Mageth

DieToDeath:

But then there is the question of how the extraterrestrials came into being. So let's not go into that. ^_^

Thanks to coragyps for picking up on this in my absence, but to be clear, I meant "extraterrestrial" in its literal sense, not in its popular sense (i.e. I meant stuff that came from somewhere else, not little green men).

Synaesthesia

DietoDeath,
[/quote]But then there is the question of how the extraterrestrials came into being. So let's not go into that. ^_^ [/quote]

Tonnes of organic materials are observed to fall to earth every year. By organic, we generally mean carbon, oxygen and nitrogen based material, it doesn't mean that it was once living.

DieToDeath

Exactly. I have books that back up what I said, madmike. Tell me what books you found your information in, and I'll go take them out of the library. Unless, of course, everything you said was fabricated on the spot or some preconception of people who try to disprove creationism, which I don't doubt.

hezekiah jones

I searched PubMed for "irreducibly complex" and "irreducible complexity" and got zero hits.

Then I searched google and came up with a load of creationist websites. What's up with that?

DieToDeath

It means that madmike used a term that I like to call the "Creationistus Bullshittus Verba", or Creationist Bullshit Words. These words, which neither creationists (nor anyone else, for that matter) can really define, are used to explain away things about evolution theory that they can't refute.

scigirl

You are sort of right. Evolution theory does not explain, or attempt to explain, life origins. All it does is explain how it diversified once it got here.

Just about zero? Like, say, 0.0000000000001? (I made that number up). Remember that the earth was around a long time, and under conditions of immense heat and pressure, when we think life arose. Given enough time, the right ingredients, and heat and pressure, you get all the "really rare" reactions that I memorized and subsequently forgot about in organic chemistry.

Oh, and the probability of life arising on this earth is equal to 1. Just because you can't understand how it happened, doesn't mean that it didn't happen according to boring old laws of physics and chemistry.

scigirl

sbaii

But it shoor does impress the local yokels when they want to mess up the science curriculum at the public schools.

lpetrich

Except that it is possible to form "thermal proteins" by heating mixtures of amino acids.

Madmike, can you please tell us what those 14 proteins are?

And although the DNA -> RNA -> protein system does look irreducibly complex, there is good reason to believe that it had emerged from an earlier, simpler system, and the favorite candidate for that is the "RNA world". This is deduced from the following:

The discovery of RNA molecules that can act as enzymes.

A similar discovery about DNA, though no such enzymes occur in the wild.

Several RNA-containing cofactors which are involved in various metabolic processes that have little connection with DNA->RNA->protein. NAD, FAD, Coenzyme A, ATP, etc.

The RNA of ribosomes being the most important parts of these tiny protein-assembly structures.

Our world grew out of the RNA world as a result of these steps:

DNA is a specialization of RNA for master-copy duty.

RNA enzymes tended to get cofactors attached to them; some of these still survive. Niacin still looks like a modified nucleic-acid base; in NAD, it takes the position of one in a RNA dimer.

Some of these cofactors were amino acids; the DNA->RNA->protein system was an outgrowth of a system for constructing amino-acid-chain cofactors.

There is a problem with the RNA world: where did the RNA come from? Prebiotic-chemistry experiments have difficulty making ribose, which has led to the speculation that RNA had somehow taken over from some other self-replicating substance. And it is difficult to identify that substance.

KeithHarwood

The earth is a big place. It was a big place 4,000,000,000 years ago. There is a good chance that it had more than one environment. So amino acids form in atmosphere, fall onto hot springs, onto clay left from hot springs drying up, onto hot dry depressions in hardening lava, onto rock crystals left by evaporating pools, onto places where it just sat polymerising for hundreds of millions of years while the earth cooled down and created yet more environments. Similarly, the interesting chemicals that can form in an abiotic sea can be distributed by storms, tides, tsunamis and the emergence of new land into all those same environments.

Just because creationism creates life in one place at one time doesn't mean science has to do it the same way.