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Pastimes : Ask God -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Martini who wrote (18908)	7/8/1998 4:38:00 AM
From: Chuzzlewit	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 39621

Don, those statement were out of context. Perhaps it is a context you do not understand. The primary difference between science and religion is that in science everything is open to question. If you were to open a modern treatise on enzymology or virology or organic reaction mechanisms you would find just as much controversy. Science progresses by probing and discarding ideas which do not fit the facts. Such is the case with the Urey Miller hypothesis. The important point that they demonstrated was the prebiotic synthesis of the necessary precursors of life -- not the mechanism by which life originated. Because the idea of this prebiotic soup is probably incorrect in no way refutes a natural beginning of life. It simply casts doubt on that hypothesis as being likely. Now the thing that you need to understand is that when dealing with long periods of time the improbable may become probable. Let me illustrate. Suppose there is a 1 chance in a million of something happening. The proability of that outcome is considerable though if we have say ten thousand trials. Remember, all it takes is one success. Secondly, all of those authors believe in a mechanistic origin of life. They are simply uncomfortable with existing hypotheses. There is nothing unusual or telling about that. That is exactly how science has always operated. Third, the theory of evolution does not depend on establishing the mechanism of the beginning of life. That may very well be unknowable because you are asking for a reconstruction of history -- a history for which there is no direct evidence. Perhaps the best we can come up with is a plausible hypothesis. The real issue is that with extant organisms extant, every key element of the synthetic theory of evolution has been demonstrated over and over again. There is simply no reason to believe that the organisms living today existed in exactly their current form at an arbitrarily selected date some 6,000 ago. There is zero evidence to support that notion. CTC