Author Topic: (Possibly) One Step Closer To Explaining Biogenesis  (Read 2608 times)

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Offline R. U. Sirius

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(Possibly) One Step Closer To Explaining Biogenesis
« on: January 04, 2015, 03:41:06 pm »
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/03/god_is_on_the_ropes_the_brilliant_new_science_that_has_creationists_and_the_christian_right_terrified/

Brilliant work on this guy's part, but I sadly doubt that we're going to see creationism's death throes within our lifetime. There are always going to be people who think that the way they want the world to be should trump the way it is.
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Offline Ironchew

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Re: (Possibly) One Step Closer To Explaining Biogenesis
« Reply #1 on: January 04, 2015, 03:51:12 pm »
You mean abiogenesis. Biogenesis is just the observation that organisms come from other organisms reproducing.

Life arising from abiogenesis is a fact; hypotheses that assume a creator was involved raise more serious questions than they answer. That said, we don't know exactly how life on Earth arose and Salon is puffing up this piece a bit too much. I'm not saying that England doesn't have a key insight in the works here, but it needs more experimental evidence and I would imagine even then it won't be the anti-creationist silver bullet. Salon isn't giving religious people enough credit for making shit up.
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Offline Sigmaleph

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Re: (Possibly) One Step Closer To Explaining Biogenesis
« Reply #2 on: January 05, 2015, 04:07:18 pm »
The "this will kill creationism" hype is just noise, but I guess "Science!" doesn't sell quite as well as "Science! And also that guy you dislike is stupid!".

The implications for abiogenesis are interesting. I'm not sure it will help solve the riddle of how it actually took place on Earth (since this seems to be a very general result, thermodynamics rather than chemistry), but it has interesting implications for search of life elsewhere. Also terrible implications re: the Great Filter.
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Offline Ultimate Paragon

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Re: (Possibly) One Step Closer To Explaining Biogenesis
« Reply #3 on: January 05, 2015, 04:17:36 pm »
Indeed.  It won't kill creationism, but it might prove a major blow.

Offline Sigmaleph

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Re: (Possibly) One Step Closer To Explaining Biogenesis
« Reply #4 on: January 05, 2015, 05:10:05 pm »
I don't think it will. First of all, this is very new and not established. If it can't convince your average biochemist, it has no chance to convince a creationist.

Second, assuming it became established, well, there's about six billion metric fucktons of well-established scientific arguments against Creationism. Thinking "oh, but this one will be the one" strikes me as a mistaken model of the creationist. It's not that they are highly sceptical and thus demand more evidence. They have rejected it a priori for religious reasons (most of them, anyway) and they live in a self-reinforcing bubble of pseudoscientists parsing the information for them.

I expect your average creationist will see this first via an article on Answers in Genesis (or equivalent) which will say something to the effect of "Ha! Silly evolutionists pretend this is a death blow for creationism, but actually this disproves evolution because <insert nonsense about order in the universe or the second law of thermodynamics>", they will nod, think to themselves "Of course, evolution disproved once more" and go on with their day.

This will not be a major blow for creationists. Or a minor one, for that matter. I don't expect there's anything you can do to convince the average creationist by this point short of time-travel. They will just die out eventually if we're lucky.
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Offline Askold

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Re: (Possibly) One Step Closer To Explaining Biogenesis
« Reply #5 on: January 06, 2015, 02:02:51 am »
Life arising from abiogenesis is a fact; hypotheses that assume a creator was involved raise more serious questions than they answer.
That is not how science works. If scientists can't prove how abiogenesis happened then it is still a theory. A theory that has much less things to explain than the theory that a divine being created the universe and breathed life into existence, but still a theory.
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Offline Ironchew

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Re: (Possibly) One Step Closer To Explaining Biogenesis
« Reply #6 on: January 06, 2015, 08:28:51 am »
Life arising from abiogenesis is a fact; hypotheses that assume a creator was involved raise more serious questions than they answer.
That is not how science works. If scientists can't prove how abiogenesis happened then it is still a theory. A theory that has much less things to explain than the theory that a divine being created the universe and breathed life into existence, but still a theory.

I will admit that we have trouble devising experiments that conclusively demonstrate abiogenesis, but I think "conjecture" is a better fit than "theory" for this if only because a theory supported by all available evidence is as good as you can get in science.
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Offline SCarpelan

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Re: (Possibly) One Step Closer To Explaining Biogenesis
« Reply #7 on: January 06, 2015, 09:54:51 am »
When universe began there could not have been life. Now there is life. Logically this pretty much confirms abiogenesis. The question scientists are trying to answer is how did it happen; we know that it did happen by simply observing that life exists.

Offline Sigmaleph

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Re: (Possibly) One Step Closer To Explaining Biogenesis
« Reply #8 on: January 06, 2015, 03:39:27 pm »
Life arising from abiogenesis is a fact; hypotheses that assume a creator was involved raise more serious questions than they answer.
That is not how science works. If scientists can't prove how abiogenesis happened then it is still a theory. A theory that has much less things to explain than the theory that a divine being created the universe and breathed life into existence, but still a theory.

Abiogenesis is both a fact and a theory. There's the fact that, barring some very weird time travel paradoxes or life always existing somehow, life had to come from non-life. Since the alternatives have essentially zero probability given what we know of the universe, there's no point in calling it anything other than fact.

There's also a theory of abiogenesis that posits self-replicating chemical structures and whatnot (not my area of expertise, sorry). It's not a theory because it falls short of being a fact, somehow. It's a theory because it aims to explain how something happened, rather than being the raw observation that something happened.

This is much the same as evolution or gravity. There's a fact of evolution, painstakingly established through fossils and genetic trees and bacterial lines and whatnot, and a theory of evolution that discusses the role of natural selection and mutation and genetic drift and other stuff in the process of things evolving. There's the fact of gravity, established by looking at things that fall and planetary orbits, and a theory of gravity that explains it via the curvature of spacetime.
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