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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."
Abiogenesis.... Take that ID-iots!
Scientists stitching together molecules like a chemical zipper to recreate a simple RNA sounds a lot more like "Design" and a lot less like "abiogenesis" to me, actually...
Quoting Sutherland's team from TFA:
It's not as simple as putting compounds in a beaker and mixing it up. It's a series of steps. You still have to stop and purify and then do the next step, and that probably didn't happen in the ancient world.
Seriously, watching Abiogenesis fiends bickering with "Intelligent Design" supporters over who is more wrong makes me think I'm back on Digg when it was used as Richard Dawkin's RSS feed.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?
-Epicurus, 300 BCE
The refrain from fundamentalists, Christian and Muslim and Jew alike, is because he is God, and he said so, according to this really old book. Which is usually the inerrant word of God - they just can't agree on which version is the "perfect" word. Once you try to engage someone who firmly believes that they know what God thinks, there's no use in trying to apply logic.
One of my favorite David Cross bits is where he's asking out loud for the name of the television show where there's this guy on stage, and everyone in the television audience believes he can talk to the dead. The crowd in front of David keeps shouting out "Crossing Over!"
And then David says, "Oh no, it was church, it was church."
Indeed; nothing can.
Nor indeed is there any requirement or reason to "demonstrate the non-existence of X," where there is no evidence for the putative existence of X.
On a side not, this discovery doesn't demonstrate the non-existence of the tooth fairy either.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke