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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."
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.
Philosophers refer to it as magic meat (as in if you assembled a completely identical clone of yourself--a meatbag--and you didn't consider it to have a soul, then your soul would only be granted by the fact that you are made of magic meat and the meatbag over there is just regular meat). Christians refer to this as "life begins at conception". Those who reject the magic meat hypothesis consider life to have begun billions of years ago, of which any human is only a small part and process. Rejecting magic meat essentially means that you rejected the idea of having a soul.
It's the diet soda theory of evolution.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
A nice, crusty Asiago Cheese Bread.
#DeleteChrome
If you're living in a virtual reality and all your actions are without consequence, it changes everything.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Stardust assembled itself to form us. How can it not be clear to everyone?
If we were to suddenly discover the exact mechanism, it changes nothing.
Oh yeah it does, if we can figure out how life was created, we can create more life. And THAT opens the door to a lot.....
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
mods must be jews
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.
Yes, we all realize some people have 0 interest in science. It was nice of you to remind us of your preference for ignorance, though. I sometimes forget about you people.
"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
Well, depending on your criteria, I may already be a threat to humanity.....or is it that humanity is a threat to me? I need nicotine, but these patches really taste bad when u light them
... 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.
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=-
What would be changed if we learned we're living in a Matrix? As long as the operators don't shut it off, and there aren't game-breaking glitches or backdoors discovered, then it shouldn't have any affect on our lives on the inside.
Good thing it takes two humans to make life!
You could argue that all of science is "educated guess work": taking what you already know, and making a hypothesis about something you don't. Make a guess and test it, rinse and repeat.
Laevo was forced by polarized light from the stars.
Orig Life Evol Biosph. 1991;21(2):59-111.
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....
It sounds like your life is completely pointless. Why not just die now and leave your nutrients for people who actually matter?
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
You can trust me. Honestly. Seriously. No worries.
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.
if we can figure out how life was created...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
Well, if I actually found someone who really mattered, I would seriously consider it....
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?
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.
Where do you live that social impact doesn't change your life? What would you be doing if slashdot no longer existed? Posting on Ars?
We're doing that already - we call the processes science and mysticism, and every backdoor we discover opens the path to the creation of new kinds of mods. Really the only big difference would be the search for cheat codes, and a lot of religious people are already convinced they've found some of those as well, they just won't know for sure until they reach the game-over screen.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Hey, if you want to waste precious resources investigating something that will have absolutely no impact on humanity, then go ahead. I was just stating my opinion. I don't look down on anyone because they do. I just think it is pointless.
Well, if the Matrix is maintained by EA, we might be in trou---- AUTHENTICATION FAILED, DISCONNECTING.
Why would you care if anyone has that knowledge if you think it is pointless?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well, if /. wasn't here, I would probably be back in the electrical department testing electronics. But since it does exist, I'm not. Do all of you honestly believe that once we find out the exact mechanism that creates life that it will suddenly change everything? I will still have to eat, drink, poop, etc. I live near a rather large metropolitan area. Social things pass me by all the time. It isn't going to change the fact that I have to have a job, or that I need to put gas in my car, or need to sleep this evening. If a whole bunch of believers are affected by this knowledge, that is their issue. Not mine. Fads come and go. And yet, everything remains the same. There will still be illiteracy, poor people, homeless people, hungry people, people @ war, crime, whatever. This knowledge will not change the face and the actions of humanity as a whole.
My favorite is that mommy got fat and decided to go to the hospital for a doctor monitored diet. If she does really good, they give her a baby to take home as a prize.
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).
Actually we're already at the threshold of creating life in any form we wish - I believe it was a year or so ago that someone successfully implanted a fully synthetic genome into a bacteria and had it develop and reproduce as a new organism. There are (presumably) limits as to how far you can reshape a given cell using the technique, but given the vast spectra of life on this planet we will probably soon be able to create almost anything we can imagine, though some of it may take several generations of successive modifications if we wish to drastically overhaul the internal cellular processes.
Knowing how life (may have) first arisen is largely an intellectual curiosity, much like anthropology, paleontology, or any other historical study. Knowing how we got here may give us some degree of insight into the forces that drive us, but our interpretation will be limited by our current understanding of the processes involved, and that understanding will have already opened the door to any new technologies.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
Evolution is already proven as an ongoing process, and if someone doesn't believe in the fairly well established historical evolution of Man from apes, much less small shrew-like creatures that shared the Earth with dinosaurs tens of millions of years ago, I seriously doubt they'll be convinced by theories of how life first arose hundreds of millions of years before the beginning of the geologic record (Earth's crust gets slowly recycled, a process which has mostly erased roughly the first billion years of geologic history).
So long as people accept faith as something to be held in spite of solid evidence to the contrary, there will be no hope of disrupting their perception of the universe. And for religions whose creation myths are embraced *as* myths, well there's already no conflict - the story of how the elephant got it's nose isn't actually about elephants and alligators, those are simply characters used to communicate a superficially unrelated lesson.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Scientific research isn't all about YOU.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Never implied that it was. I was merely stating my opinion.
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!
I am not spreading anything. Just stating my opinion....If that scares you, stop reading...
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...
My apologies. I forgot that AC's are actually the equivalent of perfect beings, with 100% logically laid out opinions and emotional responses.
Oh yeah it does, if we can figure out how life was created, we can create more life. And THAT opens the door to a lot.....
Not necessarily. If we discover that the "secret mechanism" to creating life is spending a few billion years randomly slamming every combination of rocks and sludge together until you get the particular combination of self-replicating macromolecules that lead to all later life, then you haven't helped lab efforts much. The mechanism might be reliably reproducible: e.g., "every time you mix a sludge of precursors X, Y, Z, bake for 15 minutes at 325F, then zap with lightning, you'll get life." On the other hand, it might be a hard-to-reproduce fluke: e.g., "once in a trillion times you mix a sludge of precursors X, Y, Z, bake for 15 minutes at 325F, then zap with lightning, you'll get life; usually, you just get foul-smelling goop."
anyone who believes that humans are direct descendants of apes are using faith as a tool as much as one who believes in religion X.
Sigh. That's just absurd. This isn't some random philosophers sitting in a room coming up with "interesting ideas". There is well documented DNA evidence (as well as morphological and anatomical evidence, etc) that can be used to trace human evolution back millions of years with an extremely high level of confidence. And you are equating that to people who think the Earth is 6000 years old by claiming direct observation is all that matters, and everything else is "faith"?
Just because you don't know the first thing about evolutionary biology doesn't mean no one does. And reason and deduction are not the same faith.
As the earth cools, its average density goes up, causing the planet to shrink. All just depends on whether the rate of expansion is enough to counteract the rate of contraction.
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?
And what have you accomplished that leads you to believe you have some special powers of judgment capable of discerning useless from useful knowledge?
Thank goodness we've had people throughout history who weren't so dismissive of certain lines inquiry and didn't share your lack of imagination.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This is just my opinion. Geez, you degreed people sure can be hard to get along with sometimes. I haven't accomplished any great deeds in my life. I am just a guy. I was trying to share my opinion. That's all. I have no special powers of judgement. Just my perspective from my limited knowledge. I apologize for wandering into a forum that required a pedigree and some form of institutionalized thinking structure to participate. I find it ironic that you accuse me of lack of imagination when you are doing nothing more than spouting things that others have told you. You have to realize that my comments are specific to my perspective. I am not trying to change anyone's mind, just trying to share ideas.
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."
Try getting bit by a radioactive spider. It might help.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
By that logic, nothing at all has ever mattered. Your mistake is taking medium to large social impact events, dividing by the huge number of people on the earth, and rounding down the small impact per person to 0 impact per person. Yes, compared to everything else in the world combined, no one thing looks particularly significant. But some changes/discoveries/viewpoints do have a bigger impact than others, and contribute their small but non-negligible effect to the sum total of human society. The number of illiterate, poor, homeless, hungry, warring, and criminal folks does actually vary as a function of historical changes; assuming this is an immutable constant is a great way to produce more illiterate, poor, homeless, hungry, warring, and criminal folks.
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
Rejecting magic meat essentially means that you rejected the idea of having a soul.
One could easily retain (rather than reject) the idea of a soul by positing that a sufficiently good meat-clone would have one too. Assuming the existence of souls does not require assuming the existence of magic meat, though the two propositions are often co-joined in many belief systems.
Nice to know that soulskill has multiple accounts...
How is figuring out how we got here supposed to change illiteracy, homelessness, hunger, crime, etc?
Well said. ...
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.
Predicting a direct path of influence is difficult or impossible. However, based on past history, rather "vague" shifts in philosophical understanding can have dramatic effects. For example, many current religious sects have major influence over national-level policies. Small shifts in the public credibility of these sects claims to have a "True" description of the universe might have major state policy effects, impacting the treatment of illiteracy/hunger/etc. Even without direct impact from, e.g., medical technology advancements from improved understanding of basic cellular function, the "secondary" impact of societal philosophical shifts can be quite large (and hard to predict). For a concrete example, consider the (usually negative) impacts of "Social Darwinism" in the 20th century --- nothing to do directly with technically correct interpretations of Darwin's theory, but the (misunderstood) implications of "advancement by competition and survival of the fittest" justified all sorts of really horrible social agendas.
Huh? - everyone knows it's a gooseberry bush..........???.......BURN HIM!!!!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
What would you call ERVs? And if you don't know what they are, then you should be mightily ashamed of yourself for making such a grand declaration based upon your near total ignorance of human evolution.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You keep acting as if the mere fact that you can form an opinion gives that opinion weight.
Your opinions appear to be based on your personal ignorance. Even wtrse, you seem to hold your ignorance in high esteem, and condemn those that don't suffer your willful ignorance.
Humans evolved from apes, are apes and that is that.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
WTF, Mods? I know my posts might not be worthy of a +1 for anything, but would anyone please respond to explain why my post above is "Redundant" and "Overrated"? I'm honestly baffled --- perhaps because I'm a complete idiot; someone please enlighten (or cleverly insult) me.
Sure we will. Oh, with the addition of a few million years of simmering.
What we're getting close to is understanding how it happened, not performing magic tricks.
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.
I sat in a login queue for nine months!
So done. The account of 'n3tm0nk' has now been hacked and is under the control of a blithering imbecile, as will be clearly evident from any further posts.
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 !
Of course we aren't direct descendants of apes, we are apes. The evidence is pretty overwhelming and how any educated person can even doubt it... Next you'll be stating that it is only faith to claim that lions and house cats are both felines, I mean lions roar, don't purr and hunt as a pack, obviously no relationship to the house cat who God created to keep lonely old ladies company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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...
Not to mention quantum mechanics - we're only just scratching the surface and look what the transistor alone has done...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
Oh yeah it does, if we can figure out how life was created, we can create more life. And THAT opens the door to a lot.....
Quite true - so much so, in fact, that my wife insisted I get a vasectomy.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
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.
I really hate how the "ignorant public" assumes that every time a scientist is really excited about the obscure details of the topic she's devoted years of his life to studying, that she's trying to "blow up details" in some sinister immoral conspiracy. Yes, scientists are nerds who derive great joy and excitement from delving deeply into the finest minutiae of obscure, technical subjects. They will get excited about things you won't understand. They're not trying to take over the world, and will likely be fine with you being passionate about whatever your own interests are, too.
So then, it was take-out?
Have gnu, will travel.
We do; they just aren't all alive at the same time. As you go backward into the past, the genotypes of humans and other apes (e.g. chimpanzees) gradually converge, until several million years ago, they are the same. Taken as a whole, there HAS been a continuous spectrum of creatures from humans to apes. (And traced far back enough, between all living things.) It staggers me that people find this difficult to understand.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
But developing theories or how life came to be when we have absolutely no definitive way of knowing the original conditions is not science.
A lot of the initial conditions are known — the fundamental energetics of chemistry haven't changed since then, we can make a decent go of estimating what sort of rocks were present, and we know there are some weird things in meteorites because that's still true now — so it is possible to take a reasonable, educated guess as to what is feasible. If the energetics are right and the ingredients are (probably) present, it's a theory that doesn't fall at the first hurdle; the likelihood of something like that happening isn't desperately low.
Can't prove it utterly, of course. We don't have that kind of time machine. But we can have theories, and we can at least make them not require magical intervention to happen.
Of course, this particular theory probably isn't the last word on this particular topic (how life came to be using ATP for energy management inside the cell). Feel free to go away and come up with something better. But if you're going to do that, at least come up with one where the ingredients were somewhat likely to be present and which doesn't require very fancy catalysts (i.e., enzymes powered by ATP) to do critical steps.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
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.
What exactly do you mean with the term "synthetic genome"? What was it synthesized from? How was the bacteria different after it was injected with the so-called synthetic genome? Was it a new kind of bacteria never seen before or simply a bacteria with slightly different characteristics?
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
Four words: slash, dot, week, end.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Actually, finding out how life got started wouldn't tell us diddley about evolution.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Given the utter absence of evidence, you could easily make any claim about souls you wish.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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
As contrasted with "uneducated guess work"...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Actually we're already at the threshold of creating life in any form we wish - I believe it was a year or so ago that someone successfully implanted a fully synthetic genome into a bacteria...
That's the impression you'd get from skimming the headlines. I fear it's a bit sensationalist.
The experiment you refer to involved a synthesized -copy- of an existing organism's genome. An impressive feat, but not quite "creating life in any form we wish."
We've learned to copy-and-paste DNA. Right now that's about all we can do. Protein-folding is a hard problem, so we can't easily predict what a given DNA sequence will do, let alone invent new sequences. We can do a bit of remixing, copying a gene from here to there, but we can't create new genes yet.
We'll get there, I don't doubt that. But at this stage, our "synthetic genome" is just a xerox copy.
Informative link about the "synthetic genome" experiment: http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/%20projects/synthetic-bacterial-genome/press-release/
... actually, here's a more informative link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoplasma_laboratorium
Damned impressive stuff. They synthesized a copy of the m. mycoides genome from a computer record.
developing theories or how life cam to be when we have absolutely no definitive way of knowing the original conditions is not science.
Why?
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
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
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
No, humans share a common ancestor with apes. Probably a fairly ape-like common ancestor, but nonetheless not an ape. We tend to forget that taxonomy is a point in time classification and evolution takes place over some period of time. The same reason why there is no such thing as an 'intermediate' species.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
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
Synthetic, as in the DNA was created in a lab from raw chemicals and a digital representation of the desired genome. Still the same components as natural DNA obviously, or the cellular machinery wouldn't recognize it. If the comment below is correct (they have links if you want more info) then it was actually just a copy of the original DNA, but as a proof-of-concept it's a major accomplishment, and as we understand the DNA better we should be able to warp the cellular machinery into doing most anything within it's potential.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Yes, that was definitely one of the experiments I remember, but I could swear that someone actually managed to get a bacteria running on a severely stripped-down genome, part of a project to develop an absolutely minimalist organism to serve as a predictable experimental platform for genetic engineering research and potentially future custom organisms, sort of a next-gen white rat to be understood on a genetic level rather than only large-scale biology. Perhaps that's still a work in progress though.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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
Citation needed.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
All great apes, including humans, are in Hominidae, the common ancestor would have been an ape.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Eh I guess. I don't think current science really compares, but you're right, there's nothing that says we couldn't find something through science that is just as powerful and useful as a "back door" in a "matrix" style system if not more. I mean, we figured out how to use fire and electricity to our advantage and they're really game changing techs when you think about it.
Fire and electricity seem to be game mechanics. They happen all the time even if humans aren't around, think about a lightning storm. Game changing, yes, but what the game designer expects you to find and use.
Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, seems more like an artifact of the implementation of reality: everything seems to behave like a classical, Newtonian, clockwork universe, until you look really closely and see we actually have delayed evaluation (or "compute when needed.") That seems like an efficiency hack we weren't supposed to be aware of, and actually makes me think we are probably in a simulation.
...If the comment below is correct (they have links if you want more info) then it was actually just a copy of the original DNA.
It was a copy of a different species' DNA. They took a sample of m. capricolum, and replaced its DNA with a synthesized copy of m. mycoides's genome. The test organism actually changed into a different species.
Humans are a type of ape. We only confuse ourselves if we insist on a semantic distinction.
If gibbons are in the club, then we can't justify excluding ourselves... we're much closer to the other apes than gibbons are.
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.
But we are nor descended from apes, but we do share common ancestors.
The lawsuits from people injured in Chelyabinsk are heading towards your church even as we speak. Thank you for your allegation ; police investigation for "reckless endangerment" and multiple other crimes will ensue.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
A lot of the initial conditions are known
True, and for a long time already. In fact, the Bible itself describes a lot of them, speaking about sunlight and starlight and minerals and water and the yoman work of plate tectonic forces (leading to land, bringing outthe mineral porridge of the mantle and below, the cooling of the surface and emergence of "seas" and the atmosphere and hydrologic cycle. It even describes the "soup", by describing the waters in which life began, and from which it emerged onto the land, as "pisswaters" (read mucky shallows), etc. So Uri was hardly that much of a pioneer.
And, btw, what's wrong with a little "magic", as you call it" If I wanna make a lasagne, it helps to have the intelligence & forsight to to it, and a recipe and themagic of wallyworld to provide the various ingredients (even better with ready-made noodles and cheeses and sauces rather than trying to do it all fromcomplete scratch!) Gimme them and I can quite possibly even get the product I want by chance, if I just keep slamming the ingredients together a few (millions?) of times, in a fortuitously good environment (pan oven, etc?).
Lasagna ain't life, for sure, but I ain't nearly God. By definition, He's gotta be bigger than the universe he made and smart enough to design it and powerful enough to run it all - forever!
PS There's room enough to be open minded about this, and need enough for the tolerance tofor call off the culture and religious wars that are afflicting us, eh?
Alcaide's Cafe,
We need a flag or something for these seven digiters.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Yes, we are. Hominidae is called the "great apes", and includes humans as well as a bunch of other primates.
Not only are we descended from apes, we *are* apes. Not descended from a gorilla, maybe, but from an ape, absolutely.
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.
Where did the chemicals used to synthesize the DNA come from? Did it come from something that was alive or previously alive or was it synthesized from chemicals that were never part of a living organism? I have never heard that something nonliving becomes alive.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
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
I dislike comments like "...never implied that it was...", why add worthless flotsam to the conversation. You are aware that there are people who are interested in this stuff. Adding your two cents "just to be heard" is worthless, unintelligent, and really kind of a dick move. Own your words, you wrote 'em.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
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
This strongly suggests that you don't understand thermodynamics the way you think you do...
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
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.
Don't worry... my question asking for actual information behind the negative generalizations also got downmodded. I think we're just thread victims.
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.
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
Science in a sentence: "The validity of an idea is tested by experiment" (as opposed to say, by sitting and having a really good think about how things ought to be, as favoured by certain greek philosophers, or by reference to scripture/revelation).
So we have an idea about how life might have come about, and we do experiments to see if that really is a viable way for life to happen, or whether our hypothesis gels with what we can find out about the conditions of an earlier state of the planet. We are doing science, and in doing so we shift the probabilities as best we can know them in favour of whatever hypothesis fits best. We won't achieve perfect certainty, but we don't expect to.