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re: #125 stretch
that explanation ignores the improbabilities quite blissfully. This proof is nothing more than saying: “of course life arose from non-life, we’re here aren’t we?” Anything observable about life originating from non-life? Otherwise, it is just an unreasonable and unfounded faith.
I’m not convinced you know what you’re saying here. First off, you seem to have a misunderstanding about probability. There are diseases that occur in only one in every 30 million people. That’s about as likely as flipping a coin 25 times and getting heads each time. If you were to observe this coin toss, you’d conclude that something is wrong with the coin, and you’d probably be right. But the people still exist, because nature is flipping coins (so to speak) at a dizzying rate. Similarly, if a reaction only occurs one out a million times that the reactants meet, and the reactants meet a trillion trillion trillion times, it’s virtually certain to happen.
Creationists frequently argue that there is simply no way for life to bootstrap itself in the manner I’m proposing, that inanimate matter can never preserve and pass down information without some driving force impelling it to do so. I’ve given you some non-trivial examples of how it can happen, according to pretty non-controversial facts about chemistry. And then you tell me that you want to see me do it.
Okay. First, check out the Urey-Miller experiment.
Amino acids arising from decidedly dead components. I know you will have two objections here.
The first is that amino acids are not life, which I certainly agree with, but the purpose of the experiment was to demonstrate that the building blocks of cells can form on their own, not to create artificial life.
The second is that laboratory experiments aren’t “real”. That one is a little harder for me to swallow. You want me to show you proof that life has arisen spontaneously, in a lineage independent from every other living thing; essentially, an alien organism. This would be extremely hard to find, as evidenced by the fact that nobody’s found one yet, despite the fact that it would be without a doubt the most earthshaking scientific discovery of all time. Why’s it so hard?
1) Such an organism would almost certainly be at a profound disadvantage against every other life form on the planet. It’s easier to make a rudimentary organism when there exists absolutely nothing that wants to eat it. However, in the present day, every single living thing needs carbon to survive, and they’re ruthlessly good at finding it after billions of years of non-stop war. It might actually be easier to find a silicon-based alien organism, except that silicon isn’t very likely as a substitute for carbon.
Short version: This may have happened, it may even happen today or tomorrow, but it really wouldn’t have a ghost of a chance of surviving long enough for anyone to find it.
2) If this thing did manage to survive, it would be really hard to find. Firrstly, it would be microscopic at best, and much more likely sub-microscopic. Secondly, every single one of our techniques for detecting the DNA / RNA of unknown organisms relies on their common ancestry. You take a known sequence, preferably an extremely common one like the 16s rRNA subunit (basically, a gene sequence that every single living thing ever analyzed has in it) and sequence whatever sticks to it.
There’s no other feasible way to do it. This is our very best technology. We can’t find DNA that we know absolutely nothing about, much less an organism that might not even have DNA.
