Why do educators lie?

[NewtonTrino]

He ran away after 7 posts? Try harder next time religious trolls.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

You are confusing evolution with abiogenesis.

As if evolution doesn't start at the beginning..

Sorry for the sarcasm but I think it's time for biologists to toss this cookie. I liken it to an apology. Why not just say we're working on that piece of evolution theory and actually researchers are making significant progress? There is no need to say, yes, but put that aside and just take the evolution piece. I don't know who first made the apology but I refrain from adopting it. It is not necessary.

The OP, if I've read it correctly, someone stop me if I didn't, is a fake thread title for a claim that since we don't yet know all the specifics of abiogenesis and jeremydschram can't possibly imagine how scientists could ever figure it out we should all credit the Sky Daddy now.


YAWN...........

 

[catsmate]

That. I will need a bigger bumper.

Perhaps one of the LED matrix displays? You could have the message scrolling past.............

 

[Delvo]

Actually, life spontaneously arising from non-living ingredients has already been observed.

The right acid solution of various elements leads to formation of not only amino acids and nucleic acids, but also fatty acids. Fatty acid molecules stick together when they collide. When enough have collided and stuck to each other, they form microscopic round objects called vacuoles, which enclose water inside them, separate from the water outside them. When vacuoles touch more fatty acid molecules as they drift around in the solution, they incorporate them and grow larger (a process which is also partially or entirely driven by their tendency to take in more of those simple organic acid from the surrounding solution than they let out, as described below). Past a certain size, they wouldn't stay intact anymore against the forces of the water currents, so any more growth results in splitting, which yields two vacuoles, each with half of the contents of the original inside them. This happens without breaking open and spilling just because of how sticky the fatty acid molecules they're made out of are to each other. Another interesting side effect of that intermolecular stickiness of fatty acids is that when two vacuoles bump into each other, the larger one takes material away from the smaller one, growing larger and eventually completely destroying/absorbing the smaller one. So these things--made of a lipid membrane enclosing an aqueous solution just like any living cell, but without a single protein, organelle, or gene--consume nutrients, grow, reproduce, and kill & eat each other. That's what makes life life.

Anything else to add to that is just a matter of enhancing their effectiveness in the natural selection of the Membrane Wars. And the space inside them is particularly conducive to collecting amino and nucleic acids and combining them in various ways at a higher rate than in the general solution they live in, because any larger polymers thus formed inside them can't get out, which results in more monomers being pulled in by osmosis, which can then add to the polymers, so polymerization (accumulation of larger and larger polymers) is a positive feedback condition inside these vacuoles (which, as I mentioned above, contributes to their growth in the first place).

 

[Ocelot]

It's life Jim but not as we know it.

 

[Ziggurat]

There is simply no plausible mechanism for the initial formation of the first life.

My cat can't figure out how door nobs work. For her, they appear to be magic. Does that mean that they are magic?

No, it means she's too stupid to figure it out.

Maybe we're just too stupid to figure out abiogenesis.

Or maybe we're just missing pieces of the puzzle. I was recently reading "Journey to the Center of the Earth", the old Jules Verne classic. The characters are debating theories about what's at the center of the earth, and what the source of heat powering volcanoes was. The competing theories mentioned were that the center of the earth was a multi-million degree gas, and that the heat originated from oxidation of metals during the formation of the earth. Both of these theories are actually nonsense, they're both fatally flawed, but nobody could figure out any better explanation. Why? In that case, not because people were too stupid, but because they were missing the critical piece of the puzzle: nuclear fission. The sun was actually a similar problem for a long time: where did all that energy come from? People knew the sun was full of hydrogen, but burning hydrogen doesn't produce enough energy. Neither does gravitational collapse, another proposal. The missing piece was fusion.

Maybe we're still missing the critical piece of the puzzle for abiogenesis.

 

[LarianLeQuella]

Maybe we're still missing the critical piece of the puzzle for abiogenesis.

Some sort of god shaped pieces perhaps? And when we find them, and it turns out to be NOT MAGIC, where does the poor critter run off to? Poor thing.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

My cat can't figure out how door nobs work. For her, they appear to be magic. Does that mean that they are magic?
....

 

[Ziggurat]

My cat can't figure out how door nobs work. For her, they appear to be magic. Does that mean that they are magic?
...

And apparently I'm not much smarter than my cat, because I can't figure out how to spell doorknob. Or door knob. I've found it in both ways, but always with a k.

That damn silent k... mocking me...

 

[Donn]

Hey, it could'a been door noobs... Those things are tough on first timers.

 

[Hellbound]

I just assumed it was a euphemism for something dirty.

Of course, I assume that about everything.

Makes life more fun

 

[pristerognathus]

Bit late to be joining this one but the OP states:-

"There is simply no plausible mechanism for the initial formation of the first life."

How life began is not something that evolutionary theory addresses, this is Abiogenesis which is in some ways a subject as old as the hills but as a scientific endeavour somewhat more recent. Evolution does not have any answers because the origin of life is basically irrelevant to the process.

Having moved the discussion on from one theory to another, scientists engaged in research on the Abiogenesis question have some test results and hypothesis that may start to explain where / how life began. However, it's a complex field, after all the conditions of the planet 4 billion years ago are difficult to replicate. I'm sure there are other forum members who can throw a bit more light on this, but at this time there is no Theory of Abigenesis in the same way as there is a Theory of Evolution. Maybe it's a god what done it, or aliens or flying spaghetti monsters, or maybe it was a happy coincidence of chemical and atmospheric conditions being just so

 

[Toke]

Maybe we're still missing the critical piece of the puzzle for abiogenesis.

That sounds suspiciously like "I don't know", what kind of scientist are you.

 

[pristerognathus]

oops -sorry folks, should have scanned a bit further before sticking my sizeable snout in. Still I'm going with must be something superduper natural.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

oops -sorry folks, should have scanned a bit further before sticking my sizeable snout in. Still I'm going with must be something superduper natural.

So does that mean you got to the posts saying the same thing, or the one with my answer to it?

Define where evolution starts?

The first replicating organism?

Didn't molecules have to replicate before that?

The first replicating organisms upon which natural selection pressures could act?

Didn't natural selection pressures act on those precursor molecules as well?

Do you see the problem one gets into with the apology that evolution theory does not include its beginning? Isn't it more practical to simply acknowledge that piece of the theory is currently still being investigated? It is, after all, and significant progress has been made in the research. You might be surprised how far along that research is.

Last question, when the mechanism of abiogenesis is worked out, will it then be part of evolution theory?

 

[Ziggurat]

oops -sorry folks, should have scanned a bit further before sticking my sizeable snout in. Still I'm going with must be something superduper natural.

Does that mean something that's even more natural than normal?

 

[Captain Obvious]

This is at least partially related to the sorites paradox (when does a heap of sand become not a heap as grains are removed). It's pretty easy to argue about what is alive and what isn't, and this more accurately reflects the human tendency to want labels and neat categories, which the universe is always so reluctant to provide.

In that case we should stop burying and cremating people then.

 

[fuelair]

Now I have the image of a poet in full Victorian-era gown being pushed back and forth in random, jittery motion by the tiny impacts of gas molecules.

We do our best to bemuse and bewilder.

 

[jeremydschram]

loss_leader???

Who said anything about god? Viruses aren't alive, really? But if you are going to rule god, intelligent design, or anything else, out in the name of science then I would expect science to follow the scientific method and therefore be testable and repeatable. I want there to be a natural mechanism for this process but there is not one. Time will prove this and that there is no higgs boson. There is more out there than we have yet to see or conceive.
To all the people above you are right I didn't know the difference between evolution and abiogenisis. I personally don't believe in god so if you think I was trying to support anything like that I wasn't!!! It just pisses me off that science and those that teach it act as thought the subject is 'all wrapped up' and if you question them you are automatically a creationist. Why does the question have to be between god and natural processes where time is this almost supernatural magical factor, can't there be some room for something we don't yet know?

 

[Sledge]

Why does the question have to be between god and natural processes where time is this almost supernatural magical factor, can't there be some room for something we don't yet know?

Who is claiming we know? Specifics, please.