With the earlier emergence of "just turn it on" devices, such as the Palm PDA from 3Com Corp.'s Palm Computing Division or Sun Microsystems Inc.'s SunRay thin client, we might have avoided vast investments in training users to administer PC operating systems
Uhhhh.... It's pretty silly to think that these devices might have been created without 20+ years of r+d put into developing PCs. Really, does anybody think that hardware companies were going to put 20 years of effort into developing these things without producing a product and without a specific goal???? It's like saying "Gee, we could have saved a lot of resources if we had just created electric cars to begin with at the beginning of the century", isn't it?
If you "assume no limits to reality", then acknowleging that there is, or at least there could be a God who created us, should be a natural inclination for you
I don't know that there isn't a God, but the evidence doesn't seem to support it, as far as I can tell. I'll admit that there's a possibility, no matter how remote.
Okay. Then I'm approaching it as "There's a possibility that it happened, so I want to consider the possibility, and admit that I may not know all of the science required to figure it out. Because of this, I can't know that it didn't happen".
And remember that "basic science and math" don't say anything about quantum theory, so there may be more to it than what basic science and math say.
I guess that I'm approaching this from the "It happened, so let's figure out how" point of view, and you're approaching it from the "I don't see how it could have happened, so it must not have" point of view, which is very unscientific. That second camp assumes that they know everything, their own judgement and knowledge are the limits of reality. I assume no limits to reality, but look to come as close as possible by observing what goes on. (I've posted somewhere else in all of this muddling about life about Richard Feynman. Read him for more on this sort of thing).
Yes, long random string were probably formed, but the odds those could be anything useful (the sequences we have picked) are mathematically zero, just as the odds your genome would match one randomly designed are zero.
"(the sequences we have picked)" -- Once any self-reproducing sequence formed, then it's just a matter of mutation and reproducing before you start to form more complex sequences, like those 300 or so that these scientists have targeted. Again, it's not a matter of all of these atoms moving into sync at the same time! It's a matter of a simple sequence reproducing and mutating into a more complex one, with the chances of the simple one being randomly produced being > 0.
I'll put it like this. The chances of a a bunch of molecules of iron existing in a large slab of organic material are 0, according to your logic. But I say that it happens all the time. Way back a long time ago, some amino acids bunched together. Then mutations and evolution occurred. Now people are pounding nails into walls everywhere. You don't advance straight to step 100,000, you have do go through smaller, more probably steps along the way.
Getting back to Miller. He obviously didn't show exactly what happened, but I think that he did show that there's merit to this primordial soup thing.
Last time I checked, science doesn't have a great track record on "moral" judgement either. Nuclear weapons, enviromental rape, super-bacteria created by the wide spread overuse of antibiotics (sp?), yada, yada. Oh science is DEFINATELY proven that it keeps moral implications high on their list.
You absolutely need to read some of Richard Feynman's writings (everybody else in this thread should, too). His view on this is that science is a way of doing things - it doesn't have morals. It's not good or bad, but can be used to either end. It's the people who use science that have good or bad moral judgement. How can something that's not sentient have morals?
Feynman has several wonderful books. The one that has several chapters addressing this issue is called "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out", and addresses these very issues.
LOL... so you think you're as special or more special than God just because you figured out how to take apart something He has built and re-assemble it to something else that still works? It's like taking apart your car and re-assembling it to another car, and then claiming that you invented cars. Rather myopic, if you ask me.
The problem I have with these statements is that you're taking the view that there absolutely is a God, so therefore he must be more powerful than us. I say evolution and chance did it, and people are awfully clever to have pieced together (a very little bit of) how it happened. And since this assumes there is no 'God', then we're not copying anybody's work, it's all original.
So what if life on this planet is the result of some aliens coming down millions of years ago, and dropping some of these 300-gened organisms on earth?
There were ideas of things like "personal morality, the idea of universal humanity, charity, the sanctity of life and much much more" long before Christianity (and related religions) sprang up. Before Christianity appeared, the world was not total immoral chaos, people already had the ideas of 'thou shalt not kill' and whatnot. These were not revolutions brought upon us by Christianity.
More evidence that the church (Catholic in this case) is 'anti-science': it was only in 1993 that the Pope pardoned (or whatever they do) Galileo, and admitted that he was right....
He only succeeded in creating amino acids. The odds of them randomly stringing together (with no rights!) to form something useful are so low it's absurd
But if enough amino acids interact enough times (as would have happened in the millions of years that life-forming conditions presumably existed), the odds become not so absurd. Also, a low probability of an event occuring doesn't mean that it didn't - there's a low probability that I would have ended up with my exact genetic makeup, but exactly that happened.
Slashdot Mirror
With the earlier emergence of "just turn it on" devices, such as the Palm PDA from 3Com Corp.'s Palm Computing Division or Sun Microsystems Inc.'s SunRay thin client, we might have avoided vast investments in training users to administer PC operating systems
Uhhhh.... It's pretty silly to think that these devices might have been created without 20+ years of r+d put into developing PCs. Really, does anybody think that hardware companies were going to put 20 years of effort into developing these things without producing a product and without a specific goal???? It's like saying "Gee, we could have saved a lot of resources if we had just created electric cars to begin with at the beginning of the century", isn't it?
If you "assume no limits to reality", then acknowleging that there is, or at least there could be a God who created us, should be a natural inclination for you
I don't know that there isn't a God, but the evidence doesn't seem to support it, as far as I can tell. I'll admit that there's a possibility, no matter how remote.
Okay. Then I'm approaching it as "There's a possibility that it happened, so I want to consider the possibility, and admit that I may not know all of the science required to figure it out. Because of this, I can't know that it didn't happen".
And remember that "basic science and math" don't say anything about quantum theory, so there may be more to it than what basic science and math say.
I guess that I'm approaching this from the "It happened, so let's figure out how" point of view, and you're approaching it from the "I don't see how it could have happened, so it must not have" point of view, which is very unscientific. That second camp assumes that they know everything, their own judgement and knowledge are the limits of reality. I assume no limits to reality, but look to come as close as possible by observing what goes on. (I've posted somewhere else in all of this muddling about life about Richard Feynman. Read him for more on this sort of thing).
Okay. Do you have any idea how many electrons there are in the Universe?
Yes, long random string were probably formed, but the odds those could be anything useful (the sequences we have picked) are mathematically zero, just as the odds your genome would match one randomly designed are zero.
"(the sequences we have picked)" -- Once any self-reproducing sequence formed, then it's just a matter of mutation and reproducing before you start to form more complex sequences, like those 300 or so that these scientists have targeted. Again, it's not a matter of all of these atoms moving into sync at the same time! It's a matter of a simple sequence reproducing and mutating into a more complex one, with the chances of the simple one being randomly produced being > 0.
I'll put it like this. The chances of a a bunch of molecules of iron existing in a large slab of organic material are 0, according to your logic. But I say that it happens all the time. Way back a long time ago, some amino acids bunched together. Then mutations and evolution occurred. Now people are pounding nails into walls everywhere. You don't advance straight to step 100,000, you have do go through smaller, more probably steps along the way.
Getting back to Miller. He obviously didn't show exactly what happened, but I think that he did show that there's merit to this primordial soup thing.
Last time I checked, science doesn't have a great track record on "moral" judgement either. Nuclear weapons, enviromental rape, super-bacteria created by the wide spread overuse of antibiotics (sp?), yada, yada. Oh science is DEFINATELY proven that it keeps moral implications high on their list.
You absolutely need to read some of Richard Feynman's writings (everybody else in this thread should, too). His view on this is that science is a way of doing things - it doesn't have morals. It's not good or bad, but can be used to either end. It's the people who use science that have good or bad moral judgement. How can something that's not sentient have morals?
Feynman has several wonderful books. The one that has several chapters addressing this issue is called "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out", and addresses these very issues.
LOL... so you think you're as special or more special than God just because you figured out how to take apart something He has built and re-assemble it to something else that still works? It's like taking apart your car and re-assembling it to another car, and then claiming that you invented cars. Rather myopic, if you ask me.
The problem I have with these statements is that you're taking the view that there absolutely is a God, so therefore he must be more powerful than us. I say evolution and chance did it, and people are awfully clever to have pieced together (a very little bit of) how it happened. And since this assumes there is no 'God', then we're not copying anybody's work, it's all original.
So what if life on this planet is the result of some aliens coming down millions of years ago, and dropping some of these 300-gened organisms on earth?
There were ideas of things like "personal morality, the idea of universal humanity, charity, the sanctity of life and much much more" long before Christianity (and related religions) sprang up. Before Christianity appeared, the world was not total immoral chaos, people already had the ideas of 'thou shalt not kill' and whatnot. These were not revolutions brought upon us by Christianity.
More evidence that the church (Catholic in this case) is 'anti-science': it was only in 1993 that the Pope pardoned (or whatever they do) Galileo, and admitted that he was right....
He only succeeded in creating amino acids. The odds of them randomly stringing together (with no rights!) to form something useful are so low it's absurd
But if enough amino acids interact enough times (as would have happened in the millions of years that life-forming conditions presumably existed), the odds become not so absurd. Also, a low probability of an event occuring doesn't mean that it didn't - there's a low probability that I would have ended up with my exact genetic makeup, but exactly that happened.