[mlo]

"Well, that's true. But what I was trying to say is that we cannot observe, much less test, the creation of life. The origin of life is in the past."

So your contention is that science is restricted to only studying phenomena that are happing right now. Oh boy. There goes Geology, Cosmology, Archeology, and a lot of other entire fields of study.

I'm sorry, but you don't know what you are talking about. There is no such restriction in science. We can study the effects of something regardless of when it occured. We can run experiments to recreate conditions and circumstances to see how they come out. We can try to replicate consequences.

The scientific demand that experiments be replicatable is real, but it applies to experiments. Not to the subject being studied. You are confused.

"And this again highlights confusion over what you mean by evolution."

This was already covered. Your confusion is what you mean by evolution. As I said, you have it wrong. Evolution and Biogenesis are two different things.

You may be a good lawyer but science is not your thing. Leave writing about it to other people.

[Moseley]

So your contention is that science is restricted to only studying phenomena that are happing right now.

Science can only draw reliable conclusions about what is happening right now, because there is no other way to follow the Scientific Method. The only way to perform repeated experiments is with phenomenon that we can observe in the present.

In fact, the concept of studying something other than in the present is absurd. You can only look at what exists now. Unless you have a time machine, you cannot observe anything other than the present.

Oh boy. There goes Geology, Cosmology, Archeology, and a lot of other entire fields of study.

No, not at all. Geology is the study of what is in the ground. You cannot leap to conclusions about what happened in the past. You can study what is there know.

Your wish that you could know the past does not mean you can know it.

But as I said before, we can see the tectonic plates moving NOW. That is not the past. We can see magma flows happening NOW.

Same with cosmology. There are many things we can observe now.

However, the rest is pure bulls**t.

You can fantasize all sorts of things. But you are indulging in pure fantasy.

[Moseley]

I'm sorry, but you don't know what you are talking about. There is no such restriction in science

It is not I but the Scientific Method.

Science is completely incapable of addressing anything that does not occur in the present, or more precisely something that is timeless and always existing or happening.

The Scientific Method -- which I did not invent -- demands that a hypothesis be tested by repeated experiments.

There is no way to repeat an experiment testing a hypothesis if that phenomenon is not happening and observable NOW in the present.

There is no way to perform the experiment even once if the phenomenon cannot be observed in the present tense.

[Moseley]

Evolution and Biogenesis are two different things.

Oh, no, there are many more variations of the ever-changing fog of evolution than that.

As I stated, are you trying to prove that life CAN be created in the laboratory or what DID happen originally?

Those are two entirely different questions.

Can life be created is an entirely different question than where did life come from originally.

So if researchers create life in the laboratory that does not tell us where life came from on Earth.

Even if we found life on another planet, that would not tell us wehre life came from on Earth. Evolution DEMANDS vagueness, so that no one can pin down the errors in the arguments.

[Heartlander]

For those who say evolution has nothing to do with abiogenesis - what other natural causes would you attribute to this miracle?

“Evolution is a theory about the origin of life” is presented as false. It is not. I know many people like to recite the mantra that “abiogenesis is not evolution,” but it’s a cop-out. Evolution is about a plurality of natural mechanisms that generate diversity. It includes molecular biases towards certain solutions and chance events that set up potential change as well as selection that refines existing variation. Abiogenesis research proposes similar principles that led to early chemical evolution. Tossing that work into a special-case ghetto that exempts you from explaining it is cheating, and ignores the fact that life is chemistry. That creationists don’t understand that either is not a reason for us to avoid it.
-PZ Myers

________

Abstract: It has been repeatedly proposed to expand the scope for SETI, and one of the suggested alternatives to radio is the biological media. Genomic DNA is already used on Earth to store non-biological information. Though smaller in capacity, but stronger in noise immunity is the genetic code. The code is a flexible mapping between codons and amino acids, and this flexibility allows modifying the code artificially. But once fixed, the code might stay unchanged over cosmological timescales; in fact, it is the most durable construct known. Therefore it represents an exceptionally reliable storage for an intelligent signature, if that conforms to biological and thermodynamic requirements. As the actual scenario for the origin of terrestrial life is far from being settled, the proposal that it might have been seeded intentionally cannot be ruled out. A statistically strong intelligent-like "signal" in the genetic code is then a testable consequence of such scenario.

Here we show that the terrestrial code displays a thorough precision-type orderliness matching the criteria to be considered an informational signal. Simple arrangements of the code reveal an ensemble of arithmetical and ideographical patterns of the same symbolic language. Accurate and systematic, these underlying patterns appear as a product of precision logic and nontrivial computing rather than of stochastic processes (the null hypothesis that they are due to chance coupled with presumable evolutionary pathways is rejected with P-value < 10-13). The patterns display readily recognizable hallmarks of artificiality, among which are the symbol of zero, the privileged decimal syntax and semantical symmetries. Besides, extraction of the signal involves logically straightforward but abstract operations, making the patterns essentially irreducible to natural origin. Plausible ways of embedding the signal into the code and possible interpretation of its content are discussed. Overall, while the code is nearly optimized biologically, its limited capacity is used extremely efficiently to pass non-biological information.
The “Wow! signal” of the terrestrial genetic code