everyone says that the theory of evolution rules out the existence of god, or his involvement in the creation of life. no.
it rules out his hand in the manipulation of genetics over the past 4 billion yrs. we can see that a really old monkey family was separated by a river and a swamp one day, and some of them had to wade through waist high water most of the time and therefore their kids who were born to stand on two feet survived better and spread those genes, making the monkeys on one side of that river evolve into standing up humans after a million years or so.
thats great, you can explain how humans came from monkeys, but you cant explain how bacteria came from rocks and gas.
i am under the impression that heisenbergs uncertainty principle prevents us from seeing the exact motion of the molecules in the dna chain, or the exact motion of the molecules that, 4 billion yrs ago bumped into eachother while inside a meteorite that was struck in mid air by lightning and a solar flare and thus created life.
what is the size threshold of things we can resolve clearly with an electron microscope? is it possible to increase the resolution of an electron microscope picture by replacing electrons with leptons or quarks or neutrinos? is there any theory about being able to see things without touching them with probes?
wouldnt it be awesome if it was truly impossible to see the exact machinery of dna? would that convince anybody of gods hand in the matter?
You don’t need to see the individual atoms as much as know which bases are present. The language of DNA is after all A,T,C and G…as far as we know the basic code has been constant since prokaryotes evolved. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle doesn’t really apply here because the bases are all bonded together. We can detect the positions of molecules in the DNA without changing it’s velocity significantly because they are so massive. a change in momentum that would send a small particle flying off into space will barely move an entire DNA chain.
there are other detection methods as well…X-ray diffaction (short wavelentgh is key) was use back in the 40’s to determine a lot about the structure of DNA. You odn’t have to “see” it to understand how it works.
yeah we can see today very clearly what the code is, what some parts of the code correspond to, what proteins are created by what code and how rna follows the laws of chemistry to create those proteins, but that doesnt say how it started.
presumably there is some super special spark that happened a long time ago turning A G C and T into DNA. i mean what makes those proteins ‘decide’ where to go and what to do. sure the sequence of AGC and Ts ensures that the protein will be composed of just the right chemicals, and maybe even something in the rna will guide it to the correct place in the body where the laws of chemistry will accurately describe exactly how and why it is used to do some random sounding task like make a chemical to help me stick ants on my tongue or something.
i just want that cell to have motivation like i do. how can it accomplish anything if its just a force like a magnet. how can it go from a rock to such a complicated machine, set up so elaborately? if it wasnt god, then whatever created it almost has to be something that we understand and see today, since we understand and see pretty much everything that would ever affect some molecules on the surface of the earth. shouldnt we know by now which one of those things zapped into the AGC and T to make life? cause we dont. and shouldnt it have happened again since then? shouldnt there be a fundamentally different form of life born right on the other sde of the world that uses F Q J and $ in its dna?
why cant we just put AGC and T into a vat, reproduce any of the events that could have happened on early earth to a vat, and come back tomorow with a new species? my theory is that god zapped it right under our nose and if we were there at the birth of life on earth, watching it the whole time with a super electron microscope, whatever he does is just barely out of focus. thats the only explanation that makes sense to me at this point, and i dont see how it is possible that future technology will provide another. does anybody?
First of all, life is such a complex thing that just as we can’t say we know how it came to be, we also can’t say we don’t know how it came to be.
I think its possible that the ‘explanation’ of life might be discovered in maybe 50 years or so, once our computers are powerful to represent and calculate the actions of those soupy particles on earth, or perhaps elsewhere. It doesn’t have to be an exact replica, just a demonstration of how complexity arises naturally from matter (in a computer, we can ‘fast forward’ the interaction of matter to span over a billion years). There are already scientists working on this stuff, I believe.
The human mind is rather incapable of conceiving the amount of possibilities that occur in a billion little molecules, perhaps stagnating and randomly forming into longer and more complex chains and patterns, over a billion years. I like to imagine snowflakes, and how each one is exquisitely different.
btw future, what was the meaning of that thread about elephants eating poop?
according to the only four forces we know, life doesnt move. only magnets of varying sizes and types and mass, all in a predictable straightforward way.
wheres the fifth force? is it possible that we will never see closely enough to definetively say that there is none thanks to hesienberg?
they have calculated everything that could have happened to spark life according to everything we ever thought could possibly happen, i think. how many things could there be? i do remember hearing on discovery channel people talk about numerous failed experiments.
according to the only four forces we know, life doesnt move. only magnets of varying sizes and types and mass, all in a predictable straightforward way.
wheres the fifth force? is it possible that we will never see closely enough to definetively say that there is none thanks to hesienberg?
they have calculated everything that could have happened to spark life according to everything we ever thought could possibly happen, i think. how many things could there be? i do remember hearing on discovery channel people talk about numerous failed experiments.
as for elephants eating poop, i just dont buy how we could evolve an instinct to do something like that. and if he just learns from his parents, how did the first one find poop to eat, since the babies eat their parents poop. and how do they know to not continue eating poop if theyve linked it to good cellulose digestion? surely they dont understand that they share bacteria? surely god is dead?
The primordial Earth was very different that today, the atmosphere when struck by lightning would form a cluster of amino acids and other things. We have done experiments in labs that prove this. Over billions of years, and uncountable lightning strikes not to mention the effects of radiation and other things is it that far fetched to think that one of these amino acids was arranged in a way that gave rise to life? And by life all I mean is the ability to replicate.
I guess the question is, what will we run into first. Life on other planets? The technology to arrange things on a atomic level, and create our own “life”. Or the ability to formulate computer models in which life is generated from non-life, in earth like conditions. Perhaps we will never figure this out, and it will forever be pure speculation.
we have lots of amino acids today, ill bet that if we wanted, we could synthesize even more than would have fallen into a single vat on early earth.
yes we are familiar we all of these things, we can recreate them, science is further ahead than you guys think, with less of an idea about life than you think.
somebody who knows something about heisenberg: does the uncertainty apply to seeing the exact mechanics of dna and when it decides to do things? is it possible to use ever smaller probes to overcome any barrier heisenberg presents?
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is not a barrier. DNA is too large a molecule to for the momentum change associated with detecting it to make any difference. It won’t go flying off into space if we hit it with an electron or a photon.
That said, It’s difficult to analyze DNA because it’s function depends very much on it being in the cell in the presence of the proper enzymes. Observing it in it’s natural state is tough because there is all that cellular junk in the way. We can observe it indirectly by learning the chemical processes that take place…a certain enzyme placed in a medium containing DNA will unwind the strand, another will join fragments into a whole strand, another will attach a complementary strand to a 1/2 of a DNA strand, etc. We know of all those mechanisms already.
What we really don’t know is exactly what happens once the DNA is transcribed to RNA. We know how proteins are made, of coruse (highschool biology class explained that…) but a lot of RNA has nothing to do with protein synthesis. Eukaryote cells seem to have very complex regulation through RNA and signal molecules that Biologists until recently were unaware of. This is a much greater mystery.
What? Of course life moves. Our body is like an engine, takes in fuel, with little motors whirring inside. Within cells, those little engines move in predictable ways. I don’t know why you are talking about forces… presumably this is just regular old mechanical force at work here.
Thats a hell of a lot of calculations. Are you sure they’ve done them all, and proven they’ve done them all? I highly doubt it.
I can totally buy the instinct. For instance, human babies are wired to suck their mothers breast. Gooses are wired to make motions with their beaks to roll eggs back in the nest, judging by roundness of object, even if that object is a billiard ball they roll it back to the nest. Animals are wired with these various instinctual and arbitrary rules, that they have no idea what they are doing, but they do it anyway.
so what? those are merely more examples of what i am describing. i am trying to say that these hardwired complex behaviors were zapped into us by none other than god trying to make his nature work in harmony.
correct me if im wrong, but darwin would explain this behavior by saying that a mutant child was born one day who just had this crazy brain tumor that made him eat his parents poop just once, and then not again. and this mutation helped him to live more efficiently and better than any other elephants and therefore he has tons of kids and in a thousand years, all elephants have this same brain mutation.
three problems there:
1)holy crap what a ridiculous random mutation
2)i dont think anybody has ever observed a new behavior being mutated into new humans, like a hardwired instinct to eat rocks. its the same thing, there should have been a baby or two by now randomly born with some crazy idea hardwired in there. that is, if they do in fact zap in there on their own at random and we are just waiting for the one that makes our lives easier for spreading genes
the baby eats poop so that he gets the beneficial bacteria into his stomach. if there is no beneficial bacteria in the poop, the baby does not benefit from eating it. the first baby elephant to eat his parents poop ate poop without bacteria, because where would his parents have gotten it? they didnt have the idea to eat poop in their heads, they had to have been inefficiently eating cellulose their whole lives and they probably would have died. i dont think elephants can exist without this bacteria, which means it must have been zapped into them from the start, as well as the idea in their babies heads that allows them all to continue using the bacteria forever
computers are pretty awesome. look theres only so many phenomena that happened on the surface of the earth a while ago. this is a huge deal, finding out what made life, youd think people tried everything if they are faced with the possibility that they will actually create life. some scientists can do the job previously attributed to god. i think theyd try pretty hard to figure this one out.
im pretty sure if its possible that life was created by a random event on the surface of early earth, then its a type of event that weve never observed or calculated the effects of.
it moves in a way that i choose. i decide that i want to go up, gravity says go down. the electromagnetic forces in my body say ‘stay together’, or the ones in my nerves say ‘contract this muscle’ the electro in my brain says ‘stimulate this nerve’ but how can science expect to quantify the initial decision by my brain to jump as no more than the effects of the 4 fundamental forces? if its not directly a product of those 4 forces, then its a 5th force.
if the fifth force is not explained in terms of the other 4, ie if the force in our brain is unlike all other observed forces, then that is what we call supernatural, by definition.
Certain breeds of dog have been raised by humans to have certain instinctive behaviors. For example, pointers and birding dogs point their nose at the bird. My family’s dog, a Karen terrier, was bred to sneek out and kill rodents. Even as a puppy, he liked to go in small holes and such, hide under the couch- go in small and dark places. He had no idea what he was doing, nobody taught him anything especially not my family, buch of lazy bastards. Is it the hand of God ‘zapping’ these behaviors into bred and domesticated animals? or is it the hand of man, purposely shaping their environment and forcing them to adapt?
Computers are not magic. Even though the best ones do billions of operations a sec, we are still a long way off from reconstructing a virtual environment molecule by molecule with all the accurate physical forces, and calculating all the movements in that environment over billions of years.
Again, its like a machine that was set in motion. Theoretically, it was set in motion by a random jostling, for example a prot0-dna molecule that randomly replicated itself (therefore creating more proto-dna molecules, more chances for auto-replication). In a pool of proto-organic mud that was moving just enough for the molecules to move around, but not enough that it would easily break up the chains of those molecules (in other words, the “edge of chaos”), therefore allowing them to grow increasingly complex over time.
The actions of DNA replication are rather automatic and mechanical, intricate to be sure, but the DNA molecule nevertheless owes its design to its easy replication and mutation.
so its still just jostling about randomly? except its so INCREDIBLY UNIMAGINABLY random that it actually makes sense and fools us into thinking we have free will? ill post more later. how can it be random if im not.
As I pointed out, I can imagine it just fine. Just think about snowflakes, and how every one is slightly different. Organic molecules forming intricate and complex strings, like the snowflakes each one different, over billions of years eventually one of em automatically replicates, starts off a chain of cause and effect.
so im saying that we have never seen any mechanism that turns rocks into life, and youre saying that all it takes is
thats what i thought.
besides, it didnt take billions at all, life started relatively shortly after the formation of the earth, and so would seem kind of simple and easy to reproduce.
you use the words randomly and billions of years as if those are causes, or they facilitate whatever the cause may be. heres what those terms really are: lack of knowledge. we dont know what happens when you have a random thing for billions of years, therefore that could be how its created. thats absolutely not at all different from saying that god did it.
The defining characteristic of biological molecules is their tendency to self-assemble. If you put a bunch of phospholipids in water (the molecules that make up our cell membranes), they naturally form a bilayer. If you stir it, they clump into little cell-size vesicles on their own. RNA and other such information carying molecules are naturally self-replicating. In theory, if the right molecules formed accidentally at the right time, you’d have all the makings of a primitive cell. Obviously, this is only theory, because we have not duplicated it experimentally. The point is, however, that it is plausible that there is no “god” in the equation because of the nature of the molecules.
im not so much concerned with the ability of molecules to replicate as i am with their ability to search for food and make the subdecisions required to do that.
the electrostrongoweak force explains how cytosine in a vat will link up with guanine in a vat and how, similarly, a chain of As and Cs will link right up with a chain of Gs and Ts. i wonder what triggers the DNA molecule to split up in order to allow this, but i know that science has nothing to say on that matter besides the presence of a certain catalyst? what releases the catalyst?
but anyway the big problem i have is how does a molecule whos entire family was plants, that is, all life up until then just sat around and let the food float into them (i would refer to those plant bacteria as half of life, since they dont actaully DO anything), then all of a sudden, one day, the molecule and its crazy random collection of friend molecules DECIDES TO MOVE.
i can understand if the electrostrongoweak force sucked the bacteria over into a pile of food, but thats not what happens. i never heard of life being a magnet. ive heard of sensory organs that detect magnets and that could, in theory use that information to find magnety food, but the actual electromagnetic force does not move the organism anywhere. a complex machine whose stimulus is not explained by the 4 fundamental forces is what moves the organism.
how can you explain a randomly created a machine that randomly hooks up to the sensory organ that was also just randomly created? only if you replace the word ‘god’ with ‘random over billions of years’ and then dont explain. thats how.
all movement in the universe happens because messenger particles shoot about and cause other particles to slowly move about in absolutely calculatable ways. life does not calculate anywhere near as easily, not even bacteria. how?