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Author | Topic: How did it start? | |||||||||||||||||||||||
crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Produce the amoeba We're talking about things that are much, much simpler and smaller than any living microorganism. What do you think the odds are that we would find fossils of it, especially since it wouldn't have any bones or hard parts?
That would be evidence. If the only thing that would convince you is that that can't possibly exist, then you're in a pretty invincible position of ignorance, wouldn't you say?
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Give me the real thing, alive and kicking. But not begotten in some fashion, like you said before? How do you propose we do that, construct a time machine? Why don't you get right to work on that.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
All we need is for somebody to produce obvious life from nonlife. That's proof enough for me. Like a little bug or something. Search for "minimal organism" and you can see what work has already been done in that field. The biggest obstacle to showing you something "obviously alive" is that nobody knows what the least complex "obviously alive" thing is. It's like adding yellow to blue paint, and wanting to stop at the first color that is "obviously green". How green is that, exactly? Could something be less green than that and still be green?
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
I didn't say it would be easy, but I would think it would be theoretically possible to artificially produce life It should be, yes. If you want to help out, you could get a biochemistry degree and get to work.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
After all, it would be the "artificial" production of life, put together by Minds. Minds working to duplicate the effects of nature. The laws of physics don't change when you step into a laboratory, or when someone with a brain enters the room. If scientists, working through the laws of physics and chemistry, can create life, then we know that chemistry can create life. Intelligence isn't some magic force that we must infuse matter with to have life. When intelligence gets results by duplicating processes found in nature, we know that intelligence isn't necessary for the result.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
But the point I want to make here is that evolution is a process caused by some "passion" to survive and replication with error over large periods of time. I think that's quite erroneous. It's entirely possible to have living things with no particular drive, or even ability, to reproduce, errors or no. There's absolutely no inherent drive to reproduce or evolve in living things. But naturally, those that do not reproduce will not have any decendants, and so all living things are the decendants of those that did, for whatever reason, want to reproduce. By now the only living things that really have a chance to compete are those that need to reproduce.
I think if we look at why 1) RNA wants to survive, and 2) why it replicates, we will understand the origins of life. Did this make sense to you when you typed it? How could RNA "want" anything? The reason that it seems to you that RNA "wants" to survive is because the RNA that didn't survive isn't around for you to wonder about. The fossil record is a record of extinction; the history of life is a history of death. The organisms that did survive did so not because they wanted it more, but because they were lucky and won the life-lottery. RNA replicates because of the laws of chemistry. When you raise and release a stone, it doesn't "choose" to fall to the earth; the laws of physics demand it must be so. Similarly the laws of physics demand that RNA will replicate in the proper situation.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
I was under the impression that reproduction was part of a formal defitnition of life, along with some form of energy transmission. Women often have tubal ligations as a method of birth control. That doesn't mean they cease to be alive. And clearly they lack a "passion" to reproduce, or they would be doing so. At any rate I'm not aware that any formal definition of life exists in the first place.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
How can movement be a property of life when so many organisms are sessile?
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Well, when you called these "properties of life" that's not the impression you gave, now is it?
What are the minimal properties that all living things share? None of the rest of the properties are relevant. Some living things are blue; we wouldn't say blueness was a property of life.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Name a sessil organism that does not move. All sessile organisms do not move; that's what "sessile" means.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Trees are sessile, yet they move they're branches to collect more light. They might grow that way, but few trees have the ability to actually move. Consider lichens, or algaes, that have no moving parts at all, except perhaps cellular ones. But then even non-living objects are in motion at the atomic level. Beyond being pedantic, I think you're equivocating on the term "movement". But happy holidays, or whatever.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
I was referring to species, types, groups, not individual beings. Fair enough.
Virii are not alive as they do not metabolise anything, I understood. I propose that anything that can evolve via the mechanisms of natural selection and random mutation, and that experiences decent with modification, is alive. That would include virii. (A position that I believe I came around to in a discussion with Quetzal and others, a while ago.) Does it include prions? I don't know. They don't seem to evolve or change that much.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
To test simply the alleged self-combining tendency of carbon, I placed one microliter of India (lampblack) ink in 27 ml. of distilled water. The ink streaked for the bottom of the test tube where it formed a dark haze which completely diffused to an even shade of gray in 14 hours. The carbon stayed diffused, not aggregated as when dropped on paper. To test simply the accuracy of the Bible, I lit a bush on fire. I found I was quite unable to communicate with God in this manner.
At this simple level, there is no evidence that the "primeval soup" is anything but fanciful imagination. At this simple level, there is no evidence that the "book of Genesis" is anything but fanciful imagination.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
OK, let's argue!! Let's not. You're rightly identified my reasoning as simplistic; that was the point. Your so-called "test" proved nothing; it was simply a strawman. Just like mine, when I turned the same reasoning against you.
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