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Scientists Create RNA From Primordial Soup
Kristina at Science News writes "The RNA world hypothesis proposed 40 years ago suggested that life on Earth started not with DNA but with RNA. Now a team of scientists bolsters this hypothesis, having assembled RNA in the lab from a mixture that resembles what was likely the primordial soup. 'Until now,' Science News reports, 'scientists couldn't figure out the chemical reactions that created the earliest RNA molecules.' The new work started the RNA assembly chemistry from a different angle than what earlier work had tried."
I'm waiting....
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
This is like saying "Scientists find a way of creating diamonds from carbon." Its easy to say you figured out how to do something when you get to guess what the materials really are in the first place. They don't really know what "primordial soup" would have been. They just said "hey, we can make RNA out of this random shit we figured would be laying around... using this expensive equipment and a method that requires accurate timing and purification and controls."
don't get me wrong, I'm willing to look at "random accident" as a method for the creation of life, but this article is bullshit. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go write an article showing that a copper mine with sand in it can evolve into a circuit board for a car stereo with a few simple steps and a bunch of human intervention...
Just because it *may* be possible does not guarantee that it happened that way and there is no proof that it did. Yes, we are here but there is a huge leap between being here and *suggesting* the way it occurred. Without someone being present to witness the actual method used we can't say it was this method. It could have been any number of things from a scientist's perspective and no proof of any of them actually being used long, long time ago. I'm surprised this would be taken as sufficient proof given that there is none. It is the same thing as a Creationist saying how things were created with the evolutionist saying there is no proof for that particular method. I guess faith exists on both sides but only one is willing to admit it while the other ridicules them for it.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
A quote form a Greek, that believed in the predestination of Hellenic Gods. A 300 BCE quote really?
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
Are you familiar with the scientific process? This was yet another falsifiable test for the currently best supported version of the theory of abiogenesis. It was a test the theory passed
None of this is science - let's stop using that word. Everyone here is making conjectures about a certain something that happened in a point of time. That isn't science, that is history. Proving that life can be created spontaneously does not infer that it did. In the negative, not having a method to have it happen today does not mean that it didn't happen in the past.
Science tells us what is most likely to happen in the future. It isn't a great historian because history isn't subject to testing (today only happens once).