Irrelevant. There was no "biological setting" involved. Crystals (including clays) are often composed of long homochiral molecular chains. Point being: There was plenty of chiral substrate on the pre-biotic planet, and a lot of it was replicating. There's your selection pressure - better fit to a substrate, better coordinated chemistry in feeding etc, etc. That's the mainstream take. The more radical takes include things like this: You've seen this before: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160211141747.htm
paddoboy: I'm not sure what you think you gain by repeating yourself constantly. Wrong the first time means wrong for the next 100 repeats as well. It would save you a lot of time if you simply conceded the point, but your ego never lets you. Everything has to be a contest for you. You appear to be referring back to a done-and-dusted discussion we had. If you have nothing new to add, I'm going to assume I dealt with your objections previously. I'm sure I wouldn't have ignored your objections. What a surprise! Why you feel the need to simply repeat the same claim, when I have already explained what's wrong with it, is a mystery. I guess it gives your ego a kick or something. Argumentem ad populum. A logical fallacy. How do you know that's the only alternative? (See my post above.) Maybe you should ask him why, if what he likes matters so much to you. Isn't my position clear to you yet? Take a guess. I'll tell you if you're right. And so? That doesn't mean a fully-fledged theory of abiogenesis springs magically into being.
It is not assumed, but demonstrably self-evident, unless you want to discredit science and scientific language. i.e. the Table of Elements. Do you doubt that abiogenesis is a chemical process? Are the constituent atomic and molecular parts of non-living objects different from the constituent atomic and molecular parts in living objects? What is the chemical difference between a live beetle and a dead beetle ? Nothing! Only the chemical pattern arrangement has changed! I believe you are focusing on the wrong facts. It has nothing to do with faith or process. The process has been identified as an inanimate chemical state somehow changing into an animate chemical state. The cause for change is unimportant, it is and was chemical in nature. This "understanding" is unassailable. Hence the axiom. Because science has established (demonstrated) that the fundamental physical properties of the universe are chemical in nature. At least that's how science has identified them in the Table of Elements. No religion can change the Table of Elements. Can you think of a physical object that is non-chemical in its constituents? Are we inventing new non-chemical atomic and molecular physics? AFAIK, Abiogenesis does not dispute the chemical nature of physical objects, it only disputes the causality of change. The term "chemical" is inescapable when speaking about Physics, animate or inanimate. p.s. Even the assumption of a mathematical universe expresses reality as atomic and molecular chemical patterns....Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Question: Are subatomic particles chemical in nature or do they represent only non-chemical mathematical values?
Earth's atmosphere was oxidizing before the earliest evidence for life: http://www.godandscience.org/evolution/earth_early_atmosphere.html And your assertion '...As were complex and elaborate nonliving chemical structures...' in a prebiotic world is just that, an unevidenced assertion.
You misinterpret what I wrote. The context of my words you quote should have been real clear - I obviously meant homochiral organic molecules, originating on clay surface templates, that had the ability to self-replicate. The muddled history and actual iffy at best status of Cairns-Smith clay hypothesis, and similar efforts: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160823-the-idea-that-life-began-as-clay-crystals-is-50-years-old
Yep, your position is quite clear and like q-reeus' position, I reject it in favour of the more popular position. Why don't you stop your silly condescending replies and act like an adult. I've given links and I am far more inclined to accept them for obvious reasons, then your own 'fence sitting" and that of the IDer q-reeus. Abiogenesis is the only scientific theory/assumption/process we have and can be confident in, as opposed to any unscientific creationist crap.
Science isn't a popularity contest. Am I supposed to take every idiotic question you ask seriously? I'm on the record as being an atheist. That means I don't believe in any gods, including supernatural spaghetti monsters. Obviously. So go figure out the obvious implications of that. You've gone from "theory" to "theory/assumption/process". You know there's no theory and you don't have a process, so why not act like an adult and admit I've been right all along?
So what is this "answer"? Presumably "abiogenesis" is more than just an incantation that supposedly explodes theists. (You need the right kind of magic wand for that.) So what do you take its actual content to be, what do you think that it means? You act like you possess this "answer" that you write about constantly, or at least can say something intelligent and "scientific" about what it is, what its qualities and implications are, and how you know that it exists. Perhaps it's time to do that, to spell out precisely and in detail what you are on about. I most assuredly agree with James in thinking that you've just created a false dichotomy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma So what's wrong with just admitting that nobody currently knows how life originated? Let alone knows what the ultimate shape and contour of reality is. Admitting that you don't know what you don't know is certainly more intellectually respectable than pretending to know things that neither you nor any other human being can possibly know. Lowering yourself to what you take to be the level of your opponents and preaching your own alternative faith-based belief system isn't the best way to battle what you believe to be obscurantism, Paddoboy. You need to be smarter than they are, not make yourself just like them.
Write4U: For some reason, people in this thread have come to the conclusion that I don't think science will solve the problem of abiogenesis. That's despite my clearly saying several times that I think it will. I have said nothing about how I think God did it, or a flying spaghetti monster, or anything else. Currently, there is no scientific theory of abiogenesis. If you assume there is one, or you think it is self-evident, I can't help you. All I can do is to tell you the facts. I don't know how it happened. Do you? If you're asking whether living things are made of the same kinds of atoms as non-living things, the answer is, broadly speaking, yes. But you already knew that, didn't you? You make it sound simple. Why, then, can't you bring a dead beetle back to life? Or create a living beetle from scratch (without other beetles)? The key word being, in this discussion, "somehow". You should send a note to all the scientists who are working on the problem, to tell them it's not important. What understanding? Assumption. Your assumption, you mean. Chemistry is (just) a subset of physics, roughly speaking. Not everything is a chemical. Yes. A neutron star. I don't know what you're inventing. All I'm saying is I don't know how life started. You're the one pretending to know. "abiogenesis" is just a label for whatever (currently unknown) process formed life from non-life. Wrong. Chemistry is concerned essentially with how atoms bond together, which is largely due to what their electrons are doing. There are huge areas of physics that are completely unconcerned with the details of atoms and their electrons. Assumption piled upon assumption. Why do you insist on doing that? Chemistry is concerned with physics at the atomic level. At the subatomic level, chemistry is irrelevant. By asking whether subatomic particles are chemical, it only shows that you really don't know what chemistry is the study of. I've also told you before that no mathematical values can create "stuff", and that includes atoms and sub-atomic particles. Maths is an abstraction.
You're not right, just as you're not right with your denial of theory of evolution being fact and theory. I't's a process of how life came to be....It's a theory, the only one we have of how life came to be, It's the scientific assumption of how life came to be....take your pick, it certainly over rides your contention of trying to establish the unscientific myth of ID....
Because as I know you understand, Abiogenesis is the only scientific assumption/theory/process, that we know of that can support that. ID, or any other supernatural/paranormal explanation is unscientific.
At one time there was no life on Earth: Then there was. We are here is evident enough for Abiogenesis, being the only scientific answer. Quora: Paul Lucas , Ph.D in Biochemistry concluding remarks..................... So yes, abiogenesis is considered as something that happened, by whatever means. Scientists do not consider that there is a “gap” there. Creationists, of course, refuse to accept this. Creationists share a belief of atheists: if there is a “natural” process, then God is absent. Steve Baker: Blogger at LetsRunWithIt.com (2013-present) The word “abiogenesis” means “the making of life from non-living stuff” - and there really are only two choices here: Life arose from non-living stuff by itself. A magical creature from who-knows-where magicked it all into existence.
No, but if you start with simple chemicals and end up with complex chemicals the process must have been of a chemical nature. I cannot see any other logical interpretation. I am looking at this in very simple direct terms. It's like saying that 2 + x = 5 is not necessarily a mathematical equation and that "x" may be something other than mathematical. That just doesn't sound right to me......Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! We don't need to know what value "(+ x)" represents to establish it as a mathematical function. And if I understand the definition of Abiogenesis, it describes a chemical process, regardless of environment and causal forces.
. So? Your link there does not hyperlink to the Nature article it somewhat misrepresents, btw. Also, it claims that all this geological circumstance over billions of years is evidence of God - you might want to find a link less foolish than that. Not very. The Great Oxidation Event happened more than a billion years later. And the planet still harbors, to this day, large anoxic regions and volumes, billions of years after the atmosphere became strongly oxidizing. And many of the living beings in these regions belong to the oldest evolutionary lineages still extant. No matter how many times you repeat it, the assertion remains irrelevant. You have demonstrated that you are unable to come up with a plausible guess for the specific evolutionary sequence that produced the early living beings. I accept that demonstration - it's what I would have predicted. I can't do that either. That's what my link noted, yep. So? There is a very large amount of evidence for the ability of chemical elements to combine in complex molecular structures. There is also the fact that many of these structures replicate with variation, exhibit chirality, and so forth. And finally, there is the fact of selection among different molecular structures in all plausible early environments. That combination of circumstances will - with probability near 1 - produce complex structures over time. What do imagine would have prevented such structures from forming?
Why are you citing chemical conditions to prove a non-chemical Abiogenesis? Don't you see? You can argue conditions and causality all you want, Abiogenesis always occurs as a chemical process! A dead beetle has the exact same chemical composition as a live beetle. The difference is in the pattern the chemicals are arranged.
Another example of complete misrepresentation of what I was actually saying. You lost the drift some time back. And it's likewise tedious and frustrating dealing with your other statements here. These exchanges get nowhere useful. They never have. On any topic we engage in. Joust with others more willing to keep the conversation going and going and going.
I say there is no theory of abiogenesis. You say I'm wrong. Easily settled. Point me towards the theory. Provide a link, a reference, anything that will show us all the full theory. Your nonsense about denial is irrelevant and I will ignore it. I walked you through that stuff already. What is unscientific is telling lies about a non-existent theory. A word isn't an answer. Nor is it a theory. Paul never says he has a theory of abiogenesis, or that anybody else has one. This is irrelevant. False dichotomy. There are thousands of other possibilities that this guy isn't considering. You ought to pick your authorities more carefully that by random google searches.
In response to Paddoboy trying to set up his false dichotomy, I asked, "So what's wrong with just admitting that nobody currently knows how life originated?" Paddoboy repeats his mantra once again as if the strength of an argument is a function of repetition... Can support what? Your conclusion? How does one get from simply observing that life appears to have had an initial origin (somehow, somewhere) to a never-clearly-stated conclusion that you seem to believe is absolutely devastating against the creationists? If you want to make progress from the place where you are currently stuck you will need to clearly state what your conclusion is and then argue for it as best you can, making clear all your hidden assumptions. Why must the true answer to life's origins be "scientific"? What prevents these other sorts of accounts of life's origins from being true? If you want to slay creationism you will need to answer that one. I don't think that you can without making clear your implicit unstated premise of metaphysical naturalism -- your apparent belief that reality and the scope of natural science are coextensive, such that nothing can possibly exist that science can't at least in principle explain using purely natural principles. Of course, justifying that metaphysical naturalism premise would seem to be impossible. So it looks like a statement-of-faith not unlike the creationist's belief in divine agencies. Both would seem to be making assertions about the ultimate nature of reality that exceed knowledge and justification. This constantly repeated assertion of yours about "abiogenesis" being the "only scientific assumption/theory/process" isn't really about theory or process at all, is it? It isn't about the exceedingly technical details of nucleic acid polymerization, the genetic code and its regulation, protein synthesis, cell organization, or the origins of autotrophic chemical and energy metabolism or any of that. You don't seem interested in the strengths and weaknesses of all the gritty details of all of the hypotheses. "Abiogenesis" seemingly just serves you as an occasion for slipping in your own metaphysical belief about the nature of reality as your initial premise without stating it openly, so that you can triumphantly pull it out again with all of the supposed authority of "science" behind it in order to slay the evil creationists.
