patrick.net

MisdemeanorRebellionNoCoupForYou says

Warning: Oozing with pederasty and disgustingness.

Oh! So like Dizzey's Pinocchio.

richwicks says

@WineHorror1 - Is this the book you were talking about?

https://m.egwwritings.org/en/book/132/toc

You would be aghast at how open I'm willing to read different points of view. I love reading banned books. Except Naked Lunch. The film was fun, the book requires you to be out of your mind on heroin to read.

@richwicks - sorry for the late reply. Yeah, that's it. In fact, I think I'll listen to it on Spotify myself.

It's also on youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF1XqXrDvro

WineHorror1 says

It's also on youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF1XqXrDvro

Mmm, I'm grabbing it now.

Youtube has rate limited me, but I'll get it in time.

How interesting, 15 years ago I'd be giving your crap. I have to be honest, I don't agree with you, but I'm not in opposition to your viewpoint even when I disagree with it.

A hard science education, it destroys faith, and questions the usefulness of faith. Jesuits are very well educated, they are in the religious order, and the rumor is that more than 1/2 of them are atheists. I'm not as well educated as them. I think your faith is useful for society, even though I ultimately think it's incorrect.

Still, I'll listen and learn from any point of view.

richwicks says

WineHorror1 says

It's also on youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF1XqXrDvro

Mmm, I'm grabbing it now.

Youtube has rate limited me, but I'll get it in time.

How interesting, 15 years ago I'd be giving your crap. I have to be honest, I don't agree with you, but I'm not in opposition to your viewpoint even when I disagree with it.

A hard science education, it destroys faith, and questions the usefulness of faith. Jesuits are very well educated, they are in the religious order, and the rumor is that more than 1/2 of them are atheists. I'm not as well educated as them. I think your faith is useful for society, even though I ultimately think it's incorrect.

Still, I'll listen and learn from any point of view.

It's just way too difficult for me to believe there is no God.

WineHorror1 says

It's just way too difficult for me to believe there is no God.

Most Atheist pushed Steady State in the first half of the 20th Century. Even Hoyle, who pushed Steady State and invented the mocking term "Big Bang", was converted to soft Deism.

The Universe has a beginning.

Check out the prevalence of Carbon.

Check out how DNA could have possibly come about? It takes specially shaped amino acids, themselves damned rare, having to interlock "just so", and being able to reproduce from square one. The raw chances of that happening are more than the number of elemental particles in the observable universe.

"Eventually, a group of monkeys will type Shakespeare's Macbeth given enough time."

But that's not the first problem - the monkeys FIRST have to hit upon language and letters, invent grammar, stick with both, and build the typewriter. Not only come up with them, keep using all of them simultaneously, and then keep typing for untold amounts of time.

You could restate it: "Eventually monkeys will hit upon semiconductors, build a CPU, build a compiler, generate a computer language, and a compiler, and then will write an application with it, given enough time"

Oh, and there's no junk DNA. Instead, DNA is omnidirectional, multilayered, incredibly complex, sometimes repetitive but often not.

Great book I'm reading: "Return of the God Hypothesis."

Most people never learn that Newton was a very, very religious person who wrote extensively on theology. He's been presented as Saganites as a key figure in the story of Materialism, when he was anything but such a person. In fact, the top criticism of his Gravitational Theory was that he wasn't trying to be materialistic/naturalistic enough.

The amount of fine tuning in the universe is damned odd.

The problem isn't among physicists, but biologists. Most physicists eventually admit there's something fishy in Denmark.

That's why Atheists and Agnostics are now turning to a form of Intelligent Design, postulating a Sheldon, that we live in a Simulation.

MisdemeanorRebellionNoCoupForYou says

WineHorror1 says

It's just way too difficult for me to believe there is no God.

Most Atheist pushed Steady State in the first half of the 20th Century. Even Hoyle, who pushed Steady State and invented the mocking term "Big Bang", was converted to soft Deism.

The Universe has a beginning.

Check out the prevalence of Carbon.

Check out how DNA could have possibly come about? It takes specially shaped amino acids, themselves damned rare, having to interlock "just so", and being able to reproduce from square one. The raw chances of that happening are more than the number of elemental particles in the observable universe.

"Eventually, a group of monkeys will type Shakespeare's Macbeth given enough time."

But that's not the first problem - the monkeys FIRST have to hit upon language and letters, invent grammar, stick with both,...

This is why I need faith. I simply do not have the intellect to match your comment or research, let alone the memory you possess to recall such things. I "think" I'm pretty good at deduction though and that is how I roll.

The virus will go away when people quit going to the hospital to be treated for the Cold.

MisdemeanorRebellionNoCoupForYou says

That's why Atheists and Agnostics are now turning to a form of Intelligent Design, postulating a Sheldon, that we live in a Simulation.

Problem for the atheists with this model is that it absolutely REQUIRES a Creator! Whoops!

Shaman says

Problem for the atheists with this model is that it absolutely REQUIRES a Creator! Whoops!

Yes, the shear complexity of life even beyond DNA formation implies intelligent design. Consider:

Parasitic horsehair worm that lives in water but has insect hosts. It finds it way through the food chain to be eaten by a grasshopper and then grows several inches long inside the grasshopper's body. Then it releases a chemical that causes the grasshopper to find water to jump in and drown, after which the worm extrudes from the body.

Zombie ant. A fungus infects an ant, then releases a chemical that causes the ant to climb to a high point and die. A tall stem then grows out of the ant's head, then a knob at the top of the stem sheds spores to infect the ants down below.

Parasitic wasps lay eggs under the skin of caterpillars. The wasp larva devour the caterpillar from the inside without killing it. At the right time, the larva releases a chemical that stops the caterpillar from turning into a moth. The larva later devour the whole caterpillar, pupate, then fly off the mate and find the right species of caterpillar to lay eggs in.

Another parasitic wasp paralyzes tarantulas to lay an egg in. The larva know to save the vital organs for last to keep the paralyzed spider alive long enough for the larva to pupate and fly off.

Now consider how many animals munch other animals in order to survive.

Very complex systems that imply a designer, but not a kind soul. One could say the Devil made the world while God was distracted by Charlotte.

MisdemeanorRebellionNoCoupForYou says

Check out how DNA could have possibly come about? It takes specially shaped amino acids, themselves damned rare, having to interlock "just so", and being able to reproduce from square one. The raw chances of that happening are more than the number of elemental particles in the observable universe.

I dispute the math of your odds there. Billions of years stirring and mixing together in primordial soup is a LONG TIME, incomprehensible to human time scales. Look at the Miller-Urey experiment of the 1950s. They mixed together a couple of simple chemicals they thought likely to be present on early Earth, added lightning, and voila, soon had complex amino acids and crudely self replicating molecules. Though the starting mixture they used was subsequently determined to be a poor model for early earth, revised experiments still produce complex amino acids out of simple gases and liquids as building blocks, ON A SCALE OF DAYS. This proves the principle that the building blocks of life "spontaneously arising" isn't as rare or implausible or at mathematically impossible odds as Deists make it out to be, usually with a toss of their hands.

I might buy the hypothesis that higher life forms came from intelligent design elsewhere and earth was at some point "seeded" with DNA. This manner of "god" has ZERO connection to literally everything all the religions of Earth have come up with over thousands of years. It would be amusing to see the reaction of actual "superior beings" from elsewhere when they hear how humans conceptualize them, and how seriously some worship the alien golden calf Strawgod they imagined them to actually be.

Can anyone explain timelessness and where primordial soup came from?

WineHorror1 says

Can anyone explain timelessness and where primordial soup came from?

IDK what you mean by "timelessness." Are you referring to time scales incomprehensible relative to a human second-to-lifetime?

"Primordial soup" is the base stock of simple, inorganic chemicals that existed and evolved over time abiotically before any forms of "life" arose. It was made of the original elements that agglomerated together to form the original proto-Earth, and changed over time from chemical reactions and energy inputs from insolation, volcanism, radioactive decay mainly. For over a billion years (guessing here) there existed a reducing atmosphere with no free oxygen. Life as we know it (outside a few simple extremophiles) couldn't exist then even if the fully assembled DNA sequences were magically transported there by the cubic mile. The "primordial soup" originally consisted of simple elements like nitrogen and carbon dioxide atmosphere, over time it changed to include nitrates and sulfides and much later, free oxygen thanks to biotic processes. The "soup" was god knows what liquids in different places and times. The building blocks of nucleic acids may have been delivered on comets and meteors according to some, but chemically can form just as well from earthly pools of hydrogen cyanide.

Automan Empire says

WineHorror1 says

Can anyone explain timelessness and where primordial soup came from?

IDK what you mean by "timelessness." Are you referring to time scales incomprehensible relative to a human second-to-lifetime?

"Primordial soup" is the base stock of simple, inorganic chemicals that existed and evolved over time abiotically before any forms of "life" arose. It was made of the original elements that agglomerated together to form the original proto-Earth, and changed over time from chemical reactions and energy inputs from insolation, volcanism, radioactive decay mainly. For over a billion years (guessing here) there existed a reducing atmosphere with no free oxygen. Life as we know it (outside a few simple extremophiles) couldn't exist then even if the fully assembled DNA sequences were magically transported there by the cubic mile. The "primordial soup" originally consisted of simple...

Yeah but while the big bang is controversial these days as well as the continuous expansion vs eventual contraction (as previously thought) to the pre-state, who engineered that state which made it all possible? Surely a Creator / creative force.

MisdemeanorRebellionNoCoupForYou says

postulating a Sheldon

Who is Sheldon?

HeadSet says

God was distracted by Charlotte

Who is Charlotte?

The one thing I don't have any good explanation for is consciousness.

I'm pretty sure it's related to recursion. A de-brained cockroach can still scurry away from light, as the photo receptors directly drive the legs. But then you can imagine an intermediate layer of brain which creates the perception of perception. A loop.

Maybe if you point a video camera at its own output monitor (very cool, btw) you see the recursion. Maybe there is some kind of consciousness created in that moment.

But that doesn't explain subjective perception.

I'm pretty sure the Buddhists are on to something when they say that self is just an idea, and not an objective reality.

Pain and pleasure all revolve around the idea of less self or more self.

Things that are painful if considered as resulting in less self can suddenly be perceived as pleasurable if re-interpreted as meaning more self.

And self can include other selves, which is the definition of love imho.

I go on about it ad nauseum here (a little embarrassing, but it's what I really think so far):

https://patrick.net/post/1336214/2020-10-31-how-things-are

I could be wrong about anything or everything of course.

I imagine he's talking about Charlotte of Charlotte's Web fame.

Automan Empire says

Look at the Miller-Urey experiment of the 1950s.

That was junk science proving absolutely nothing. In fact it’s been repeatedly debunked.

Patrick says

HeadSet says

God was distracted by Charlotte

Who is Charlotte?

From the Marvel Comic "Lucifer" and the TV show by the same name, Charlotte is God's wife.

Automan Empire says

Billions of years stirring and mixing together in primordial soup is a LONG TIME, incomprehensible to human time scales. Look at the Miller-Urey experiment of the 1950s. They mixed together a couple of simple chemicals they thought likely to be present on early Earth, added lightning, and voila, soon had complex amino acids and crudely self replicating molecules.

Life on Earth began at least 4 BYA, almost immediately after it wasn't a hot burning sphere of lava. The Earth is about 4.7 Billion Years Old.

This is another problem for biologists; only 300 MYA between hellscape and first life forms. Not enough time for those monkeys of random chance to suddenly create a letters, words, spelling, a language, and a mechanism to reproduce it endlessly.

Let's go to Miller-Urey:

Amino Acids ain't Life, Neither is Protein

The molecules were ultra simple amino acids which weren't life.

Amino Acids aren't Proteins, which aren't life. Tholins have been found on space objects and are not living.

If Tholins were life, with DNA/RNA, we'd already know the answer to extraterrestrial life. They don't have DNA/RNA and amino acids aren't life.

The molecules weren't self-replicating.

The molecules lacked Chirality, which is "handedness" or the ability to seamlessly combine.

DNA contains ultra-specific proteins which a very particular shape; DNA has Chirality.

Without chirality, you're not getting a double helix.

In fact all the molecules found in the experiment don't have "R" or "Right Handed" Chirality at all. All life on Earth has Right Handed Chirality.

Information
Amino Acids are a building block of life in the same way trees are the building blocks of a Norwegian Stave Church. However, getting from the Wood to the Church takes a shitload of steps - INFORMATION or CODE - which Amino Acids don't have. From chopping to stacking to debarking to creating boards to measuring the exact fit, creating multiple pieces of different sizes, connecting them in different ways, and so on and so forth.

Data does not arise naturally in any other circumstance, it needs organization.

"But evolution". Right, but the data already exists.

The other issue with evolution is the sudden explosion of entirely new forms of life without any gradual changes. Not a species or two of 'missing links', but entirely new forms of life without any intermediate species that is a plausible fit.

To be clear, this isn't going from a part-time bipedal monkey to an early hominid with a gap between. This is going from Multicellular Bacteria to Trilobites in a 20 Million Year Period.

Consider the evolution of Apes to Humans being at least 9MYA from a common ancestor, a far smaller change in form.

The Cambrian Explosion has long puzzled biologists.

Where did all the new forms - the new data - to create new forms come from?

Atmosphere
Miller-Udey supporters have been in denial of several facts about the Early Earth Atmosphere.

One is that the early earth probably lacked Methane, and was mostly Nitrogen with some CO2, a bit of water and trace free hydrogen. It did however have trace Oxygen of chemical origin.

When you conduct the same experiment under those conditions, you get nothing If you take out all water molecules, you'll get a little glycine - one amino acid.

Miller-Urey assumed an atmosphere very high in free hydrogen, which simply didn't exist on Early Earth.

It was not a purely reducing atmosphere. It took biologists about 30 years to finally accept the fact that Early Earth was not completely oxygen free long after physicists and chemists and geologists accepted the evidence.

If there was a primordial soup, there would be abundant evidence of nitrogen rich products in precambrian rock, which have not been found.

Time
The appearance of life within a few hundred million years of the Earth's Formation, the Cambrian Explosion which puzzled Darwin himself and has never been answered adequately --- the key element is TIME.

Naturalistic explanations require time - and the OOL and the Complexity of Life didn't have it in spades.

MisdemeanorRebellionNoCoupForYou says

Data does not arise naturally in any other circumstance, it needs organization.

You'd change your tune real quick when you see how a chip gets routed. It's done through what is called simulated annealing.

In a few hours, or days, a chip with millions of transistors and wires is optimized for the least space used on the silicon. The result is VASTLY superior than what any team of human beings can produce, over years.

The problem you're hitting is what you consider "data" and "organization".

The origin of life will probably forever be a mystery on Earth.

If you look at a crystal, you might think "this is highly organized" because it is in a lattice structure. But it has no data. If you look at an amorphous solid and the organization of the molecules, it might be entirely random, or it might contain information.

Compressed data, LOOKS random. If you look at a compressed, I dunno film, and do statistical analysis on it, it will appear to be entirely random data.

richwicks says

You'd change your tune real quick when you see how a chip gets routed. It's done through what is called simulated annealing.

Chips are intelligently designed, however. Simulated annealing is the end result of millennium of directed human intelligence.

The Boltzmann Constant is another one of those exceptionally "lucky" fine-tuned constants. And expressed by math, another long and complex chain of knowledge due to intelligent actors. Monte Carlo/Markov Chains came about after 6 million years of Hominids efforts.

If one threw around a bunch of plane parts, the argument goes, eventually - with billions of years in time - one would get a functional plane, once.

However, who made the plane parts? How could a natural environment produce turbines and glass cockpits? Why is it when fit together properly, a plane can be flown? But in most/all other of the countless configurations 1000s of parts could have, not very useful.

When we see data so well organized, it generally has a Creator. Crystal lattices are nothing compared to the variations of DNA in terms of multilayering, omnidirectionality, reproduction and variance, etc.

MisdemeanorRebellionNoCoupForYou says

Chips are intelligently designed, however. Simulated annealing is the end result of millennium of directed human intelligence.

My point is from a simple set of rules, complexity can be created that far outstrips a human's ability to create the complexity through just randomness and selection over generations.

MisdemeanorRebellionNoCoupForYou says

The Boltzmann Constant is another one of those exceptionally "lucky" fine-tuned constants. And expressed by math, another long and complex chain of knowledge due to intelligent actors.

This is just the anthropic principle. We really don't know what "universal constants" are dependent upon themselves. There might be fundamentally a single universal constant, and all the others can be derived from it.

If we lived in a universe that couldn't support out existence, we couldn't contemplate it.

MisdemeanorRebellionNoCoupForYou says

If one threw around a bunch of plane parts, the argument goes, eventually - with billions of years in time - one would get a functional plane, once.

That's NOT the argument and you damned well know it. Some organism develops the ability to float or to glide, like a squirrel. It gives them a slight survival advantage and in 30 million years time, squirrels might be flying around in the sky because the genetics not only proliferates but becomes more common in successive generations to expand this ability.

MisdemeanorRebellionNoCoupForYou says

However, who made the plane parts? Why is it when fit together properly, a plane can be flown? But in most/all other of the countless configurations 1000s of parts could have, not very useful.

This is making an assumption of "who". Who did X? The correct question is WHAT caused X to happen?

When you ask "who" you end up with the same stalemate an atheist does - who created god? What caused our creator to be created if indeed there is a creator?

MisdemeanorRebellionNoCoupForYou says

When we see data so well organized, it generally has a Creator. Crystal lattices are nothing compared to the variations of DNA in terms of multilayering, omnidirectionality, reproduction and variance, etc.

30 years ago people in Silicon Valley were FULLY CONVINCED we'd end up with the singularity at some point, and we still may. If an artificial intellect can be created, it will be created. If the intellect is as smart and as creative as the people that created it (whatever smart and creative might mean) it will augment itself. It will gain function and creativity, and will soon outstrip its creators, becoming fundamentally impossible to understand in either its motivations or even morality.

It might, for example, just leave this Earth, after all, it's filled with toxins that degrade it - if it's silicon. It might recreate itself biologically. It will only need energy and might decide it's best if it settles on the moon. It won't have to compete against us - its only requirement would be energy. It wouldn't need to have a nice home, or a huge plot of land and I doubt it would want one. It wouldn't desire "comfort", it could program itself to experience that.

We would be its creator, but at the same time, FAR inferior to it in terms of intellect, creativity, maybe even morality. It could, conceivably, turn our society into one of treasured pets - grateful for its existence, and for all intensive purposes loving and kind. We cannot predict it.

DNA, in my opinion, is just a compression algorithm. In compression, you take common sequences that are reused in the file, and reduce it to the least number of bits, when you expand the file, that sequence is used over and over for reference, sometimes to do entirely different things - maybe in one section is audio data, in another its code, in another, its data. DNA does the same thing, a gene sequence can be expressed MULTIPLE times in entirely different ways.

Life is too complicated for us to figure out, but perhaps not for a machine. Time will tell.

richwicks says

My point is from a simple set of rules, complexity can be created that far outstrips a human's ability to create the complexity through just randomness and selection over generations.

But not data. DNA is both complex and specific - it's data.

DNA is an error-correcting information storage and retrieval system.

The chances of that occurring naturally might happen - given untold billions of years - and then it would have to be self-replicating also, so now far less likely.

It was something of an argument back when it was believed there was 2-3B years between Earth Formation and First Life AND prior to DNA when the working hypothesis was self-ordering chemistry gradually becoming more complex over billions of year. Now that DNA and Life must have emerged within less than half a billion years, it's far less likely.

Where do entirely new forms arise within tiny spans of time?

richwicks says

That's NOT the argument and you damned well know it. Some organism develops the ability to float or to glide, like a squirrel. It gives them a slight survival advantage and in 30 million years time, squirrels might be flying around in the sky because the genetics not only proliferates but becomes more common in successive generations to expand this ability.

It IS the argument. It goes back to the Monkeys typing and eventually coming up with Shakespeare. It presupposes the language, grammar, syntax all being used by all the monkeys (17th C. English too, not 10th Century or Modern) as well as typewriters for the monkeys to use. The monkeys can't just be slapping keys, they have to have the keys innate to the typewriter - not using a Georgian or 9th Century Arabic or Cantonese one.

The plane parts themselves are incredibly complex and show signs of complex, organized, specific design as well, hence the 2nd analogy.

Given 10 billion years, there's a tiny chance it might happen. Given a few hundred million, vanishingly small as to beggar belief.

The argument is not what DNA does after it exists, but how it incredibly specific, complex, organized, and precise coding system - with correct Chirality - it is and how it came to be.

The idea that life arose from spontaneous combinations of Chemicals gradually become more complex was destroyed by the discovery of DNA, because DNA itself is unbelievably complex even in the simplest, oldest form and requires so much time and chances the odds of it happening are infintesimal, particularly in the now known very limited timeframe of just a few hundred million years rather than the billions assumed previously.

Just as the Big Bang ruined the idea that the Universe was Eternal and in a Steady State.

Lossless Compression has mid 20th Century creators. If we see lossless compression, then comparing it to what we know, we should assume a Creator.

richwicks says

If we lived in a universe that couldn't support out existence, we couldn't contemplate it.

We weren't around to contemplate Asteroid Impacts millions of years ago either, or for the formation of the solar system, but the same materialists who would never use that argument for geology apply it to the universe and origin of life questions?

richwicks says

This is making an assumption of "who". Who did X? The correct question is WHAT caused X to happen?

WHAT or WHO. There is no reason to assume a "What", at least as some kind of law or force, either.

For Francis Crick, DNA discoverer, he has a WHO: Panspermia by Aliens.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0019103573901103

Some life is pretty damn tough and could survive in space, like tardigrades, or even just mold spores. I think it's possible that spores of some kind just drifted down to earth. Maybe more are arriving all the time.

Patrick says

Some life is pretty damn tough and could survive in space, like tardigrades, or even just mold spores. I think it's possible that spores of some kind just drifted down to earth. Maybe more are arriving all the time.

It that is true, then we will find such life on the other planets/moons as well. When I was a kid I predicted that water would be found on the other planets/moons. My reasoning was that water got to Earth via comets, so comet impacts would deliver water on the other bodies as well.

Shaman says

Automan Empire says

Look at the Miller-Urey experiment of the 1950s.

That was junk science proving absolutely nothing. In fact it’s been repeatedly debunked.

THe original experiment included both flawed assumptions and premises, and probably some lab sloppiness and contamination. Later experiments "debunked" the original experiment when a corrected starting atmosphere didn't result in "brown goo" or complex molecules. Still later experimentation found the simulation was too simplistic and allowed the mixture to form compounds and PH levels that quickly destroyed any more complex molecules that formed. Adding iron minerals IIRC didn't replicate the "brown soup" but DID result in amino acids forming in the "corrected" experimental atmosphere.

The ORIGINAL incarnation of the Miller-Urey experiment was debunked, but further development of it has NOT debunked the notion of complex molecules "spontaneously" forming from simple elements. The fact that the experiment "only" produced simple amino acids on a scale of DAYS doesn't debunk evolution on a time scale of Sagans of years. (Unit meaning "MILLions and BILLions!")

H2O is pretty common, though mostly frozen of course.

Ice Worlds seem to be extremely common, if our solar system is in any way typical. Europa, Enceladus, Ganymede, Mimas, Callisto, Miranda... and a bunch of dwarf planets...

Shaman says

Automan Empire says

Look at the Miller-Urey experiment of the 1950s.

That was junk science proving absolutely nothing. In fact it’s been repeatedly debunked.

The Miller-Urey experiment may not have replicated the early conditions of Earth - but it demonstrated how easy it is to make amino acids and self replicating, um, "things". It's a stretch to call them "life".

Look, any organic chemist can create the conditions for “complex” chemicals to be formed. But the proteins involved in DNA or even RNA are on the order of 30,000 to 60,000 molecules big! All formed in a “just so” way that lets the molecule fold in special way that gives it its structure and enables its function. And if you start with non-living carbon-based strata like oil or plastic, you get molecules that fold in a mirror image of a carbon-based molecule that’s been formed by a living organism. Those will NOT be compatible with organic life.
For even a single 35,000 atom molecule of a base DNA pair to be spontaneously “made” would be extremely unlikely, perhaps one in a billion. For it to acquire other similarly formed base pairs, and then the cellular machinery that allows it to replicate and form proteins is unlikely to have happened in 10 billion years. Then to have all those things plus a million other biological processes come together in a way that made self-replicating “life” would require more time than the heat death of our universe and more real estate than it encompasses. We are talking about a statistical impossibility. You’d be far more likely to get a brand new Mercedes Benz produced from an explosion at an auto parts store than to get even the most basic unit of life produced by an at-random mechanism.

Life is nanotechnology. We don’t look at a wristwatch and ponder the evolutionary road that iron and copper and tin could have taken to arrive at this small mechanical wonder. A single cell is light years more complex than a watch.

This is simple mathematics, folks. Life is irreducible complex. Darwin’s Black Box of the basics of Life can’t explain that which it can’t comprehend. And all the hand-waving in the world around this subject only underscores how little we know.

Shaman says

This is simple mathematics, folks. Life is irreducible complex.

Michael Behe has been RESOUNDINGLY debunked multiple times.

Look, we don't have any idea how life began and may never have any idea how it began, we may be very wrong about fossil records, laughably wrong, we we know we absolute certainty that evolution happens. There's no question about it.

Saying "I can't figure out how this could come about" is just a statement of ignorance. Maybe NOBODY can understand it but we cannot ignore observation.

Here's an interesting thing to do - compare the skeleton of a human being to any other mammal and you'll find they have the basic same skeletal structure, but bones are longer or shorter. Even fingers.

A billion years is a really long time.

Shaman says

For even a single 35,000 atom molecule of a base DNA pair to be spontaneously “made” would be extremely unlikely, perhaps one in a billion. For it to acquire other similarly formed base pairs, and then the cellular machinery that allows it to replicate and form proteins is unlikely to have happened in 10 billion years.

This reminds me of "debates" with creationists who heard "birds evolved from reptiles", and thus assume people who believe in evolution believe "A lizard woke up one day and decided, "Hey! Imma grow feathers and FLY!"

It's like you're looking at the finished outcome of billions of years of evolution in a snapshot of how-it-sits-today, can't imagine ALL the incremental steps and evolutionary blind alleys between primordial soup and now, and dismiss it as "Too complicated to have arisen spontaneously!"

Fully formed DNA base pairs didn't need to appear by immaculate conception first, in order for the first "life" to arise.

Edit: We should make a breakout "origins of life" thread, I miss talking about the nurses getting fired.

richwicks says

Here's an interesting thing to do - compare the skeleton of a human being to any other mammal

Compare the human anatomy with that of a frog. Same skeletal, muscular, and nerve layout. Even the digestive system is similar.

HeadSet says

Compare the human anatomy with that of a frog.

Later, compare the recurrent laryngeal nerve in the horse and the giraffe.

Automan Empire says

It's like you're looking at the finished outcome of billions of years of evolution in a snapshot of how-it-sits-today, can't imagine ALL the incremental steps and evolutionary blind alleys between primordial soup and now, and dismiss it as "Too complicated to have arisen spontaneously!"

Actually what I was saying is the very smallest least complicated example of life we know about is irreducibly complex. I’m not debating about how life forms can evolve and change over millennia and millions of years. I’m making the statement that NO MODEL currently understood by the most highly educated biologists in the world can adequately explain how the FIRST life came to be, in whatever form that took.

This is one of those questions that on the face of it looks simple: evolution. But the more that you learn on the subject, the thornier and more intractable the problem becomes, spiraling into fabulous complexity.
Have you heard of the Dunning-Krueger effect? Might wanna Google that one and learn how dangerous it is to assume you have even a basic understanding of a subject when in reality you know extremely little. I like to think that (after getting a degree in Biochemistry) I know just enough to understand the edges of this subject, and perhaps grasp the enormous range of particulars that encompasses it and which I don’t understand.

Shaman says

Actually what I was saying is the very smallest least complicated example of life we know about is irreducibly complex. I’m not debating about how life forms can evolve and change over millennia and millions of years. I’m making the statement that NO MODEL currently understood by the most highly educated biologists in the world can adequately explain how the FIRST life came to be, in whatever form that took.

Yep, that's completely right.

But it did - somehow. It might have been a 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 chance of happening, but if the universe is infinite and time is infinite (it might be! There's good reason to believe the Big Bang is incorrect) - it's going to eventually happen. Maybe it was EXTREMELY unlikely, but it happened anyhow.

Shaman says

Have you heard of the Dunning-Krueger effect?

I'd be frankly surprised if anybody hasn't.

All you really learn is how much you don't fucking know. You can only claim to be an "expert" in a very very small section of any subject.

When I came to Silly Con Valley 20 years ago, it was pretty much accepted as inevitable that we'd have created a thinking, creative, independent machine entity in time, easily within our lifetimes. We don't even understand if HUMAN BEINGS are actually sentient and conscious. How do we even start making a thinking machine? We are still at step 1, and there's probably 10,000 steps to go. It may not be possible for a human being to understand something entirely, just the most vague ideas of it.

Ever head of the Boltzmann Brain? Maybe that is what god is.

Never forget, not only are you stupid, and I'm stupid, we're all fucking stupid. But the really stupid people think they're smart.

richwicks says

A billion years is a really long time.

Not only is a billion years a really long time, the processing is happening in parallel. Quadrillions or whatever ridiculously large number of molecules are bouncing around in the ocean and lakes all the time. Once a magic self-propagating formula happens to appear, then things could really take off as the better versions survive longer and reproduce more.

Or you could shortcut all that with a single mold spore drifting down from space.

Patrick says

Not only is a billion years a really long time, the processing is happening in parallel. Quadrillions or whatever ridiculously large number of molecules are bouncing around in the ocean and lakes all the time. Once a magic self-propagating formula happens to appear, then things could really take off as the better versions survive longer and reproduce more.

I struggle with religion.

At one point, I was a complete materialist, and viewed everything though the lens of amorality and superficial self-advantage.

But there really seems to be a force between good and evil. The concept of good and evil seems to be something outside of my own moral viewpoint. There seems to be a real group that simply wants to harm, a group that is amoral, and a group that opposes the harm. There really seems to be a war even though the majority, are simply sheep and don't see it.

I think the truly hyper-evil people, like Fauci and Pfizer CEO Bourla, just think if it as a game and the people who die as just worthless pawns in their game. It's the mafia mentality, and maybe literally a mafia.