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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (101857)	1/25/2009 8:23:11 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542961

It's actually a pretty decent little article on where we are now with various hypotheses on the prebiotic origins of RNA. The summation is here: "Whether RNA arose spontaneously or replaced some earlier genetic system, its development was probably the watershed event in the development of life. It very likely led to the synthesis of proteins, the formation of DNA and the emergence of a cell that became life's last common ancestor. The precise events giving rise to the RNA world remain unclear. As we have seen, investigators have proposed many hypotheses, but evidence in favor of each of them is fragmentary at best. The full details of how the RNA world, and life, emerged may not be revealed in the near future. Nevertheless, as chemists, biochemists and molecular biologists cooperate on ever more ingenious experiments, they are sure to fill in many missing parts of the puzzle. " .............. luckily this guy is NOT saying "Since we don't know there must be creationism or ID at work". He's saying there are many interesting guesses out there, and scientists are looking for proof for them. I hadn't known about the theory of a simpler assembler than RNA- some earlier precursor genetic system that then because (oerhaps) the template for RNA.

To: JohnM who wrote (101857)	1/25/2009 9:25:29 PM
From: Katelew	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542961

2. Whatever one thinks of the argument is this piece, it wouldn't count as serious scientific work unless the argument itself had been translated into falsifiable propositions--operationalizations. His comment on the paradox of RNA I took as an observation, not so much an argument. If you read the entire piece, you would have noted that, thus far, laboratory experiments to refute the observation have failed. That leaves the observation standing, and this in turn calls (perhaps) some of the existing presumptions about the whole evolutionary process into question. At least, that's what jumped out at me. OTOH, it doesn't have to. There's room (in my head anyway) for both evolution and a designer to be in play. The two are usually viewed as antithetical but I've never felt they had to be. I'm surely over my head science-wise, and all of this is way too complicated to peck out on a thread, so I'm done with the topic. Except to say one more time that I haven't read anything so far to make me want to put ID theories in a ninth grade biology class, so the court rulings have probably been appropriate.