Create life in the laboratory?

[Casper_Hesp]

@sfmatheson

I am pleased to see that the BL system allows one to ignore posters. That’s probably the wise next step.

Hi Stephen, thanks for joining us here. I think your expertise in cell biology may come in handy. Just dismissing someone by ignoring that person won’t help any kind of discussion.

A bit of background may be useful. @GJDS has been maintaining such claims here for (at least) the past few years. From his writings on this site, I gather that he’s asking for a plausible chemical pathway from basic chemical building blocks towards anything resembling RNA. See, for example, this reply by me in a previous discussion between me and George:

Why the opposition to ID theory?

Who are those “others” you are talking about? Last time I checked, these people (whom you are basically calling lousy scientists) are all publishing their research in peer-reviewed academic journals of fundamental biochemical research… I think you are very much at odds here with “mainstream” science. It’s good that you asked because that was not at all my claim. My claim was that evolutionary theorizing led to the RNA world hypothesis as an explanation for the origin of the current complexes …

The gist of my reply was that origins-of-life research has pushed back the frontiers from DNA complexes towards RNA. That’s already laudable progress. There will always be frontiers in science, but they are continuously shifting at the moment. Therefore I dare say that significant progress is being (and will be) made on the origins of RNA, too. Though that won’t affect George much because he will likely shift his scepticism to wherever the frontiers happen to be.

@sfmatheson, is there anything you think would be useful to add to what I said earlier to @GJDS? I think your expertise could help to formulate an answer that is more thorough and (hopefully) more satisfactory to George. After all, I am just a poor neuroscientist / astrophysicist myself .

Casper