That was my point--I was attempting to *bolster* your point about current thinking. If the RNA encoding was in a book from 17 years ago, that means it isn't even "latest & greatest " anymore. :-)
Please, why the implied slur? I never said that we know down the last detail how things occurred, I said that current thought is that the first self-replicating molecule was RNA.
Not meant as a slur, implied or otherwise. Sorry to have given that impression. The gist of my point is that to hear some of the more fervent pro-evo's on this thread talk, evolution is as firmly nailed down as (say) the r2 dependence of gravitational attraction, to umpteen decimal points. And virtually anyone who dares to point out possible contradictions in the mechanisms proposed (even ones put out merely carelessly as examples on this thread) is immediately lambasted as an ignorant savage. In most other fields of science I have seen, the scientists *welcome* questions, because it either gives them a chance to sharpen their intellectual claws, or because (as both Feynman *and* C.S. Lewis pointed out), if you cannot explain your subject to a layperson using mostly words of one syllable, you don't really *understand* it yourself, all the way down.
BTW, the impatience with any questions about evo on this thread might just be due to the sheer volume of trolls and people who think that Duane Gish = Stephen Jay Gould as a resource ;-0
When I believed in God I had to fight this God of the gaps tendency myself. God doesn't belong in the gaps, but should be an engineer of the processes that we may eventually discover in those gaps.
I'm not *playing* God of the gaps. I'm playing *prick the balloon* of inflated claims by people who are doing one of two things:
1) Confusing a purported mechanism, or "latest thinking" with "absolute truth"
2) Trying to point out (again, and Again, and AGAIN) that many of the cre-trolls have (at best) very little formal science training and simply DON'T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE. And so instead of flaming them, a better approach is to try to educate them.
The banned RightWingProfessor tried, but was often too irascible: and went over their heads.
Ichneumon (haven't heard from him lately) wrote elegant encyclopedias, but they took too long for a casual reader to go through.
The dictionary of scientific / philosophical terms by (I think) Coyoteman and/or CarolinaGuitarman and/or Dimensio and/or Patrick Henry is a great start.
We need more of that kind of thing on these threads.
One of the other posters suggested I start on it. It's on my to-do list and I'm seriously considering a series of bite-size threads on various beginning points.
Full Disclosure: Ironic comment only. It is odd that despite the claims that evolution isn't about disproving God, many (not all) of the most ardent evo's are at best agnostic, at worst militant atheists. As you said, "*when* you believed in God etc. etc." ;-) Cheers!
It's still the best theory going, and given the amount of evidence that RNA is foundational, it's probably going to remain the forerunner. It is possible though that nucleic acids with different sugars came before RNA and then when RNA was made it took over from them and went on to catalyze the appearance of more complicated systems including DNA and protein. It will be interesting to see what comes of this research.
Duane Gish = Stephen Jay Gould
He doesn't?! ;-)
I'm not *playing* God of the gaps.
I misunderstood your post. There are a lot of posters here who seem to want to insert miraculous intervention whenever we have some uncertainty or ignorance about a process. I used to be YE creationist myself. I found to my great discouragement in (Christian, officially YEC) college that many arguments were not arguments for a young earth, but arguments against evolution based upon criticisms of dating methods, stratigraphy, phylogenetics, etc. A lot of them take the form, "Evolutionists do not understand this completely, therefore God did it." Over time I realized that many of those criticisms were invalid and things weren't as murky as others portrayed. I reached the point where I either had to acknowledge that the gaps were getting so small that God was being reduced in significance and might eventually disappear or I had to remove God from the gaps and allow the gaps to be just what they are, gaps which may eventually be filled either with natural mechanisms or supernatural, but either way should be ok with me.
At that point I had already left YEC and the removal of God from these gaps caused me to leave ID. Then I was a theistic evolutionist--God created the universe through natural means but is sovereign over it, not in the sense that he miraculously kicks it along all the time, but in the sense that he has ordained its path. I probably would have remained so indefinitely if my research into Islam had not prompted me to go back and come up with a fully integrated reason why atrocities in the OT were all right (and even laudable) but those committed by Mohommed were evil. Over a year or so I hammered away at this until I came to the conclusion that I would never resolve that without embracing an idea of God that was radically different from the one I had grown up with. I found that untenable, so right now I'm agnostic. You can read about this a bit in the post at the end of my profile. Some people use this as a gotcha--"Ah-hah! You are godless because you are evolutionist!" The reality is that acknowledging evolution occurs preceded my determination that God as I knew him does not exist, and that was based upon my analysis of morality as depicted in the Bible.