"How we got to elemental material spewed out from a supernova to DNA, *that's* the missing link."
For the answer, I recommend you read "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. It's a very well written and interesting book which answers that exact question. I just finished it a couple of months ago. Does Dawkins know how this came about? In that case he can silence all the creationists in one move - all he has got to do is to actually develop such a self-organising, self-replicating structures and perhaps a single unicellular organism in the lab using the steps that he knows.
The article makes the assertion that life came to earth as amino acids on meteorites. Amino acids are only constituents of an organism - and therefore we can take for granted that *after* the amino acids came to earth (through whatever means) that some of these acids and other substances came together to form a *living* organism which later on evolved to form all the different creatures we see today.
Do scientists know how these amino acids came together to create the first living organism?
Why don't you think outside the box and answer my questions? You might say that my belief in religion is just blind faith in something that is not proven. by that same definition, your faith in evolution is blind too - because that isn't proven yet.
May I appeal to your gigantic intelligence to answer the simple question my weak creationist mind has come up with? (it is no doubt an easy question for someone of your grand stature to answer).
Anything that can come about by evolution can be deliberately engineered in the lab. If not, why not?
Ok, going by that argument - can we create a unicellular organism using one of the *existing* self-replicating modules?
The difference between the scientists trying to explain this and religous people doing the same, is the scientists openly admit they don't know, where the religous factions can't stand the idea they don't. A pretty broad and unsubstantiated claim coming from someone who claims to espouse a scientific temper.
Even hard proof that we were derived from random evolution should not shake anyone's faith in God. Before we can arrive at any *hard proof* of evolution, we will first need to know what it takes to create a self-replicating organism in the first place. We are no where near knowing the different steps it takes to deliberately create a living unicellular organism.
When we don't even know this, we cannot reasonably postulate the different evolutionary stages required to create this same organism.
Anything that can come about by evolution can be deliberately engineered. If not, why not?
If you try to catalyze it by causing the chemical reaction then the experiment may lose credibility. As a first step, we need to at least create this self-copying structure. We haven't even come close to doing this.
The question of whether such a structure can come about without someone deliberately creating it is something that can be dealt with after we have created the self-replicating structure.
I didn't ask for scientists to prove evolution. I only asked for them to create a unicellular life form using deliberate methods based on their understanding of what it would take to create life.
Anything that can happen as a consequence of circumstance, chance etc, can be deliberately engineered in the lab.
Example: If a stone takes on a particular shape because of constant flow of water over it over thousands of years, it should be possible to create a stone with the same shape by taking another stone and just grinding it into shape without requiring thousands of years to do it.
To know how evolution works, one will necessarily need to arrive at how it works in the following two stages:
Stage 1 - Create a unicellular organism in the lab using deliberate steps (that is, the scientists need not replicate the conditions that existed on the earth, there is no need to mimic the different stages of evolution etc). They can directly manipulate the creation of the amino acids, the cellular structure etc. They can form the different chemicals, proteins etc using whatever methods.
Stage 2 - Once stage 1 is complete and we know the exact set of steps required to deliberately create a unicellular organism, determine how this could have come about by evolution. Stage 2 will be difficult to prove because any experiment could take millions of years to complete.
However, if we cannot successfully complete stage 1, that is, if we don't know the exact set of steps required to create a unicellular life form in the lab from ground up, then we cannot really know what steps are required in stage 2.
This doesn't seem to have prevented the scientific community from vociferously claiming that they have a good understanding of stage 2 despite not coming anywhere near completing stage 1.
People like Dawkins need not spend so much time and energy trying to prove creationist wrong. All they have to do is complete stage 1 - that is, they need only come up with a way of creating a unicellular life form in the lab using deliberate methods and then start work on stage 2.
Let the scientists come up with a *single* unicellular life form using any/all these amino acids by *deliberate* and *guided* methods in a *controlled environment* within a *lab* using all the scientific resources currently available, and I will start believing that it is indeed possible for life to form from a sea of amino acids and other organic material.
Anything that can be created by evolution can be created by deliberate engineering. If not, I would like to hear why not?
Till then if I choose to believe in FSM or anything else, you have no grounds to mock me.. because your beliefs aren't grounded on any *proven* evidence.
The title of this article on/. is misleading. If you RFTA, you will know that the author mentions that the new architecture will *greatly improve* backwards compatibility.
The approach used to get the backwards compatibility will be different and superior to that used in Vista - that is the main point of the article.
I will be interested in knowing exactly who was involved in the panel which decided on this "miracle" gravity lamp. If this is the type of rigor they are capable of exercising when deciding on a design, then we are all in trouble.
Didn't they bother to spend even 10 minutes on determining the feasibility of a design?
It's because you specifically noted primate and human evolution versus the theory of evolution in general, somehow implying that humans are special and outside the system Please read my comment again. I was stating the simple fact that the timeline for the human and ape split has been "corrected" by over 100% - and that is a worrying thing because getting something wrong some 10% is a correction, 100% is a tragedy. There are many other such "findings" in various branches of science.
Something that immediately comes to mind is the findings about the age of the earth based on the discovery of the world's oldest diamonds in Australia.
"Well, if we were wrong about one thing, we could be wrong about everything in science!". I was questioning the nature of the peer-review and the fact that this so called finding could have been found much earlier, if it was discovered in just a few hours of work by a group using just spreadsheets.
I don't believe that we are wrong about everything in science - but there is reason to believe that there may be things in science which could have easily been caught by more stringent peer-review.
If this happens to be the same arguement made by "Intelligent Design" folks, does it make it any less true?
"Why do I feel your hidden conclusion from this is 'Jebus is teh g0d!'" Interesting that this was brought up. Questioning a "scientific finding" these days or even implying that there may be problems in how the scientific research is being conducted can bring all kinds of interesting people from the woodwork - it is an act about as sacrilegious as arguing before the pope during the dark ages that the sun is not, in fact, rotating around the earth.
I fully expect to be modded down to oblivion for this and I honestly couldn't care less.
I agree that the nature of science is that we will definitely need to improve on our findings and get higher and higher levels of accuracy. That is to be expected.
What I find worrying is the range of correction that needs to be applied and also the fact that the correction takes this long - especially considering that the group was able to arrive at a value which is *twice* the older value by just spending a little bit of time studying the data.
The questions it raises are:
1. How is it that the Milkyway was considered to be 6000 light years wide? When someone made this claim, wasn't the data ever rechecked by anyone? If someone with a spreadsheet can come up with this new value of 12000 light years just by spending a few hours studying it, why was it not done earlier? What happened to peer-review - was it ever conducted? If this isn't an indication of incompetence at some level among a few people involved in setting this value, what is?
2. Scientific findings will, no doubt, be modified as new things come to light. However, corrections are normally meant to be just a few % off the initial value. 100% change is not an improvement - it means that the initial value was astoundingly and absolutely wrong. What is staggering about this is the fact that the new value was not calculated based on any *new* finding - but rather it was found just by recalculating based on the *already* existing data.
3. What implications does this have on other findings?
My example about the dating of primate and human evolution was to prove that these type of huge "corrections" have occured even in other scientific fields as well. So what we know to be absolutely true today, can be completely off tomorrow.
What I find disturbing is the fact that a number is this widely off and no one discovered it for such a long time! I can imagine deviation by x % or less where x
The split of Humans from the Apes pushed back by another 6 to 7 million years earlier than previously thought based on molecular genetics. The difference from the earlier estimate of around 5 to 6 million years is therefore over 100% http://www.news24.com/News24/Technology/News/0,,2-13-1443_2169361,00.html
Thats interesting because many "enlightened thinkers" were also professing Christians and they believed the exact opposite of what you claim. Isacc Newton comes to mind instantly. There are many more.
Fact is, the western world which is now the bedrock of democracy and freedom of speech had its foundations in Christianity.
Name one other place in the world which has this same level of freedom (apart from Japan) which didn't have a Christian foundation?
Very true. In the fields of anthropology, archeology and paleontology, there is also pressure to sensationalize the research. For instance, in paleontology when a fossil is found, they will attribute as many sensational characteristics to the specimen as possible - example: 5 inch teeth able, jaws capable of generating 6 tonnes of pressure per square inch, capable of running 60 kmph, killed its prey by shredding it with the powerful jaws, razor sharp teeth and 12 inch claws.
To accommodate for the fact that there is very little evidence for the above said sensational behavior, the scientist will add weasel words like "probably" or a "it is thought that" in the same statement.
You can verify this for yourself by looking at many paleontology literature (and also sites). You will notice that the vast majority of the research is into things like determining the strength of a particular specimen, the speed at which it would run.. etc.
There is a desire to feed the popular press and to do a few interviews on tv, sell a book or two and perhaps even rights for a movie. This compromises the quality of a lot of research going on in these fields and also opens up opportunities for other charlatans who are willing to steal your ideas from you, if they can help it.
What about peer review, you say? Well, when you have a bunch of people who are having quite a party by making their "findings" as "interesting" as possible, who among them would want to make this any less interesting.
There will be some other companies who will hire these "young uns".. you just need to wait it out till they gain some experience there and you could then offer them a job. Why hire fresh and spend money training them when there are other companies willing to do that for you? You are never going to have a case when all companies wait it out for someone else to recruit and train fresh recruits.
You mean pretty much everyone who has made it big got there by politicking? Well, I think you are wrong.
There are a lot of people who worked their asses off to get ahead. Even now, if any from the new generation have both the competency as well as the willingness to work hard, they will get way ahead of their peers who may have the same competence but who are unwilling to work as hard.
Many companies will happily pay to have a few senior people (30+) and some with medium seniority (5+ years) rather than have a bunch of new young uns with no experience and bad attitude. A lot of firms are waking up to the reality that fresh recruits are not worth the problems that you would have with them.
I agree completely. I have been interviewing people for several years now and I can see that the overall quality has dropped considerably.
The new generation has:
a) No work ethic (eg: SMS lingo in business emails and communication. Poor etiquette) b) Next to no social skills (eg: Picking up calls on their cell when a meeting is in progress) c) An entitlement mentality (they feel they have earned it - even on their first day at work) d) No attention span (give them some work to do and they will be on chat and email with their friends/coworkers while they should be working) e) Know-it-all-attitude coupled with a feeling that if you are older than them by 5+ years that you are a dinosaur.
I am not surprised they consider themselves having the right to demand high pay because they are also quite deluded.
That is a very arrogant viewpoint. If you are associating the ability to think (that is intelligence) with atheism, then how do you explain the fact that Issac Newton, Pasteur etc were all believers in God? Were they stupid?
Also, are you claiming that pretty much the entire planet (apart from a small minority who call themselves atheists) are stupid?
Slashdot Mirror
The article makes the assertion that life came to earth as amino acids on meteorites. Amino acids are only constituents of an organism - and therefore we can take for granted that *after* the amino acids came to earth (through whatever means) that some of these acids and other substances came together to form a *living* organism which later on evolved to form all the different creatures we see today.
Do scientists know how these amino acids came together to create the first living organism?
Why don't you think outside the box and answer my questions? You might say that my belief in religion is just blind faith in something that is not proven. by that same definition, your faith in evolution is blind too - because that isn't proven yet.
You are still way off.
May I appeal to your gigantic intelligence to answer the simple question my weak creationist mind has come up with? (it is no doubt an easy question for someone of your grand stature to answer).
Anything that can come about by evolution can be deliberately engineered in the lab. If not, why not?
My assertion is this: Anything that can come about by evolution can be deliberately engineered.
If you don't think so, I would like to know why?
When we don't even know this, we cannot reasonably postulate the different evolutionary stages required to create this same organism.
Anything that can come about by evolution can be deliberately engineered. If not, why not?
The question of whether such a structure can come about without someone deliberately creating it is something that can be dealt with after we have created the self-replicating structure.
I didn't ask for scientists to prove evolution. I only asked for them to create a unicellular life form using deliberate methods based on their understanding of what it would take to create life.
Anything that can happen as a consequence of circumstance, chance etc, can be deliberately engineered in the lab.
Example: If a stone takes on a particular shape because of constant flow of water over it over thousands of years, it should be possible to create a stone with the same shape by taking another stone and just grinding it into shape without requiring thousands of years to do it.
To know how evolution works, one will necessarily need to arrive at how it works in the following two stages:
Stage 1 - Create a unicellular organism in the lab using deliberate steps (that is, the scientists need not replicate the conditions that existed on the earth, there is no need to mimic the different stages of evolution etc). They can directly manipulate the creation of the amino acids, the cellular structure etc. They can form the different chemicals, proteins etc using whatever methods.
Stage 2 - Once stage 1 is complete and we know the exact set of steps required to deliberately create a unicellular organism, determine how this could have come about by evolution. Stage 2 will be difficult to prove because any experiment could take millions of years to complete.
However, if we cannot successfully complete stage 1, that is, if we don't know the exact set of steps required to create a unicellular life form in the lab from ground up, then we cannot really know what steps are required in stage 2.
This doesn't seem to have prevented the scientific community from vociferously claiming that they have a good understanding of stage 2 despite not coming anywhere near completing stage 1.
People like Dawkins need not spend so much time and energy trying to prove creationist wrong. All they have to do is complete stage 1 - that is, they need only come up with a way of creating a unicellular life form in the lab using deliberate methods and then start work on stage 2.
To continue - taking any organism and replacing its DNA or changing its DNA is NOT the same as creating an organism in the first place.
Let the scientists come up with a *single* unicellular life form using any/all these amino acids by *deliberate* and *guided* methods in a *controlled environment* within a *lab* using all the scientific resources currently available, and I will start believing that it is indeed possible for life to form from a sea of amino acids and other organic material.
Anything that can be created by evolution can be created by deliberate engineering. If not, I would like to hear why not?
Till then if I choose to believe in FSM or anything else, you have no grounds to mock me.. because your beliefs aren't grounded on any *proven* evidence.
The title of this article on /. is misleading. If you RFTA, you will know that the author mentions that the new architecture will *greatly improve* backwards compatibility.
The approach used to get the backwards compatibility will be different and superior to that used in Vista - that is the main point of the article.
I will be interested in knowing exactly who was involved in the panel which decided on this "miracle" gravity lamp. If this is the type of rigor they are capable of exercising when deciding on a design, then we are all in trouble.
Didn't they bother to spend even 10 minutes on determining the feasibility of a design?
Something that immediately comes to mind is the findings about the age of the earth based on the discovery of the world's oldest diamonds in Australia. "Well, if we were wrong about one thing, we could be wrong about everything in science!". I was questioning the nature of the peer-review and the fact that this so called finding could have been found much earlier, if it was discovered in just a few hours of work by a group using just spreadsheets.
I don't believe that we are wrong about everything in science - but there is reason to believe that there may be things in science which could have easily been caught by more stringent peer-review.
If this happens to be the same arguement made by "Intelligent Design" folks, does it make it any less true?
I fully expect to be modded down to oblivion for this and I honestly couldn't care less.
I agree that the nature of science is that we will definitely need to improve on our findings and get higher and higher levels of accuracy. That is to be expected.
What I find worrying is the range of correction that needs to be applied and also the fact that the correction takes this long - especially considering that the group was able to arrive at a value which is *twice* the older value by just spending a little bit of time studying the data.
The questions it raises are:
1. How is it that the Milkyway was considered to be 6000 light years wide? When someone made this claim, wasn't the data ever rechecked by anyone? If someone with a spreadsheet can come up with this new value of 12000 light years just by spending a few hours studying it, why was it not done earlier? What happened to peer-review - was it ever conducted? If this isn't an indication of incompetence at some level among a few people involved in setting this value, what is?
2. Scientific findings will, no doubt, be modified as new things come to light. However, corrections are normally meant to be just a few % off the initial value. 100% change is not an improvement - it means that the initial value was astoundingly and absolutely wrong. What is staggering about this is the fact that the new value was not calculated based on any *new* finding - but rather it was found just by recalculating based on the *already* existing data.
3. What implications does this have on other findings?
My example about the dating of primate and human evolution was to prove that these type of huge "corrections" have occured even in other scientific fields as well. So what we know to be absolutely true today, can be completely off tomorrow.
What I find disturbing is the fact that a number is this widely off and no one discovered it for such a long time! I can imagine deviation by x % or less where x
The split of Humans from the Apes pushed back by another 6 to 7 million years earlier than previously thought based on molecular genetics. The difference from the earlier estimate of around 5 to 6 million years is therefore over 100%
http://www.news24.com/News24/Technology/News/0,,2-13-1443_2169361,00.html
Nice generalization. Are you always this clear in your thinking?
Thats interesting because many "enlightened thinkers" were also professing Christians and they believed the exact opposite of what you claim. Isacc Newton comes to mind instantly. There are many more.
Fact is, the western world which is now the bedrock of democracy and freedom of speech had its foundations in Christianity.
Name one other place in the world which has this same level of freedom (apart from Japan) which didn't have a Christian foundation?
Very true. In the fields of anthropology, archeology and paleontology, there is also pressure to sensationalize the research. For instance, in paleontology when a fossil is found, they will attribute as many sensational characteristics to the specimen as possible - example: 5 inch teeth able, jaws capable of generating 6 tonnes of pressure per square inch, capable of running 60 kmph, killed its prey by shredding it with the powerful jaws, razor sharp teeth and 12 inch claws.
To accommodate for the fact that there is very little evidence for the above said sensational behavior, the scientist will add weasel words like "probably" or a "it is thought that" in the same statement.
You can verify this for yourself by looking at many paleontology literature (and also sites). You will notice that the vast majority of the research is into things like determining the strength of a particular specimen, the speed at which it would run.. etc.
There is a desire to feed the popular press and to do a few interviews on tv, sell a book or two and perhaps even rights for a movie. This compromises the quality of a lot of research going on in these fields and also opens up opportunities for other charlatans who are willing to steal your ideas from you, if they can help it.
What about peer review, you say? Well, when you have a bunch of people who are having quite a party by making their "findings" as "interesting" as possible, who among them would want to make this any less interesting.
There will be some other companies who will hire these "young uns".. you just need to wait it out till they gain some experience there and you could then offer them a job. Why hire fresh and spend money training them when there are other companies willing to do that for you? You are never going to have a case when all companies wait it out for someone else to recruit and train fresh recruits.
You mean pretty much everyone who has made it big got there by politicking? Well, I think you are wrong.
There are a lot of people who worked their asses off to get ahead. Even now, if any from the new generation have both the competency as well as the willingness to work hard, they will get way ahead of their peers who may have the same competence but who are unwilling to work as hard.
Many companies will happily pay to have a few senior people (30+) and some with medium seniority (5+ years) rather than have a bunch of new young uns with no experience and bad attitude. A lot of firms are waking up to the reality that fresh recruits are not worth the problems that you would have with them.
I agree completely. I have been interviewing people for several years now and I can see that the overall quality has dropped considerably.
The new generation has:
a) No work ethic (eg: SMS lingo in business emails and communication. Poor etiquette)
b) Next to no social skills (eg: Picking up calls on their cell when a meeting is in progress)
c) An entitlement mentality (they feel they have earned it - even on their first day at work)
d) No attention span (give them some work to do and they will be on chat and email with their friends/coworkers while they should be working)
e) Know-it-all-attitude coupled with a feeling that if you are older than them by 5+ years that you are a dinosaur.
I am not surprised they consider themselves having the right to demand high pay because they are also quite deluded.
That is a very arrogant viewpoint. If you are associating the ability to think (that is intelligence) with atheism, then how do you explain the fact that Issac Newton, Pasteur etc were all believers in God? Were they stupid?
Also, are you claiming that pretty much the entire planet (apart from a small minority who call themselves atheists) are stupid?