scientific circles.
I for one welcome... uh, myself.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
In a manner of speaking, didn't everything start in space?
In an ironic statement, they also claim Protoss life began on Earth...
There was never a better time to tag a story nevertellmetheodds!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This makes me wonder if there are other mobile space entities smaller than planets which harbor our earlier form of life. It seems extremely unlikely it was just once and the random chance it hit Earth seems far far too unlikely. So should we be looking at things smaller than planets for life or keep searching how we are now?
I like muppets.
Soooooo, they used two numbers (mass of clay & # of comets) to generate a 1e24 to 1 odd against life having started here? Seems like they might have left one or two variables out of their equation. Hopefully this is just junk reporting rather than junk science.
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
I have not RTFA but those are some humongous odds against based on the world "could". I guess I should RTFA then...
Mark
Does this mean that we're our own inter-galactic overlords?
Not this life, pal. I was born in Santa Monica!
So what they are saying we are the product of intergalactic sperm that fertilized this ovum we call earth. Maybe we aren't inside a giant snow globe but a giant uterus and when it contracts our universe will come to a sudden and brutal end.
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
So the odds of a combination of clay + radiation was only to be found inside comets and the chances of that surviving a fiery impact at many kilometers per second are _higher_ than the same combination occurring naturally, peacefully, here on earth ? Somehow my bullshit meter goes all bananas.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
So complex biomolecules wanted to self-organize and replicate bathed in the warm glow of cosmic rays and accelerated protons and electrons, cooled gently to 3 deg Kelvin on some comet rather than in a musty old pool of water covered with deadly oxygen and unbreathable nitrogen here on boring old Earth?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
So what are the odds this is bull? A million-billion-gazillion to one?
Yeah, I'm curious how they came up with that number. Is that number of water bearing radioactive clay infused comets with enough mass to get early life down to an ocean they think are in our general area or something? I have to admit, both my Junk Science and Junk Reporting needles are hovering on the redzone right now.
I read the internet for the articles.
Please before you mod me troll, listen. The Theory of evolution does not explain the origin of life, just the origin of species. Most folk who believe in things like ID (I= intelligent or idiotic depending on your perspective) confuse the issue and attack science. Let us not make the same mistake on the science side. Even the most ardent supporters of the Theory of evolution, like Dawkins, have only proposed very tentative speculation about the origin of life. They readily admit that right now science does not have any definitive theories about the Origin of Life.
This has nothing to do with evolution. Let us keep the discussions straight.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
See... further proof that nobody was living on the North American continent until someone(something) migrated here through the Bering Comet.
Is there any evidence that comets have such isotopes at such concentrations? This sounds like the sort of thing Lex Luthor would be involved in.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
It's much worse than that. Like all panspermia advocates, and like a good many Creationists, they essentially crib the "odds" argument. This looks no different than any other pro-panspermia "study" in that it starts with a strawman of abiogenesis.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's probably also worth pointing out that this result has probably increased the chance of life existing elsewhere in the universe by a similar amount. There are far more commets than planet and they are a truly huge number of stars.
Moreover, it is more plausible that a comet could fertilize many star systems if it was knocked out of the orbit of various stars in its life-time. While this sort of event is in itself unlikely it is orders of magnitude more likely than life being liberated from a planet from a violent impact. The life would have to survive the fiery, high G, exit from whatever atmosphere there was surrounding the planet and would still have to have sufficient momentum to escape the star. These properties taken together pretty much eliminate any chance of that happening.
Compare this to the following comet hypothesis. Life gets started on a comet with a highly elliptical orbit billions of years ago. How this happens is open question but for the moment assume it does. As the star uses up its fuel it loses mass and the orbit slowly stretches. Eventually, the comet is able to free itself from the gravity of the parent star. Hundred of millions of years later, the star goes supernova. The blast wave from the supernova gently accelerates the comet into a planetary nebular. It just happens to be the one that our Earth was forged in. As the nebular condenses the life that started inside the comet transfers itself to the billions of water droplets and mineral material. You can guess what happens next.
I've always suspected we are not alone. It's just whether we're all too far away from each other for the knowledge to make any difference.
Simon
42
While I know little of these things, I've always felt that panspermia is the more likely hypothesis, by virtue of the number of different environments an old comet might encounter through out it's life. Heat and cold, primordial electron plasma, various kinds of radiation and so forth.
I think length of time was factored in somehow, the gist of it being that comets have been around a lot longer than the Earth and therefore more likely to have had the incubating effect.
That stated, it'll take more than a few numbers in a formula to convince me. I'm not going to believe this until a cometary probe comes back contaminated with an alien microbe that destroys all life on the planet. And even then, I'll be a little bit skeptical.
When I was in grad school our group was trying to make a particular type of superconducting circuit. After many attempts we got one that worked, wrote it up, and presented it at a conference.
During the Q&A, someone asked my advisor what our yields were. "On a good day, 100%". The followup question was, "what's your yield on good days?"
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
It's junk science. Wickramasinghe and Hoyle are the same two who concocted the absurd probabilistic "tornado in a junkyard" argument against evolution. Hell, during the SARS outbreak, Wickramasinghe suggested that SARS was an alien virus. Yep, it just happened to have a sequence remarkably similar to other earth-borne viruses, and just happened to fall to earth in a region where similar viruses infected wild animals. Yep, that's the ticket.
Hoyle at least used to be a real scientist. I'm not sure if Wickramasinghe ever was. He said "
"The chances that life just occurred are about as unlikely as a typhoon blowing through a junkyard and constructing a Boeing 747" in 1982, so he's been a crackpot for a long time. This guy's just one step less crazy than Behe and the other 'intelligent design' crackpots. The only difference is that the intelligent designer posited by Wickramasinghe and Hoyle is a natural one, not a supernatural one; all the other problems with their claims are the same.
If I understand their argument correctly, the abundance of clay in certain comets provides the template for RNA formation and eventual RNA-based life (with DNA coming later). There may be other factors which are discussed in the actual paper. As such, consider these thoughts preliminary.
There are several factors that would seem to argue against life starting in comets. First of all, planets have a far greater volume than comets with larger and more diverse areas in which life might form. Comets must not only reach planets but deliver their biologics intact. These biologics must then be suitable for propagation in the environment in which they arrive.
That last point is quite important. If comets did provide a birthplace for life, it is quite likely that their cargo would be unable to survive such an abrupt transition. Far more likely is that the life started on the planet in the first place.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
So where did our pointy ears go?
It would be really nice to see where they came up with their statistic. I suspect that we might not agree with some of the assumptions and estimations they made to arrive at such an enormously improbable number of life originating on Earth.
Wasn't lightning part of the whole genesis of life shindig? Or am I incorrect in my knowledge of how cells can form from organic molecules.
... without a galactic space bookie? I'm feelin' lucky!
More Twoson than Cupertino
Where did the space life come from? Are we not... in space?
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
want to tell us that life was created by random comet falls?
i demand equal time for the godly and righteous theory of intelligent comet placing!
comets did not just fall randomly to earth and create life!
god himself intelligently directed comets to come to the early lifeless earth 6,000 years ago!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
British scientists are reporting today that the odds of life starting on Earth rather than inside a comet are one trillion trillion (10 to the power of 24) to one against.
That they can even presume to put a number on the probability of life is evidence enough that they have no idea what they're talking about.
Anyway, the odds of life are totally irrelevent to anything. See: anthropic principle.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I don't understand. I just looked up abiogenesis and the word just means life from non-living matter. By definition doesn't that have to be the start of any theory of life evolving? I'm not sure why you called it a strawman.
Cow Cube
Is this surprising? I mean, in the seventies it was a popular theory that life here began out there.
Did these scientists just now get around to reading "Heart of the Comet" by David Brin and Gregory Benford from the 1980s?
Soooooo, they used two numbers (mass of clay & # of comets) to generate a 1e24 to 1 odd against life having started here? Seems like they might have left one or two variables out of their equation. Hopefully this is just junk reporting rather than junk science.
I have a new meta-theory for these sorts of things: if your hypothesis sounds like the Chewbacca Defense, it's almost certainly bogus.
In summary: Most of the clay in the solar system is in comets. Therefore life evolved in comets.
Even assuming that life did indeed evolve in clay (a popular theory, but by no means the consensus), this argument doesn't convince me.
Also in the news this week is the opposite result: that life cannot exist in comets because of the radiation. So... it's not obvious (to me) that there is any scientific consensus on this topic.
Bear in mind that this self-validating conclusion comes from Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe who is intimately tied to the theory of panspermia. Let's wait for science to do it's thing and see if everyone else agrees with his conclusions and math (yeah, right)...
Gotta say that last time I checked the water is liquid right here on planet earth also.
Now where did I put my patented super-battery designs...
Panspermia: When God masturbates.
So a comet brought us into existence, and it could take us out of existence. Seems fair to me.
If the Religious Right takes issue with Evolution, just wait they find out that little Bobby is going to be taught about Panspermia! In school! Next thing you know Health class will be teaching kids the proper way to masticate.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I never understood why life coming from outside is not widely accepted theory. There have been many proofs in the past. It is highly probable if compared to life evolving from a giant organic soup. The only problem was how, and now that also seems to be satisfactorily answered,
What is an "old" comet? No comet we're going to encounter is going to be any older than the solar system itself. Most of these comets would, in fact, only be a few hundreds of millions of years older than the Earth itself, and quite likely would have spent a great deal of their time on the outer bounds of the solar system.
We know that life was here between 3.5 and 3.9 billion years ago, with some iffy evidence suggesting it was even older. That gives us a net time advantage for any given comet of no more than about 500 million years. That sounds like a lot, but in reality it really isn't that big a span. Beyond that, considering that our knowledge of cometary history is still rather sketchy, and that our sample size is exceedingly small, this is nothing more than a pretty substantial "what-if", itself based upon one particular abiogenesis theory, which has been somewhat supplanted in recent years.
If we're going to start talking about interstellar comets, to add more time to the equation, someone is going to have to a) provide evidence of such bodies and b) provide evidence that radioactive decay is going to produce heat long enough for liquid water within the body to act as an incubator for the VERRRY long stretches of time that some organisms or proto-organisms are going to survive.
Now, weight all of this against the fact that the early Earth had all the ingredients for life to develop; *plentiful* amounts of liquid water and lots and lots of energy (in the forms of solar radiation, atmospheric conditions like lightning and geothermal energy from oceanic vents and vulcanism). Can someone kindly explain to me how a comet, even with clays or clay-like crystaline minerals and some sort of low-level radioactive decay (it has to be pretty low-level too, because anything too energetic or in too high a quantity is more likely going to be delerious than helpful) is going to provide this more wonderful environment.
As with every generation of panspermia advocates, the underlying argument is essentially "We don't think there was enough time for life to develop on the early earth, so we've got to find a way to add more time." Even if we give them this part of the argument (and I frankly think even that is FAR too generous), they still have to explain how conditions elsewhere (comets, other planets orbiting other stars) are somehow more environmentally-friendly to abiogenesis than Earth was.
This is not to slight the largely unrelated idea that comets could have been the source of organic molecules that could have been some sort of organic "seeds" for early self-replicators to develop and to use as raw materials and energy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
...That life here, began ... out there, far across the universe...
geek. lawyer.
The strawman lies in the claim that current abiogenesis theories don't give enough time for the kind of organic chemical evolution that would lead to the earliest metabolizing self-replicating molecules.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
we-are-all-made-of-stardust dept... close, but Sagan's line ended with 'star stuff', which is actually more appropriate here.
As to the relative plausibility of comet-seeded or locally-formed progenitors to life, given that reactions propagate, commonly leading to repeating and self-feeding cycles of reactions, the only argument for extra-solar is the added timescale and potential additional area for productive area for pre-life to evolve in.
Given that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and life on the earth is nearly that old, and that the universe has only been cool enough to support planets or life for much of that time, I don't believe panspermia buys us that many more orders of magnitude of time to work with.
So, it doesn't buy us time, how about area? Again, I can only guess using very rough psuedo-numbers here, but the matter we could get from previously existing worlds or small super-fertile comets has to come from somewhere previous. Given the expanding nature of the universe, we're generally only going to be getting a pie-slice of potential sources for any life-by-projectile, and each of these sources has to have been fed by enough nuclear sources to make the building blocks of simple pre-life. I can imagine a multiplication of potential sources this way, and even though it would only take one source to seed the whole set... just imagining the mass that actually makes it into out solar system, and then actually hits our earth... that likelihood doesn't seem much stronger than the numbers we think of with abiogenesis via selective pressures here on earth.
Ryan Fenton
What do you get if you multiply six by nine?
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
'Then God said, "Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds." And it was so. 12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening, and there was morning--the third day.'
Genesis 1:11-13
Evolution can act on any self-replicating structure, not just "life" as we know it. The origin of life surely had something to do with very simple molecules that were able to coerce molecules like themselves to form, and those simple molecules could have originated via random chemical processes. Indeed, life formed soon after the earth had any liquid water at all.
I did not see that the study included the probability of the random comet that originated life also impacting the earth. Nor is it obvious that it was considered that if the comet impacted earth that the life thereon survived. I would like to see a bit more before we declare ourselves progeny of a stud of a comet sowing his wild oats, so to speak.
Scientist have yet to prove their theory there is abundance of water in comet body. None of comet missions/probes could find it so far. Read e.g http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/0602 14comet.htm
From the overly brief article, it appears that the "overwhelming" probability is largely an artifact of the greater mass of clay on comments than on a young Earth. This is overly simplistic, and more bluntly, wrong, for four reasons. 1) Ultraviolet light; surface area to volume. While the mass of clay on comets may exceed that on a young Earth, since Earth is one giant sphere and not a bunch of clumps of dirt flying through space, more ultraviolet light will strike Earth-based than comet-borne clay. The surface area exposed to space will be greater on Earth. Furthermore, given the lesser gravity on a comet, liquid water will likely be on the interior of a comet, vs. the exterior of Earth, another factor reducing the UV rays striking the clay and water on comets. 2) Consistency of conditions. Earth's orbit is much less elliptical than the orbits' of most comets. This is vital to life. Even if (and this is a big if) liquid water can exist on a comet throughout its orbit, extreme variations in radiation or temperature would still significantly hinder the formation of life. 3) Weather. Earth has weather, and comets don't. Weather, and lightning in particular, is pivotal in most theories regarding the origin of life. The Urey-Miller experiment, for example, proved that dynamic weather conditions can be extremely conducive to the formation of the complex molecules, such as amino acids, necessary for life to exist. 4) Most importantly, life is on Earth. We need to consider not the mass of all comets in the Solar System, or even all those harboring liquid water, but rather, all those harboring liquid water which collided with Earth at the time that life first originated. Since life is on Earth, we know that only a comet which collided with Earth could have been responsible for life on Earth. The mass of these comets which collided with Earth is clearly much less than that of the Earth itself. Considering all of these factors, I think it is safe to say that in light of this research, life still likely originated on good old planet Earth.
In fact, most of the most popular books make for an awful reading experience. R.L. Stine could have come up with a more terrible vision of the 'stick' than a 'lake of fire'. Sheesh.
Blar.
I had Prof. Wickramasinghe was one of my Pure Maths lecturers during my first year at Cardiff. He was dreadfully hard to understand.
t icity
My flatmate, who was a paleobotany postgrad at the time, had some very disparaging things to say about him. He had co-authored a few papers claiming the Archaeopteryx was a hoax, based on his poor understanding of the subject matter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeopteryx#Authen
I can't believe that they really can begin to propose odds like that on life's origin. What if life didn't begin with clays acting as catalysts for chemical reactions but instead required a reducing atmosphere? (Current thinking is that life originally used hydrogen sulfide as an energy source, possibly from undersea "smokers"). Can the comets provide that kind of environment? What would happen when the few nascent life forms that survive the planetary bombardment that they are part of are dumped from their interplanetary cocoons into the tremendously different environment of the early earth? Don't you think that there is a good idea that the life forms that survived that environment were the ones that evolved there?
Add to that the fact that we really don't have a clue as to how life started here (or anywhere else for that matter) and you really begin to question the judgment of giving odds to this sort of thing.
I'm not saying they're wrong, I like panspermia theories as well. It's just for people to put some sort of numerical values on this kind of thing when we know so little is just well crazy. And what numerical values! Maybe after if we send out some cometary probes and find them teeming with primitive life could you claim such a thing. Even then do they use DNA or RNA? Any evidence of spectral emission lines of this from any of our flyby probes? (It would be even more earth-shaking if there was DIFFERENT life there!)
Still I enjoy reading ScienceDaily.com. (Daily in fact) It's a great site not like some pseudo New-Scien(tist) kind of site.
It seems pretty odd to me to claim that the odds are "astronomical" against life starting here on a nice cozy planet with lots of liquid water, warm sunshine and a protective atmosphere, but much more probable on some frozen snowball bombarded by cosmic rays. Whooda thunk, huh?
The chances of anything coming from Mars, are a million to one they said.
I get all my science from 70's prog rock concept albums based on HG Wells novels...
can they run Linux?
For those interested in why the tornado in a junkyard assembling a 747 is a useless analogy for the process of evolution, the simple explanation is that evolution works by a ratcheting effect: improvements are made one tiny step at a time, in sequence, for a cumulative effect of complexity. The selection process by which those steps are made - i.e. mutations that constitute an improvement in fitness survive and others die out - is simple and nonrandom. The tornado analogy implies instant emergence of full complexity, which is nothing at all like what actually happens.
A-Bomb
Hoyle's failure was an example of the classic trap that experts fall into. That is that as long as they stay in their own field of knowledge, they tend to be reliable, but the moment they move into another field where their knowledge is, at best, that of a layman, they get themselves into trouble. Unfortunately, scientists like Hoyle can get a lot of mileage by the mere fact that they are experts in some field of inquiry. He was a famous scientist, and when a famous scientist speaks, even when he's right out of his league, people tend to listen.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
We're a planet of immigrants.
Next time someone tells you to 'go back to where you come from', tell them to write Congress to increase the space budget.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
what the hell does my website have to do with it?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Bullshit like this shouldn't be on the front page, let alone using Einstein's image.
I suggest a cuckoo clock. Or a crank. Or a cracked pot. If nothing else, change it to the foot.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
It's refreshing to hear someone say that so cogently.
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
I'll believe in these Uranium-heated liquid comets when I see them. Anything that could keep a comet core liquid would have to be hot (radioactively), so then we're dealing with microbes that...
1. Can survive being frozen for indefinite periods of time,
2. Can survive excessive radiation and heavy metal contamination,
3. Can survive without sunlight (remember, it's in the center of the comet),
4. Lives off unknown chemical reactions (organic chemicals mean squat without an energy source)
5. Exists in near equilibrium with its environment over millions of years, with trivial gains in material,
6. Has to then survive on Earth after
a) melting off a comet
b) drifting unprotected in the vacuum of space
c) floating down through Earth's atmosphere
or
d) evaporating in an impact event
And this theory (he says) is more plausible than life developing on Earth. I guess we need to consider ourselves very, very lucky to be here.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
If I had mod points I'd mod you up. Damn good ref. Now I'm gonna have the theme song stuck in my head the rest of the day. =)
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
... where did the "organic molecules" come from?
And before I'm flamed, I'm agnostic w/atheist slant.
"The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."
Water is kept on space rocks, because of radiation.
Right.
There are those who believe that life here, began out there, far across the
universe, with tribes of humans, who may have been the forefathers of the
Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans. Some believe that they may yet be
brothers of man, who even now fight to survive, somewhere beyond the
heavens.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
but if I'm understanding this correctly comets are blocks of ice with various other rubble frozen in them, or sometimes big rocks covered in ice. This water and rubble(rock) comes from the formation of stars, planets, nebula, etc...
Life must have originated on some planet somewhere to get expelled into space where a comet could form in the first place.
So, life may have came from a comet, but did not in fact originate in comets themselves since as noted they must come from somewhere and the emptiness of space is not conductive to life. Therefore, either life must exist (or did exist) on a planet elsewhere or the Earth is (or was) a possible source of life for these comets during out solar system's formation.
However, I may be (and probably am) wrong due to an inadequate knowledge base for this subject.
"Now you know, and knowing is half the battle!"
It is a small one....but life has been found on earth, and life has not been found in comets.
We've been looking for alien life originating from outside this planet and all we should have done is LOOK AROUND!
Just as one example why that's important:: There are probably quite a few unknowns that can skew the estimate. For instance the time, temperature, pressure, ambient poisons, and radiation level. Any one of those, if unfavorable, could change the odds by a large factor, like 1000. Wouldnt take too many of those to lower the odds to Vegas levels.
This looks like an exercise in finding data and pulling out numbers to support conclusions that were already reached. If you look at the pattern of papers by NC Wickramasinghe, since the 1980's he's been publishing stuff that appears to be conclusion-oriented, rather than data-oriented, all with the conclusion that fully-formed life rained down upon the earth, embedded in comets.
There's no doubt that comets rain down on the earth. There is considerable controversy regarding the frequency, size, and origin of comets raining down upon the earth.
Wickramasinghe's conclusions appear to be speculation masquerading as science. What he's proposing doesn't appear to be testable. As Wolfgang Pauli said of other proposals that were untestable, "not even wrong."
He was a famous scientist, and when a famous scientist speaks, even when he's right out of his league, people tend to listen.
Indeed. My Religious Education teacher loved to wheel out Hoyle's statements and "hypotheses." I've received several pamphlets from the Jehovah's Witnesses doing exactly the same.
He wasn't too great in his league either. He had some quite odd notions regarding Quasars.
I was lucky enough to attend a colloqium (sp?) given by him at Cardiff back in the early '90s. He was very sure of himself and great entertainment.
Stick Men
This could mean that life could form in comets orbiting other star systems. In addition, if they were to crash on a planet that is reasonably close to survivable they could exist long enough to possibly mutate to better survive in the conditions. Caves formed partially by impacts and liquid water from a comet's ice melting quickly on hot worlds could create environments underground for some form of life to survive and evolve.
In other words this, if true, dramatically increases the probability of life, including the probability of intelligent life, on other worlds in the universe.
Seems to me they based their probability on the number of potential life baring comets in the universe to the one place we absolutely know life exists, Earth. comets : earth.
Duh.
Anyway I'd like to take those odds and bet him $1 he's wrong...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
HA! I knew God was an alien.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Wasn't this already covered in the move Evolution?
http://www.accelerateglobalwarming.com
Coming up with such a precise number seems particularly brilliant, considering that we have no
idea how life really originated.
Energy from sun + basic chemicals = basic chemicals necessary to life (methane, ammonia, water, hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide, phosphate...). More energy and salts give you proteins... all having been demonstrated in lab settings.
Or, more eloquently by Darwin, "[In a] warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights, heat, electricity, etc. present, so that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes"
My guess these guys will find alien life everywhere they look. It's just nobody else does with the exception of other "true believers". The astrobiology gig is just great. You get paid for dreaming up hair brained scenarios, toss out some random scientific looking numbers and generally chat about alien life and nothing can be disproved. What a nice way to avoid doing anything useful or productive.
6F 9E A9 1E 96 9F 74 27 ED B8 81 6D 0C 4E 1E 78
My other Sig is a 229.
Isn't the Earth in space?
nt
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Just for the record, have you read Michael Behe's book: Darwin's Black Box?
I finally got around to reading it last year and was surprised to find a very reasonable argument. Nothing in the book was what I'd describe as foaming at the mouth, claiming to debunk Darwin and/or prove the reality of a 6 day creationist world view. As a bonus, I actually learned many interesting details of sub-cellular life from reading the book (the appendix alone is a great overview of microbiology).
I ask because, in the year since, I've never yet met anyone (mostly in Comp Sci. circles) who have actually read his book but I've met plenty of people (in the above circles) with a strong opinion of Behe's intellectual prowess :-).
It's my opinion that we don't know nearly enough about abiogenesis to go making claims like this. We simply don't know how life/replicators/whatever originated to go assigning goofy probabilities. But it makes for a snappy headline.
Whatever.
While I understand what you are saying, people are using "evolution" to represent naturalism and materialism in general. So for all practical purposes, that's what is the debate is about. Naturalism, especially the "ism" part. Criticisms in regards to naturalistic origin of life scenarios may say "evolution" but that is what they mean.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Well, panspermia has the argument of time. You pushed stuff a bit too much when you said that it was a 500 milions of years advantaje, because comets and metheors cooled much faster than Earth. In fact, it was more like a 1 to 1.5 bilion of years. That means somewhere from 3 to 10 times the time life would had to develop on Earth.
Also, they don't have to prove that conditions were better at metheors by that time. They only need to prove that conditions were good enough and that life would be able to spread from one rock to the other. Those researchers seem to have advanced on the former, while the latter is quite plausible and don't need exceptional evidence.
Everything being the same, panspermia has the advantage of time, and if we are to belive that life is hard to happen (that could explain the Fermi paradox) time is crucial.
Rethinking email
All this effort for so many years, and now I find out I'm *already* a member of the mile-high club!
We already did that back in 2000.
Question for the crowd: Are there comets that we are aware of which transit our solar system (rather than orbit it)? Would it be feasible to craft and inject into one of these comets something akin to a fertilized human egg which can replicate as if it were a bacterium until such time as it found an environment not entirely unlike a womb and then rather than simple replication begin the chain of events that generate a human form? Could the bacterium found within a comet be the fertilized eggs of another sentient being or civilization? Or something that contains enough genetic material to, in the right environment, build into a multicelled organism? What if we were able to predict how a particular cellular organizm would evolve in an in environment. Could we produce an un-evolved microbe which, once within a livable atmosphere, would begin the process of, not just reproduction, but evolution? Could this be the source of the "intelligent design" theory? Ouch!
The latest estimates put the upper bound of life on Earth at 3.9 billion years ago. That's a mere 600 million years after the formation of the solar system. It's not many times more available time at all.
As to life being hard to happen, who is to say? This is little more than a restatement of the 747 in the junkyard claim.
Even worse for this or any panspermia theory is the utter lack of evidence. Can you provide some evidence that such comets as the one needed for this theory to exist are or were out there? Can you provide evidence that any sort of life, even in this hypothetical hibernation state, could survive hundreds of millions of years of freezing alternated with a pretty damn high radiation environment?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So are we talking about real life or virtual life here?h tml - The New York Times has an article about all of us being simulations.
...if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.
In fact, the number of virtual ancestors (X) is likely to be so huge compared to the number of real ancestors (Y) that Y is a tiny % of (X+Y). So the probability that we are a part of the X bucket is a lot more.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/science/14tier.
The argument, in a nut shell, is as follows: Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or "posthumans," could run "ancestor simulations" of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.
2+2=5 for very large values of 2.
I couldn't help but notice a parallel to one of my favorite psalms. And as there is obviously no one on /. antagonistic toward religion, I thought I would share... ;-)
Theory of the Article: We developed inside a radioactive ball of clay, water and organic molecules and were stuck there for millions of years until we crashed into the earth, after which we developed into terrestrial creatures.
Psalm 40:1-2: "I waited patiently for the LORD, and He turned to me and heard my cry, and He brought me up out of a tumultuous pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings."
Life started on earth, and it is even possible that deep in the oceans some life forms are still emerging spontaneously from basic molecules.
It's conceptually easier to envision life starting from somewhere else rather than attempt to create or even imagine the right conditions that could lead to a synthetic life form.
The main reason is that we want to mystify and spiritualize life. We prefer to speculate that somehow life started where it had no chance to evolve and accidentally reached earth which had all the right conditions for millions of years, but no seed! Such theories are fine except that we still have to figure out how the first life form started sometime between now and the Big Bang.
Indeed the idea of some basic molecules spontaneously starting to reproduce a given scheme and eventually leading to conciousness and all our present technology is disturbing, but there is no science if we start by discarding the most plausible hypothesis!
So did Deep Impact find any deep-fried space critters?
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
I've always thought the tornado in a junkyard analogy was a stronger argument against ID than it was evolution, since it actually describes (albeit with a "smart" tornado) what ID claims is the truth, not what evolution theorizes is the most likely scenario.
I read the internet for the articles.
No, there's nothing in ID that argues for instantaneous creation, or against creation by evolution.
That makes a big difference, though. It's a question of probability. If life cannot spread through space, then it must have begun here of its own accord, and so we're looking for a theory that allows good odds that life will start on any planet chemically and environmentally favourable for it to do so. If life, once started somewhere in the Universe, can spread through space by natural means (i.e. without first needing to evolve intelligence and build starships), then we're allowed much longer odds, because of the far wider range of space and time. If you have a million worlds all rolling the dice on abiogenesis, you have far better chances than with only one.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I haven't read the book but based on the summary alone I can make a quick guess at the guys intellectual prowess. He claims from what I can tell that the current molecular system is irreducible which I don't find surprising at all for two reasons:
a) The current molecular systems is not the one that originally evolved or the one that existed at any point in the past. Evolution removes unnecessary pieces and those pieces are quite likely the building blocks (now replaced with more efficient and specialized versions) that are essential for it to be reducible.
b) The structure that this evolved from may be a lot different from what it is now. It may be irreducible (partially by the previous point) to anything close to its current role but its past role may have been very different. The reason or even form of the past role may be impossible to determine without knowing the exact environment that it evolved in. For example modern blood types are apparently the result of them, by pure luck, bestowing resistance to humans against certain disease (which will not exist in a million years but blood types still may in some new role).
c) Our current knowledge of molecular biology is primitive in terms of our predictive power and is based almost fully on analysis of what we see. We cannot predict what is possible given slightly different molecules or subtle changes, we simply lack the computing power for it.
In other words I find someone claiming that there is no evolutionary path to something a strong indication of their idiocy or irrationality. We simply do not know enough to make any such claim as we cannot predict to any degree other mitigating but now invisible factors (ie: due to c we cannot predict the possibility of a or b being the case).
Wouldn't it have been simpler to say a septillion rather than a trillion trillion? It's not like 10^24 is an unnamed number.
can't remember the exact theory, something about a comet from the alien's home planet seeding life on earth, or the other way around... nothing like old Fox sci/fi shows.
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
Evil: What sort of Supreme Being created such riffraff? Is this not the workings of a complete incompetent?
Baxi Brazilia III: But He created you, Evil One.
Evil: What did you say?
Baxi Brazilia III: Well He created you, so He can't be entirely...
Evil: [Blows Baxi to bits] Never talk to me like that again! No one created me! I am Evil. Evil existed long before good. I made myself. I cannot be unmade. *I* am all powerful!
--Time Bandits
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
I guess Hubbard was right! Time to get out your thetan-blasting guns; it's 22 trillion trillion to one that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_(Scientology ) happened.
Using data from recent comet-probing space missions, British scientists are reporting today that the odds of life starting on Earth rather than inside a comet are one trillion trillion (10 to the power of 24) to one against.
I find it amazing that, despite the fact we are the only place in the known universe where life exists and NO life has been found anywhere else (only a single dubious fossil of a bacterium which may or may not have originated off-world), they can postulate that the odds are so very much in favor of life having originated elsewhere.
I'd say the "Overwhelming evidence" is stacked in favor of this being yet another crackpot theory.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It's a main argument that might have made more sense half a century ago when our best data was limited and our experimental evidence was largely Urey-Miller. The growing body of evidence, while still woefully small, suggests that the kinds of chemical reactions that might be needed to go from prebiotic organic matter to some sort of proto-life may not require all that much time at all. What seems to take a lot of time is moving from more primitive prokaryotic organisms to eukaryotes, and on to the more complex plant, animal and fungal forms that we see today.
I think the most basic problem with panspermia is that it seeks to solve a problem that we don't even know exists yet. It seems to violate Occam's Razor by adding a good many entities to the abiogenesis argument, and still doesn't really answer the origins issue, merely pushing it back.
If, and I'll admit at this moment that it is an if (big or little), life requires water (or some liquid capable of dissolving and suspending molecules for more complex organic chemical processes to occur), along with energy, it would seem that the early Earth had both of these in abundance. There are problems with modern abiogenesis theories, there is no doubt about it, but the problem with panspermia models is that they do no better job of answering the real dilemnas than other abiogenesis theories, save perhaps that it adds more time, though in an environment that is extremely hostile to life, particularly over long periods of time.
Panspermia seems to commit essentially the same error as Intelligent Design, by insisting, with really no evidence at all, that there is something so inherently complex in life that the time between the formation of our planet and the cooling stabilization of the surface was insufficient to produce life. The problem here is largely in what these arguments tend to think of as life and what abiogenesis researchers are referring to. There seems to be this attitude that life must have, under terrestial abiogenesis theories, sprung up pretty close to being recognizably modern, when in fact, it seems far more likely that there was a progression from some sort of primitive self-replicating molecule through a number of evolutionary stages until we end up with the first primitive cells (which might not, other than being bags to isolate internal chemistry for the external environment) necessarily resemble modern life at all.
We do know that there was plentiful amounts of energy on the Earth at that time, and if energy is ultimately the major engine driving the evolution of life from organic molecules into forms we could confidently call living organisms, then time may not be that much of an issue at all. We're still talking about about a hundred million years or more here, and if life couldn't form in a hundred million years, how does increasing that by a factor of five make it that much more likely.
I won't even get into the really goofy trans-stellar or trans-galactic versions of panspermia, which are even harder to defend.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The tornado analogy is not meant to be an analogy for evolution; it's meant to be an analogy for the origin of life. Evolution may work as a gradual ratcheting up, but it only works amongst reproducing organisms. The simplest thing we have that is theorized to be capable of evolving is a bacterium, which is orders of magnitude more complex than a 747. While it is hypothesized that in the past there may have been simpler forms capable of reproduction and evolution, we would need to have a full-blown theory -- a workable model -- of such, to see whether such a thing would be more or less complex than a 747.
Well, since there is still a chance they're wrong, faith has legs to stand on here. After all, that's the whole purpose of faith: to believe and accept something as fact against overwhelming odds.
Not that I believe it but the faith based folks certainly haven't been defeated here. Not like there's a contest or something.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Yes, I have.
I finally got around to reading it last year and was surprised to find a very reasonable argument.
No, it's not. It's a very long and drawn out argument from incredulity. Stephen Colbert took the piss out of his "irreducible complexity" nonsense with a single sentence:
No offense, but you have a way in making one of the most fascinating and simple stories, confusing and difficult to understand. Are you related to Dennis miller by any chance?
"Either is happens, or it doesn't"
And there was a 50/50 chance that I'd get the punchline right, and I got it wrong thanks to a spelling mistake.
Either it happens, or it doesn't.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
The simplest thing we have that is theorized to be capable of evolving is a bacterium
Nonsense. Any replicator subjected to differential survival pressure is capable of evolving, and there are simpler replicators than bacteria.
What's confusing about it? The main argument (I might say the ONLY argument) for panspermia is the central claim that there wasn't enough time between the formation of Earth and the cooling of the planet sufficiently for a substantial atmosphere and liquid water to form, and thus for the conditions to become ripe for life to evolve.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
NPR Science Friday just had a presentation last Friday by Dr. Kay Bidle about measurements of microbial DNA in antarctic ice sheets. He found that although it was possible to revive some microbes from buried ice as old as 8 million years, the DNA became significantly degraded. The effective half-life for the DNA was about 1.1 million years, and this was for ice buried at the earth's surface, under the significant shielding effects of the atmosphere and the overburdening glacier. Cometary ice in space will be subjected to a much more intense radiation environment. The Bidle paper (appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) speculates that panspermia within our solar system may be possible, but tranfer from outside the solar system would be extremely unlikely.
They were in a canister, but worms managed to survive the space shuttle Columbia explosion & subsequent crash to earth at high speeds:2 19.shtml
http://science.slashdot.org/science/06/01/04/0334
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-6016657-7.html
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
If you have have been reading science stories lately.
It might be life Jim..., physicists discover inorganic dust with life-like qualities
http://www.physorg.com/news105869123.html
The article states: Particles in a plasma can undergo self-organization, This effect results in microscopic strands of solid particles that twist into helical structures. Under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust can become organized into helical structures. These structures can then interact with each other in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and life itself.
I have a theory that has been called crackpot by many of my friends,
Maybe it's nutty, but I am putting it here in the event that someday if it's proven correct maybe I will get a little credit.
Let me add a few minor crackpot theory alterations, maybe it's possible for high temperature plasma based DNA, life to slowly adapt to cooler non-plasma organic life?
Possibly how life was formed. (my crackpot theory) Dec 30, 2006
1. All higher elements such as carbon an Oxygen had to be formed in the core of a star. These could only have been released in a super Nova.
2. Our planet, sun and solar system much have been formed from the remains of such a super Nova.
3. Within a star must be strata of gases, liquids and light solids like rocky material and heavy iron solids. These were created in the nuclear reactions and precipitate down withing the star and eventually settle into there own strata.
( I have since been told only plasma can exist, but I am not completely convinced. Either way there would still be strata, and now we learned that inorganic DNA like molecules can form within plasma )
4. All objects such as comets and asteroids must be composed of super nova debris. I would think each of the three types of objects comets *water" and smaller "water" asteroids are from similar strata while stony asteroids are from silicon rich layers and then heavy ones from Iron rich layers.
5. With in a star, nothing is really solid at such fantastic temperatures and pressure but everything must seem like a super heated ocean environment.
6. Like in the oceans we have solid methane gas that only stays solid because of the pressure. And we also have super heated water that stays liquid at +700C, and supports life at these temperatures.
7. Below the earth crust is far more life then at the surface, these are all extreme-o-files living off of other chemical processes such as sulfur reactions. These single celled organisms also live in very high temperatures and pressures.
8. Comets are full of amino acids. How did they get there? They must have been formed within the star itself?
9 The chemistry of a Red giant star and regular stars must contain oceans of liquid Hydrogen, methane and water at different strata. All at somewhere near 4000C (measured within a sunspot) possibly lower and at enormous pressure.
10. For the most part much of the chemistry at 0 to 50 C on at 1 atmosphere of pressure can work at much higher temperatures when under higher pressure.
11. The Volume of high temperature oceans within a sun are much much larger then can be found on any planet.
12. With increased volume this increases the probability of interesting rare chemistry occurring such as the type that created DNA. Also the stability over a very like time, 5 Billion years, would allow such reactions to occur and evolve.
13. The creation of DNA / and it's protein molecular engine, the single celled organism) is the only think I find incredible to have evolved on earth. That engine It's the most complex thing on this planet.
14 Like on earth appeared almost immediately after the surface cooled. This seems like life was trapped in
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
+5 PWNED! He got you good, Gore!
Evolution can act on any self-replicating structure
Provided the self replicator does not make "perfect" copies.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"Er, five," said the mattress.
"Wrong," said Marvin. "You see?" Item 2: "That's a pity," said Arthur. "I'd like to hear what he had to say. Presumably he would know what the Ultimate Question to the Ultimate Answer is. It's always bothered me that we never found out."
"Think of a number," said the computer, " any number."
Your brain is not a computer.
Does it confuse you to characterize statements that are clearly plausible as not merely self-evidently wrong (without any elaboration on your part) but as literally "crazy" and thinkable only by "crackpots"?
I'm just not clear on how you get yourself to say with such conviction what you yourself know you don't believe (the emotional energy you have gives it away), and psychology is a sideline interest of mine.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Spore delayed to add pre-cell comet level
Didn't the whole planet come from non-terrestial sources.
JWs (I'm quite familiar with them, having been raised one) and other Creationist groups are really big on finding scientists like Hoyle that they can quote, or in many cases, simply taking quotations out of context (quotemining) to make scientists sound like they're saying one thing when they meant quite the opposite.
What I find truly ironic about these groups (almost all of them Protestant, or in the case of Harun Yahya, Muslim) is that for all their addiction to arguments from authority, they'll reject the statements by well-known theological experts like Pope Benedict XVI. Essentially, authority is only good when it backs up there own pseudo-scientific and pseudo-theological musings, but when it goes against them, authorities suddenly become unreliable quacks out to distort the True Faith.
My favorite JWism, though to be honest, most JWisms are pretty much cribbed from the older ICR literature (it's odd that for all their declarations of morality, various Creationist groups have no problem whatsoever stealing from each other without attribution), is the claim that "All Science Agrees With The Bible", and then immediately turning around and declaring "Any Science That Goes Against The Bible Is False Science". They cherry pick the science they'll incorporate, and reject that which they won't. They'll use arguments from organic chemistry to reject abiogenesis, but then reject organic chemistry that indicates the nature of the abiogenesis event.
Of course, these guys aren't writing for the scientists, who are overwhelmingly on the evolutionary side and basically lost causes, but for the unwashed masses that wouldn't know an emperically sound argument from a load of horseshit.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And it would appear the trolling starts with you... If you act like a troll, look like a troll, and probably smell like a troll... dude... your a troll.
This is just a restating of a theory that has been around since the 1960's. The author of this is one of the origional authors. The problem it has always had is that there is no real proof. There can't be until we have the ability to go out and survey a large number of comets. Not going to happen real soon.
The origional authors were Sir Fred Hoyle, an astronomer, and Mr. Wickramasinge, a mathematician. Both were major level scholars in thier respective fields. Mr. Hoyle also did not believe in the Big Bang or universal exspansion. The evidence was not all in at that time. It seems to be now.
The panspemia theory was that comets or large meteorites could harbor some forms of primitive life, and that the life forms carried could survive intact in some impact events. Life then would be 'seeded' in new planets by debris from other star systems. In this view, most of the planets that could harbor life forms, will have (or have had) at least simple bacteria. Everything more complex was explained by evolution.
It was origionally a way to get from non-life to life, by effectivly doubling the time available. At the time (and to a large extent even today), the jump from non-life to bacteria is larger than the jump from bacteria to us.
The theory was rejected in the 1960's by most scientists because they knew that no life form could survive in space. They also knew that while collision events can expel tons of surface debris into space, that no life form could survive being blasted off the earth, and even if it did, that it couldn't survive the impact of landing on a planet.
We now know that all of the objections were wrong. Fungus has survuved for a decade or more in space with vacuum, radiation and extreems of heat and cold. Some bacteria is millions of times more resistant than we are to radiation, and frozen/dried out bacteria are known to have survived for many millions of years entomed in amber, only to come 'back to life' when the conditions are right. Bacteria have also survived earth re-entry on space junk. So, all of the conditions for panspermia CAN be met.
At this point it is near certain that earth and Mars had at least the potential to exchange life forms early in thier history, probably both ways several times. There should have been bacteria ladened rocks hitting some of the moons of the outer planets too. A few rocks would have been exchanged with passing stars, so even if we weren't origionally seeded from elsewhere, we have probably seeded some other stars.
Still that's a lot of if's. All of that doesn't really prove anything, and it would take visiting and analyzing DNA on site to determine if there is any relationship between any earth life and any life (present or past) on another planet.
As an Idea, panspermia will not die, but it also can not be accepted as true by main stream science. It's just not able to be proven. I don't expect to live long enough to see that change. I don't think you will either.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
I couldn't help noticing the following parallel:
Theory of the Article: We developed inside a radioactive ball of clay, water and organic molecules and were stuck there for millions of years until we crashed into the earth, after which we developed into terrestrial creatures.
Psalm 40:1-2: "I waited patiently for the LORD, and He turned to me and heard my cry, and He brought me up out of a tumultuous pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings."
One argument I've not seen against Cometary Transspermia is
based on recent biochemical findings. Despite what Star Trek
tells you, our common genetic 'software' (DNA, RNA [4 bases]
and proteins [the common 20 amino acids]) is an accident of
maintaining 'legacy code'. Although no evidence exists that
the 'kernel' of life has ever changed -- on earth or above
-- all creatures use the same chemical language -- in the lab
creatures using alternative chemical 'bits' (nucleotide or
amino acid) have been created readily. If cometary life-rain
is the source of life then where is the 'alternative' life
ecosystem possessing different chemical 'software'? It is
really unlikely given the vast potential of chemistry to
come up with the same biopolymer DNA/RNA/amino acid code
-- why Ala Asp Cys...etc anyway.
Should not every single life giving comet have its own unique
storage polymer (something like DNA) its own repertoire of
unique amino acids (why should they be L -- why not D)
Quick answer, transspermia physicist types do not know a thing
about chemistry or biochemistry much less the conditions on the
early earth. Wickramasinghe has begat good deal of cock and bull.
---537
1. intelligent design, and fundamentalism, deserves to be mocked
2. if you are a fundamentalist, that is, you hew to what is written in a dusty book more than you do to your own sense of humanity (don't tell me there are no conflicts between those two things) then you deserve to be mocked as well, or worse, for creating suffering, poverty, death, and evil in this world, as all fundamentalists do, directly or indirectly
fundamentalism, whether abrahamic, dharmic, or even atheist (stalinism, for example), is the very definition of evil on this planet, and fundamentalism is the enemy of peace, and the enemy of every good moderate religious person (ie, humanists, who will champion good common sense when pressed to choose between the commands of a dusty book and basic decency)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
but i would like you to give me evidence of and i quote
obviously i'm not as knowledgeable on this subject as you are but i do have had my fair share of
carbon chemistry and i don't recall to ever hear about self-replicating molecules, please explain
i do think however you're absolutely right on most points and i wholeheartedly agree on the fact
that it just seems some scientists are very eager to assume they're spawns of alien organisms
Or perhaps it depends on how you look at it. But the problem is easier to understand as a False Dilemma, not a Straw Man. Since we don't know exactly how long life takes to evolve, because it's a random process that we've never watched happen, it could be that it evolved independently on Earth, in comets, and all over the place. It could also have come solely from the planet Krypton. Even finding actual life in a comet would not show that it evolved there, rather evolving or being created by God on Krypton. That's a metaphor.
The good professors should embrace, as they say, the healing power of 'and'.
sigs, as if you care.
No, you're wrong.
Since comets arrive in the solar system from all directions, it is assumed there's a big cloud of comet-like material out there beyond the solar system. This is called the "Oort cloud". We know almost *nothing* about it. Astronomers believe that this material is much older than the solar system, left over from the condensation of the solar nebula.
Remember that the heavy metals in the earth did not originate in our sun, they are from a previous star that went supernova. Much of the material in the solar system has been recycled in this way from previous events. There's a lot of material around that is vastly older than the sun... the gold you buy your wife was born in a supernova.
In fact, assuming (1) the hypothesised vast longevity of pre-sol cometary material in the Oort cloud, and (2) assuming that this material contains liquid water and organics and clay, and (3) assuming that life can originate spontaneously in such media, it is almost inconceivable that life didn't form in comets before it formed on earth.
Sorry: having violated the groupthink, I completely expect to be modded as a troll. Sigh.
i have answered a similar question recently. you mention Dawkins, but you don't mention Dawkin's discussion of heredity being the defining quality of life, and then going on to discuss the work of Sol Spiegelman. look him up, he's in wikipedia.
no, its not a definitive theory, but i think its a little stronger than very tentative speculation; the origin of life could really be as simple as the replication of a short strand of RNA.
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
I've spent a lot of time campaigning and educating in favor of evolution. With that said, Michael Behe is a pretty smart, well-spoken dude, who deserves his PhD even if he's misusing it. I think he's self-deluded, but I don't get the feeling he's anywhere nearly as much a crackpot as this guy. At least he can back up his high-level assumptions with non-clearly-incompetent math.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I'm no expert either, but it's my understanding that current theories call for a sort of intermediary stage where we have primitive self-replicators without all the trappings of what we would consider to be living organisms; long chains of organic molecules that could replicate, if by nothing other than the action of the water, breaking apart to form smaller chains that would in turn incorporate surrounding organic material and build themselves up.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
In other words, it's still a strawman.
The laws dictating how different elements and ions react and combine with one another are not random. Chemistry is not random, it's stochastic. You don't combust hydrogen and oxygen on different days and get water on Monday and aluminum file cabinets on Wednesday. Nobody, but nobody other than creationists and other folks engaged in trying to misrepresent the position they're arguing against holds that DNA or anything else "randomly" assembled itself from a preexisting mix of chemicals.
It was this same month that at the northpole scientist looking for ancient frozen cells, concluded that after 1.5 milion years the DNA helix doesnt survive, the reason for it. At the poles more radiation enters earth.
For panspermia to work and to seed a galaxy much more then a milion years are required.
And more radiation will aply in space destroying complex moleculair life bounds.
If you would say but the comet could include the right kind of clay.
Well we allready had lots of it here
So its more likely its te opposite chance
How much did it cost who sponsored them and what was their budget idea... tahts the main question.
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
... really, at some level I'm still in touch with my ancestral roots. I still get the urge to hurl my spore through the galaxy to colonize other planets. I practice every day.
Holy crap!
Does this mean that the scientologists were right all along?
I don't know if I could cope with that. Where's my towel?
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
We all know that man came to earth in a giant bubble (yep, the original bubble-boy). The only question left is: Which came first, the bubble, or the boy?
"Now I'm seriously serious!" - Serious Sam
I never got why panspermia was such a compelling theory. It just pushes the real question, "how did life begin", back a little. Maybe life on earth started from genetic material on a comet. That genetic material had to come from somewhere, so that just means that abiogenesis occurred on a planet other than earth. Why is abiogenesis elsewhere more likely than abiogenesis here?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
MYTHBUSTERS, of course! Although Adam and Jamie might run overbudget testing this one out. I'm guessing the odds are 10e24 to 1 that Adam giggles at the term "panspermia."
So now that we've figured out exactly how improbable it is, we just fire up our Finite Probability Generator, provide it with a cup of really hot tea, and voila, the Origin of Life. =p
Such as?
As it is written in the scared scrolls, " Life Here, Began Out There"
they theorize that humans came from Klingons
1. my decency compels me to be decent to every human being, unless that human being first denies that i deserve to be treated with decency as well. this is the crime of the fundamentalist, not of me. i won't deny anyone decency, unless they first deny decency to me. and all fundamentalists do that. (if they don't, they are not really a fundamentalist)
2. i applaud your humility before god. except that i think you will find that what god wants you to do is really what some grouchy old man wants you to, who says he speaks for god. either that, or what a book says, that you interpret, failingly. unless you wish to represent to me that you know god's will better than i do. which is funny to speak of humility then, because that's an interesting sort of arrogance now isn't it?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
indeed crackpod in some degree :)
No not want to hurt you, basicly all havier elements are made trough exploding stars.
But inside the stars ther is only plasma, plasma is another state of mater
To hot for strands od DNA or proteine, or blood or other life elements.
A plasma is ruled by magnetic forces and nuclear forces only
The weak bounds as for chemic bonds do not exist in a super heat plasma.
But your right heavy elements are made of stars.
complex chemics however are likely to exist (no one kept it all clean and organized)
Since there are so many chemical options it's even likely that amino acids are at some space rocks
As it is likely that there will also be chemics which resemble nothing we have seen before, or could possibly think of.
Nad yep for sure there is somewhere a golden commet larger then myself. The chance that it would look like me is however not likely (unless you have read the transgalatic hidgehyker, i'm actualy Arthur you see..)
Well what did that guide of that story told me..
The one thing intresting is perhaps carbon itself.
Carbon has a lot of chemical stable intresting combinations in chemics
From plastic bag, diamont, DNA, till perspex
Carbon turns out to be the Lego of our universe (especialy in the environment at earth).
Thats next earth environment.. lots of water in which carbon can float
Floating boiling movement, means almost a huge chemical cooking pan.
Because of the water it can move around unlike the moon (carbon overthere wont react with neigbour chemicals).
So given time you can get to life as we know it.
Given the right condition however perhaps life could be based under high pressure in some kind of acid sea based on fluor atoms but its not yet proven. Until we know more about it the best Lego are carbon atoms.
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
Could explain diversity.
so if this makes the universe the womb of life, what does it make comets?
"(10 to the power of 24) to one against"... ... and FALL-ing ...
You may think that number is really big, but that's just peanuts compared to an Infinite Improbability Drive.
Come on, are you Brits losing your nerve? Let's get back to some real heavy numbers.
(Just to switch from Adams to Vinge for a second, isn't Wickramasinghe one of those group-mind dog thingies from "A Fire Upon The Deep"? OK, back to Adams.)
Yeah, some real heavy numbers, like some Plutonium Rock. How did it go? BWAH *BWAAH* BWAH.
I am also bloody disappointed none of you came back from the future to specify Dr. Brian May to play the Disaster Area sequence. He took the time (snortsnort) to come back 50 years to appear on "The Sky At Night's" 50th anniversary, so it's the least you could had will diding. It would'll be done only another 30 years backforeing for him to going had do the first BBC radio version.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
There's nothing in ID that argues very much of anything, other than the essential concept that "somehow somewhere something is wrong with evolution". It's Creationism so rendered down that it makes no meaningful claims at all. Oh sure, there's this nonsense about IC and bacterial flagellum and the vertebrate immune system, which researchers have happily debunked by providing theoretical pathways (and let's remember, all that is require to debunk an IC claim is to demonstrate a possible means for such a pathway to evolve).
ID is yesterday's news. The latest scam is Teach the Controversy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Quotes in headline should have been on 'scientists', not 'overwhelming.' trillion trillion...
It's the 'separation from god' that really scares the suckers. I'm sure if 'hell' were a bottomless pit of fluffy pillows, there would be just as many believers.
Blar.
This depresses me. As an unwilling agnostic, I've tried hard to weigh the evidence for/against the various Creationist accounts. When advocates of Creationism employ crappy mathematical arguments, it slows down my investigation considerably.
Prions?
1/3 of jokes get modded OT. If you get the joke, mod 1 in 3 insightful/interesting/underrated to restore karma balance.
The origion of life has *NOTHING* to do with evoltion.
"Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) and Chandra Wickramasinghe (born 1939)
were important proponents of the hypothesis who further contended that lifeforms continue to enter the Earth's atmosphere, and may be responsible
for epidemic outbreaks, new diseases, and the genetic novelty necessary for macroevolution."
Yea Wickramasinghe!
Dear "scientists":
The evidence might lend some support to your theory, but at first I was confused how it allowed you to get such certain numbers.
Then I realized that your evidence came from comets, but the numbers were found at a different source - Uranus.
Yours troll-ly,
AC
Pulling the string on the See 'N Say...
"The author says..
Radiation in comets could keep water in liquid form for millions of years, they say, which along with the clay and organic molecules found on-board would provide an ideal incubator."
So does Earth. It's GENIUS, I say. GENIUS!
You said panspermia... uh. huh-huh. heh. uh. huh-huh-huh. hm. huh-huh.
Mod parent down!!! He actually read the book. HE doesn't belong there.
Not only did the comet house humans...but there was a perfect earth waiting for the housed humans to have a perfect ecosystem to live off of? an ecosystem that now keeps 6 billion people alive on a daily basis? it also allows all of our animals to live (water and land life)? and it just happened to be that it landed on that planet? out of all planets? wow, athiests bring some crazy theories to the table why can't we all just accept the creationism theory and move on with our lives who would have thought that one day you'd go from living in a comet to surfing the internet on a perfect planet...
The thing to keep in mind here is what Creationists do when they come up with this "bazillion to one against x happening" claim is that they're usually trying to argue for the occurence of an entire novel feature out of some base system (ie. bacteria from an organic soup). Well of course, that's so unlikely as to be impossible (though I still think one should demand to see the work behind even this kind of claim). But that is nothing more than pushing over a strawman of what abiogenesis theories state. No modern theory claims that anything like a modern cell popped out of the first abiogenesis event. Quite the opposite, the basic notion is that the first products of such an event probably wouldn't even be considered life. They were replicating organic molecules. Abiogenesis wasn't one giant leap, but a series of intermediate steps that ended with something approaching what we would view as a cell.
In short, these great big statistical arguments against abiogenesis aren't even arguments against any hypothesis that scientists are putting forth.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
what bothers me is that a co-author is a phd student that *appears* to be a relative of the professor studying under him.
A distinct conflict of interest and something the university should strongly discourage,
Oh, gosh. That Wickramasinghe. Those Archaeopteryx papers he co-authored with Hoyle and others were really bad. The idea was worth checking out initially, but the whole thing collapsed under pretty basic scientific scrutiny. Not even the motivations they offered for a supposed forgery made any sense (you should see the lengthy, detailed paper that Owen, a vigorous anti-evolutionist, wrote about Archaeopteryx in the 1800s, yet he was supposedly someone involved with the forgery? Crazy). Heck, the photographic techniques they used were mundane, even though the papers were in the British Journal of Photography.
This "Archaeopteryx forgery" claim is so lame that even most anti-evolutionary creationists don't use it anymore (e.g., "Answers in Genesis" lists the "Archaetopteryx is a fraud" claim as an argument that should not be used). I can't think of a stronger repudiation of Wickramasinghe's paleontological claims than that.
Anyway, past performance doesn't mean his current argument on a different subject is wrong (at least it involves math!), but it certainly bears careful scrutiny.
It does not make sense.
"One the one hand I could understand what you are saying...on the other hand I won't understand what your are saying."
What is really silly here is that a strand of DNA won't last 5 minutes in the ocean, doh!
When the country falls into chaos, politicians talk about 'patriotism'. Lao-Tzu
I mentioned this to a friend. His reply: "I bring you a message: water, and earth." Can we get more scientific hypotheses which can get reduced down to statements from 300?
Viruses, RNA chains, proteins (prions), etc, etc, etc.
A-Bomb
What did you think about his chapter regarding the lack of published papers detailing evolutionary theory of sub-cellular mechanisms?
;-)
An argument from incredulity is not a fair summation of the book because Behe never makes the claim that evolution can't be true. He's only saying that, at a sub-cellular level, there is a (growing) burden of proof that the proponents of evolution ought to explain at some point.
In other words, we've been looking 'behind the curtain' of macro life for the past few decades and found the underlying mechanics of life to be far more precise and 'engineered' than we've realized. To be clear, I'm not saying Neo-Darwinistic Evolution has been proven to be wrong either. I'm saying that, given the last 50 years of research at the lowest level of life, it would be nice to add more substance to the theory that explicitly discusses the mechanisms of evolution at this level.
BTW, I'm particularly interested in evolution from an information theory POV. The basic premise of Evolution seems to be at odds with Shanon's laws related to signal degradation. That's what a comp-sci degree does to you: _everything_ is viewed as information
PS Colbert?! He's a comedian. Trivializing for the sake of humor is what they do! At least use the Richard Dawkins' quote on the book's Wikipedia article if you're going to be dismissive.
But don't macro-evolutionists (for lack of a better term) also rely on statistical arguments whose underlying models are hard to validate? I think they generally see that micro-evolution works in the lab, and then assume that enough micro-evolutionary events have occurred to yield the macro-evolutionary results they believe to be recorded in natural history (i.e. the fossil record).
I'm not saying the macro-evolutionists are wrong, just that they too seem to be question begging when it comes to probabilities that are hard to really validate.
Bear in mind also that Wickramsinghe is intimately tied to the whole Hoyle cosmology. Fred Hoyle never accepted the Big Bang model, and to the end of his days maintained the Steady State universe, which is infinitely old and maintained against entropy and expansion by 'continuous creation'. In such a universe, panspermia has colossal advantages - the origin of life can be as many vigintillions of years back as you like, and such vast timescales allow it to permeate every possible niche in the cosmos, even randomly drifting on ice slower than light. A steady state universe in which life has once arisen ought to be absolutely riddled with the stuff, so panspermia becomes a very viable model for how life began on Earth.
In a Universe which is only about three times older than the Earth, the advantage panspermia gives are substantially less; the range of worlds on which Earth life might have originated becomes reduced dramatically, and the depth of time since when life might have been spreading in the Universe is suddenly finite and short.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
One problem with the theory as I understand it is that comets don't have a magnetic field blocking cosmic rays and so the DNA in any cells on a comet would deteriorate from cosmic ray bombardment. The presence of cosmic rays means there would be a limited lifespan for cells to survive on a comet.
Okay, let's pretend for a minute what we're willing to entertain the possibility that the interior of comets is conducive to "primordial soup." Okay, I guess that part isn't so big of a stretch.
How, pray tell, is this "soup" supposed to survive atmospheric re-entry and impact on earth's surface?
"Inquiring minds want to know."
-CR
"So is the BSD licence even more 'free' (than GPLv2)? Yes. Unquestionably." --Linus Torvalds (TinyURL.com/2vugzl)
You're right back to the 747 in the junkyard. The problem with scientists - and biologists in general - is that we usually don't realize how difficult it is for some people to understand DNA didn't spring into existence in one single instant any more than people, lizards, sponges or bacteria did. Many simpler replicating mechanisms exist - viruses, RNA, protein (prions), and so on. The backwards path of evolution follows smooth curve all the way down to zero complexity - it doesn't end at bacteria, as some foolish poster already suggested, nor does it end at DNA. It goes all the way back to the very first replicating molecule, which was undoubtedly extremely simple, and which only had to occur one single time in history to explain everything we see today. It's utterly explicable. As a result, chances are that life is very, very common throughout the universe.
A-Bomb
The people that did the recent revival of ancient bacteria said that their numbers prohibit interstellar panspermia because the half life of DNA travelling through the cosmos is very low, due to cosmic radiation. They found that DNA's halflife in the Antarctic was something like (IIRC) 800,000 years, and that's within earth's and the Sun's protective magnetic fields.
I would be extremely interested in seeing your math on this one. A good definition of "information" and how to measure it would be a good start. Everybody I've seen invoke Shannon or Kolmogorov in this context has fallen flat on his face before even getting to that point.
Colbert actually hit on a crucial point: The whole idea of irreducible complexity falls apart for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that the constituent elements of a supposedly IC system would have to be useless in and of themselves.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
We can start with the fact that macro-evolution (as defined by biologists, and not creationists) has been observed (that is to say, evolution beyond the species level).
There is a fairly (and far beyond me to explain) statistical aspect to evolutionary biology, but the main thing to keep in mind is that modern evolutionary theory predicts that all life, extant or extinct, will fit into a nested hieararchy. The bonus of the Modern Synthesis and of the last thirty or forty years of genetic research has given us a twin-nested hiearchy; not only do the fossils give us a pretty good notion of the faunal succession, but the genetic data, by and large, confirms and extends those observations.
This is the root of why evolution is a well-supported scientific theory. It's nice to have a single line of data, but when you get to evidentiary lines that fit together as well as the fossil and genetic data does, I don't think it's any great leap of any kind to state "Here is evidence for common descent".
Let's remember the flip side of all of this, and that's falsification. For common descent to be falsified, one need only provide some examples of organisms that fall outside of the twin-nested hieararchy, or of fossils that violate the faunal succession. So, if you can produce some bacteria that uses an entirely different genetic scheme that is not related in any way to the way life as we know it does, then common descent has been falsified (though, you'll note, evolution has not). As to the faunal succession, if you pull a rabbit fossil out of strata, say, 3 billion years ago, where bacterial colonies represented the most complex organisms around, then we have a very serious problem.
Now, how do we falsify a common Creationist retort; that God (or the Designer(s) or whatever) used a common toolkit, and that's why all life uses the same basic nucleotide system, or genetic language if you will. On the face of it, it seems a reasonable retort, until your factor in that said Designer likely could use any genetic he/she/it/they pleased, and there's every reason to expect that there might be a half a dozen, or a hundred or any number you like (and can expect to be likely to be useful for inheritance) such systems as there is just one. In short, any and all observations are essentially compatible with the claim "God did it" (or whatever formulation of God/designer/alien scientist/etc. you want to invoke).
The reason Creationists are picked on for their "million to one, 747 out of a scrapyard" arguments is because those arguments do not in fact address anything that modern evolutionary theory or Common Descent states, but rather knock down oversimplified and rather silly strawmen of what those theories claim happened. There's nothing positive in their claims, simply just fallaciously-formulated arguments against everything from the Big Bang to the formation of the first cell.
If one observers that all extant organisms fit into a hieararchy, then I don't think it's an inference too far to state that that relationship is more than just happenstance. If that observation fits within the predictive nature of a specific theory, then is it unreasonable to state that that observation is in fact a piece of evidence for that theory?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There are those who believe, that life down here, began out there...
The last time I checked with my telescope I could swear that Earth was floating in space, so yes, life started in space alright, unless those guys think that it is turtles all the way down...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Is that the reason why humans are destroying the earth and live in Mars instead?
Strive to be happy...
Yes. You have to compare mass of oceans vs. the mass of liquid water in comets which hit the Earth between the time oceans formed and life began to determine the odds, assuming each liquid water droplet has the same odds of having life starting in it spontaneously in a given time period. It doesn't help Earth any if life begins in some comet which never hits the Earth...
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
For those interested in why the tornado in a junkyard assembling a 747 is a useless analogy for the process of evolution
Isn't the correct term for this "emergence" which is what happened before evolution. Obviously, matter, energy, and gravity had to come about with a sun and planet formations with the proper elements way before we can even start to talk about evolution.
And since there is no evolution in planetary formations (and most non-organic matter), we call this emergence.
In theory, if you had an infinite amount of tornadoes, infinite number of junkyarks, and infinite amount of time you could eventually get a 747 if you wait long enough.
Of course we might be facing the death of the sun, proton decay, and/or heat death of the universe by the time this happens.
And by no means is this something that will even come close to the time scale of the millions of years evolution takes.
I mean... It took 10 billion years for the Earth to even form and then 4 billion after that before we even got to macro evolution today that produced the life that would even have the remote chance of evolving into intelligent life.
So in that respect, if your definition of a 747 is a planet that is conducive to carbon life then we have have answered this question, but this took longer than even macro evolution of intelligent life.
It doesn't really matter how bad the odds are because in order for intelligent life to notice itself, it has to have happened. The whole concept of Anthropic Principle is that the universe must have at least at one time be friendly to carbon based life even on a minuscule probability before carbon based life can sit around and contemplate this fact.
If the 747 did not happen, then we would not be here discussing this.
But I'll agree... The tornado and the 747 analogy have nothing to do with macro evolution. Emergence and evolution are two completely separate things, but you need emergence to get the building blocks of life first.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I especially like this flaw:
"The earth receives 51 billion kilowatts of solar energy every second."
Really? Kilowatts per second? So it's increasing? Try kilowatts. No scientist would make this mistake. It's obvious, you buy lightbulbs by the watt, not watt per second. This website is much better (from NASA): http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/Oven/
"the Sun deposits 342 Watts of energy into every square meter of the Earth."
Watts per square meter is much better. Thank you NASA. Saladin: stop embarrassing pro-evolution.
That's an excellent summary of his (IMO) loony hypothesis!
>>Radiation in comets could keep water in liquid form for millions of years
Could. Possibly. Maybe. If everything is exactly right. And if there were several heretofore unknown mechanisms in place. And a few scientific principles were ignored. etc. etc. etc.
vs.
Sedimentary evidence of a stable environment RIGHT HERE ON EARTH that has kept water in liquid form for, oh, say A FEW BILLION YEARS.
Sheesh. Was the "It's turtles, all the way down..." lady his mom or something?
Any spoon would be too big.
A clue as to where life started surely comes from noticing a peculiar coincidence: the Earth-Moon system is a freakish double-planet system. Round about when life began, the Moon was very much closer to the Earth, and a day much shorter (4 hours?). Tides, twice a day, would have been enormous. The perfect mixing cauldron for banging chemicals together until something interesting happened. And here life is found. Coincidence?
I have no goose.
The conditions of early Earth can be determined to some degree, and the time between Earth forming and the earliest known signs of life can also be determined. Any theory which states that life began on Earth has to explain how said conditions lead to life in said timeframe. This far none has.
Panspermia, on the other hand, claims that life was born somewhere else at some point after the Big Bang and earliest signs of life on Earth. "Somewhere else" doesn't constrain the possible set of circumstances nearly as much as "on Earth", and the timeframe is far longer too. It is also impossible to prove false.
Given the choice between lots of time-consuming chemistry reasearch and a hypothesis which is impossible to falsify or really even research but allows a lot of poetic pseudo-philosophical nonsense in the vein of "we are children of the stars", "cosmic bortherhood", and "the thrut is out there", which do you think people will choose ?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Panspermia: (n) the theory which states that sperm gets all over everything.
The probability of life starting on comets is 100%. There are vastly more comets than planets in the universe, comets sometimes even travel from solar system to solar system. And as far as we know, the universe is infinite, therefore any subjective percentage becomes 100%. As for how that comet got to earth safely, microbes aren't given enough credit. They're tough, they're *really* tough. Depending on the size of the comet there would be a good probability it would shatter in midair before it struck the ground - just from the increase in the temperature of the comet, and the sudden resistance from the atmosphere. That would likely lead to a type of aerosol effect with some of the water from the comet, potentially carrying microbes. Water itself is an amazingly efficient heat resister, so much so that I think there would be a very good chance of some debris from the comet landing safely. All it takes is a single microbe for things to get started, and as this theory suggests - that precious cargo is in the center of the comet, protected by the exterior ice and clay.
In the absence of pre-existing organic life, none of those things are self-replicating. Ideas evolve as well, even simple ones, but that is again not helpful in determining the simplest thing which can (without help from another organism) replicate. To my knowledge, bacteria, or the bacteria-like organisms thought to precede them, are the simplest such things currently known, or in any meaningful way theorized. It's been speculated that maybe there was an RNA-based life form that was simpler, but I don't believe any actual model for such has ever been suggested.
There is a 100% chance that life began in space.
--NerdMachine
Maybe a good argument exists, but if so the person offering the crappy argument doesn't know it, so it follows that their conclusion is not based on any good argument.
(a) and (b) are wrong, and (c) is a logical fallacy (even ignoring the fact that his premise is wrong due to (a) and (b)).
If he has supported any of that nonsense with math, I'd like to see it.
That's the trick though - you don't actually need good odds at all. All you need is for the event to not be impossible even though it may be improbable.
Keep in mind - when you have the entire surface of the Earth (with all it's wildly varying conditions) to work with, you have a giant MIMD chemical paralell processor. Even if the event is improbable (per try), the odds of it happening at all go sharply up when you are trying millions (billions? googol?) of times per minute across millions of years. How this seems to generate (in the minds of some people) impossible odds - while accepting that it was a) not only possible somewhere else, and b) transferred to Earth by an even more unlikely event, escapes me.
factor 966971: 966971
children of Khan Noonian-Singh :)
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
Any theory which states that life began on Earth has to explain how said conditions lead to life in said timeframe. This far none has.
Except that it doesn't really. If the timeframe Earth has been around is 1/1000th of the average time you'd expect the abiogenetic process to yeild life on average, well that's ok. There are likely to be 1000s of Earth-like planets in the galaxy. All those stochastic molecular events are not only taking place on the surface of primative earth, but every other primative earthlike planet in the universe. It only has to happen once for us to be here and puzzle at how rare we are. I mean, the chances of winning the lottery are extremely low, but someone usually wins.
Given the choice between lots of time-consuming chemistry reasearch and a hypothesis which is impossible to falsify or really even research but allows a lot of poetic pseudo-philosophical nonsense in the vein of "we are children of the stars", "cosmic bortherhood", and "the thrut is out there", which do you think people will choose ?
You are right there. No doubt about it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Sort of like when celebrities speak about, well, anything.
Well, that throws a wrench in the works!
To
If we find life on Mars, the odds are that we put it there.
Once the accidental or purposeful spread of life is possible, then the probability of life spread to neighboring space far outweighs the random formation of life there. Intelligent life existing somewhere only increases the odds of the spread of life.
I guess it's more appropriate to speak of the Earth as the final frontier, now. Poor trekkies.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Paragraph 5
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Oh come on, mods. How is this flamebait?
>The simplest thing we have that is theorized to be
>capable of evolving is a bacterium, which is
>orders of magnitude more complex than a 747.
ooohh, you mean like a 777?
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
"In the absence of pre-existing organic life, none of those things are self-replicating."
Nonsense...ever done PCR? ALL DNA and RNA can self replicate without being inside a living organism.
Well considering even our planet began by congealing particles in space, why is this even a discussion point? Of course we came from 'space'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Time works in favor of probability, but against duration. That is, while long periods of time work in favor of probable occurrence, long periods of time work in opposition to duration or persistence. The probabilty that a beneficial mutation will persist is less than the probability it will occur. That is why such noted evolutionists as Stephen Jay Gould in "Structure of Evolution" and Ernst Mayr in "What Evolution Is" do not accept the "one tiny step at a time" theory.
But your underlying point still remains: the argument about the probability of a bacterium forming spontaneously depends on the completely unsupportable assumption that no simpler natural self-replicating system can exist.
Let's see: liquid water for millions of years, check; clay, check; organic molecules, check. Hey, the odds of life originating on Earth are a trillion trillion trillion gazzillion to one! Whaddya think about that, mister?
We were looking all this time for aliens and apparently we ARE the aliens...
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
There once was a comet near Venus
with a tail so small it was tenous
it landed on Earth
despite its small girth
though it wanted to hit on Uranus.
I come down on Dawkins' side of the debate, not Goulds'.
A-Bomb
And the result has been a disaster! So, the comparison with Hubbard is good!
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
The only thing that makes people not take theories of human origins from space seriously is their egos. You guys are just too damn *educated* to think scientifically about an issue. I'm not saying anyone knows the truth, but it isn't that drivel that they fed you in school. Look-see: Fish, reptile, little ape, ape, ape-man, man. I know, 'cause I've seen the cartoon in my science book. If any one looks scientifically at all the holes in this theory, an open mind would have to say, "C, something else".
Here's the cartoon I originally meant:
[Two aliens observing the planet earth]
A1: It seems the earthlings have developed atomic bombs.
A2: Let me see, maybe it's time to interact with them?
A1: They are pointing them at each other.
[Two aliens walk away from observation site]
I wouldn't approach us, either.
As a biologist, I can tell you your thoughts on bacteria are wrong on so many levels. First, what we would call the simplest form of LIFE capable of evolving is a virus, and derivatives thereof. Amazingly enough, there are even simpler things which we would not immediately think of as LIFE that are capable of evolving. In fact, one of the most interesting theories on the origins of life is that of the self-replicating RNA. RNA is ribonucleic acid, a polymer made up of ribonucleotides. These ribonucleotides can spontaneously polymerize at an agonizingly slow rate (maybe other factors present in the primordial Earth could speed it up). However, once you allow the possibility of RNA assembly, you can start to get macromolecules, and at some point, one of these RNA sequences could acquire an enzymatic activity. The most intriguing activity being replication. So far, in a laboratory setting, scientists have be able to select RNA sequences (from random ribonucleotide polymers) that have the ability to ligate two RNAs together. This is an extraordinary proof of principle that a very simple self-replicating molecule can arrive from even simpler components. Once you have RNA (which is already an information carrier, like DNA), random mutations can be the force for evolution.
Never lose sight of the fact that all evolution is about cumulated changes over time. In a sense, it could also provide a framework to think about the origin of "life". The tornado analogy fails even there, since exceedingly simple "life" is nowhere near as complex as a 747 (on the other hand your comparison is wrong because a bacterium is far more complex than a puny jumbojet).
You're going to have to do a lot better than that. That argument is no more convincing, on its face, than saying that God created life. In fact, I'd personally say the odds of God creating life are higher than 1 in 1000 so if I have to choose between competing theories with no proof, I'll go with God. Plus that solves the other confusing problem of how the whole universe began, something which your 1 in 1000 lottery doesn't get us any closer to answering.
You're using big words, but I can't imagine you've possibly thought this through. Have you actually read peer-reviewed literature on the RNA origin hypothesis? There have been plenty of models suggested. Now we can even recreate in a laboratory setting the creation of random RNA sequences that have enzymatic activity such as ligation of other RNAs. Once you allow for the idea that nucleotides can come together all on their own (albeit at an exceedingly slow rate), you need nothing more than a long time and selective pressure to get to the point where you and I can debate this point on Slashdot. It sounds like you believe in a creator...please correct me if I'm wrong. If that is the case, you will always suggest that the spark of life can never have had a natural cause because it was always too complex, required preexisting components, etc. All I can say is that we'll continue to find more and more evidence for complexity arising from even simpler components, to the point where these simplest components have well established natural origins.
Devil's advocate here...
This is kind of a questionable achievement. Since biologists define what a "species" is ("a group of related organisms that share a more or less distinctive form and are capable of interbreeding") and since biologists define what "macroevolution" is ("Evolution at or above the species level"), it doesn't necessarily follow that observed macro-evolution is enough to conclude that all known species occurred through such evolution. This is akin to saying "I define space as anything above 500 feet. I know the moon is in space. I know I can shoot a bullet with my gun higher than 500 feet. Therefore I conclude that I can shoot the moon with my gun."
I can definitely imagine how microevolution could lead to a situation where organisms might no longer be able to breed. I'm not sure that necessarily convinces me that this will lead to some of the organisms sprouting wings and others sprouting trunks.
Again, Devil's advocate: "I don't think it's any great leap of any kind to state 'Here is evidence for a common creator.'"
If I see two very similar looking programs with similar programming style, comments, etc. I can either conclude that one evolved from the other. I could also conclude that they were written independently by the same programmer.
True enough. And while that might mean their claims aren't scientifically, it doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong.
If a virus is a form of life, it is only such in conjunction with a host organism. It's only by means of the complexity of a host organism that it can reproduce or evolve. So the complexity (or lack thereof) of a virus says nothing more about the complexity needed for replication or evolution. If I write a simple computer program which evolves into something more complex, that may be even simpler than a virus, but it's equally beside the point because it's not evolving on its own, but through the agency of something far more complex (namely me).
I'm aware of the theory, and it's interesting work. However, it comes nowhere close to actually modeling an organism that could grow, reproduce and evolve indenfinitely. Hopefully somewhere down the road there will be more to it.
First of all, it was my point that a bacterium is far more complex than a jumbo jet. Second, if you can point me to a colony of virueses which reproduce and evolve without the aid of more complex systems, or any other complete system that can reproduce and evolve that is significantly less complex than a bacterium, (or a jumbo jet, for that matter) please do.
There is obviously much compelling evidence that indicates the age of the universe, but with a good deal of that, the words 'if we are correct in our assumptions' can be found fairly regularly. (A good thing in my opinion) What if we are (widely) wrong about the currently accepted values? Not trolling, genuinely curious - most of the alternate theories are up their with the conspiracy crackpots, surely there must be some rational ~scientific~ argument from the other side of the fence?
Where does relativity fit in to the equation, expansion, dark matter, 600 million years is a spec of time, what's the margin of error? And why?
Dawkin's says it nicely, the "747/junkyard" argument works AGAINST a designer. Evolution doesn't pop out finished life-forms, it's gradual. Yet, for ID to be valid, something enourmously complex would have had to exist first to do the creating. We don't need tornados in junkyards for life to evolve, but we need something even more magical for the designer to have sprang forth from nothing...
Maybe "God" evolved? Maybe. But there's no evidence for that, and the folks who push ID don't much like that idea. Maybe we shouldn't ask where the designer came from? Maybe, but that ain't science - science doesn't draw lines in the sand and forbid further inquiry. Not asking where the designer came from puts ID squarely in the dogma/religion category. ID, taken scientifically, invalidates itself.
[quote]Radiation in comets could keep water in liquid form for millions of years, they say, which along with the clay and organic molecules found on-board would provide an ideal incubator.[/quote]
the earth didn't have liquid water, clay, and organic molecules for millions of years?
lose != loose
You should see this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objections_to_evoluti on
It is obviously very easy to twist statistics to fit any need. But logic can not be twisted and this article should at least bring some doubt into your mind about evolution.
Help Me! I'm trapped in the tubes! Oh noes! Here comes a internet!
Speaking as a biologist, there is a grain of truth to the 747 out of a junkyard statement. A widely held theory (especially among biologists who study microRNAs and ribozymes) is that life forms with DNA-based genetic elements originated from organisms with RNA-based genetic elements. The (circumstantial) evidence is that RNA (or RNA-like molecules) are central in many biological processes. For instance, the catalytic function of the ribosomes (protein-RNA complexes that assemble proteins from amino acids) is performed bot by protein, but by RNA. Many protein enzymes rely on ATP and NADH as cofactors to perform their normal function. Many viruses have an RNA genome.
d own, which is a bit surprising for scientists.
So, fine, DNA-based life forms slowly evolved from RNA-based life forms. That much is, at least, imaginable. RNAs that could copy themselves started to use proteins and DNA to do some of the work, and added things on piece by piece until one of them hit on the combination of roles for DNA, RNA, and proteins that we see today.
But what about the first RNA-based life form -- some RNA that can make a copy from an RNA template. In a gneral soupd of organic chemicals, with some energy input, you can get nucleotides to form by chance, and even chains of them. I can easily imagine that somewhere you just happened to have one RNA strand that, quite luckily, can copy other RNAs. The real hitch is that two of them have to 'just happen' in the same place, at the same time, so that one can copy the other. This is asking for a lot, even for a simple form of 'life,' a RNA-based RNA polymerase.
To solve this problem, RNA-life apologists often postulate a form of 'Pre-RNA Life," which is a litte bit unsatisfying. It's a little bit like turtles all the way down http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_
I believe a quote from a lecture by Dave Bartel http://web.wi.mit.edu/bartel/pub/ sums it up best:
"Based on what we know of pre-biotic chemistry, you could make a pretty good, I would say airtight even, case that life as we know it should not exist. Unfortunately, it does."
People concerned about trying to discover the origins of life, wherever they may have occured (given our reliance on liquid water and solution chemistry, frozen comets seem a little farfetched to me), would be well-served to focus their efforts on studying the conditions that lead to the creation of simple, self-replicating, organic chemicals. Understanding those conditions would certainly place constraints on the possible locations for the origin of life on earth, and provide a palatable answer to the 747 argument.
It may not be much of a leap, but can you explain to me how one would go about determining how or why a creator would use one method, ten methods or a hundred? Common descent makes a prediction. That prediction, thus far, has been bourne out by every analysis of every genome of every organism we've had the chance to look at.
You can falsify common decent. I cannot imagine a way in which you can say that for a Creator. All possible observations can be explained by "a Creator did it", and it thus has no explanatory power whatsoever.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Maybe you should check out http://talkorigins.org/ and then explain why tired, debunked objections should carry any weight with me at all.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'd just love to know how precisely you compute the odds of God doing something.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"The only thing that makes people not take theories of human origins from space seriously is their egos. I'm not saying anyone knows the truth, but it isn't that drivel that they fed you in school."
Poppycock, finding where life on Earth came from doesn't tell you anything about the origins of life! If life can spontaneously arise in one ball of rock and goop in the universe then given the size of the Universe it's extremely likely it can arise on many balls of rock and goop in the Universe. We will never know where the first microbe arose/landed on Earth but who cares? - It's how it arose in the first place that is important.
Multi-cellular life did not land/arise on Earth until a couple of billion years after microbes, again it's not the where that is important (or even likeley to be knowable) it's the how.
The rest is evolutionary history that is grossly over-simplified for school kids as a worm-to-human progression.
"...an open mind would have to say, "C, something else"."
No. An open mind would read more than the high scool text book, unless of course it's ego won't allow it.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Although I think there are simpler replicators than bacteria, PCR is creating an environment artificially that is not likely to happen, with very complex (and expensive) enzymes in abundance, and a regular heating-cooling cycle (yes I have done PCR).
Which means that something like PCR would not have spontaneously happened.
My car won't start in space, you insensitive clod!
You don't realy know that until you try it.
Until then, it's just a theory.
The truth shall set you free!
"In space, no one can hear you cream."
While this may be garbage, even if we presume that the comets we can currently see are at the maximum lifespan of comets, a big presumption in and of itself, then that would mean that at the time life began on this planet comets as old as the ones we see now probably existed, which would mean that those comets could have had a several billion year advantage on the earth.
....we are children of the stars.....
To me it is preferable to believe we are the children of the God who also made the stars. Because we are His children, we are also brothers. That is the truth that is more palatable to me and many others than the idea that we are a cosmic accident flung to earth by a comet.
All theory is gray
....There are likely to be 1000s of Earth-like planets in the galaxy....
That is wishful thinking. There are simply too many parameters that have to be "just so" in order to build a laboratory where the conditions for life exist. There is likely only one such lab, our earth. That lab, like any science lab did not just happen, but was planned and executed by a superb engineer.
All theory is gray
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
.....They were replicating organic molecules.....
Has anybody ever made any such molecules? If so, were the conditions under which they were made even remotely close to what is imagined to be the environment of the early earth? Science is about observation and experiment. These theories postulate process nobody has ever seen or made happen in a real science lab. Just because you can make bricks, doesn't mean you can make a house by the same methods you made the bricks.
All theory is gray
Don't enzymes just speed the reactions up? If you don't have the enzyme, the process can still happen, just not quickly. Evolutionary models all work on long term, geologic-scale timelines. I fail to see the conflict there.
Not from around here...but a real square, little, fellow.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Give a monkey a brain and he'll swear he's the center of the universe.
I don't like those two words so close together. Sounds like a combination you'd see on Fox News...
.....We can start with the fact that macro-evolution (as defined by biologists, and not creationists) has been observed (that is to say, evolution beyond the species level)......
Are sure that is a FACT, scientifically observed? Can you give an example that shows where someone has observed in nature today or made this happen in a lab?
In the Bible the word "kind" is used and that is not the same as the scientific idea of "species". Dogs, cats, snakes, birds etc. are different kinds. There are many species within each kind.
To contradict the Biblical record upon which the Creationists base their theory, someone would have to DEMONSTRATE the evolution of one kind of creature into another kind. Saying that this only happens over large amounts of time doesn't demonstrate this. That simply makes time equivalent to magic. Anytime you postulate that a certain process happened in the past, it should be possible to demonstrate this process in the present.
In physics we can emulate with powerful particle accelerators, many of the conditions that are theorized to have existed at the "big bang". That gives us real science understanding of what likely took place way back then. Nothing similar has ever been done in the life sciences.
Evolution from one kind of creature to another has been postulated, but has never been demonstrated TODAY.
All theory is gray
Homer: Air?
Warden: Ain't no air in space.
Homer: There's an air-in-space museum.
.... if energy is ultimately the major engine driving the evolution of life from organic molecules into forms we could confidently call living organisms,.......
The problem is that energy alone is insufficient to build something complex out of simple parts. The ingredient of Information must also be present. Proteins are quite complex. DNA and RNA are proteins which store the information to make proteins. What came first, the DNA made from proteins that holds the information to make proteins or the proteins? It's the ultimate chicken and egg problem. The likeliest solution is that someone made them both together in their lab and put them here together. Someone also made a whole chicken, which subsequently laid eggs.
You can supply all the parts of a mouse trap, but without some sort of direction, energy alone will NEVER assemble these into a functioning device for catching mice.
All theory is gray
In physics we can emulate with powerful particle accelerators, many of the conditions that are theorized to have existed at the "big bang". That gives us real science understanding of what likely took place way back then. Nothing similar has ever been done in the life sciences.
And yet, the fact is, nobody has ever actually seen a uranium atom split or hydrogen atoms fuse. We've never actually seen an electron tunnel across a barrier potential, but the evidence that they do is overwhelming. We infer that these things happen based on our models and the evidence collected from data. In other words, you're being terribly inconsistent. On the one hand, you accept inferences that come from physics, but you deny the very same kind of inferences made by biology. You can't have it both ways, you either deny or accept them both, otherwise you are nothing more than someone who selectively picks and chooses what they believe in to satisfy a personal agenda.
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
Xenu made it all happen! Now, give me $15,000 and I'll clear your thetans.
You are ignorant on this topic.
I would recommend some Dawkins-- he goes through theories about origin of life in the beginning of Blind Watchmaker and Selfish Gene. Very easy to read, not very in depth, but a good starting place. Happy reading!
To sum it up, there are many, many theories and models for what could have preceded bacteria-like life and have been far simpler, yet could lead to bacteria-like life.
For example, if you put nucleotides, which have been observed to form in young-earth like conditions in a vat of water, they can slowly form a chain of RNA. Given enough time, these RNA chains will replicate without any of the machinery that today's life uses for the same task. The fact that these processes are slow is not an issue--- there was plenty of time back then, after all, for them to do their dirty work, and no other organic monsters lurking and waiting to eat them.
Given the limited supply of nucleotides, natural selection will kick in--- and variation will beget evolution.
Cheers.
That's very untrue, we can place some reasonable constraints on life's origins based on what we see now. A good starting point would be that the original replicators were subject to the three tenets of Darwinian selection: 1. Variability 2. Heretability 3. Differential fitness. This excludes a great number of potential hypotheses, and suggests some avenues for research. In any case, even if their number is "wrong" (they don't know the exact mass of comets, they had to guess) they do make a reasonable case based on time and real estate that life probably originating in space. The number is helpful in that others who might add a third or fourth variable to the equation have some idea of what kind of difference would be required to overturn their result- adding a 50% probability in a third variable doesn't change the conclusion.
Ah, but you forget the possibility that life originating in one comet could spread to other comets. Imagine a large comet, where life formed, and completely filled with the little buggers---- and then the comet passes a little too closely to Jupiter, and the gravitational field tears that comet into tiny shreds that go shooting like a life shotgun into the solar system. It might not be long before everything in the solar system that is compatible with that life form is infested. The authors of this paper are making the case that at 10e24 times more time and real estate, the rate of spread between Put another way, we have numerous pieces of Mars here on Earth--- ejected from Mars' surface and out of it's gravitational pull following meteorite impact there. If there was life on Mars at some point, it traveled to Earth in this fashion. And vice-versa. And so too with every other major gravitational body in the solar system and most of the minor ones.
What if most of the Earth's water came from comets?
If you mean 1 septillion why say trillion trillion? Can't anyone count these days?
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1367-2630/9/8/263/n
Even the Urey-Miller experiment required electrical input.
Brown dwarfs come into the picture because their atmospheres should be low enough temperature to allow life to exist on planets traveling through them. On such planets, the entire planetary surface would be bathed in a diffuse light and relatively weak electrical activity at all times. This would be the ideal setting for the formulation of both DNA and lifeforms because there would be no seasons, no tropics and no ice caps. Furthermore, L-type brown dwarfs have water as a dominant molecule in their spectra, along with many other biologically important molecules and elements. Its satellites would accumulate atmospheres and water would mist down from the sky. He adds:
The statistic about the chances that comets are the harbingers of life is a completely meaningless number. We couldn't assign even slightly meaningful statistics to astrophysical theories until we had figured everything out at the very end.
I'm sure some of Thornhill's details don't correspond with the mainstream views of brown dwarfs in various ways, but it stands as yet another prediction by him. He has quite an impressive track record on these sorts of things, by the way, so people would be wise to not discount him on it.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
An alien microbe, having evolved in a completely different environment, would likely not fare well in competition with Earth's native microbes, and would thus be hard-pressed to survive at all, much less go on a killing spree. There's some truth to the "War of the Worlds".
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Viruses don't replicate on their own, but require a living cell to do so. RNA chains do, but without a proteing synthesis machinery (cell) surrounding said chain, two different RNA chains don't differ in their survivability at all, since the information coded in them doesn't do anything without said machinery. Prions might just make it; even so, it is hard to see how a more complex prion would have an evolutionary advantage over a less complex one, since more complex ones are likely to require more complex (and therefore more rare) raw materials to convert.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Genesis 2:7 - "The Lord God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being."
You might think it's a better idea but that doesn't really make it a 'truth' now does it.
On a side note I find it incredible that people persist in clinging to narrow minded beliefs such as those imposed by religious observance. At least make an effort to open your minds to the real wonders of reality.
Fixed that for ya.
I have to say that this is nearly the best comment I have ever read, certainly the funniest. Thanks! But at the risk of sounding like a bit of a smart-arse, don't you mean "Chemistry is not random, it's not stochastic"...?
Yes, multiply that by the probability that particular "life-bearing" asteroid hit the Third Rock from the Sun... That should even things out...
How can you just suppose something as complicated as replicating organic molecules just - poof! - came to be??? Start with Genesis, and good night's rest and a warm cup of humility and call me in the morning.
i smell BS! We all know life and the universe appeared about the same time about 6000 years ago. It says so right here in the bible!
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
I have a question for everyone. The conception is that we were the first products of this solar system. (Disclaimer) I am by no means an expect or even a newbie on solar history) From what I have learned is that there was a sun and possible system pre-dating our sun which would have had exploded. The evidence is in the heavy elements with in our planet that are not created unless in certain cataclysmic events.
So if the star exploded then a planet with proto-life in our (old) system would get destroyed and sent to space as fragments and frozen water. When this system reformed and eventually the gravitational pull from the current sun pulled the material back; the existing material would be pulled back to the planetoids.
The finest shade.
And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.
That argument is no more convincing, on its face, than saying that God created life.
Well I wasn't really arguing about God, but comparing abiogenesis and panspermia. I was just arguing that the objection raised (earth hasn't been around long enough) to abiogenesis doesn't really affect it's likelyhood with respect to panspermia. I just pulled those numbers out of my ass, and if it's more like one in a billion or a billion billion, there are plenty of galaxies in the universe.
I'd personally say the odds of God creating life are higher than 1 in 1000
What are the chances of something creating god? An omnipotent being is surely more difficult to create than us puny humans. If God can exist without a creator why not us?
Plus that solves the other confusing problem of how the whole universe began
Except it doesn't. It just pushes the question further back. If god started the universe, who started god?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I would say the findings offer a plausible mechanism that overcomes several objections to the Panspermia theory but it's much too early to call the evidence overwhealming.
Even on the basis of statistics, we would have to first know what percentage of comets have enough radioactivity to keep water liquid AND not so much radiation that it destroys anything life like that comes about AND the radioactive elements have a long enough half-life that those conditions would last for billions of years AND the right mix of hydrocarbons and clays. So far the sample size is 2. Neither showed the necessary radioisotopes.
For a statistical argument, arguing (however successfully) that a comet COULD have the necessary conditions and then counting total cometary mass vs. Earth's mass simply does not cut it.
Note that so far the number of direct measurements revealing all necessary elements in a single place on a single comet is ZERO. Of course, we haven't yet had time to study a significant number of comets comprehensively enough to have such a direct measurement so nothing is ruled out either.
The main problem is the answer to "how did life start" is "nobody knows" what is also unknown are the right elements and conditions for it to start...
...then life could have started in comets
So we have,
if comets have the right elements for life to start
if comets have the right conditions for life to start
if comets have the right conditions for life to survive in space
if comets have the right conditions to transport it to earth
if life in comets can survive on the early earth
or
Life started on Earth (which might also have had the right conditions...)
or
Panspermia is right but life started elsewhere and was only transported on comets
or
Panspermia is right but life started elsewhere and got here by another method
or
Panspermia is right but life started here independently anyway
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Ironically the "junkyard assembling a 747" analogy is applicable to Hoyle and Wikramsinghe's hypothesis that viral pandemics are due to viruses from space. Since there is no pathogen host co-evolution, there is no evolutionary rachet effect. The space evolved "virus" has to be randomly "lucky" to act as a pathogen to a complex organism that has not evolved to infect.
Wikramsinghe has made a contribution to scientific knowledge in his work showing that organic molecules are widespread in space. Unfortunately though he is a distinguished scholar in mathematics, physics and astronomy he and the late Sir Fred Hoyle have not have even a basic understanding of biology. Both the evolution of life from abiogenic materials on earth and in space in comets are possible and not totally mutually exclusive hypotheses. But to claim that the evidence points extremely strongly to life on earth having evolved from cometary origins is highly contentious to say the least.
The earth is flat and the sun orbits around the earth!
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Generated in deep space inside a comet, eh, and not even on Earth at all?
Mysterious are the ways of the Lord. I'm sure there's a passage in the Bible that predicts this somewhere.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
With all the comics here, it's hard to get comets in edgewise.
sig
Dogs, mate, dogs.
They, as a species, were once wolves, werent they?
DNA and RNA are proteins, but are the blueprints for proteins. RNA is used for short term transcription of proteins while DNA is longterm storage. Most theories say that RNA came first. The importance of clay in the summary is that clay has a structure remarkably similar to RNA. It is thought that clay was the first transcription substrate and RNA came from existing proteins later.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
.....And yet, the fact is, nobody has ever actually seen a uranium atom split ......
I guess the fact that two cities have disappeared under a mushroom cloud and that there are numerous fission reactors doesn't prove anything about splitting uranium atoms. What is your definition of "seen"? We can measure and observe the effects of electrons tunneling and even use it in many of our technical gadgets. NOBODY has ever turned a lizard into a bird or an ape into a man. Evolution believers always tell everyone that sort of "evolution" takes time, lots of time and cannot be made to happen in our lifetime or even over many generations.
Evolution theory has become a catch all for trying to answer the question of origins. Only very narrow aspects of evolution have been and can be shown to take place repeatedly and reliably TODAY. These all have to do only with organisms adapting to their living conditions. Bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics and Finches with thicker beaks surviving because they can eat tougher, harder to crack seeds. Darwin observed this on the Galapagos Islands. Science is about observation and experiments TODAY. Conjecturing about processes and procedures that may have happened in the past, but cannot be made to happen today or observed to be happening today is NOT science. Nobody has ever made a fossil, especially by any conceivable method that could occur naturally, without the application of intelligence. Again the magic of time is brought into play to explain the existence of fossils.
All theory is gray
whereby hewing to a rigid interpretation of how humanity should function, rather than being a good student of how it actually does, creates suffering and evil
all fundamentalist notions do this, and all fundamentalist notions fit this definition
as for me being a fundamentalist because i mock people and i point out evil: nice try. i am not perfect in my communication, but i am no fundamentalist
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
......On a side note I find it incredible that people persist in clinging to narrow minded beliefs such as those imposed by religious observance.......
Indeed so do I. Man, no matter where he resides on this planet is incurably religious. Religions take precious resources away from the evolutionary drive for the "survival of the fittest" and should have, according to the theory died out long ago.
The Biblical view of God creating man in such a way as to include within that human creature a yearning and attraction to Himself, explains the deep seated religiosity of mankind much better than evolutionary theory. Despite years of atheistic, evolutionary indoctrination, the vast majority of Americans still believe in God.
All theory is gray
.......Most theories say that RNA came first........
Maybe so. However both RNA and DNA are only information CARRIERS in the same way that a floppy disk or a piece of paper is. In a disk or paper, the source of information is ALWAYS a mind, a human mind. DNA and RNA have been called the blueprints of life. A blueprint carries information of how to build a house, an airplane or even a paper mill.
The DNA and RNA carry information how to make proteins, including the proteins they themselves are made of. Where did the instructions encoded into the DNA originate? In the mind of God? If not from the mind of God, then where?
All theory is gray
I think the DNA would denature before it would have a chance to replicate, although perhaps you are right.
PCR was still not the best example, though.
"Soooooo, they used two numbers (mass of clay & # of comets) to generate a 1e24 to 1 odd against life having started here? Seems like they might have left one or two variables out of their equation. Hopefully this is just junk reporting rather than junk science."
The most obvious one is "mass of all comets to have hit the earth prior to the date that life appeared on earth". It doesn't matter how many commets are out there. It doesn't matter how many commets hit the earth after life already appeared. We know life is here and approximately when it appeared. How many commets BROUGHT clay here PRIOR to that event.
their math assumes (among other things), that if life emerges on a commet anywhere, that it will immediately travel through space and pollinate all the other commets.
A more reasonable approach would be to assume that generally life can't travel from commet to commet and therefore the only way life on earth started in a commet, is that if it started in one of the commets which at some point actually hit the surface of the earth prior to life already existing here.
all the commets still floating out there in space are irrelevant. They are NOT the source of life on earth because they are still OUT THERE.
There could be a billion times more commets out there and it would not matter 1 iota. All that matters is how many commets struck the earth and how much of this potential living clay did they bring prior to the date that life already existed, compared to how much of this clay already existed on the earth at that time.
and thats assuming that life survives atmospheric-entry 100% of the time.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
An expensive disaster at that, aided and abetted by irrational zealots. By, this analogy just keeps on giving.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Sure, but all of these are pretty much guesses. The process has not been reproduced and we have no idea how to do it. Coming up with such numbers, when there is so much underlying uncertainty is good for Slashdot but other than that has limited value.
Oh, it's you again.
I'm not sure that necessarily convinces me that this will lead to some of the organisms sprouting wings and others sprouting trunks.
Same tired old shtick. I remember telling you A YEAR AGO that your notion about what macroevolution claims and requires for proof is complete bollocks. Macroevolution does not require the "sprouting wings" and "sprouting trunks". Your analogy comparing macroevolution to the moon is quite absurd.
"I don't think it's any great leap of any kind to state 'Here is evidence for a common creator.'"
Same old shtick. Same old useless analogy about comparing computer programs to living organisms, comparing the machinations of biology and chemistry to the thought process of a human, then implying that the design habits of a creator must be the same as those of a human. You still have not answered the question that forms the basis of this useless analogy. WHY WOULD GOD NEED TO USE TOOLS?
No reason. ... Therefore your argument based from the appearance of tool usage is garbage.
....From clay. Go read up on abiogenesis and clay.....
Where did the information in the clay come from? Proteins are not simple and require detailed instructions to make them. The chemistry of ink on blueprint paper doesn't explain or address the instructions printed thereon how to build a house. Information can only come from a MIND, not some inanimate object. The latter can be carriers, but not originators of information.
All theory is gray
What is your definition of "seen"?
That is precisely the point. By your reasoning, we can't make any logical inferences at all because you willfully misunderstand evolutionary theory such that it is impossible for any data to meet your standard of evidence. I can just as easily make the claim that because nobody has ever actually seen an atom split that the actual process that generates energy is completely different even though it happens to match the theory very well. That is precisely the argument you are making with respect to evolution and your willful ignorance of the theory is precisely what makes it possible for you to make such absurd arguments against it. Evolution doesn't predict that lizards turn into birds in a single generation, but using fossil and DNA evidence, the inference is every bit as tightly constrained as the inference that when atoms split they release energy.
The rest of your post is nothing more than a pathetic attempt to evade the issue of admitting that you do actually accept logical inference, but only when it doesn't conflict with your poorly constructed faith. For 1700 years theologians have warned against interpreting the Bible too narrowly in the face of reason, it makes Christians look like fools and ultimately destroys faith when the truth is revealed, just as your faith is being destroyed due to your idolatry of the Bible. You do not worship God nor do you have faith in God, you worship the Word as though it is the One, but it is not, and you have revealed yourself to be a fool.
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..... Evolution doesn't predict that lizards turn into birds in a single generation,.......
Nobody has seen this happen in a thousand or a million generations either. Evolutionists tell us that reptiles evolved into birds over large amounts of time. We can grow many generations of e-coli for example, and produce all sorts of variations thereof, but they will ALWAYS remain basically e-coli. You will never get an amoeba or a paramecium, no matter how many generations of e-coli you grow, though the latter two are also single cell organisms..
Evolution is faith, not science. Science is when a REPEATABLE experiment yields the same result each time. Drop a rock a million times and it always gains speed at the same rate. We can make observations of the behavior of natural phenomena again and again, but only in the present. That is science. When we try to INTERPRET the past or future from present observation, often, certain assumptions (beliefs) come into play.
We see and measure certain processes and then assume (believe by faith) that these processes are constant and extrapolation into the past or future is based on that belief. Such a belief may be well founded or maybe not. We cannot KNOW for sure because we have only such a minute time snapshot. Any logical inferences based on an assumption (belief) makes the conclusion, however logical the thought process may be, also a belief, not science.
Fossils, for example do not form today because of decay and oxidation after an organism dies. We do find fossils all over the planet. If we cannot watch them form or make them by a plausible mechanism, then all we can do is conjecture about how or why the decay that happens today did not happen in the past.
You cannot refute what I am saying and so, like usual, you resort to a personal attack. That is always a sure sign that you have lost the debate.
All theory is gray
Good point, and one can get a better idea by reading "The blind watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins. There is also a BBC Horizon documentary about it, where Dawkins himself explains in easy terms how things work. It is an old documentary, and it's very interesting.
The saddest poem
"This just in! Ants have been spotted who think they are elephants! Apparently their knowledge has puffed them up so much, they think they are more amazing than they are! They are redefining irony by joining in on bashing their Creator, who they say doesn't exist, but still insist on bashing Him! What we can't figure out is if they think He is so insignificant, why do some even mention him as a footnote at the bottom of every comment??? When they realize the error of their ways, they will surely wish they had praised Him and rejoiced in His amazing wonders of creation. Some are so confused they think they are Martians! Their brains are a stumbling block, causing so much pride, it is preventing them from seeking their Creator! More research must be done to understand how they could make such a huge mistake. For now, we must pray their hearts will be softened, and recognize their Creator, God Almighty, who sent His only Son to pay their debt. If they refuse to recognize this, when they have their first death, they will still be in debt, and God will honor their decisions they have made their entire lives to go another path than to choose to be with His Son. Here they will suffer the second death, for eternity, which is so long, time can never catch up!!!!"
Who's refusing to engage in the debate? You are! You keep moving the goal posts. Stick to the point I called you on! Explain to me the difference between the logical inference involved in concluding things that happen in physics versus the inference used to conclude that evolution is correct. All you did was show your ignorance of the scientific process by spouting creationist claims that have been refuted more times than I can count. Then you accuse me of making a personal attack when in fact, I'm merely telling you how screwed up and self centered your thinking has become, and you didn't attempt to refute that either.
We do find similarities in the DNA between closely related modern animals as well as anatomical similarities in fossilized ancestors REPEATEDLY just as evolution predicts we should. *And* we are even finding fossils of animals that evolutionary theory predicts that we should find, repeatedly.
Fossils shmossils, we find remains in various states of fossilization all the time! At the bottom of bogs for example where the oxygen level is low, such things have been found. And in older fossils we often find cases where bones, etc are *still* in the process of mineralization.
There's your response, even though you haven't responded to my original point. Please explain why logical inference is ok in other branches of science but not in biology. Stick to the point, I will not respond to any more of your goal post moving.
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Palatability is not a requirement for good theory.
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
.....We do find similarities in the DNA between closely related modern animals as well as anatomical similarities in fossilized ancestors REPEATEDLY just as evolution predicts we should........
Inferences, logical or otherwise are based on certain fundamental assumptions. One of the key evolutionary beliefs in interpreting the evidence of similarities in life forms and chemistries is the BELIEF that the more complex DESCENDED from the simpler. Another way of INTERPRETING the very same evidence is the belief (both are beliefs) that components and processes that work well get reused by the designer. The DNA data storage and coding system far exceeds in density, anything human designers have come up with. It is so flexible and robust the designer used it again and again, just as human programmers aim for re-useable code.
We use this idea of re-useable parts and processes in our own designs. The basic idea of the wheel is recycled for many uses. Nobody would suggest that modern wheels on cars descended from those on horse carts in the same sense that humans are thought to have descended from apes. Its just that elements of design that worked well for cart wheels have been incorporated into cars by their designers as well. We can even say that the cart wheel is the ancestor of the automobile wheel. However we use the idiom of ancestor here to mean common principles of design. This is not how the word "ancestor" in used by evolutionists when applied to living things.
The idea of descent, in the sense of lineage, is not used in other sciences. Even in physics certain assumptions, especially pertaining to time, are made. For example, we measure certain relationships and find that they have not changed much or at all since we developed the ability to measure these. We assume (believe) that we can extrapolate this short term constancy far into the past and future. Based on these assumptions we can calculate when certain events must have taken place or will take place. The "constants" upon which radioactive decay is based are BELIEVED to be invariant, but recent evidence has shown that this is not the case. We can make very logical inferences and come to good conclusions based on these only if they are not based on assumptions, but sure knowledge.
Evolution, just like religion, is based on certain fundamental assumptions (beliefs) that simply cannot be known. You can believe or not in the existence of God, but you cannot prove or disprove this.
All theory is gray
That link to the supposedly "fringe theories" that Wickramsinghe supposedly has in addition to his comet origin theory shows nothing of the kind. All that it says there is that some Creationists in 1981 foolishly tried to use Wickramsinghe as a witness for Creationism - but Wickramsinghe said Creationism is claptrap . In a perfectly circular argument, this Slashdot summary is now slandering Wickramsinghe as a Creationist by citing a page that features Wickramsinghe precisely because he is not a Creationist.
For even more perfect circularity, the person referencing Wickramsinghe in that debate (in defense of evolution) mocked Wickramsinghe because he has maintained since at latest 1981 that Earth's organic evolution began in comets. Which is exactly what this story is about, with now over a quarter century of Wickramsinghe's consistent science.
Wickramsinghe might be wrong. But this circus of supposed geeks just casting doubt on his work without any science in their "counterarguments" is a worthless opposition.
--
make install -not war
You're playing fast and loose with the evidence, making strawman characterizations of scientific theories and evidence and then you expect me to take your argument seriously. Sorry it doesn't work that way.
Strawman #1
One of the key evolutionary beliefs in interpreting the evidence of similarities in life forms and chemistries is the BELIEF that the more complex DESCENDED from the simpler.
This is not a belief, it is a confirmed prediction of evolutionary theory. Not only that, but you got the prediction wrong. Evolution theory predicts change by mutation. A mutation can lead to higher or lower level complexity, and we see evidence of both.
Strawman #2
The DNA data storage and coding system far exceeds in density, anything human designers have come up with. It is so flexible and robust the designer used it again and again, just as human programmers aim for re-useable code.
Then the designer is an idiot. Junk DNA, and long strings on non-functional DNA is not an efficiency that humans would replicate. Not only that, there is zero evidence that God designs things in the way that you want to assume. You have no evidence to support this other than your assumption, and it is a violation of Occam's razor. All you intelligent design types are supposed to be ok with that. Or are you lying?
We assume (believe) that we can extrapolate this short term constancy far into the past and future.
And how is this at all relevant? You're going into the "we can't make any logical inferences about anything" territory. And, as I've said (and you haven't refuted), you can't have it both ways. The scientific process is either useful or it is not, intelligent design proponents such as yourself claim that the scientific process is lacking, but you have yet to demonstrate that the process is lacking at all except through a lot of incoherent and thoroughly refuted arguments that don't amount to a hill of beans.
Anyone that claims that the assumptions of science bear any similarity to the assumptions of religion clearly doesn't understand the nature of either one, and you probably don't understand the difference between faith and reason either.
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.....Palatability is not a requirement for good theory.....
No it isn't, but then what is your definition of a "good" theory. Is your theory (if you believe in evolution) that you are descended from a rock, via worms and finally through apes better than my theory that I am a creation of a loving God who desires to have me in His presence now and forever?
All theory is gray
.......The scientific process is either useful or it is not,.....
The scientific process is very useful. It is when the scientific measurements are interpreted under certain assumptions, that different conclusions are drawn than if other assumptions are made.
(...Evolution theory predicts change by mutation...)
I have never made a statement about any mechanisms that are theorized to drive evolution. Evolution is based on descent, whatever the mechanism for change may be. It is the idea of descent that is assumed. ID assumes re-useable components and processes. Whatever evidence you present, can be interpreted based on good logic derived from either assumption. There is NO way to prove either assumption is correct. ID is certainly closer to way we humans as intelligent beings operate our technologies.
(.....Junk DNA, and long strings on non-functional DNA is not an efficiency that humans would replicate.....)
It used to be thought by medical science that certain organs, such as, for example, the appendix or the tonsils, were superfluous leftovers for which there seemed to be no discernible function. Only after years of painstaking research was it discovered that these things did have important purposes. Could it be that these so called "non-functional" DNA sequences do have purpose which has not yet been discovered? After all, as far as genetic science goes, we are still in the crystal radio stage right now.
(......And how is this at all relevant?......)
I have no quarrel with the logic of any inferences, only upon the basic, underlying assumption upon which the house of logic is built. Evolution in itself is a very logical, beautifully built house. However it is built upon a foundation of certain assumptions which cannot be proven any more than certain axioms in geometry are ever proven. These axioms are just accepted, without any questions or proof. One of the axioms of evolution is the constancy of our MEASUREMENTS of time, as based on certain relations in physics which we assume (believe) to be constant. Another axiom of evolution is that in living things, change is successive descent from one generation to another.
ID can explain or interpret all of the evidence in an equally logical way, but there is a different set of underlying assumptions (beliefs) as the foundation. The axioms of ID or evolution are unproven and unprovable.
(......you probably don't understand the difference between faith and reason either........)
Yes I do. Reason is based on faith. We have faith that the laws of physics were the same yesterday and will be the same tomorrow as we observe them today. We have ONLY access to the present. Yesterday is gone forever and tomorrow is not here yet. There is NO way we can KNOW for sure, but we believe this and it is a REASONABLE belief, but a belief, nevertheless. Science then is based on belief.
You believe that you will wake up tomorrow, but there is NO way you can know this. If you are young, it is highly probable that you will be alive tomorrow. Yet there were many of people alive yesterday, even young ones, who believed and hoped that they would be alive today to do this or that and they are dead. They never made it to today. Yesterday was their last day. One day it will be your turn. You do not believe that at that time you will face your Creator, but what if your belief about God and judgment were wrong? What if Jesus was right about the things He said and did?
All theory is gray
You are confused, and here it is laid bare right here:
Yes I do. Reason is based on faith
Reason is not based on faith. It is the other way around. Reason is based on logic. Nothing, not even God has the ability to change the fact that 1+1=2 without changing the definition of what 1+1 means. That is basis of reason. These things are true because they are constructs from which we extrapolate. If you can not define your universe in a logical fashion you can not reason, and you can not have faith, because faith is the conjecture that reason can not make. But without reason, faith does not exist, because without reason it is impossible to have any level of certainty at all. You can not believe in God without a reason, even if the reason would not be considered a good one, the reason is there. Faith comes from knowing that the reason is insufficient. You would not believe in God if you had never heard of Him. The very fact of hearing of Him, is a reason to believe, not necessarily the best of reasons, but a reason none the less. Faith is the leap beyond that.
They never made it to today. Yesterday was their last day. One day it will be your turn. You do not believe that at that time you will face your Creator, but what if your belief about God and judgment were wrong? What if Jesus was right about the things He said and did?
You're going to have to do better than that. Pascal's Wager? Please. By the way, I never said I believed or disbelieved in anything, only in your narrow minded conception of God's works. I don't claim to have all the answers, but I do know that God is not the petty tinkerer that ID proponents and Biblical literalists have made Him into. I know and understand far better than you do what it means to be uncertain about the world around us, about how it is impossible to know anything for certain, your patronizing tone is quite amusing though, you talk about not being able to know anything for certain, but you miss the point entirely because you miss that there are many things for which we can have a high degree of certainty about. No scientific theory will ever be proven, but a good theory can be shown to have a good reason for believing it, simply conjecturing that your theory can make just as much logical sense as evolution isn't good enough, and it never will be.
Let me put it this way, let's just suppose for the sake of argument that ID is correct. Then what? What are the consequences for medicine? How do we use that theory to predict how to treat disease? How is it in anyway useful at all when if we encounter something we don't understand, we simply state that the designer made it that way? How is that useful and conducive to progress?
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Replace 'microbes' with 'sustainable self-replicating chemical reaction'. I think you'll find that all of the same problems apply. Advanced microbes would actually be more resistant to many of these problems than the goo would be- but then we still get into the problem of where the microbes came from.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
.....Faith comes from knowing that the reason is insufficient.......
That is the best statement you have made. You are quite good at expressing some thoughts. God challenges us to reason with Him in Isaiah 1:18. It is not necessary, nor even good, to park reason outside of the church door.
(.....Let me put it this way, let's just suppose for the sake of argument that ID is correct. Then what? What are the consequences for medicine?....)
That's easy. God came up with this design, let's try to figure out how He did it and see how we can improve certain aspects of the design for our use. We do this with human designs all the time. Just giving credit where credit is due for a design or invention doesn't at all negate it's usefulness or clever solution to accomplish a task. When a programmer comes up with a clever piece of code, does giving him/her recognition for that reduce the usefulness of the program? We imitate God's designs in our technology. Survival aids, such as the echo location system used by bats and dolphins still outdo our sonar and radar copies. No human has yet designed a light source that converts 100% of its energy input into light. Fireflies and certain other luminescent creatures do. Let's learn how God figured this out and make use of it for our light sources.
The early scientists who laid the discovery foundations for our modern technology were almost all Christians. They believed that God designed an orderly universe with consistent, discoverable laws, mirroring His own nature. They believed that this God had communicated to mankind through the written record of the Bible, as well as through the things He had made.
We live our everyday, practical lives much more by faith and trust than reason. When you get into an elevator, train, airplane etc. you trust that the people who designed, maintained and operate these conveyances did their jobs faithfully. When you are about to drive your car across a bridge, you don't first stop and examine with your reason whether that bridge is safe. Every once in a while though we learn that those responsible for that bridge or conveyance did not do their job or were ignorant of some factors. Still, exercising faith, I'm sure you have crossed a few bridges since the one in Minneapolis collapsed. It would be totally unreasonable for you to now refuse to have faith in all bridges, just because of a major collapse of one. You still have reasonable faith that the next bridge you cross will not collapse, but you do not KNOW it won't.
We exercise reason based on faith in the designers, builders, maintainers and operators of almost all of our modern infrastructure and technology. Reason then is built on a foundation of faith, whether in God or other people. I have faith that God is truthful in what He has communicated.
All theory is gray
Unfortunately, much to the chagrin of those that use that argument, religion and science don't play by the same rules. It is accepted in science that for every effect, there must be a cause. An airplane doesn't just spontaneously explode into existence and neither does an entire universe--except that seems to be what happened. So there are lots of pet theories to explain how that happened or what happened "before time", but none of those theories are particularly satisfying, nor are they any less faith-based than a belief in God.
So who started God? God did. If we assume God exists and created the universe, there's no reason to assume that God is subject to the laws of the universe that we understand. While everything in the physical universe exists because something preceded it, a theoretically spiritual and omnipotent God doesn't necessarily have to adhere to those same physical laws.
I know you'll say that's a cop-out, but it's perfectly reasonable if you do assume the existence of God.