Re: Is a fact something that has been proven?


ave1 wrote:
catshark wrote:
ave1 wrote:

What Pasteur and Francesco Redi did was to take down ideas of nonlife
having some innate capacity to develop matter into living forms
(whether they be single cell organisms or flies).

That is word salad whether it is theirs (I doubt it of Pasteur but
don't know about Redi) or yours. It assumes there is some innate
capacity needed and is a (poorly) hidden assertion.

An innate capacity WOULD HAVE TO BE THERE whether we're talking about
chemical evolution or maggots from meat. The idea that nonlife can
cross the threshold into the life category means that ORGANIZATION of
large levels of information that used to not be there would have
necessarily come about through some process.

If I look at a jungle with rubber trees, iron ore deposits, and
subterranean oil, I'm looking at the ingredients for an automobile.
Would you say that the ground beneath our feet has an innate capacity
for producing cars?

The environment - outside forces - acted on various molecules under
various conditions and produced life. This process likely took millions
of years, maybe hundreds of millions. Assuming it was a natural
process, scientists will eventually be able to produce at least one
scenario describing a pathway to the first self-replicating structures
(which would still be far short of a modern cell). We may never be able
to state with high confidence that it happened in a certain manner,
altho I rather expect it.

What do you mean by "organization of high levels of information"?
Wouldn't the molecules simply have to be organized? What do the words
"high levels of information" add to our understanding of this claim,
and do they mean anything at all? I would simply say that an organized
structure eventually appeared (by whatever process) that wasn't there
before.


Oh, and for those of you who, I suspect, intend on dragging me in to
some semantics war concerning the word "information" or "genetic
information" (Deadrat is a prime example in a message he posted just
today), I'll refer you to
http://www.bizcharts.com/stoa_del_sol/conscious/conscious5.html which
has some good quotes from Carl Sagan. His use of the word
"information" is no less relevant (not to mention, TRUE) to a
discussion of life and life systems than any instance where I may
choose to use it in our discussions. Carl Sagan has the accolades of
Pulitzer Prize winner and has received the NASA Medals for Exceptional
Scientific Achievement and for Distinguished Public Service twice.
Most Evolutionists consider him to be one of the top scientific minds
of the 20th century.

"Sagan refers to chromosomal DNA as the "book of life." The DNA double
helix is a language written only in four letters. The variation of
these letters is seemingly infinite. As for human beings, their
hereditary material requires some five billion bits of information.
These "bits of information in the encyclopedia of life-in the nucleus
of each of our cells-if written out in, say English, would fill a
thousand volumes. Every one of your hundred trillion cells contains a
complete library of instructions on how to make every part of you."
[Carl Sagan, COSMOS, Ballantine Books, 1980, p. 227.] [new paragraph]
And Sagan considers that the evolving brain has increased not only in
complexity but in information content."

A few weeks ago I watched an episode of "Cosmos" which dealt with the
origin of life on Earth, and Sagan went on an on and on about how life
has so much information inherent. If I recall correctly, he dedicated
more than a fourth of that show entirely to the subject of information.


I remember that show. I have no trouble with the word information per
se, but then I'm not a scientist. How do you want to use it?

Does my genetic code contain more information than a lizard's?
Why can't mistakes in replication produce more information, with much
being selected against, most neutral, and some selected for? What does
this have to do with ID?


Even Dawkins talks about information in the same way:

"... there is enough information capacity in a single human cell to
store the Encyclopaedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four
times over. ... There is enough storage capacity in the DNA of a single
lily seed or a single salamander sperm to store the Encyclopaedia
Britannica 60 times over. Some species of the unjustly called
'primitive' amoebas have as much information in their DNA as 1,000
Encyclopaedia Britannicas." Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, pp.
116-117. (The book "In The Beginning" references this quote, and
that's what brought it to my attention)."

Anyway, on with what we were originally talking about. . .

Saying that this doesn't apply when large amounts of time are added in
is special pleading.

Since that wasn't what was being said, that is of no import except as
an attempt at a red herring.

A red herring would be occuring if I was attempting to change the topic
of discussion into something other than that which was relevant. I'm
not sure where you're getting the thought that I was changing the
topic. What I was saying is that spontaneous generation is spontaneous
generation whether your referring to the generation of life from
nonlife within a few days or within a few million years.

In the 8th century, the poet LiPo tried to reach the moon with a rocket
(Nobody was riding it). It failed. Did this prove that space travel was
impossible? Pasteur only proved that soup did not produce bacteria of
itself; Redi showed that flies laid the eggs which led to maggots. This
hardly disproves abiogenesis by other means.

Time is not
some special element that adds a unique quality to natural processes,
and to say that this would be the case would be special pleading.

Oh?
Erosion.
Growing up.
The formation of mountains.
Building cities.

Sure... one day, one million years. It makes no difference to any
process *I know of studied by science. Except pretty much everything.



The experiment which confirmed this (and is still confirming
this) was when there were no flies/maggots coming from old meat when
it's sealed from the outside world.

You can't even bother to get this right? Pasteur's experiments involved
germs and their source in flasks of various infusions.

<http://www.bact.wisc.edu/Microtextbook/index.php?module=Book&func=displayarticle&art_id=27>

Okay, I named the wrong scientist. Francesco Redi was behind the meat
and flies experiment. The point remains, though, whether you are
talking about Redi or Pasteur-- THEY BOTH BROUGHT FORWARD EVIDENCE THAT
WAS MEANT TO DISMANTLE THE IDEA OF SPONTANEOUS GENERATION.

Yep. As they framed it: life currently spontaneously arising in
complex form from nonlife. Since that has nothing to do with the
various modern proposals for abiogenesis, that too is an attempt at a
red herring.

I don't see how you could say it has nothing to do with
abiogenesis/"chemical evolution". It's only logical to think that
somewhere on the way of alleged abiogenesis processes, something which
would not meet the definition of what a lifeform is, would cross a
threshold into being defined as a lifeform.

No; there might have been a first self-replicating molecule or
structure, but it would not have looked like a modern cell. Nature has
a way of giving us fuzzy boundaries, no matter how much we may want
clear categories. It certainly would not have looked like a fly.


Abiogenesis is a concept which claims that life indeed comes from
non-living material. It is spontaneous generation, because at some
point along the way in the process of abiogenesis there'd be something
that's not defined as living (maybe something like a virus) crossing a
threshold into having an "offspring" which has all the components
needed to be called a living organism.

That is part of your problem right there. Even though you claim that there
is some sort of "threshold" between the living and the non-living, you
cannot even begin to describe it. *snip*

Well, how about I begin to describe it now to show you that you're
wrong.

The threshold would be between a cell and a complex arrangement of
interconnected compounds (CAIC) which lacks one of the following 5
abilities: Respiration, Digestion/metabolism, growth, reproduction, a
barrier which keeps out foreign substances.

So what I'm saying is that once the CAIC (having four of the five
abilities) gains the fifth ability, it crosses the threshold-- by
definition--

By *who's* definition?

I've heard life defined this way before. If you have an additional
criterion to add to the ones I mentioned, feel free to chime in. I'll
be completely willing to admit to any omission errors in my definition
of life if I've made any.

What was there before?

Apparently a CAIC I guess. . .

Sure. And you can describe a "big person" as anyone massing over 100
kg.

But that doesn't mean there isn't a smooth spectrum of adult people
covering a range of masses from 25 kg or so to over 300.

You would have a clear demarcation by definition, but it's pretty
arbitrary. You could define "life" as the first cell meeting the above
criteria, but that doesn't mean Earth didn't have increasingly complex
structures and other arrangements showing up and fading for hundreds of
millions of years. Your first cell definitely did not pop out of a
carbon and water sludge; it had a history, a lineage.


from nonlife to life. THIS WOULD HAVE TO BE AN INSTANCE
OF SPONTANEOUS GENERATION happening by an occurance of a single
mutation or a bunch of simultaneous mutations in *a single generation*.

In what way did Pasteur's or Redi's experiments address that, <snip>

They addressed life coming from matter which lacked life.

Life is just stuff arranged properly. Organization increased in certain
ways, until it reached a point where you would say there was life. It
wasn't a magic infusion of vitalism, however.

How can you
think you're going to win an argument with a position that life coming
from nonlife has nothing to do with abiogenesis?

That's the very definition of it. Who said that?

Can you not see how this is absurd?!

Oh, I see; you're commiting the fallacy of equivocation (as well as
strawman). You are deliberately conflating Redi and Pasteur's
experiments with current research and hypotheses on abiogenesis.


Steve
---
Did mind come before matter in the universe or matter come before mind?

Most of the universe is matter with no mind. There are no known cases
of mind without matter, so: matter came first.

Chapters 1 and 2 have your answer:
http://www.bottomlayer.com/bottom/reality/Intro.html

Kermit

.

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