Vorkosigan

I am moving this from another thread to keep things on topic.

Is anyone here willing to be honest and admit that abiogenesis presents a big problem to anyone with common sense?

Tawk amongst yourselves.

Hallucigenia

I'll bite.

Abiogenesis presents a big problem to what?

To evolution? No. It matters not how life first got here. The mechanisms of evolution still work the same.

Abiogenesis is a problem, in the sense that scientists are still working on a solution. It is not, however, as I think you are implying, a threat to any particular theory.

Oolon Colluphid

I'd like to know what exactly, according to creationists, needed to be abiogenesis-ed.

The first cell? (Eukaryotic or prokaryotic?)

The first replicators surrounded by a membrane? (How is that difficult?)

The first DNA? (Or do you mean RNA?)

The first self-replicating molecule? (Isn’t that just chemistry?)

The first carbon-chain molecule? (Isn’t that just chemistry again?)

The first carbon atoms? (Isn’t that just physics?)

Sure, scientist don’t know (yet) exactly what happened. Maybe we never will. But it sure doesn’t look like a problem in principle.

Oolon

[ July 17, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

seanie

'common sense' is a somewhat over-rated virtue.

Oolon Colluphid

It is also, of course, irrelevant for much of science. Our human minds were shaped (hey, I’ll even include the possibility of it being by god, this time! ) to cope with sizes from the barely visible to a few hundred miles, and timescales from large fractions of a second to a few hundred years. Thus great swathes of nature -- and of the scientific principles we use to understand it -- lie outside of ‘common sense’. Being counterintuitive does not make something wrong, because our intuition cannot be trusted outside the human scales of things.

If such a thing as god exists, it surely lies outside the realms of normal reality. The flip-around is just too obvious: Is anyone here willing to be honest and admit that god presents a big problem to any theist with common sense?

And I’m still waiting for a creationist to explain -- using common or any other variety of sense -- why a loving god would create <a href="http://www.who.int/inf-fs/en/fact162.html" target="_blank">Rickettsia prowazekii</a> and <a href="http://www.path.cam.ac.uk/~schisto/Nematodes/hookworm.html" target="_blank">Ancylostoma duodenale</a> (pdf: <a href="http://www.gwumc.edu/microbiology/Downloads/sabin%20annual%20report.pdf" target="_blank">40% of global morbidity, 44 million pregnant women affected</a>; see also <a href="http://www.unicef.org/sowc98/panel20.htm" target="_blank">this UNICEF page</a>), for instance.

Theo, what does your ‘common sense’ say about such a being?

Oolon

Hi Seanie, btw! Another Brit!

seanie

Appeals to common sense make me think about a different argument that could have raged a thousand years ago.....

What do you mean the earth isn't flat?

You say it's a sphere? Spinning at a thousand miles an hour? Travelling at 45,000 miles an hour through a cold empty void?

Why don't people fall off? Why aren't they blown flat by the speed? Why don't the oceans flow out into this supposed void?

Is anyone here willing to be honest and admit that a spherical earth presents a big problem to anyone with common sense?

Kevin Dorner

"Common" sense means nothing in the sciences. It has been nothing but a failure: "Obviously" the earth is flat because it looks that way, and stationary because it feels that way, and it's "obvious" that lead can be turned into gold chemically if we try enough combinations of reagents, and "common sense" tells us that diseases are caused by bad air. It's "intuitive" that a heavy object will fall faster than a light one.

But all of these formerly accepted and "common sense" explanations were incorrect, and are obsolete now.

Starboy

GeoTheo:

Check out

<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=001079" target="_blank">"Is abiogenesis an important part of evolution?"</a>

Evolution would still be a descriptive and predictive theory even if it was all started by god.

Starboy

[ July 17, 2002: Message edited by: Starboy ]</p>

bluefugue

Didn't Huxley once comment that science was basically "organized common sense"? Of course, the "common sensical" thought processes that (according to Huxley) drive science could nonetheless lead to some very un-common-sensical conclusions -- like the idea that I am currently standing on a gigantic sphere that is hurtling through space at thousands of miles per hour, or that my body is constantly being penetrated by invisible electromagnetic rays, or that folks in Australia are (from my perspective) hanging upside down this very moment, or that my desk is composed mainly of empty space...

MrDarwin

So GeoTheo, just what "big problem" does abiogenesis present?

It presents no problem for evolutionary theory, which holds that at some point life began, and descended with modification from that beginning.

It presents no problem for paleontology or geology, which clearly demonstrate that the earth was at first lifeless, and that at some point life came into being.

In other words, abiogenesis is perfectly consistent with both evolutionary theory and the geological record. It is perfectly consistent with what we know about the natural world. So just where is the problem?