DailyDirt: Life Is Complicated
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
The classic question of "which came first: the chicken or the egg?" is not that easy to answer. There are a lot of unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable) questions about the origins of life. What came first: DNA, RNA or proteins? How did chirality start? We have a few clues, but without a time machine, we can't quite observe what actually happened. Here are just a few scientific probes that could help us understand the early stages of our biosphere.- Re-creating the conditions under which life began isn't easy because no one knows exactly what was around way back then. Maybe lightning stuck some organic molecules and formed amino acids in a pre-biotic soup, or maybe there were localized electrical fields on the surface of minerals that helped synthesize the chemicals that formed early life forms. So far, zapping lifeless soup hasn't created self-replicating molecules.... [url]
- The biology of prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells is still mysterious in many ways -- such as how mitochondria came to exist or how prokaryotic cells might have evolved into more complex cells with internal membrane compartments. Perhaps it may be possible to genetically engineer a "missing link" cell that isn't more complex than a prokaryote, but less complex than a eukaryote. [url]
- A ribozyme made in a lab from ribonucleic acid (RNA) could help explain how RNA replication might have worked in a primordial RNA world. The early primordial RNA soup might have contained a mixture of RNA isomers, and researchers have created a ribozyme that could be useful for test tube evolution experiments. [url]
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Filed Under: biology, biotech, chirality, dna, mitochondria, origin of life, primordial soup, ribozyme, rna, test tube evolution
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Waiting For The ...
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Re: Waiting For The ...
A baseball sitting next to a broken window does not mean that the window was broken by that baseball.
Whether life got here spontaneously or by design of some kind remains to be seen. We still lack a great deal of information. Anyone that disagrees with this are the types that walk away from the seen mentioned above and assume it was the baseball. Meer fodder for their simple minds believing themselves to be superior to every other id of hubris walking on two legs among them.
Your comments appear to put you in the "I only like the parts of science I agree with" camp... much the same as the "I only like the parts of my religion I agree with" crowd. A "Sunday scientist" as it were.
And there you have it, science has become a non-deity religion to replace the deity based religions most of the world believes in. Yes most of the people can indeed be wrong and additionally fooled most of the time, however this proves nothing either.
Science is the search for proof and understanding, anyone whom says it disagrees with religion does not understand science.
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Re: We still lack a great deal of information
You see, if life was too complex and wonderful to have arisen by itself, then it had to be created by someone/something else. Agreed? But this someone/something else presumably had to be even more complex and wonderful than life. So how could it have arisen by itself?
Unless it, in turn, was created by something else...
You see how logic works? Once you start claiming that anything is “too complex to have arisen by itself”, you end up in a trap of your own devising, hoist by your own petard.
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Re: Re: Waiting For The ...
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Re: Re: We still lack a great deal of information
We fundamentally lack the information and evidence to know any better... that is just all there is to it... mankind once used logic to create slaves, murder, and work all manor of despicable act against each other. Forgive me if I do not immediately take your logic for anything special.
I simply told you that you don't know either... and your desire to dance around it like an ignorant idiot shows you are nothing but a fundamentalist just like all the other idiots peddling their stupid religions.
There is a reason that science advances one funeral at a time... just like the Pope and the Catholic Church. Funny how they parallel each other so well. Both have brought a lot of good and evil to life here on our special little mudball in the universe.
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Re: Re: Re: Waiting For The ...
Out with it... otherwise you would not know any bullshit if it hit you in the face cause you seem to be ignorantly covered in it.
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It's OBVIOUS where life comes from...
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Re: We fundamentally lack the information and evidence to know any better
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Actually, one of my first philosophical lessons was that that is one of the easiest paradoxes.
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I blame...
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Re: which came first: the chicken or the egg
Well, you didn’t say chicken egg...
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@#2
LIFE had to start....
GOD YOU SAY...
so what made god then...see what i mean ....
heck lets have real fun , what made all the matter etc in the universe in the big bang and what caused a singularity to explode....NO really we have super massiv eones that never seem to explode...so what caused it? 2 such things colliding....?
LOGIC dictates that some how someway it evolved or was caused by events with the right timing
and if you think about all the junk we have in our dna that appear sot do nothing anymore you get the idea its been trying and awful long time
4 billion or more years on earth alone....13.7 billion to make 9.7 billion before that to get one earth....
and until i see pics of actual planets like earth they can ramble all they want....when i see one i know it wil have life if its like our planet
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chemical reactions and combinations of atomic structures 101
simple no brains required...google chemistry and the periodic table and how the atoms can interact...there is a reason evolution happened this way and if you look up the mass extinctions you will see, that life was very different in the beginning....in fact that life COULD NOT LIVE TODAY...because of oxygen....
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Re: Re: We fundamentally lack the information and evidence to know any better
What is life? If one understands what "life" is then you may be able to go onto your question.
We can create various processes that appear to mimic the processes we find in the cells of "living" creatures - but we do not seem to be able to define what is living and what is not.
A simple example is related to plant seeds. One can set up an experiment where you can take a number of seeds. They are characterised by not growing, there is no self division, no energy production or usage. They simply exist. Place them into what we consider to be the right conditions and some will suddenly start cell division and growth, using the external environment to "grow" and others will just do nothing. Anyone who tries to propagate plants by this method has this experience at some time.
Yet for all our investigation and study, we are unable to distinguish which will grow and which will not. Plants are not the only things that do this, there are other organisms which appear to have this capability.
We may have some broad principles as to what is living and what is not and we still don't understand what is "life".
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Re:What is life?
Now get back to answering the question.
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Re: Re: Waiting For The ...
A theory involving ancient non-human intelligences doing vaguely defined things at an unspecified time is a theory that assumes an enormous amount, predicts nothing and is nondisprovable.
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Re: Re:What is life?
They both have birdbrains.
I read your response and all I can think is how much effort it takes to explain anything to a Kiwi.
Let the jokes begin!!!!
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Junk DNA???
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Re: What is life?
Choose whatever definition you like for “life” so that the answer to the question “is life too complex to have arisen by itself?” is “yes”, and we will proceed from there.
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Re: Re: What is life?
I have seen your style of arguing and you tend to argue that your position is true, hence any arguments against your position have to be false because your position is true and you don't actually have to prove anything because your position is true.
This is usually what a "true believer" argues from. Religious, political and scientific arguments of this nature don't lead anywhere.
Finally, since none of us were there when life came into being (whatever life might be and we don't have any actual knowledge of what the conditions or circumstances were at the time, as in actual verifiable measurements), any arguments about how/what/why of life's beings are purely speculative and are based on our individual belief systems. You cannot prove anything about life's beginnings. You can certainly make hypotheses but verifying them or proposing experiments for them fail in one very singular way - we don't have the starting conditions available for us any more, they are not even reproducible because we don't know what they were.
So we can't even argue about complexity since complexity is in the eye of the beholder. Look into the subject of perception for examples of this. If you have asked the wrong question then you will never get the right answer.
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Re: oh, really easy
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Re: oh, really easy
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Dinosaurs are hatched from eggs. Dinosaurs were around long before the chicken. Thus, the egg came before the chicken.
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Re:gives rise to a result that is not persuasive.
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Re: Re:gives rise to a result that is not persuasive.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Waiting For The ...
Otherwise - what?
Damn, get a grip.
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Re:
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Re: Kiwi's!!
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