Turns out Random is Better (Evolution)

by David Turell , Sunday, February 21, 2010, 19:44 (5387 days ago) @ dhw


> Only if scientists were able to prove through experiments that the components really could assemble themselves spontaneously (though "experiments" and "spontaneity" sound like a contradiction in terms), would materialists have a positive case. Otherwise, it's one faith versus another. -
 Even if scientists develop a way to produce life directly from inorganic material, it does not prove that this is the way it originally happened. It may be a parallel method. It only proves that human intelligence can produce life.-Look at this article. Science has advanced to the point where a group of RNAzymes can feed and reproduce with some changes. Whether or not those changes are beneficial is not being tested against a challenge. Natural selection can only test life, not pre-life chemicals.-http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/3325/life-evolution-a-test-tube -
Dr. Robert Shapiro, a self-declared agnostic and opponent of ID theories, wrote the following in his book Planetary Dreams (page 102) in 1999 regarding the future engineering of self sustained RNA systems:-"When that event takes place, the media probably will announce it as the demonstration of a crucial step in the origin of life. I would agree with one modification. The concept that the scientists are illustrating is one of Intelligent Design. No better term can be applied to a quest in which chemists are attempting to prepare a living system in the laboratory, using all the ingenuity and technical resources at their disposal...the search for ribozymes invokes the same feeling of achievement and beauty in me that I get when I see a skilled golfer playing a difficult course at well under par. To imagine that related events could take place on their own appears as likely as the idea that the golf ball could play its own way around the course without the golfer."-
On 1/26/2010, Dr. Shapiro posted the following comment to an article by Carl Zimmer on the SCIENCE Magazine website under the heading "Origins, a history of begnnings". "Despite the clarity of his prose, Carl Zimmer has fallen into a trap that has impeded progress in the origin of life field for the last half century. He has confused the process of total organic synthesis with the abiotic chemical reactions that may have taken place on the early Earth. Total synthesis involves the preparation by skilled chemists in laboratories of substances that we isolate from biology. The late Nobel Laureate Robert Burns Woodward was a master of this endeavor... On the early earth, however, there were neither chemists nor laboratories. No driving force has been demonstrated that would direct complex mixtures of organic chemicals of modest size to assemble themselves into a functional RNA. According to Gerald Joyce and the late Leslie Orgel, such an event would constitute a near miracle..." (Taken from Uncomon Descent, 2/21/10)-
I certainly agree. What we are seeing in the work done on RNAzymes is intelligence at work, human intelligence. It is an enormous jump from inorganic molecules, lying around, to a feedback mechanism supplying energy to organic compounds (amino acids) that can then receive the energy to combine in a non-enzyme world, to the appearance of simple enzymes, to finally some RNAzyme. Again, the probabilities against this are enormous, looking to chance as the only mechanism.