Hi, Dcarraher.
Welcome to EvC!
dcarraher writes:
First, a qualifier - in my responses, I will respond to multiple previous posters in a single post. This is not an indication that I am confusing who posted what, simply brevity for the sake of brevity.
You probably shouldn't do this: this board is set up so that responses can be linked to specific posts and posters, and many posters have it set up to get notification of a reply to one of their posts. It’s okay if all the messages you respond to come from the same poster (as I’m about to do here).
If you want to continue responding to multiple people in one post, you can do so by using the "Gen Reply" button at the bottom or top of the screen, rather than the "Reply" button at the bottom corner of an individual message.
Generally, it works better if you respond individually. Of course, this means you'll probably have to pick and choose which posts and points you respond to, and ignore the rest. But, it helps make the discussion more easy to follow.
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dcarraher writes:
In other words, there isn't a single element of what distinguishes biology from chemistry.
Message 7
I’m going to add my voice to Catholic Scientist’s and say that biology is basically chemistry. I’ll alter what CS said by stating that I consider biology to be a subset of chemistry that can be studied on a different scale (i.e. organisms instead of molecules). A life form is a relatively discrete microcosm of chemical reactions, and all its characteristics ultimately derive from its constituent chemical reactions.
This little RNA experiment is a great example of the middle ground between what would classically be called chemistry, and what would classically be called biology: it is, as you say, simply a chemical reaction happening; but, its occurrence displays some of the characteristics of what we consider life (namely, growth and evolution).
Doesn’t that make you at all curious about how it fits into the puzzle of what life is and where life comes from?
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dcarraher writes:
To an educated creationist, this article is so clearly irrelevant to the entire argument of abiogenesis, it shouldn't even need refuted. To an evolutionist, apparently, this is practically first life, and a clear refutation of any creationist concerns over the impracticability of abiogenesis. Ah, well.
You’ve clearly exaggerated the point of view of evolutionists here. If a healthy, stimulating debate is what you're after, I recommend avoiding caricatures and focusing on arguments, rather than people.
From what I’ve read so far, nobody has yet claimed this to be anything more than a demonstration that the RNA World hypothesis, or something similar to it, is a feasible explanation for at least part of the process of abiogenesis. This can therefore serve as a justification for further funding and implementation of more research into the RNA World hypothesis; but it is not being taken as
the silver bullet against creationism.
Science is never specifically about what one is showing now, but always about how our current and future picture of the world is changed by what one is showing now. Iblis has provided a great demonstration of this in his
brief discussion. The whole point of science is to get people like Iblis to start thinking critically about what needs to be done next to fill in the remaining gaps in our understanding.
Abiogenesis is a very tough thing to show, and I’m confident that it is a vanishingly small minority of biologists and other scientists who believe that one experiment is the final word on any given topic. Most of us reach our air of finality when we connect the dots between this little experiment and the hundreds of other, similar little experiments that have been done before it.
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dcarraher writes:
dcarraher writes:
Now, maybe if the experiment had started with amino acids, and ended with DNA, you might have something...
Fixed. Mea culpa. Congratulations, you've scorned a typo.
DNA also isn’t made of amino acids.
DNA and RNA are both
nucleic acids (that’s what the NA stands for).
I repeat Cavediver’s sentiment: either way (RNA or DNA), it would have been a very remarkable experiment, indeed.
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dcarraher writes:
If there is no clear demarcation [between life and non-life], then what is abiogenesis all about?
Is it your view that we should only study things that are clearly demarcated?
Is the emergence of life any less intriguing if we can’t easily delimit what life is? I don’t see how that could be: it seems to make it
more intriguing, at least to me.
Part of the reason for exploring the emergence of life is to fuel the quest to understand what life actually is.
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dcarraher writes:
So, at the end of the day, you have an interesting chemical reaction that is interesting not because of any relevance to abiogenesis (you haven't gone anywhere - you end up with more of what you already started with)...
That’s the whole point! Life is just more of what it started with: chemistry, building on top of chemistry. We don’t need to go anywhere, we just need more of what we already started with. This experiment is just one tiny piece of a large puzzle that shows that life is a case of
more chemistry than what it originally had! This is precisely why this experiment is interesting!
Edited by Bluejay, : "against" and "fits into"
-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)
Darwin loves you.
™ Version 4.2
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