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To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (14386)	6/13/2007 10:09:04 PM
From: SeachRE	Respond to of 14758

Good points, Lazy. I stand corrected on an earlier assessment.

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (14386)	6/14/2007 1:35:24 PM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 14758

and the many chicken-egg problems re. its origin as well as the opinion of people like Hubert Yockey and others. Name 'em. Okay, here's a couple. DNA needs enzymes (proteins) to replicate, but the enzymes are encoded by DNA. DNA needs protection/seperation from the environment i.e. a cell wall or membrane, but the cell wall/membrane is also encoded by the DNA. Scientists say that all life on earth is of common descent. The same genetic code with only slight variations in all life is one argument in favor of that. That implies life has only come into existence once in the 3.8B years life has existed on earth. So? If it only happened once you'd expect only one basic code, wouldn't you? While you're at it, come up with another chemical structure that will perform its functions. Because if there is no other, you're STUCK. If it only happened once in 3.8B years, that ipso facto means it is very very rare. Very very rare things are low probability things. Which is the point I'm trying to make. Therefore I'm justified in analogizing the origin of life as a "lottery win" occurren ce - something with very very low probability. Even if it originated more than one time in earths history, all but one line of life died out.1. Prove it happened more than once. By hedging that abiogenesis could have happened more than once, I was being overly generous to your side of the argument. And now you're challenging me on that generosity. That'll teach me. I can't prove life originated more than once. And I don't even believe it did happen more than once. Which supports to my point. The abiogenesis of life - assuming it can even happen at all - is very very rare - a "lottery win" type occurrence. 2. If only one basic structure would work (and we see only one that does), any new biogenises would simply be absorbed into the existing one, wouldn't they? Just to show you life could be very different chemically than it is, scientists have succeeded in engineering a form of bacteria which uses an amino acid not used by other life on earth: Expanding the genetic code--TSRI scientists synthesize 21-amino-acid bacterium Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) report in an upcoming article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society their synthesis of a form of the bacterium Escherichia coli with a genetic code that uses 21 basic amino acid building blocks to synthesize proteins--instead of the 20 found in nature. This is the first time that anyone has created a completely autonomous organism that uses 21 amino acids and has the metabolic machinery to build those amino acids. "We now have the opportunity to ask whether a 21-amino acid form of life has an evolutionary advantage over life with 20 amino acids," says the report's lead author Peter Schultz, Ph.D., TSRI professor of chemistry and Scripps Family Chair of TSRI's Skaggs Institute of Chemical Biology. [ Why the hell they would want to ask that question is beyond me. Seems to me they run the risk the answer might be yes, in which case some new super Ecoli could wipe us all out. ] ............... Why Expand the Genetic Code? Life as we know it is composed, at the molecular level, of the same basic building blocks for instance, all life forms on Earth use the same four nucleotides to make DNA. And almost without exception, all known forms of life use the same common 20 amino acids--and only those 20--to make proteins. "The question is," asks Schultz, "why did life stop with 20 and why these 20?" [ They just showed it didn't have to stop with those 20. ] ................ eurekalert.org In addition to life using more and different amino acids than it does now, the coding system used in life itself could be different. For example, the nucleotide triplet codon GCC codes for the amino acid alanine. In a different coding scheme the same triplet might be designated as a symbolic code for a totally different animo acid. See? Furthermore if life could come into existence by chance easily and often, we'd be seeing it happening around us. Nobody ever said "easily and often". Fine. You admit the abiogenesis of life is difficult and rare. All the more reason to liken its occurrence to a "lottery win". At least we'd see evidence around us it had happened. You do. No, I don't. There is one basic genetic code, not a bunch of completely different codes used in differing clearly unrelated lines of life. The same basic amino acids are also used in all life, despite the fact that we know others could have been used. BTW since you are arguing that the science books which say all life is of common descent are wrong, though, I'd like to express my appreciation for you saying we should be skeptical of what scientists say. And its reasonable to believe the winner of a stream of lotteries is the beneficiary of a rigged game. How can you possibly know? You probably won't make 100 years. How can you say what can happen in 100 million years? Look, if an individual won a lottery 3 or 4 times, no one would believe the lottery was fair. Evn though its remotely possible that it could happen. Most people would conclude the lottery was rigged. And people would be logical to think the lottery being rigged was a better explanation than the same guy won 4 times. You like to throw out a lot of off the wall questions - well here's a couple questions for you: How does information (example: which particular 564 amino acids need to be combined in the proper order to produce up a particular protein along with messages at the beginning and end of the list to start and stop) get encoded or written in a particular sequence of three nucleotide bases in DNA/RNA? How does information get encoded symbolically anywhere except by intelligence?