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Scientists Are Cracking the Primordial Soup Mystery
derekmead writes "Scientists have had a basic understanding of how life first popped up on Earth for a while. The so-called 'primordial soup' was sitting around, stagnant but containing the basic building blocks of life. Then something happened and we ended up with life. It's that 'something' that has been the sticking point for scientists, but new research from a team of scientists at the University of Leeds has started to shed light on the mystery, explaining just how objects from space might have kindled the reaction that sparked life on Earth. It's generally accepted that space rocks played an important role in life's genesis on Earth. Meteorites bombarding the planet early in its history delivered some of the necessary materials for life but none brought life as we know it. How inanimate rocks transformed into the building blocks of life has been a mystery. But this latest research suggests an answer. If meteorites containing phosphorus landed in the hot, acidic pools that surrounded young volcanoes on the early Earth, there could have been a reaction that produced a chemical similar one that's found in all living cells and is vital in producing the energy that makes something alive."
Jesus.
Well, I for one don't really care about the exact details of how we came to be. If we were to suddenly discover the exact mechanism, it changes nothing. I still have to work, pay taxes and die....
Doctor Shaddup Enfundme will submit a grant proposal anywhere along the spectrum from Dr. Seuss to iambic pentameter.
Seriously, keep funding the work, and let's see if they get to a reproducible experiment.
Are we just souless zombies.
Think about it. Who lives in space? Who can shoot hot spunk into space? This spunk then hit the primordial soup pool.
Now if god created man in his own image, god obviously must have had a penis. So where is god's missus?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
There is no "alive" vs "not alive"! It’s a gradient! And there exists, and existed, every step in-between!
Why is this such a unknown thing in Leeds? Here in Germany, it's already accepted common knowledge.
It's as if they were completely blind to prions, viruses, and other things that are in-between what they like to call "alive" and what they call "dead". Or, and this is what I think, they are deliberately and obsessively trying to force a hard distinction because their rigid (and in this case willfully ignorant) world view is built on it.
You get proteins (not DNA) of bigger and bigger size forming from the same basic building blocks. Like Prions and the normal proteins of our bodies. Now get one that is by accident capable of self-reproducing (probably with the environment and other simpler proteins already doing most of job), and voila, you have something alive enough to fit your arbitrary (and varying with the mood of the day) lower limit.
This is ridiculous and embarrassing for people who call themselves scientists.
It's the diet soda theory of evolution.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
A nice, crusty Asiago Cheese Bread.
#DeleteChrome
Stardust assembled itself to form us. How can it not be clear to everyone?
So please report back after you have added some phosphorus to your primordial soup and you have multiple examples of original life.
Ah ahahahahaha !
Some of the dumbest crap I have heard in a LONG time.
This only works when someone explains the non-existent mechanism by which ONLY laevo-rotary DNA molecules were selected . . . because any random assembly not only has the molecule as quickly disassembled but also randomly assembles an equal number of laevo-rotary and dextra-rotary DNA molecules. The latter are not only useless but dangerous to life. Thus, these notions about space rocks are only distractions.
Cranky educator.
Karl Popper is turning in his grave as I write. This crap is about as scientific as the flat earth hypothesis. The idea that a chaotic system can give rise to complex life is in the not even wrong category. I am not saying that the probabilities are small. I am saying that the probability is exactly zero. Why? Because, as any programmer can tell you, the beneficial code combinations are dwarfed by the destructive combinations by many, many orders of magnitude. Things can never get to the self-replicating stage because they are guaranteed to be destroyed before anything vaguely interesting can happen.
This is just propaganda crap for dirt worshipers. Sorry, the dirt-did-it crowd is much less credible than the aliens did it crowd.
[citation needed]
"The idea that a chaotic system can give rise to complex life is in the not even wrong category"
...
This non-chaotic-system that gave rise to complex life, what gave rise to it, and don't say it was just always there
AccountKiller
... and exactly how many multi-million-year simulations have you run that prove the negative you assert, that never, once, ever, a 'beneficial code combination' escaped destruction by the 'destructive combinations' long enough to make a few copies of itself? Or that it never can?
I notice you specifically said ".. complex life". Well of course, no one asserts the primordial soup went from a few simple molecules to "complex life" in one magical step. The crux is that systems can grow in complexity in small, incremental steps.
Genetic algorithms have already shown that natural selection can operate on pre-life patterns. It works like a ratchet, each step can build on the next up the "complexity" ladder.
Never say 'never'. Never say 'guaranteed' either. Especially when it comes to nature, given geologic time. It if doesn't out-and-out violate the laws of physics, who are you or anyone else to say it couldn't happen, given the right conditions and enough time?
I've always understood life to have arisen from or near hydrothermal vents. These cells thrived via a process known as chemosynthesis.
I'm sorry, but the idea of valcanos, soup ponds, meteorite, and lightning bolts sound too wacky. Such an environment is also too unstable for delicate life forms to survive IMHO.
Life is not for the lazy.
Most scientists don't know shit about the origin of life. It's educated guess work.
If everybody knows that, why do we have so many religious people in the world?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Suggestion for the editors: if an article is interesting, cite it. But if the initial submitter writes something totally idiotic, feel free to delete that part.
Oh, please. They can barely proofread and correct spelling.
Laevo was forced by polarized light from the stars.
Orig Life Evol Biosph. 1991;21(2):59-111.
1. Meteorite hits the young Earth
2. ???
3. Life
My proposal for (2): Earth experienced a Menthos meteorite shower which produced Life after it rained in the big lake of Cola that formed around Mount Bullshit.
The idea that a chaotic system can give rise to complex life is in the not even wrong category. I am not saying that the probabilities are small. I am saying that the probability is exactly zero.
Did you miss Darwin's Theory of Evolution? It's kind of obscure, you might not have heard of it yet. Anyway, it demonstrates one mechanism that simpler life can become more adapted to its environment and become more complex. So the idea that chaotic systems can't give rise to more organized systems already has a big widely-accepted contradiction.
This non-chaotic-system that gave rise to complex life, what gave rise to it, and don't say it was just always there ...
There are two realms. In one, the physical realm, you find things that can be created and destroyed. In the other, you find things that can neither be created nor destroyed; they just are. The blue and red colors that you consciously sense and the flavors that you taste from food do not exist in the physical world, even if you think they do.
Isaac Asimov wrote an essay about this, "The Left-Handed Universe". The book, of the same title, in which it was published is a collection of non-fiction science essays; "Why does ice float?", "Why is the night sky black?", etc.. I don't know if Asimov's ideas in "The Left-Handed Universe" are correct, but Asimov is always fun to read anyway.
The probability for a DNA molecule to appear without having used a pre-existing DNA molecule as template is tiny. Maybe it has only happened once in the entire lifetime of the Earth. In that case the orientation is completely random. It would be 50/50 for one orientation or the other. In that case if we ever find DNA based life elsewhere, the orientation of DNA molecules can give hints as to whether life has evolved independently or spread from a common origin.
It may be the probability is higher, and DNA created from scratch has happened more than once in the lifetime of the Earth. But if hundreds of years passed between the first two times it happens, it could be that life had already spread across the entire planet in the meantime. In that case the second DNA molecule could have caused some havoc in the area where it appeared, but eventually life around it adopted enough to wipe out the DNA molecule, that did not fit in.
Maybe both variants existed for some time, but during the evolution of life, one variant got extinct.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
It isn't random, it's chemistry. You were informed of this the last time you posted on the subject.
One thing that has always stunned me is how fast after the Earths crust had cooled down that life appeared. * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_evolutionary_history_of_life This if anything indicates that the determinig events leading to a self-replicating unit (perhaps RNA) must have happened pretty fast and thus been very probable. Take this perspective to the stars and all the potentially habitable planets out there and the universe is teeming with life! .... pretty cool if you think about it.
By morons.
The blue and red colors that you consciously sense and the flavors that you taste from food do not exist in the physical world, even if you think they do.
I understand the point you're trying to make... but to play devil's advocate: the blue and red colors you sense and the flavors you taste exist in the physical world... just measure the chemical and electrical activity in the brain as the photosensors and chemical sensors react to the incoming stimuli. It can all be measured, and is similar for all people. That's all in the physical world.
If we understood the brain well enough, we might also be able to isolate the concepts themselves -- but as those would be stored uniquely in each brain, we're still a long ways away from figuring that part out. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist though -- just as easy to say that the Higgs boson doesn't exist in the physical world (which, in a way, it doesn't).
short version... "it was just always there".
Typos happen in all media, even The New York Times. I assume that the eds are busy ''behind the scenes", like setting up upcoming stories, formatting comments (who knows?) and 'shit happens' sometimes, the 'shit' gets fixed. It's a great tech info site, and I've learned a lot reading here over the years. The editors here care about the site, and don't always get the applause they deserve, that's part of the job, I guess.
maybe your god doesn't exist, but I have several including Richard, Steve and Bill
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
Purple doesn't exist. It is a human construction created by our eye. Red and blue do exist, as wavelengths of light.
...who are a lot better educated than you and can duplicate their science, where you have nothing but opinion and speculation to back yourself up.
It wasn't even a nice try. Go troll on 4chan.
So everyone knows plate tectonics explain the formation of the planet, or do they? The expanding earth hypothesis is ridiculed, yet we have been and still are bombarded with megatons of meteors for billions of years. How on earth has the planet not been expanding?
Especially in the NYT.
That rag is a load of bullshit. That article on the Tesla car, basically faking results, then the public editor just ignoring all the lies that the writer put in his article. I'm amazed that people use it as an example of quality journalism!
decades ago they came up with a "theory" for the origin of life and they have been working ever since to find the bits that fit their theory... this is 180 degrees out; they ought to have followed the evidence they could find to whatever destination it led.
What was the "primordial Earth" like? They have plenty of ideas, BUT theory and conjecture of what it was like is not proof of what it was actually like. They then compound this by looking for an imagined set of circumstances and events that *might* dovetail into an environment they imagine was present and then imagine a miracle (a meteor strike with just the right elements and impact conditions) and declare that they have the answers. Excuse me, while I hike to a remote mountain top to seek a robed eastern guru hermit suffering from oxygen deprivation and frostbite for an equally valid and scientific explanation of the origins of life...
Simple enough - any random assembly will obviously be unstable, except for that vanishingly tiny minority which *is* stable, and capable of self replication, and in an environment that doesn't immediately destroy it. Those will begin to spread, creating a more benign pocket environment by using up the precursers which might otherwise become incorporated into destructive arrangements. By the time something as complicated as DNA arose the planet had probably been largely conquered by RNA at any rate, with randomness having been "tamed" into driving mutation rather than running free among the precursor molecules.
Which is more likely? That both chiralities of proto-life by chance developed simultaneously, with neither ever getting a significant advantage over the other, or that at some point one chirality gained a significant advantage and eradicated/starved out the opposing chirality? By the time the first cells arose the question of chirality was likely long since settled.
One of the interesting things to be learned when we start discovering independently arisen life (if we survive long enough it seems inevitable) will be whether there's anything "special" about our biochemistry. Is something like DNA a common solution to information storage? Is there a universal preference for chirality? Are the handful of amino acids we use any more common than the hundreds of others that might have been used instead? Are amino acids even a common building block? Unless life is *extremely* probable it seems unlikely we'll ever answer these questions by creating spontaneous life ourselves - it took a planet-sized laboratory and quite possibly hundreds of millions of years for it to happen the first time. I doubt anyone will have the patience to attempt it intentionally, and any "accelerated" experiment will likely be strogly biased towards biochemistry similar to our own simply because that's the only kind of protolife we'd recognize as being worth fostering.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I agree, GP is a moron. I run simulations where dots have attractive and repulsive properties, with infrequent random energy events (cosmic rays, heat, entropic forces) -- It's somewhat like like atoms in primordial soup. In just a week of CPU time the entire sim is full of stuff that can copy. The reason is that the first thing that can copy does, and it copies up all the other useful atoms, and keeps doing so. A bit longer time and different copying "strains" will emerge because of the imperfection of the copy process and somewhat interchangeability of atoms (or clusters of atoms) with equivalent charge and bonding properties. Over even longer time the chains compete for (atomic) resources and the external energies cause mutations, thus yielding in many different forms of atomic chains (speciation). Some chains are almost fractal in nature and just grow like crazy, but if they can't bud off and drift about then they'll eat all the other atoms and small chains in the area and die of old age (due to cosmic rays / heat / entropy). Granted this is an optimal conditions for life type of simulation, but of all the conditions on this planet, in all the planets of the galaxy in all the galaxies in the Universe, I'm certain that something similar could happen... Earth seems like an ideal environment, that's why there's life here.
You don't have to take my word for it, there's tons of other http://youtu.be/lMkHYE9-R0A?t=46s">researchers doing the same sorts of things, even with robotics!
There is one thing I take issue with in the Theory of Evolution. It's the part where it says all life has a common ancestor. I think that most current life forms have common ancestors, but that we can create new life, and that back in that primordial soup there were many different starting points for life -- Many of them wholly compatbile with each other, and even able to form bigger cooperative complex life. Just look at you! Your bones exude amoebas! Your sperm are like a different life form with a short life span that's been hijacked to deliver your DNA.
http://youtu.be/lMkHYE9-R0A?t=46s
Ack, messed up the link somehow?
I really hate how immoral "scientists" blow up every detail they find to epic proportions. It is time to classify such behavior as scientific misconduct and to start removing PhDs for repeated offenders.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Atheists (not scientists) have found absolutely no evidence for universal common descent, can not defend abiogensis, and are coming up with more desperate imaginary fairy tales to defend their faith.
Since when did things not exist because they can be described as having two parts instead of one? I'll assume that by "purple" you technically mean "magenta," and not the purple/violet appearance of wavelengths slightly shorter than blue. Some wavelengths of light appear red or blue to the human eye; they are themselves no more "red" or "blue" than some combination of photons is "purple." If you accept that red and blue exist, then purple does too (it's just a thing consisting of two photons, or the capability to reflect two wavelengths of photons, instead of one).
Even though you are being modded up by the usual suspects and I am being modded down, everything you said above is pseudoscientific crap. Sorry. Genetic algorithms have already shown that natural selection can operate on pre-life patterns? This is pure unmitigated BS on the face of it.
You're modded down because you're simply ignorant, and refuse to open your mind to new knowledge. I feel bad for you. You seek absolute truth -- Proof of exactly what happened. There is no absolute truth in science. This is where you fall short on the science stick. We don't have the absolute evidence -- It's gone. The oldest of Earth's crust has been reabsorbed into the mantle. This happened billions of years ago, but it was after life formed here.
Application of one set of inferences and conclusions based on observations to other similar systems is not bullshit. Not any more bullshit than applying math like Information theory to descriptions of biological processes, like evolution. Selection pressure is being used in many ways, both natural and artificially. That we can do so artificially indicates that such could occur naturally as well. In short: What we see in a lab may be applied in the rest of the world. It's a basic tenet of science.
We apply evolutionary concepts in simulations because it's cheaper, but what this tells us is that it's possible for life to emerge. If we did have the time to sit and wait, we could put molecules into a specific soup in the right conditions, and eventually life would emerge. If you're lucky, have a big enough environment, and have enough time, then sentient life can emerge. We may not have the exact recipe, but we've gotten similar results with so many other ingredients that the possibility is undeniably in the favor for the emergence of life in this way -- We're not even sure if the recipe was brewed here, it If not here, then elsewhere and seeded here, but we're sure enough about the mechanism of selection that we can say that it played a key role in the formation of life.
What's interesting to me is the application of information theory to the Universe. If our universe were as you say, having too much entropic forces that would destroy all complexity before it got complex enough to be called alive, then life could not have formed. You also don't want a Universe with too little chaos; Not enough randomness and you get a monoculture -- Something that just forms then degrades over time once, with no speciation -- Like crystals. However, the parameters of this Universe are such that there is enough chaos to allow complexity to arise, but not so much randomness that it can not arise.
IMO, Earth being in the gulf between spiral arms is a huge benefit to the rise of life. Less dramatic life eradicating entropic events, like gamma ray bursts. That's where we should look for other life: Cradled between the arms of the galaxies -- They should have sent a poet.
I leave you with more evolution in action.
I see it starting in Oort clouds and other such low grav areas, possibly more energetic areas like Europa or gaseous clouds around stars then being spread like dandelion seeds by natural forces raining down on planets everywhere.
Micro gravity seems more conducive to cell formation to me.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
IAAMB
It's not generally accepted that 'space rocks played an important role in life's genesis on Earth'. More like, it's generally accepted that life probably began at ocean floor in proximity to hot vents something akin to the lost city hydrothermal field.
Why doesn't somebody just ask Gil Gerard? After all, he was there TCB.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Nice to know that soulskill has multiple accounts...
Yeah, some of us have even read reprints of darwin. Your apparant misunderstanding of it, is eclipsed by your falsley stated explanation.
Don't get me wrong, your scenario is certainly worthy of some consideration. But darwin didn't even come close to saying what you claim. Maybe the obsure version you came across was in a comics book?
You're modded down because you're simply ignorant,
Nah. I am modded down because I don't belong in the dirt-did-it religion. Pseudoscientific crap, all of it. Not even wrong.
I am not trying to change anyone's mind, just trying to share ideas.
Share this (skip the first 2:30 if you don't want the anti-creationist rant). The idea that some special ingredient was missing until it landed here from outer space is fucking nonsense, the entire planet was made from "space rocks". The thing that is "special" about Earth is our liquid water oceans, ocean + time = life.
I haven't accomplished any great deeds in my life. I am just a guy.....trying to share my opinion.
I have a double maths/cs degree, yes it's an accomplishment, but so is cleaning the toilet. Ask me what accomplishment I'm most proud of and I will bore you to death with photos of my grand-kids. Hopefully they will outlive me but in the end everything is temporary and "pointless", we had to come up with religion for people who failed to find their own point
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
And he's damn good looking too, if I do say so myself. - Soulskill... er... I mean AC, yeah, that's the ticket!
I'm a Sun worshipper, you insensitive clod.
The chemical is ATP. Not really ATP completely, but they found that a sample of a meteorite reacted with some acidic solution gave pyrophosphite, a reduced pyrophosphate (I think, chemistry kinda rusty) and thus, they believed they could have found a possible, natural mechanism to give "life" energy without the "irreducibly complex" enzymes for breaking ATP down.
What caused the big bang?
I don't ask this to agree with the GP, I ask this to point out the brokenness of these types of questions in general.
From TFA:
Disclaimer: I ain't a space scientist, I'm just a geek
What I want to know is this --- How come those exotic minerals exist in space rocks but not on planet Earth ?
Where those space rocks came from ? Weren't they were formed from the same batch of space dusts that gelled up the Solar System ??
Or could it possibly be that those space rocks were from an ancient planet (or star) that had exploded?
If the space rocks that contained all the exotic minerals came from an ancient planet, wouldn't that mean that it is very likely that the planet, which was itself rich with all those exotic minerals, had lifeforms of its own ??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
So I'll assume you are an idiot. He said purple doesn't exist, and he is correct. Magenta does exist, but purple is the sensation created from a mix of red and blue. There is no purple wavelength. There are things that appear purple because they reflect or emit a mix of red and blue. But there is no purple light. Do you get it yet?
Carl Sagan did some work on the synthesis of ATP in the primordial soup. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1963/8/21/sagan-synthesizes-atp-in-laboratory-plaboratory/
The step from prokaryotic to eukaryotic took much longer - 3 billion years. It looks like that may actually be the difficult step. .... all the way to ZZ9pluralZAlpha promotes A.
Self replication is practically a given in the primordial soup environment. It doesn't need to be A directly creates copies of A.
It could be molecule A promotes B, B promotes C, C promotes D,
Any such loop, no matter how many steps, will optimise as it progresses. That's what evolution means.
ps. Even that is a vast simplfication. It is more like "the presence of A increases the chance of B forming C instead of D".
Millions of such "rules" acting together in the soup will produce self-promoting systems that eventually evolve into fully self replicating entities. ie Life.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
I never said there was a purple wavelength (and what wavelength is "magenta," which is the color produced by mixing red and blue light, and which you say "does exist"?). The AC's statement was not simply that "red" and "blue" wavelengths exist, but that "red" and "blue" exist "as" something ("red" and "blue" wavelengths of light) that they correspond to. But "red and blue photons together" (=magenta) is something equally existent to "red" or "blue" photons alone. Do you think that feathers exist, and beaks exist, but refuse to think that birds exist because they are made of both feathers and a beak? Why does a thing composed of two things, that you think exist, not exist? If you want to be consistent, then also deny that "red" and "blue" exist (because they are only subjective human perceptions of a variety of pure or mixed photon wavelengths).
I'm From Leeds. Well I was born in Leeds. Actually, I grew up in Leeds then I moved to the States.
I lived at the hospital mostly.
Recommend Robert M. Hazen's book on the Origins of Life. This is just one theory. There are many others all probable. There is also a lot of politics here too. The primordial soup camp has starved researchers into alternate theories of funding. Recommend Hazen's book because he covers AFAIK all of them.
So then, it was take-out?
Have gnu, will travel.
The article pretends to be a scientific article, but it really is a religious article full of "could" this or that. Yes I could have won the lottery if I had picked the right numbers and could be such a chemical reaction could have happened, but no one knows whether it really did. When you start talking about what could have happened, why could there not be a God who made life? I always thought that science was about how things work and what DOES happen, not about what could have happened millions or billions of years ago.
Getting a few chemicals to combine produce energy in a way similar to what is known about how life forms produce energy, still is a long way from producing a living, self reproducing single cell. Even the simplest single celled organism is unbelievably complex and contains a prodigious amount of information. The theory that life on Earth was seeded from space begs the question, how did that life begins wherever it did begin? Even with the best efforts of intelligent scientists and the expenditure of mountains of money, no one has yet created any life form whatsoever from nonliving matter.It appears that the intelligence of whoever or whatever designed life far exceeds that of any human scientist.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
The rocks the molecules, the whole enchilada. FU PETA. Aware as well. My favorite part of asimov has always struck me as true and obvious
What has computer source code got to do with the behavior of complex molecules?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So... do you get extra sins forgiven on Sunday if you get on the internet on Saturday and tell the heathens that they should be as ignorant as you are?
(Were you a bad boy this week, or do you do this every weekend?)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If creationists listened when someone explained something, talkorigins.org wouldn't exist.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
i'm getting a strong image of you saying that with your fingers stuck in your ears.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
I appreciate that you believe that you know everything but you clearly do not understand that Christians, Muslims, and Jews all believe in exactly the same god, they all believe that Jesus existed too but there is disagreement over who he was and therefore his importance. Religions stemming from further east do not necessarily discount the fact that one of their deities may well be the same god too. Whether god does or does not exist does not necessarily impact in any way upon the subject matter of the paper, I strongly suspect that it's a minority of believers that accept creationism in it's absolute interpretation, the majority believe that the development of life happened in exactly the way that scientists believe but that god got the whole thing started. Indeed, even the most hard nosed scientists cannot explain how the universe came into being without a huge leap of faith into some fanciful theory that has matter, space and time produced from nowhere. If you learn to listen more and speak once you've honestly considered what you've heard you'll be surprised what you're capable of, until that day I shall continue to be surprised what you're capable of.
When you start talking about what could have happened, why could there not be a God who made life?
No one says that it didn't happen with all certainty, but when you have two perfectly acceptable solutions to the problem, one of them requiring a pre-existing intelligent being gifted with powers outside the range of conceivable natural beings, and the other one not making any such requirement, the latter wins as per Occam's razor, at least until you can demonstrate that the existence of such being should be admitted because it would explain other natural phenomena for which an alternative explanation would be lacking or outright inconceivable. (I am aware of no such other phenomena.)
Ezekiel 23:20
Even the simplest single celled organism is unbelievably complex and contains a prodigious amount of information. The theory that life on Earth was seeded from space begs the question, how did that life begins wherever it did begin?
That's true. But somehow you don't seem to draw the correct conclusions from that. When confronted with something complex, the theory of evolution tells you it can not have formed instantly, but instead it happened gradually. Therefore, the "starting point" of life is at the molecular level, not at the cell level. And I put the quotes there deliberately, because there won't be a single point, it will be a gradual process. Just like there isn't a point where there is a "first tree" or "first human".
Even with the best efforts of intelligent scientists and the expenditure of mountains of money, no one has yet created any life form whatsoever from nonliving matter.
So what? Why should we be able to create life? Why should it be simple? There are an unknown number of possibilities to consider. It might have been a freak accident or rather trivial, nobody knows. Whatever the odds, in a universe this big it is rather a non-issue.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
And i've actually followers of Christianity tell me that their god is not the same as that in Islam. They argued quite vigorously about it.
I appreciate that you believe that you know everything but you clearly do not understand that Christians, Muslims, and Jews all believe in exactly the same god, they all believe that Jesus existed too but there is disagreement over who he was and therefore his importance.
How is it exactly the same God if they disagree so much on its characteristics? They can all agree that there is a god that created them and is tied to whatever afterlife there may be. They can agree that this god is immortal and all powerful. From this point they'll branch out in to a web of mutually exclusive characteristics for this god.
It's exactly same god in the sense that movies and board games are exactly the same type of entertainment.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Finally an answer to the question: What goes with primordial soup?
a. Oyster crackers
b. Crusty French or Italian Bread with butter
c. Saltines
d. Sliced Bread (any type) with butter or margarine.
RHB
Let me rephrase your question and see any answer comes back.
The theory that life on Earth was seeded by god begs the question, how did that god begin wherever it did begin?
I don't have an answer for you, and it's exceedingly doubtful that you have any sort of non-superstitious answer for me. I've seen little to no evidence that there isn't a god, but I've seen none at all that there IS, either. When we can detect only a tenth of all the matter and energy in our universe that leaves plenty of wiggle room for deities, ghosts, fairies and other oddball things. That **doesn't** mean that they actually exist, either.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Please back up your claims with actual evidence. Otherwise it's no more authoritative than what the GP said. However programming evolution to happen is quite different than evolution programming itself to happen.
Lots of things happen in nature that we find difficult or impossible to replicate. That doesn't mean nature is more intelligent than us.
Clearly you have trouble with logic.
It's no wonder you want to use god to explain things: you don't have the tools to do anything else.
The trouble is that doesn't help us learn anything. It's the kind of thinking that's probably responsible for the dark ages.
I'm beginning to wonder whether religion is spread by a microscopic biological vector that cause some kind of mild, localised encephalitis. The alternative is to believe that these people really are that dumb, and that really *does* strain my credulity.
Robert Hazen's lab should many metabolic reactions that require emzymes (catalysts) at surface conditions dont need such at high pressures and temperatures. Life-like stuff could have began at the seafloor first, then migrated to to surface niches as protein emzymes evolved.
I take it you're willing to wait 300,000 years to see whether the experiment succeeds, or if they need to re-try it with a different set of parameters and wait another 300,000 years.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
When you start talking about what could have happened, why could there not be a God who made life?
No one says that it didn't happen with all certainty, but when you have two perfectly acceptable solutions to the problem, one of them requiring a pre-existing intelligent being gifted with powers outside the range of conceivable natural beings, and the other one not making any such requirement, the latter wins as per Occam's razor, at least until you can demonstrate that the existence of such being should be admitted because it would explain other natural phenomena for which an alternative explanation would be lacking or outright inconceivable. (I am aware of no such other phenomena.)
The problem is that both solutions are faith-based. Evolutionists tell us that the universe is billions of years old. In order to tell time you have to have a clock. You have to have faith that your clock that you are using has always ticked at exactly the same rate as we observe it today. This cannot be proved, that must be assumed. The word "assumed" is a scientific way of saying believed, i.e. faith.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
Science is based on experiment and observation. There has never been one to experiment or observation that anything living can come from something non-living. Life always comes from life, that is what we observe today. Adding vast amounts of time does not solve the problem because no one was there to observe life come into existence.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
This only happened 6000 years ago. Don't believe me? Ask your neighborhood Bible Thumpers, they know all the answers.
I appreciate that you believe that you know everything but you clearly do not understand that Christians, Muslims, and Jews all believe in exactly the same god
And I appreciate that you too believe that you know everything, but you clearly do not understand that there is an entire world of religious beliefs out there beyond those you were taught in Sunday School. You can try and dictate that those religions stemming from further east do not believe in the gods they claim to, but rather actually believe in your god, but that works about as well as me claiming you do not believe in your god, you actually believe in the FSM. But I do not get to dictate your beliefs, and neither do you get to dictate the beliefs of others.
If you learn to listen more and speak once you've honestly considered what you've heard you'll be surprised what you're capable of, until that day I shall continue to be surprised what you're capable of.
There is no way to prove or disprove the existence of God. You have to believe that He exists and that there is a world beyond that which is visible and can be grasped by instruments of science. You also have to believe Carl Sagan statement: "the cosmos is all there is and ever will be". At one time scientists believed that the universe itself is eternal, that is it has always existed and will always exist. That has been shown to be false. The universe had a beginning and will someday come to an end. Unless the law of cause and effect is violated, a beginning requires a beginner. This is the problem of the "first cause". Somewhere, by faith we have to postulate that there is a first cause that requires no cause. The Judeo-Christian worldview is that God is the eternally self existent Creator that caused everything else to come into being. In the secular/evolutionary worldview the first cause is a mathematical entity called a singularity from which the universe exploded with a "Big Bang".
Life holds many mysteries that cannot be explained in terms of our senses. Where does the commonly held notion of what is right and what is wrong come from? Even a little child will exclaim, "why that's not fair!" Where does this sense of what is fair and what isn't come from in an evolutionary sense? I could bring other examples that cannot be answered by any belief system that excludes an external cause that is behind what we observe today.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
You obviously don't know much about learning. There are two main ways by which we learn. One is by experiment and observation and the other is by reasonably believing that someone else tells us. Most things in life we learn by the latter method. This means you have to believe, that is trust whoever is trying to tell you whatever. It is far less important what you believe, than whom you believe. This is especially true when it comes to history. Despite the mountain of evidence we have that the Holocaust happened, there are some who will deny this historical fact. In the end, no one will believe something he/she does not want to believe.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
There has never been one to experiment or observation that anything living can come from something non-living. Life always comes from life, that is what we observe today. Adding vast amounts of time does not solve the problem because no one was there to observe life come into existence.
And you can wait millions of years for a pocket calculator with no batteries to give you the answer to 1+1, but you will never observe that. Once you add batteries though, it happens very quickly.
Darn, I should have used a car analogy. You can wait millions of years for a car to drive up a hill without observing that. Add gasoline and then it can happen.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
You have to have faith that your clock that you are using has always ticked at exactly the same rate as we observe it today. This cannot be proved, that must be assumed.
I see that you're a cognitive nihilist. I shall kindly remind you that you've just made a faith-based assumption that I'm an actual real person and not a mere figment of your pathologically delusive imagination.
Ezekiel 23:20
Unless the law of cause and effect is violated, a beginning requires a beginner. This is the problem of the "first cause". Somewhere, by faith we have to postulate that there is a first cause that requires no cause.
The logical fallacy you've just committed is called "special pleading". Basically, you've just posited as a given that everything is caused by something (you're pleading something), except for the one thing that you don't want to be caused by anything (you're pleading something special, in a random fashion).
Ezekiel 23:20
Whenever someone does not have a reasonable answer, resort to a personal attack. If you don't like the message, shoot the messenger. You're an example of a person that does that.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
I am not pleading anything or putting forth any kind of fallacy, but you refuse to acknowledge that cause and effect do exist and we are subject to it every day, moment by moment. Every effect requires a cause, even if we don't know the cause or want to admit its existence.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
Adding vast amounts of time does not solve the problem because no one was there to observe life come into existence.
Suppose someone was there to observe it, what problem would then have been solved? We would have a historical claim about the abiogenesis, but that would be it. That's not science, it explains nothing. We could even doubt the veracity of the claim, and there would be no way to settle it.
Adding large amounts of time does not answer any question, indeed. The only thing it does (together with the vast scale of the universe), is that very rare events can not be ruled out. Again, nobody knows how life started and it is quite possible we will never find out, but I have no problem with not knowing. I don't feel a need to invent invisible magical creatures that then magically created life. That would be silly.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
and when they do have a reasonable answer, stick your fingers in your ears and shout "LA LA LA LA LA! My fairy book is the same as your hundreds of years of combined, improved upon knowledge. We're the same, because I don't understand the way science works!"
I don't know if you've ever stopped to consider this, but your whole worldview is flawed. You believe there are only two options, either a) science is correct in every minute detail, or b) Magic. Any time you say "Science is just like faith" everyone who knows anything will immediately assume you are a moron because you stated "I think a 2000+ year old stone age book is on equal footing with hundreds of years of research, put under extreme scrutiny all the time."
We have exactly ZERO reason to believe that things were dramatically different billions of years ago. Nothing that we have ever seen suggests that it would be the case, which makes your "it might have been different" nothing but special pleading to allow yourself an excuse to believe in fantasy. Anyone can make crap up. "We don't know that all particles weren't made of bunnies 3 billion years ago. We have FAITH that they weren't. Anyone who says the universe isn't made of tiny bunnies is doing so for religious reasons." See how stupid that sounds? And is? Faith in a god is not the same as belief that the chair you sit in won't magically disappear, and you are a liar and charlatan if you suggest otherwise.
It is basically true that when someone does not want to believe something, they generally will not. There are people today who are unwilling to believe that the Holocaust ever happened, despite the massive evidence, as well as the testimony of people that survived it. Only persons who WANT to believe in God will attribute the origin of life to him. At the least you are honest in declaring your indifference, rather than most who try to find an explanation outside of God.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
The theory of evolution critically depends on unfathomable amounts of time. We have made a lot of progress in a lot of areas of science, but understanding the nature of time and how to accurately measure it is not one of them. We assume (believe by faith) that the clocks we're used for measuring time today have always run at the same rate they do today. This is particularly true of the atomic clocks upon which radioactive dating depends. The equations that govern the forces between atoms contain something called Planck's constant which varies inversely with the speed of light. The assumption is that these "constants" are and have been constant throughout all ages of time. The equations of gravity by means of which the movements of heavenly bodies and man-made satellites can be easily computed, contain no elements that imply time.
There is evidence in the light arriving from distant parts of the universe, that this assumption is not true. When the universe was small, after the creation event which has been labeled the "Big Bang", a beam of light would have crossed the entire universe in a tiny fraction of the second. Today a beam of light takes billions of years to make it across the universe. When Hubble discovered the red shift in 1929, he assumed this was due to the Doppler effect. This was not an unreasonable assumption, given the information he had at the time. Since then William Tifft observed and measured the red shift from distant galaxies in 1977 much more accurately and was astonished to find that the red shift is quantized. You can look up reports from him and others who have repeated these observations. Since objects cannot move in jumps, it is an indication that the observed red shift is not due to motion. It is a sign that constants such as the speed of light and those derived therefrom have changed many orders of magnitude. From the red shift measurements it is possible to calculate a curve which depicts this change. All data that uses atomic clocks need to be adjusted for this immense change over time. Clocks which are controlled by mass, using gravity, do not depend on time-containing constants. The Earth's and the other planetary bodies' orbits have been the same since their beginning. Therefore there is an increasingly large difference between clocks governed by gravity and clocks governed by electric charge, the further back we go towards the beginning.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
So you are saying you are a religious fundamentalist because you don't want to admit to being a monkey?
Only persons who WANT to believe in God will attribute the origin of life to him.
And only persons who WANT to believe in aliens will attribute the unexplained lights in the sky to flying saucers.
What I believe or don't believe has nothing to do with what I want. It would be rather stupid to believe something is true because you want it to be true.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
You should read some Stuart Kauffman - you might gain a different perspective on how it's plausible, even if we don't know how it actually happened.
BTW: The evidence is strong enough to conclude that it actually happened. The question is how. Science is filled with stories of "we couldn't see how it was possible, until (x) was observed." The probability of something that has already happened is always 1.