Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Brumar89 who wrote (914175)	1/13/2016 10:30:13 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573920

Really? Yes really. What exactly about our understanding of physics, biology, chemistry tells us life can form out of non-life. 1 - The evidence that historically it happened. 2 - The fact that even without knowing the precise way it as created, and without having hundreds of millions of years and a whole world to run experiments, we can and have taken steps along path, not to the point of creating life, but to creating amino acids and other complex compounds that we find in life from simple inorganic precursors by simply putting them together in an environment life what we think existed in the early Earth. Yes there is a noticeably gap between amino acids and other biological chemicals, and even a simple virus. But A - There is a pretty good understanding all the way from nuclei-synthis in stars to amino acids. That puts the gap somewhat in perspective. B - A gap is a lack of knowledge, not knowledge of impossibility. 3 - Your changing the question. You claimed it couldn't happen according to our current understanding of science. That's a hard claim to defend, and would require specific evidence that it can't happen, not lack detail from the other side about how it can happen. I consider that a statement of blind faith. You free to consider it what you want, but its just a matter of following the evidence. Its not even a bold assertion. I didn't say "it did happen", I said science gives us no reason to think it is impossible. If you think science shows us it is impossible, I'd say the burden of proof is on you. So life IS software based. I don't think that's a very meaningful term, either in describing life well, or in establishing anything in the context of this conversation. I think a lot of "scientific" hypotheses are driven by a desire to make God unthinkable. And if needed, I can give you quotes of a number of philosophers saying so explicitly. There is a temptation, in discussion, to assume that if someone agrees with someone else on X, that they must agree with all of their related thoughts about X. I think life can arise from non-life, I think life evolved in to multitude of different forms once it was established. Nothing about that makes me an atheist, let alone an anti-theist. perhaps the genes already existed and were somehow preserved with no purpose for millions of years, waiting on humans to develop nylon Or more likely the genes encoded for the ability to process something else, which happened to also give the ability to process nylon. Either that or the ability evolved quickly.