Science still doesn't have the answers on how life first appeared

by EndofMysteries 69 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

  • Viviane
    Viviane

    My point is that if scientifically ALL possibilities must be looked at.

    Not even close. Not how science works. Before you jump into biology, take a class on basic scientific education first. Your grasp of science is woefully lacking.

    In order to look at all possibilities, you must consider an infinite number of combinations, for instance, that a rhino made of pigs is responsible for creation, or that drywall spackle is, or that life sprang from nothing with no cause, or that life came from a collision of an ice cream truck and a comet while having lunch in the core of a neutron star.

  • OnTheWayOut
    OnTheWayOut
    life came from a collision of an ice cream truck and a comet while having lunch in the core of a neutron star. 

    That's still a more detailed answer than "God did it."  

  • Viviane
    Viviane

    That's still a more detailed answer than "God did it." 

    Holy scripture reveals the holy lunch was a  holy BLT on rye with a cup of New England style clam chowder. Anyone who disagrees is a heretic worthy of only death.

  • Simon
    Simon
    Let me explain it another way. Not how 'any' life began but how 'our' life began

    That reminds me of the crazy explanations that some want to give for fire. Seriously, some believe that we and all of our ancestors ever are simply too stupid to have ever figured out how to make fire. Their "explanation" is that ... aliens from another planet must have come and taught us.

    It's convenient to their story that they never bother to explain how anyone on that planet ever figured out how to make fire.

    This is the problem - the "simple" explanation actually contains more complexity and moving parts ... to make fire we now need spaces travel to be invented instead of someone just having a good idea one day.

    It all seems to be a desperate attempt to deny any scientific explanation and simply cling to the idea that involves there being a god. Specifically, the god that the proponent of the explanation happens to believe in. Yeah, not one of those other fake gods. Splittahs!!

    I don't think the "theist method" is as credible as the "scientific method" 

  • OnTheWayOut
    OnTheWayOut

    Science cannot figure out if humans were making fire just 12,000 years ago or beyond 1 million years ago.  They know humans had fire, but it could have been captured from nature (lightning most likely) and preserved as long as possible.  So where and when that first human who figured out a way to make it from "cold" ingredients is unknown.  
    But crediting ancient alien astronauts with telling humans gives us the same problems discussed about "life."  It doesn't tell us how any intelligent beings first figured it out, it just passes the buck.    
    And just because we don't know all the answers, it still happened somehow somewhere.  Some "person" of some sort, be he Homo Erectus, Neanderthal, or some silver dude on another planet, figured it out.  

    And life started somehow, somewhere.  If lightning struck a soup of chemicals or volcanic action sparked it, it happened somewhere.  Taking it off planet or all the way to God doesn't solve the problem.  How did that "life" start (alien or God)???????

  • Slidin Fast
    Slidin Fast

    The wonderful thing about advancing knowledge is that since we still have questions, we know we don't have all the answers.  We never will.  It is the bozos who claim to have all these answers that should be steered by widely.

    Keep asking the questions, use good scientific method to find the answers and your life will be fulfilled.

  • JimmyPage
    JimmyPage
    Again, what Jeremy England has to say about the matter is worth considering.  I posted a link to the article.
  • bohm
    bohm

    My point is that if scientifically ALL possibilities must be looked at.

    EOM: I agree we should allow ourselves to look at all possibilities, including God.

    I think the problem is there are three great unknowns in this equation. First, we don't have a very firm idea what early life could be. So we have a rough idea that the early life (according to abiogenesis) should be the simplest system of molecules that was able to store information (that is, really just a complicated molecule that could be build in different ways), copy itself and it had to have something going on chemically (a metabolism). The issue is for all of these things the current ideas for how life originated involves that existing non-living system might have taken care of some of these functions making the delineation between life and environment very fuzzy. For instance according to many ideas, volcanoes (of different sorts!) took care of the metabolism. Now we don't know at all what is possible in an earth-sized chemical environment, and that is our first problem: each decade bring new ideas for how early life might have looked and interacted with the surroundings so we clearly need to do a lot more exploring.

    The second unknown is we don't know terrible much about the early earth. So we know it had biochemistry, and we know it had amino acids and lipids, but the problem is small biological chemicals with a life-span (even in good conditions!) of about a hundred years won't leave much of a trace if you leave them on a rock for 4 billion years; in fact, the rock is likely to have either been eroded away in the mean time or buried very deep. This is very important because the acidity of the environment, the concentration of biological substances and which biological substances was available are very important. 

    The third unknown is what the earliest life on earth actually looked like. The earliest traces we have of life is identified, as far as i know, only by looking at concentration of an isotope of carbon at what is believed to be remains of life. The issue is that looking at this isotope wont tell us anything about the biochemical makeup of this life, and we should not believe it was the earliest. 


    The problem is these three unknowns makes it impossible to conclude one way or another. It could be in a hundred years geology will have advanced to a degree that we know what the early earth was like chemically, and using huge simulations we have probed what is chemically feasible in this environment. if it turns out there seem to be a very firm limit to how advanced the chemistry could have become by then, then this would be evidence against abiogenesis and for God, but right now we simply don't know that much about the early earth or what is chemically feasible. 

    It is a bit like looking at the pyramids and thinking: Man could not have build these! It must have been the aliens.

    There is in principle no problem with this conclusion, however it requires 3 elements: First, it requires knowledge of the society in ancient Egypt, i.e. what technology and resources they had available. Then it requires knowledge of what is feasible with this technology in terms of heaping stones on top of each other, and thirdly it requires archaeological knowledge, that is, you dig through the sand around the pyramids and look for evidence of (or against) quarries, worker barracks, etc. Without knowledge of these things the conclusion aliens must have done it is not warranted. 

    I would recommend the wikipedia article on abiogenesis to get an idea of the complexity of the chemistry involved and how primitive early living systems are thought to have been. I might also recommend "life ascending" by nick lane, however I thought it was a very hard book to read.


  • cofty
    cofty
    "life ascending" by nick lane

    One of my all-time favourite science books. It is a hard read but worth it.

  • bohm
    bohm

    My point is that if scientifically ALL possibilities must be looked at.

    Viviane: Not even close. Not how science works. Before you jump into biology, take a class on basic scientific education first. Your grasp of science is woefully lacking.

    In order to look at all possibilities, you must consider an infinite number of combinations, for instance, that a rhino made of pigs is responsible for creation, or that drywall spackle is, or that life sprang from nothing with no cause, or that life came from a collision of an ice cream truck and a comet while having lunch in the core of a neutron star.

    In practice, the possibilities are often grouped, as are the examples EOM gave. For instance you have a group of theistic explanations, a group of explanations involving life originating on earth, a group of explanations with life originating elsewhere in the universe, etc. Now, it is possible to conjure up an (for all purposes) infinite way of counting these explanations in a number of trivial ways, for instance you can think of life originating an infinite number of places on earth or the infinite possible values of the gravitational constant, however this is clearly not the practical problem of science as these different ways are in practice very often neatly grouped. 

    In the history of science the to-many-explanations-to-consider problem has very rarely surfaced. For instance before Einstein there was not 100 different physical ideas of coordinate invariance in inertial systems but one, Galilean invariance. With Einstein (well, Lorentz, depending on how you look at things) there was two, Galilean invariance and Lorentz invariance and it was quickly apparent which was the better. Or take the shape of the earth. I can think of a grand total of three ideas in the history of science, cylindrical, flat and round.

    In science today I would think that looking at all possibilities is exactly the sort of advice I think one should give to people. To negate the statement one end up with the suggestion that one should not look at some possibilities; however if we are really to take this suggestion seriously, we cannot decide to look or not to look at a possibility by investigating it's properties, because that would exactly require us to look at it in the first place. The advice would then seem to boil down to randomly selecting some ideas over other to look at; i think that exactly characterizes the opposite of being scientific.




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