Yes, it is as logical as “I’m rubber, you’re glue …”
History is filled with one-time events that do not re-occur, let alone every day.
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So “not wrong” and “sun is in fact not the center of the solar system”. Why are you complaining then? Earth and Sun are two bodies that interact with one another. If Earth does an ellipse in the Sun’s system of reference, the Sun also does an ellipse in the Earth’s system of reference (I think). Another example: take Singapore and Russia that also provides a lot of energy - both are the center of the world in their reference. Get it?
Anyway, this is not the topic here. I was just pointing out the excessive dogmatism on this blog site.
There is a huge deal here. And yes, it’s not the topic but it is very relevant to your ability to read, evaluate and understand scientific information.
Either the Earth is rotating on our axis at a tilt of 23 some degrees orbiting the sun every 365 or so days OR the entire universe is rotating around the Earth, with even stars relatively close moving at blazing fast speeds that oscillate where they end up each night with a period of 365 days. One of these is really happening. The other was once a neat idea, but is utter rubbish that does not describe reality.
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The hypothesis is possible pathways for abiogenesis. As stated in previous posts, it is impossible to say how life started on Earth, so scientists are limited to testing hypotheses that test how life can come about through abiogenesis.
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That is false. The entire goal of their project was to see if biomolecules could form from simple chemicals. Their experiments were a glowing success.[quote=“NonlinOrg, post:91, topic:36540”]
We do have all the building blocks of life and we know the initial conditions supporting abiogenesis would have to be compatible with life as we know it. If it happened once it should happen again and in fact we should see it every day. How is this not logic to you?
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It may be happening again, but the presence of highly evolved life would almost immediately outcompete and destroy such primitive life.[quote=“NonlinOrg, post:91, topic:36540”]
The expectation of information out of chaos without external intervention is the materialistic magic you and others support.
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That’s not magic. That is how nature works.
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Why are you here if not to learn?
This is a demonstration of Natural Selection - - forced onto two populations of bacteria.
Natural selection has also been repeatedly replicated with aquariums and fish … where one aquarium has random-sized fish removed regularly, while the other 2 tanks have the smallest or the largest fish removed regularly.
The end result is that when the smallest or largest fish are removed regularly, “selection” leaves us with a population that is unusually larger sized or smaller sized than expected.
Please do not repeat the same error by claiming natural selection is meaningless.
This has been my point from the beginning, and yet some state that there is a testable hypothesis for the origin of life. This is the cause of such confusion, and this spills over into ToE and faith arguments.
On a slightly humorous note, I am amused by the analogy between fiction of putting dead peoples parts to form a human and animating this with electricity, and some of these experiments in which parts of non-living bio-parts and mixed together to test some “life related” events.
I just happened to come across this, and it struck me as being an analogous situation. Regardless of the outcome of the study, the actual method that was used by the Neanderthals will not be definitely determined. That is recognized, yet a hypothesis is specifically mentioned, and these archaeologists seem to think the matter is worthy of investigation.
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This is an interesting example of how discoveries that point to a distant past may be considered. I am especially interested in (what I see at least) as the train of thought, so to speak. For example, if the question was how sticky substances may have been obtained for tools and weapons, my first thought was gum that may exuded from some trees and plants. If my speculation is shown to be valid, I would assume a likelihood of this substance, since they can come to it without any trial and error activities suggested by the article. To be succinct, what prompted these ancient beings to find tar in the first place? I will not labour the point, but I wish to indicate that the reasoning is more along the lines of (1) we found beads of tar, (b) we assume they must have been manufactured, and © we will find an explanation for this.
I understand why you may condense all of this as “can we hypothesise of various methods of how tar may have been made, and test these”. But I cannot see how this can be turned into, “can we prove the tar beads were made by a particular method, and also provide data to show scientifically that Neanderthals actually did this”.
I think it’s easy to see how one can state hypotheses like those and gather evidence that can support or refute those hypotheses. The fact that the events occurred in the past is a challenge to be sure, and that’s why scientists studying paleontology and especially abiogenesis would not use words like “prove” in their objectives. But hypotheses about a particular method, or about whether Neanderthals used it, are the bedrock of experimental science. There is no conceptual difference between hypotheses regarding prebiotic chemistry, hypotheses regarding ancient human activity, or hypotheses regarding the formation of mountains. And there is no valid reason to assert otherwise.
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Maybe they were the ones Noah had working for him to apply pitch to the ark.
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Those are not mutually exclusive. We can find possible pathways for the origin of life, but still not know which pathway, if any, led to the origin of life on Earth.[quote=“GJDS, post:110, topic:36540”]
On a slightly humorous note, I am amused by the analogy between fiction of putting dead peoples parts to form a human and animating this with electricity, and some of these experiments in which parts of non-living bio-parts and mixed together to test some “life related” events.
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It’s a rather poor analogy since the organisms Szostak and others are trying to produce are nothing like a modern species.
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On an even more humorous note, perhaps you could cite the specific papers in which you allege that to have occurred.
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I guess he locked them out after then 
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Interesting article, @John_Dalton. I bet @Jimpithecus can enlighten us a bit more on the subject, but here’s my take. The reason this is of interest is because of the light it sheds on the evolution of the brain and “modern” human cognition. For instance, H. heidelbergensis was using spears 300,000 years ago to hunt large game, particularly horses, but their spears were essentially sharpened sticks. “Hafted” tools (a stone head attached to a wood handle) are much more complex to make, and if an adhesive is used, that adds yet another layer of complexity, since the making of the adhesive is yet another multi-step process.
Your guess is essentially correct, @GJDS. Tar wasn’t found associated with H. sapiens tools because, well, there are no birch trees in Africa. Simple adhesives, such as tar, are ancient, but compound adhesives mixing multiple ingredients do not appear until later, perhaps 70,000 years ago. Here’s how a paper on Implications for complex cognition from the hafting of tools with compound adhesives in the Middle Stone Age, South Africa describes it:
“The use of simple (1-component) adhesives is ancient; for example, birch-bark tar was found on 2 flakes from ≈200,000 years (200 ka) ago at a site in Italy (3). At ≈40 ka, bitumen was found on stone tools in Syria (4), and a similarly aged site in Kenya yielded tools with red ochre stains that imply the use of multicomponent glue (5). Traces of even earlier (≈70 ka) compound adhesives occur, together with microfractures consistent with hafting, on Middle Stone Age (MSA) stone tools from Sibudu Cave, South Africa (see SI Text and Table S1). Several recipes are evident: sometimes plant gum and red ochre (natural iron oxide–hematite–Fe2O3) traces (Fig. 1) occur on tool portions that were once inserted in hafts (6⇓⇓⇓–10). Other tools have brown plant gums and black or white fat, but no ochre (Fig. 1 and SI Text).”
The ochre made the plant gums less brittle, apparently. Hafting of stone tools by both humans and Neanderthals was previously thought to have begun between 200-300,000 years ago, but one recent paper on Early Hafted Hunting Technology pushes that date back to 500,000 years ago.
I just wanted to follow this up with some references. You can find the original paper written by Miller here. The very first part othe paper reads:
"The idea that the organic compounds that serve as the basis for life were formed when the earth had an atmosphere of methane, ammonia, water, and hydorgen instead of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, oxygen, and water was suggested by Oparia (1) and has been given emphasis recently by Urey (2) and Bernal (3).
In order to test this hypothesis, an apparatus was built to circulate CH2, NH4, H2O, and H2 past an electric discharge."
If you check back to what the actual scientists said, you will find that they weren’t trying to create life in the lab. They were only seeing if abiotic chemistry could produce molecules that we associate with life.
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bwahahahaha! You win the internet today.
This thread is permanently closed, as it has devolved into expressions of exasperation. I’ve deleted a bunch of posts that I thought violated our tone guidelines. If anyone wants to start new threads based on a certain line of conversation, you are welcome to do so.