Freethought & Rationalism Archive

David M. Payne · 11-30-2002, 10:35 PM

I could use a little help <a href="http://hannity.com/forum/index.cfm?fuseaction=read&forum=4&id=11025" target="_blank">here</a> with this question below over on the Sean Hannity site, if one or more of you has the time.(you have to register there to use this link I believe.) You can just post your thoughts here, and I'll cut and past them there, or you can go over there and register and post them on the thread. Thanks.

David

Quote:

Kursk wrote:So there is no scientific evidence or any sort of a theory that can account for the first atom to appear.

That's the problem with evolutionary biology, as far as true physicists, chemists and mathematicians are concerned, biology is not a science. (I am talking natural science, where everything can be reduced to mathematical formulas and postulates that cannot be proven wrong. There are other "sciences" such as psychology, political science, etc., but there is a lot of subjective matter mixed in those. So lets stick to the objective science.)

Biology has some scientific content, such as laws pertaining to biochemestry and physiology, however biology fills the unscientific gap with possible accounts and presumptions, not hard scientific evidence.

So now you want to skip millions(?) years from the first atome to the first living molecule. Well, let's do it objectively, simple mathematics.

During the period we are talking about we had at least these atoms: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon. They were produced by the volcanos. We also had methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide and water. Then we got lightning that can produce amino acids. Then we are moving over to proteins and nucleic acids, that's where life begins.

So, let's do a simple fomula.

X=proteins
Y=nucleic acids
(X;Y)=(hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, methane, carbon dioxide, water.)

X+Y=LIFE.

BUT, according to your statement, "I don't know where matter first came from, and as far as I know there is no definitive scientific evidence that tells us the answer at this time."

Therefore

X=(NO scientific evidence of origin)
Y=(NO scientific evidence of origin)

But, according to evolution,

X+Y=Scientific Origin of life.

So how do we resolve this mathematical equasion:

(NO Scientific evidence of origin)+(NO Scientific evidence of origint)=Science Origin of Life, OR

NO+NO=YES.

"Perhaps some day humanity will have the answer, but not from me on this day."

Answer this one, and then only then we can move on to information theory and mathematical statistics.

We can't operate in the realm of unknown fundamentals, can we?

[ November 30, 2002: Message edited by: David M. Payne ]

[ December 01, 2002: Message edited by: David M. Payne ]

Advocatus Diaboli · 12-01-2002, 01:47 AM

Quote:

During the period we are talking about we had at least these atoms: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon. They were produced by the volcanos. We also had methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide and water. Then we got lightning that can produce amino acids. Then we are moving over to proteins and nucleic acids, that's where life begins.

I think stars had something to do with some of those elements, not volcanoes. I do believe we can show how those "simple" agents turn to more "complex". I think he is building a straw man. Say it isn't so?

Quote:

We can't operate in the realm of unknown fundamentals, can we?

No, we can't. So, why is creationism still a round?

David M. Payne · 12-01-2002, 08:13 AM

Thanks for the reply, Advocatus Diaboli. Perhaps some of our scientists here can give me a more complete answer to this guy. I am very interested to here from our biologists here about his straw man argument.

David

RufusAtticus · 12-01-2002, 11:07 AM

Here is my response.

Quote:

That's the problem with evolutionary biology, as far as true physicists, chemists and mathematicians are concerned, biology is not a science.

Would he happen to be able to support this with some offical statement by a professional organization of physicists, chemists, or mathematicians? This is a silly argyment especially with respect to evolution since evolutionary theory was and is developed by mathematicians, staticians, and theoretical physicists working in biology.

Fisher (the father of modern statistics)
Wright
Haldane
Feldman
Nei
Asmussen
Slatkin
Kimura
etc.

Quote:

however biology fills the unscientific gap with possible accounts and presumptions, not hard scientific evidence

Find me a single intorductory biology textbook that does not contain hard scientific evidence.

Quote:

So now you want to skip millions(?) years from the first atome to the first living molecule. Well, let's do it objectively, simple mathematics.

Actually it's billions of years and there is no such thing as a "living" molecule.

Quote:

During the period we are talking about we had at least these atoms: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon. They were produced by the volcanos.

Actually, volcanoes do not produce these atoms since they are not nuclear reactors. Only nuclear chemistry can create new atoms.

Quote:

We also had methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide and water. Then we got lightning that can produce amino acids. Then we are moving over to proteins and nucleic acids, that's where life begins.

Exactly where does life begin?

Quote:

So, let's do a simple fomula.

X=proteins
Y=nucleic acids
(X;Y)=(hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, methane, carbon dioxide, water.)

X+Y=LIFE.

His simple forumulas need to go back to the drawing board since it forgets lipids, sugars, metal ions, hydrocarbons, etc.

Quote:

X=(NO scientific evidence of origin)
Y=(NO scientific evidence of origin)

It's called chemistry.

Quote:

But, according to evolution,

X+Y=Scientific Origin of life.

Wrong again since evolution does not make any claims about the origin of life except one: that it happened. Evolution explains only the diversity of life. Evolution only happens after the first replicator occurs.

All this blustering has done nothing to show that common descent with modification does not account for the diversity of life on this planet.

~~RvFvS~~

Dr.GH · 12-01-2002, 11:46 AM

Where do these creationists get this stuff???

Quote:

So there is no scientific evidence or any sort of a theory that can account for the first atom to appear.

First of all, the cosmogenic origin of the elements is well known theoretically, and well established emperically. Your correspondent seems poorly informed. A good web based place to start is:

MAP Cosmology 101: Big Bang Concepts
<a href="http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni/uni_101bb2.html" target="_blank">http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni/uni_101bb2.html</a>

THE ORIGIN OF THE ELEMENTS AND THE LIFE OF A STAR
<a href="http://photon.phys.clemson.edu/StarLife.html" target="_blank">http://photon.phys.clemson.edu/StarLife.html</a>

Astronomy HyperText Book: Stellar Evolution
<a href="http://zebu.uoregon.edu/textbook/se.html" target="_blank">http://zebu.uoregon.edu/textbook/se.html</a>

Nucleosynthesis
<a href="http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~imamura/208/mar1/nucleo.html" target="_blank">http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~imamura/208/mar1/nucleo.html</a>

Element Formation/Nucleosynthesis/Big Bang
<a href="http://spectrum.lbl.gov/www/tour/elements/element.html" target="_blank">http://spectrum.lbl.gov/www/tour/elements/element.html</a>

The best current book on the fate of the elements once they become part of a planet is :

Dickin, Alan P.
1997 Radiogenic Isotope Geology Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Quote:

That's the problem with evolutionary biology, as far as true physicists, chemists and mathematicians are concerned, biology is not a science. (I am talking natural science, where everything can be reduced to mathematical formulas and postulates that cannot be proven wrong. There are other "sciences" such as psychology, political science, etc., but there is a lot of subjective matter mixed in those. So lets stick to the objective science.)

There is just about nothing accurate about Kursk’s assessment posted above. The origin of elements is not even a topic of interest to most biologists, and is of limited interest to Biology as a discipline. Isotopic fractionation in various physical and biological systems is interesting to some, but for an evolutionary biologist, carbon is just carbon. I have known some physicists who have thought that nobody but physicists have any intelligence at all. The same can be said of some members of any discipline.

Biology is different from physics becausee it is an historical science. There is no particular reason that meteors should crash into the Earth at particualr times which results in profound biological changes. This is something that biological theory must be expansive enough to accommodate, but at the same time is outside of biological theory.

This absence of total determinacy bothers some physical scientists, and even lead a theorist such as Karl Popper to briefly question if biology could be ‘fit’ into his philosophy of science.

Quote:

Biology has some scientific content, such as laws pertaining to biochemestry and physiology, however biology fills the unscientific gap with possible accounts and presumptions, not hard scientific evidence.

There is no apparent content to the sentence above. Could Kursk provide an example of a ‘gap’ and how biologists fill in with ‘presumptions?’

Quote:

So now you want to skip millions(?) years from the first atome to the first living molecule. Well, let's do it objectively, simple mathematics.

During the period we are talking about we had at least these atoms: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon. They were produced by the volcanos. We also had methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide and water. Then we got lightning that can produce amino acids. Then we are moving over to proteins and nucleic acids, that's where life begins.

The point would be here that Kursk has not the first clue about the general content of the sciences. The current consensus age of the Universe is about 15 billion years, the first atoms (well protons anyway) could have formed as quickly as 300 thousand years after the Big Bang.

Unveiling the Flat Universe
<a href="http://www.astronomy.com/Content/Dynamic/Articles/000/000/000/083dsscy.asp" target="_blank">http://www.astronomy.com/Content/Dynamic/Articles/000/000/000/083dsscy.asp</a>

The Earth formed about 4.55 billion years ago, and the oldest evidence of life comes between 3.8 and 3.5 billion years ago. Let’s round it off to 11 billion years after the first atoms, we have life on Earth. This does not rule out that life could have got its start earlier in some other star system. The entire complement of elements were present at the formation of the Earth. Indeed, a good number of isotopes were present then that are in found in naturally on Earth today. ref: Dalrymple, G. Brent, 1991 The Age of the Earth Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Further more, molecules are molecules. There is no difference to found in urea (I mention this chemical for historical reasons: urea was the first “biological’ molecule to ever be synthesized) that is produced by an organism or in a laboratory. There is no nucleosynthesis in volcanoes. There is a limited amount of chemosynthesis occurring in volcanoes. However, the most productive locations of chemosynthesis were the ocean/atmosphere interface, and the mantel/ocean interface in hydrothermal vents.

Kursk’s feeble attempts at applying a logical formalism do not rate a responce.

[ December 01, 2002: Message edited by: Dr.GH ]

pz · 12-01-2002, 12:10 PM

He's parroting a misperception of how scientists work that has been around for a long, long time -- it's an obsolete view that is modeled on physics as the only 'true' way to do science, and it's wrong (although some physicists still like to peddle it even now...).

Ernst Mayr, in Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, had an interesting dismissal of this kind of objection to Darwin's theories by his contemporaries:

Quote:

Most physicists believed that all phenomena in nature, whether living or inanimate, have to obey the same laws and have to be investigated by the same methods. All of them were essentialists and more or less strict determinists. They strongly inclined to an atomistic reductionism and considered experimentation to the the only true scientific method. At the time of Darwin the physical scientists considered themselves the only true natural philosophers and were convinced that they had the necessary expertise to pass judgement on anyting in science. The usually appallingly ignorant revies of the Origin by physical scientists are eloquent testimony of "the arrogance of the physicists" (Hull 1973). Yet, their prestige and authority was so great that in any argument between a physical scientist and an evolutionist, as that between Lord Kelvin and Darwin on the age of the earth, everyone assumed that the physicist (being a "true scientist") had to be right.

Whenever you see someone say "as far as true physicists, chemists and mathematicians are concerned, biology is not a science", you know they aren't very knowledgeable about the subject. One of the triumphs of Darwin was that not only did he revolutionize biology, but he forced everyone to broaden and redefine the general concept of science to include observation, history, and contingency. Essentialism is inadequate to describe reality.

And gee, even if you are a physicist or a mathematician, inventing bogus equations with weirdly undefined and dimensionless parameters as this "Kursk" nitwit has done is not good science.

Doubting Didymus · 12-01-2002, 02:36 PM

Simple formula: X=proteins Y=nucleic acids According to biologists, X+Y = Life.

I am laughing my fucking lungs out.

Albion · 12-01-2002, 03:02 PM

I wonder if this character cribbed all that nonsense from a creationist source or made it up himself. I'm sure astrophysicists the world over will be surprised to learn that elements are formed in volcanoes.

I didn't get any sense from Francis Crick's autobiography that he thought he was givin up science by moving from physics to biology. I got the impression that he thought that in the 1950s, biology was where the really interesting scientific questions were to be found. And considering he's still working in the field of life science, I assume that's the way he still feels.

pz · 12-01-2002, 03:09 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Albion:
I didn't get any sense from Francis Crick's autobiography that he thought he was givin up science by moving from physics to biology. I got the impression that he thought that in the 1950s, biology was where the really interesting scientific questions were to be found. And considering he's still working in the field of life science, I assume that's the way he still feels.

Have you read Weiner's Time, Love, Memory? It has a great description of the period after WWII when so many physicists rushed into the booming field of genetics. Bohr and Schrodinger were extremely influential in steering many younger physicists towards biology. Hans Delbruck and Seymour Benzer are just two examples.

I wonder if Kursk would consider Bohr, Schrodinger, Delbruck, and Benzer to not be True Scientists?

[ December 01, 2002: Message edited by: pz ]

beausoleil · 12-01-2002, 04:18 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by pz:
He's parroting a misperception of how scientists work that has been around for a long, long time -- it's an obsolete view that is modeled on physics as the only 'true' way to do science, and it's wrong (although some physicists still like to peddle it even now...).

On the other hand (and I'm not defending the nonsense that started this thread), I think there's an awful lot we don't know about why atoms and subatomic particles interact as they do, and a lot of it underpins molecular biology (insofar as it is reductionist). When I hear Dawkins (for instance) trumpeting the end of religion, I think he forgets that his mechanisms rely on bits of physics for which we have operational laws but not, as yet, clear explanations.

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12-01-2002, 08:13 AM	#3
David M. Payne Veteran Member Join Date: Oct 2000 Location: The land of chain smoking, bible thumping, holy ro Posts: 1,248	Thanks for the reply, Advocatus Diaboli. Perhaps some of our scientists here can give me a more complete answer to this guy. I am very interested to here from our biologists here about his straw man argument. David

12-01-2002, 02:36 PM	#7
Doubting Didymus Veteran Member Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: East Coast. Australia. Posts: 5,455	Simple formula: X=proteins Y=nucleic acids According to biologists, X+Y = Life. I am laughing my fucking lungs out.

12-01-2002, 03:02 PM	#8
Albion Veteran Member Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: US east coast. And www.theroyalforums.com Posts: 2,829	I wonder if this character cribbed all that nonsense from a creationist source or made it up himself. I'm sure astrophysicists the world over will be surprised to learn that elements are formed in volcanoes. I didn't get any sense from Francis Crick's autobiography that he thought he was givin up science by moving from physics to biology. I got the impression that he thought that in the 1950s, biology was where the really interesting scientific questions were to be found. And considering he's still working in the field of life science, I assume that's the way he still feels.

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