Posted on 12/11/2002 6:28:08 AM PST by A2J
How else can truth be made? It is a concept.
You do not address my central point. I am not completely sure it exists, but I am completely sure that, at our current state of knowledge, it is at least as plausable as the whopped-up-from-organic-tar theories Behe and Dembski attempt to claim the universe is confined to. Please note that they have no claim on the prize, either.
I have not read - nor even looked for the existence of - a biogenesis theory authored by Behe or Dembski. And Yockey's work is a falsification of abiogenesis, he does not offer an alternative and instead says that life should be taken as an axiom. Rocha is working on an abiogenesis theory with eyes wide open to the obstacles of which there are many.
IMHO, at this state of the art, it takes faith to say either one: that God created life or that life arose naturally from non-life.
Given many random distributions of the reactivity of a RNA sequence space, we could study how easily can reactive sequences be constructed from RNA edition of non-reactive molecules. A study of this process is forthcoming.
I don't know whether Rocha's mechanism will bear up under experimentation, but if it does, it'll nicely fit with my hypothesis that algorithm at inception is proof of intelligent design because whereas it is a proposed mechanism for abiogeneis, the mechanism itself is akin to a finite state machine and thus may tilt to the manifestation of an algorithmic step-by-step instruction. And that's my opinion, which I am also welcome to!
Interesting thing to say. I'll agree that truth is a concept, to the extent that anything a human can think about is a concept. I don't think it follows that the universe does not manifest behaviors all on its own, whether humans think about it or not, which humans can, more or less accurately, ascribe truth to their descriptions of.
You can't call it genetic information if you don't have any genes. In my opinion, RNA is also too complicated to be the initial genesis of life. The first "signaling" across a barrier, as I have suggested, could have simply been differentials in tension between bubbles. Lipids, I therefore suggest, preceeded RNA.
I do think Rocha is on the mark, however, in pointing out that it is very key that some RNA is stable, and some is not. Notibly, mRNA is not stable. For lipid world, (which, I've posited, started into the signaling busines by passing long-chain hydrophobic/philics to understocked neighboring bubbles) stability of signal would be a death sentence. If you want to regulate chemical production in a feedback loop, you cannot send a signal to the factory floor that endures forever.
If you calculate the odds against prokariotes leaping suddenly into existence, assembled from coal tar, and conclude it to be highly unlikely, you are assuming a theory of biogenesis in order to refute it.
IMHO, it takes faith to believe an oscilloscope is telling you the truth about a signal. Science is a faith-based undertaking.
Um, aren't all the signals we receive from distant stars millions to billions of years old, just like fossils?
Well, the monitor in front of your face is not a concept(at least I think so), but rights and truth are.
Sure it is, and it requires a substantial amount of ideation, both for me to recognize what class of thing it is, and for the designers to have produced it. The concreteness of a particular manifestation of a thing is no sure measure of its objective existence. I'm convinced of the objective existence of the law of gravity outside of human perception of it, for instance. I am less sure about rights and truth having cooresponding objective manifestation outside the realm of human perception, but I am open to demonstration, as soon as anyone can think of a persuasvie experiment.
How is that different from observing lots of fossils, and lining them up by morphological similarity to observe that the morphological sequence matches the chronological sequence and bridging the gaps in the story by assumption?
I have no opinion with regard to the scenario you outline at 6186. My interest is with the origin of life itself – the issues addressed by The Gene Emergence Project
Thanks for the discussion!
So it goes away when you go to sleep?
No. And if there is something objective for the concepts of gravity or truth to correspond to, they don't go away when I'm asleep, either.
I think you guys have your terminology messed up. I posted this somewhere, about 10 days ago. It may be useful here:
One can "believe" in the existence of the tooth fairy, but one does not -- in the same sense of the word -- "believe" in the existence of his mother. Belief in the first proposition (tooth fairy) requires faith, the belief in something for which there is no evidence or logical proof. The second proposition (mother) is that kind of knowledge which follows from sensory evidence. There is also that kind of knowledge (like the Pythagorean theorem) which follows from a logical proof. In between mother and the Pythagorean theorem are those propositions we provisionally accept (or in common usage "believe"), like relativity and evolution, because they are scientific theories -- logical and falsifiable explanations of the available data (which data is knowledge obtained via sensory evidence).
How do you know?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.