[_ Old Earth _] Viral Life from Outer Space? Not Likely.

[Crying Rock]

...Since a whole, functioning cell could not possibly emerge spontaneously from non-living matter, many evolutionists believe that simpler viruses were the first step towards the development of life. Researchers in Finland conducted a test on the survivability of viruses inside bacterial spores, which some scientists hypothesize may have travelled through space on meteoroids to seed life on earth. What the study discovered, however, is that life springing from space-borne viruses was highly unlikely...

http://www.icr.org/article/4744/

Long odds on space viruses seeding life

...LIFE on Earth is unlikely to have come from space, says a new study on viruses. If life is ever found on another planet, however, the findings could help us judge whether it arrived from space or not...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... -life.html

 

[coelacanth]

...Since a whole, functioning cell could not possibly emerge spontaneously from non-living matter

This sounds like a conclusion. How did they reach the conclusion that it is impossible?

 

[Crying Rock]

...Since a whole, functioning cell could not possibly emerge spontaneously from non-living matter

This sounds like a conclusion. How did they reach the conclusion that it is impossible?

I'm guessing statistical probability. Even Dawkins, who is hostile to anything relating to creationism, sees intelligent agents as a plausible cause for the initial "seeding" of life on earth:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlZtEjtlirc

See timestamps 2:58-4:35 in Stein's interview of Dawkins.

 

[coelacanth]

...Since a whole, functioning cell could not possibly emerge spontaneously from non-living matter

This sounds like a conclusion. How did they reach the conclusion that it is impossible?

I'm guessing statistical probability. Even Dawkins, who is hostile to anything relating to creationism, sees intelligent agents as a plausible cause for the initial "seeding" of life on earth:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlZtEjtlirc

See timestamps 2:58-4:35 in Stein's interview of Dawkins.

Yes, Dawkins was more or less mocking the idea. He, as he says, was bending over backwards to give ID its best shot. The makers of that movie are terribly dishonest. I hope you don't take that movie seriously.

We don't even know what the statistical probability is, but it looks more and more likely all the time, as we have come much farther than the well-known Miller-Urey experiments.

 

[coelacanth]

Hopefully this video link shows up, I have not posted a video on this site before. It is a fairly recent lecture regarding the chemistry of abiogenesis. Very interesting, but as many have pointed out and everyone agrees with, we've never seen life created from nonlife by natural processes. However, this video discusses the progress made in research that is ongoing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrMuFpGlcpk

[youtube:3dku7q6i]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrMuFpGlcpk[/youtube:3dku7q6i]

Edit: video embedding fixed

 

[Crying Rock]

...Since a whole, functioning cell could not possibly emerge spontaneously from non-living matter

This sounds like a conclusion. How did they reach the conclusion that it is impossible?

I'm guessing statistical probability. Even Dawkins, who is hostile to anything relating to creationism, sees intelligent agents as a plausible cause for the initial "seeding" of life on earth:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlZtEjtlirc

See timestamps 2:58-4:35 in Stein's interview of Dawkins.

Yes, Dawkins was more or less mocking the idea. He, as he says, was bending over backwards to give ID its best shot. The makers of that movie are terribly dishonest. I hope you don't take that movie seriously.

We don't even know what the statistical probability is, but it looks more and more likely all the time, as we have come much farther than the well-known Miller-Urey experiments.

Yes, Dawkins was more or less mocking the idea.

Certainly didn't appear so to me.

I hope you don't take that movie seriously.

Haven't even seen it. Just clips from YouTube.

Very interesting, but as many have pointed out and everyone agrees with, we've never seen life created from nonlife by natural processes.

but it looks more and more likely all the time

I'll believe it when I see it.

 

[John]

All i know is that if life can arise form non life then God is out of a job.

 

[coelacanth]

All i know is that if life can arise form non life then God is out of a job.

That's a good line

 

[lordkalvan]

Yes, Dawkins was more or less mocking the idea.

Certainly didn't appear so to me.

Rather a long reference, I'm afraid, but Dawkins himself says that he was not putting the idea forward as anything other than an attempt to give ID the best chance he could:

Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It's the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to accommodate the IDiots ("oh NOOOOO, of course we aren't talking about God, this is SCIENCE") and bending over backwards to make the best case I could for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario. Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar -- semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of the finite age of the universe). Organized complexity cannot just spontaneously happen. That, for goodness sake, is the creationists' whole point, when they bang on about eyes and bacterial flagella! Evolution by natural selection is the only known process whereby organized complexity can ultimately come into being. Organized complexity -- and that includes everything capable of designing anything intelligently -- comes LATE into the universe. It cannot exist at the beginning, as I have explained again and again in my writings.

From: http://richarddawkins.net/article,2394, ... rd-Dawkins

So coelacanth's understanding of the intent behind Dawkins' example seems soundly based and the Expelled clip is just another case of quote-mining designed to misrepresent and/or distort an opponent's understanding or arguments.

 

[Crying Rock]

I disagree. I think Dawkins was just covering his rear end after he found out this was a movie favoring the teaching or discussing of ID in our public science classrooms.

I personally disagree with teaching any kind of origins issues in science classes: both naturalistic and ID arguments. These issues are more philisophical in nature, at least currently. Just my opinion.

Anyway, the main intent of my post was to make people aware of this latest paper:

Long odds on space viruses seeding life

...LIFE on Earth is unlikely to have come from space, says a new study on viruses. If life is ever found on another planet, however, the findings could help us judge whether it arrived from space or not...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... -life.html

And the ICR article was merely a commentary or review of the paper. Nobody can prove how life originated in a purely scientific sense: whether by naturalistic, intellgient design or creationist arguments.

You, John and coelacanth may want to carry on with this thread, but I'm done.

 

[lordkalvan]

I disagree. I think Dawkins was just covering his rear end after he found out this was a movie favoring the teaching or discussing of ID in our public science classrooms....

I find it ironical that, whenever a scientist such as Richard Dawkins, Stephen Gould or Colin Patterson tries to explain how their words have been misused by creationists, filmed interviews presented to distort their views, quotemines exploited to make it appear they are saying something different from what they actually did, their subsequent refutations of these deliberate misrepresentations are simply handwaved away as being of no relevance, as post facto recastings of the truth. Effectively you are accusing these scientists of lying simply because you prefer to believe the manipulated misrepresentations of their arguments rather than what those arguments actually are intended to convey.

 

[lordkalvan]

....And the ICR article was merely a commentary or review of the paper. Nobody can prove how life originated in a purely scientific sense: whether by naturalistic, intellgient design or creationist arguments....

Creationists seem obsessed with the idea of proof; science is concerned mainly with evidence that either supports or falsified a particular hypothesis. There are several lines of evidence that point towards possible explanations for the naturalistic origin of life on Earth. ID and creationism, on the other hand, seem to have no evidence to support them at all.

 

[coelacanth]

All i know is that if life can arise form non life then God is out of a job.

That's a good line

Of course, there may be high demand for entities with experience creating viable universes ;)