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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cautious_Optimist who wrote (19079)	1/3/2012 9:25:14 AM
From: Brumar89	1 Recommendation Respond to of 69300

How do meteors spontaneously generate life ... ie information encoding systems? ------------------------------------------------------------ The Cosmos article is interesting .. like Francis Crick, they seem to accept that life couldn't have just spontaneously happened by accident on earth ... so they look to extra-terrestial origins of "building blocks". Big deal. But they and you are missing what life is ... it's not just "building blocks" thrown together. It's a system of encoding information in chemical bonds, then reading and using that information to maintain and reproduce the encoding system. Looking at the "building blocks" as the source of life is like looking at a forest as the source of a library because the books pages are made of wood pulp. Or looking at a programmed computer chip as a natural outgrowth of beach sand. Suppose we went to mars and found a large mars rock inscribed with what is obviously writing in some unknown language. Sampling the material the rock was made of would tell you nothing about the writing ... you would have to decode the writing to understand it. Well, that's what we've done with DNA. We've been able to realize that DNA contains written instructions for building proteins ... (there's no doubt a lot more written information in DNA that we haven't decoded yet, but that's another subject). Concluding that somehow these written instructions and the language they're written in just happened by accident is exactly like concluding that a monolith with writing on it found on another body in space just happened by accident. No one would believe that about writing on a monolith on mars but you believe it about the writing in our cells.