GI

Of course everything is constructed of atoms, that's all part of the wonder of what all this is!

The things is, we can explain how a cellphone arose but we cannot explain how DNA arose, or just how a heart would gradually form by random mutations. BIG difference!

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The more you know, the more you realize you don't know, the less you know the more you THINK you know.

AB517

GI

Witch creation story should we follow?

then I ask Why?

Og

Can you explain how a cell phone arose? I think that process is intimately intertwined with how human beings arose, since human beings created cell phones.

Want to see examples of a gradually evolving eye STILL in living organisms? Get the book "The Human Eye" By Clyde Oyster. This is a text book for biology, psychology of the eye and vision produced by Sinauer Associates.

http://www.amazon.com/Human-Eye-Clyd...7139205&sr=8-1

I own this book and have it open right now. The prologue is titled "A brief History of Eyes."

It shows existing evidence in actual life forms of a gradient of complexity of eyes from the simple photosensitive spot in the Protozoan Euglena to Photoreceptor arrays with screening pigments to envaginated photoreceptor arrays and compound eyes and pinhole eyes. To water lenses, reflecting and refracting eyes.

The chapter even maps out the phyologeny of eyes and how many arose simultaneously (there's obvious selective pressure for photosensitivity and many ways to go about it). It's clearly not an irreducibly complex system in any way.

But you are right, look at soft tissue systems (like the heart) and it's really difficult to find historical evidence in the fossil record about such systems. It is also not my field. How much have you studied the phylogeny of the heart (i.e. it's existence in other species)? By what metric are you stating that there is no evidence about it's development? I know that most animals have circulatory systems. I'd be surprised if there weren't existing versions of ancient circulatory pumps in many living systems (just as there are with the eye) that illustrate a gradual complexity increase.

It may also be possible to look at genetic homology between these different creatures and map our history of divergence to correlate "age" of the solutions that nature has.

That's the cool thing about the massive amount of life out there. All of natures solutions get stored somehow in living things. It takes an extraordinary event to totally remove information about our development from the fossil record.

So, again, how much do you know about the physiology of the heart. I'll postulate that it did evolve over time. What is it, exactly, about the nature of the heart, that precludes it's development through a slow process of evolution?

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

greywolf90

if we consider the cell to be the smallest unit of life, then the phone would not be considered to have the same "life" as us because it has no cells. the phone is nothing more than a combination of inorganic molecules. true that a cell is likewise, but unlike a phone, the cell has the ability to respond to it's environment. i don't think we can compare anything man-made to a cell.

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GI

Don't know the answer to the origin of life I'm afraid and neither does anyone else, do you? What are the various creation stories? Why follow anything? Just think and don't accept ideas as facts....that's all.

__________________
The more you know, the more you realize you don't know, the less you know the more you THINK you know.

greywolf90

evolution explains the diversity of life. i'm not aware of Darwin ever saying "and life/DNA began by..." i also do not know of any scientists pretending to know how life began. this whole discussion is simply your misunderstanding of evolution. scientists accept evolution not out of fear for any alternative explaination. if the purpose of science is to find the real answers, what does science have to lose by disproving one of its theories? think about it: creationists have been trying to contradict the theory of evolution since the beginning, yet evolution remains as the foundation of biology, while creationism is considered a pseudo-science. why is that? because while evolution is supported by much evidence and lacks contradicting evidence, the notion that all life forms were created individually and seperately has evidence to contradict it. it is the creationists who fear that their religions made a mistake, that we were not more special than the rest of nature, and that their is not some divine plan for our existance; that our existance was nothing more than nature taking it's course. as for blindly accepting dogma, i did my research, read the debates, considered both arguments as equally as my personal bias could allow, and evolution won. so what makes me any different from you?

__________________
"for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so."- Hamlet

WilliamBlue

People blindly accept this religious dogma. How many of you here confuse religion with agnosticism????(one)

What is your religion GI, why are you here pushing ID when it is obviously religious propaganda, come clean, you know deceit is one of the deadly sins.

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When you dance with an elephant it's up to you to not get stepped on.
How can we be so arrogant and egotistical to believe that the whole Universe was created just for us?

Og

So, life must be made of carbon molecules?

And how is it that a cell phone does not respond to its environment? What do you think the "bars" are that describe signal strength? What do you think your phone is doing when you press numbers/letters on it? What do you think your phone is doing when you speak into it? A cell phone clearly responds to its environment in an IDENTICAL manner to a cell. Even to the point of most sensation occurring at the boundary (i.e. antennea or keypad or microphone) where there are highly specialized sensory inputs (i.e. cell membrane with receptor proteins).

Apply histamine (or some other molecule) to a cell or raise the temperature and you can create a dramatic conformational change or horomone release. Press a certain combination of keys or expose a cell phone to a certain pattern of electromagnetic waves (i.e. an incoming our outgoing phone call) and the cell phone can vibrate violently or cause all manner of noise/light production.

I'm not creating a bad analogy here. I'm both an electrical engineer and a biologist and have studied and implement solutions to research in both fields.

This is the problem that people have. It's a problem with their concept of what life is. It's a problem of understanding what signal transduction and information processing is.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

Og

People have wrong concepts of what life is (i.e. poorly defined or supernatural) so they make idiotic statements about the absurdity of evolution by random mutation and natural selection.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

Og

What do you mean "we cannot explain how DNA arose?" Are you saying that we don't understand the bond affinity for nucleic acids in water? Are you saying that we don't understand the prevalence of nucleic and amino acids in places from nebulae to earth to every planet in the solar system?

Are you saying that we don't know the nature of the peptide bonds in proteins or the bonds in a chain of nucleic acids? Are you saying that we don't understand that the bonds have much longer persistence times when not exposed to raw solutions like sea water? Are you saying that we don't know about liposomes that spontaneously form in water due to hydrophobic interactions and how nucleic acid chains could be naturally selected for just by diffusing into a lipid vesicle and finding protection from destructive enzymatic activity?

Wouldn't it make sense that nucleic acid chains (which spontaneously form in the presence of raw nucleic acids) would not be naturally selected simply through the destruction of NAs that did not diffuse randomly into vesicles?

Do you know anything about carbon chemistry? Thermodynamics? The time scales involved since the beginning of the earth? The constituent components on the earth?

Are you saying that there needs to be a supernatural notion about the origin of life? Are you saying that, in spite of all we know about the above topics, that it is implausible that life originated through successive selection by natural pressures of populations of randomly assembling chemicals?

What exactly is your problem with the notion that natural pressures rectify otherwise random processes? This seems to be a CLEARLY understood principle. For example, it's implemented quite well in games of poker (substitute natural pressures for human mind). Randomness is rectified in a certain direction by an external force.

Of course, there need be no purpose to such a guiding force... Hence the diversity of life for whatever nook it arose in.

Do we not know the specific details about the process of the initiation of life? Sort of.

Is it possible to know exactly what happened? No... It's what's called an irreversible process. MANY options could lead to this current outcome so it's not possible to follow it back in a straight/deterministic line.

Does our lack of the details of exactly how it happened mean that we are somehow lacking understanding about the thermodynamics of organic systems?

No.

Your common sense is fairly common. Uninformed about thermodynamics and biochemistry. Quit arguing out of ignorance. Your stance is basically "I don't know how it occurred, therefore, god must have done it." It's a stupid stance that does nothing but close the mind.

Work with what we know. Precede your hypothesis creation by observation!

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are