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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: thames_sider who wrote (10789)	4/9/2001 12:34:09 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

TS, I didn't really want to mine the "intelligent design" article too much. It's worth reading, but I really don't want to start something up with the local proponents again. Personally, I think calling "intelligent design" more "sophisticated" than biblical creation is a stretch, it seems to fit well under the "creation science" umbrella. I have some doubt about creating viable life from inorganic synthesis, though, in the near term anyway. That's sort of the dream of nanotechnology, which I'm skeptical about. "Origin of life" is a somewhat different problem than evolution. The DNA/RNA/protein mechanism that underlie all terrestrial life is pretty complicated to be randomly assembled from the primordial soup. The last I read on this, the main line of thinking was that "life" ( in the form of self-replicating chemistry) may have started out with RNA alone. RNA sequences can be replicated like DNA, but RNA can also fold itself up to form enzyme-like structures like protein. Catalysis by RNA based structures (as distinct from RNA-carried information) is, in fact, still central in protein synthesis via ribosomes. I believe there's been some work showing RNA can polymerize on some kinds of clay that may have been present in the primordial world. There's also the meteorite seeding theory, that bacterial spores arrived that way and evolved into everything else. This begs the question of actual origin, but it does give a lot more time for the "origin" to take place, I think current evidence places the earliest bacterial fossil evidence well within the first billion years of Earth's 5 billion year history.