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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (219858)	2/19/2005 4:05:26 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575614

Ah, abiogenesis! There are a number of active research programs in this area, most with there hands out for funding <g> See: protolife.net and carlzimmer.com From the latter link, RNA, fatty acids and clay look interesting: One afternoon in the summer of 2002, Szostak was sitting in his office when Hanczyc and Fujikawa walked in with a vial of murky liquid. His students had added a kind of clay known as montmorillonite to their solution of fatty acids. Somehow the clay sped up the rate of vesicle formation 100-fold. “We spent years working on getting the growth and division stuff to work. That was a pain,” says Hanczyc. “But the clay worked the first time.” Clay had already proved to be potentially important in the origin of life. In the 1990s biochemist James Ferris of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute showed that montmorillonite can help create RNA. When he poured nucleotides onto the surface of the clay, the montmorillonite grabbed the compounds, and neighboring nucleotides fused together. Over time, as many as 50 nucleotides joined together spontaneously into a single RNA molecule. The RNA world might have been born in clay, Ferris argued, perhaps the clay that coated the ocean floor around hydrothermal vents. “The thing that’s interesting is that there’s this one mineral that can get RNA precursors to assemble into RNA, and membrane precursors to assemble into membranes,” says Szostak. “I think that’s really remarkable.”

To: combjelly who wrote (219858)	2/20/2005 2:20:08 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575614

"Evolutionist would not be concerned with the story of Noah's Ark which still follows the "kinds" of creation" I think you are reading too much into Tench's position here. Evolution, especially classical Darwinian evolution, doesn't say anything useful about the origins of life. It only talks about how animals adapt to various environmental pressures. While some theories have made attempts at the origins, quite frankly we are a long way from having anything that works. It could be some supreme being who 'poofed' the originals into being on the earth. Or it could be some alien explorers were careless with their trash. Or maybe it arrived here on a meteorite from Mars. Evolution works just fine in all of these cases. All you say above is true but by the time of Noah's Ark, much of evolution's big work had been done. After all, the species on the Ark are the same as those that exist on the planet now. Frankly, I don't think either theory, evolution or creationism, have much to do with Noah's Ark. ted