> The only way this makes sense is if you consider that the universe at time 0,0,0 to be one and only one quantum bit in superposition. But something had to have happened; wavefunctions don't collapse without some kind of "observation." There's still an explanation needed for what caused the first qubit to have inflated into the universe we see today.-The LHC has been up and running and now interesting observations are beginning to appear:-http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19485-large-hadron-collider-spies-hints-of-infant-universe.html-Another report of LHC activity. Note the diffrence in tone of the two articles:-http://www.physorg.com/news204290256.html


> At this point I think we're just at a divide. So essentially, there's a great many genes inside of all living things that can be used, co-opted, whatever you want to call it--in order to acheive similar if not identical results. 
> 
> > > 
> > > [EDIT] As an addition to my paragraph on 1, I posit that life is only functionally similar today. Not necessarily structurally.
> > 
> > What does this mean???
> 
> It means that one possibility to entertain is that what we observe now in terms of structure and function in relationship to genes may have been warped several times over so that although the same function(s) of life are being served, the structures that create those functions are different.
> 
> Is that any better? (Not sure myself.)-I don't know if you are correct. To have, what we recognize as life, requires the complexity we see, with multiple gene functions, for each gene, as mediated by miRNA's. That way 20K genes do the work of 100K. What simplistic genetic structures preceded life as we now know it, is one problem. We know nothing of it. But we do know what structures are necessary for exact reproduction for true life once it appeared, and from what we are learning, that hasn't changed much, and gets more and more complicated as research rolls on.

Matt is against the assumption that life "as it exists today is functionally AND structurally identical to life at the time of origins." He goes on to argue that it's "time to stop reasoning this way. We won't find the origin of life by studying life. We'll only find it by trying to build life."
>
> the origin of life as it exists today, which after all is the only form we know, is not your main focus of attention. 
> 
> As for the question of design v. poor design v. accident, I suspect that the same argument will be going on long after all of us have disappeared into...whatever we disappear into.-The key fact we do have is that the reproductive system of the single cell is very exact in reproduction. Error is rare and can cause mutational change, which usually is harmful, and therefore the aberrant organisms will usually die out. This exactness, which is built into every single cell, whether as a single-celled organism or a complex multi-celled organism, in general, guarantees the living stay the same. Cells constantly rerpoduce, bacteria every 20 minutes, in our bodies more slowly. It is my firm belief that what we see now is what was present in bacteria, when the apparatus was somehow initiated 3.6 byo. and its design is NOT poor


> You say I keep missing the layers of DNA/RNA, but my point has been (for about the last year) that THIS kind of argument of yours assumes 
> 
> 1. Life as it exists today is functionally AND structurally identical to life at the time of origins. 
> 
> 2. All processes we see now MUST have been in place PRIOR to the origin of life.-Without question. Bacteria, I repeat have been here since the beginning of life, essentially as they (Archaia) always were. The point you always miss is the extreme complexity of the simplest one-celled organism we can study.
>
> what we know to humans in the here and now all the way back to life at the very beginning when we KNOW for a FACT that life was definitely simpler than what we see now.-IF multicellular. Single cells are as complex as ever. 
> 
> One of the other things suggested by my Linux post, is the fact that genes have a 1:M relationship with function. One gene has many functions.-No. Only by RNA modification in another layer of complex chemistry operating on its own program. See these:- http://www.physorg.com/news192282850.html-http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/... 
> [EDIT] As an addition to my paragraph on 1, I posit that life is only functionally similar today. Not necessarily structurally.-What does this mean???

That article is just the same old same old whirlwind in a junkyard argument.
> > > What Pasteur showed was that life, in the form of grubs or flies, do not emerge by spontaneous generation. He did not show that chiral molecules cannot emerge from series of series of chemical reactions over long time periods and under many changing environmental conditions. Once life was established, using molecules of particular chirality, then of course it continued to reproduce molecules of the same chirality. That is what reproduction means.
> > 
> > I would just love to see the article in a biologic journal that shows a mechanism whereby chirality can be totally shifted from left to right or back again by any biologic process, when the coding that controls life's processes is so specifically one way. Evolution cannot explain why amino acids in life are left-handed and nucleic acids are all right-handed, 100%, 
> 
> 
> I have to interject here, David. This is because evolution explains life AFTER life got here, not origins. Evolution makes no claim whatsoever about origins. You're barking at the wrong tree. (And so is George, if that's what he means.) 
> 
> or why that need be so through natural selection. Handedness describes fittedness? Great just-so story.
> > 
> 
> You've stated yourself the fact that life is one-handed. While I still don't take this as evidence of creation, since all life either came from 
> 
> 1. the same ancestor 
> 
> OR
> 
> 2. the same process (in many different places) -
Your reasoning is based on a false assumption about my thoughts re' George. He is clearly using chemical evolution to get to one-handedness. I won't and can't do that. What you keep missing is that to have stable life that reproduces itself accurately, there are layers upon layers of control over DNA/RNA with microRNA, histones, etc. There are oodles of enormous molecules called enzymes that key-lock molecules to force extremely rapid reactions, that otherwise would take thousands or millions of years to potentiate. And then pile on the issue of chirality. Complex? Irreducibly complex. One part cannot work without the other. All have to be set up at the same time. Hoyle's 747 is an exact description of what is reqired, with all the jeering that George does. Don't denegrate Hoyle's intellect. He went to pan-spermia because he couldn't accept that the whirlwind did it here and here alone. Upset his atheism. All pan-spermia does is hide it elsewhere and not solve the problem of how it happened.

That article is just the same old same old whirlwind in a junkyard argument.
> > What Pasteur showed was that life, in the form of grubs or flies, do not emerge by spontaneous generation. He did not show that chiral molecules cannot emerge from series of series of chemical reactions over long time periods and under many changing environmental conditions. Once life was established, using molecules of particular chirality, then of course it continued to reproduce molecules of the same chirality. That is what reproduction means.
> 
> I would just love to see the article in a biologic journal that shows a mechanism whereby chirality can be totally shifted from left to right or back again by any biologic process, when the coding that controls life's processes is so specifically one way. Evolution cannot explain why amino acids in life are left-handed and nucleic acids are all right-handed, 100%, -
I have to interject here, David. This is because evolution explains life AFTER life got here, not origins. Evolution makes no claim whatsoever about origins. You're barking at the wrong tree. (And so is George, if that's what he means.) -or why that need be so through natural selection. Handedness describes fittedness? Great just-so story.
> -You've stated yourself the fact that life is one-handed. While I still don't take this as evidence of creation, since all life either came from -1. the same ancestor -OR-2. the same process (in many different places) -Then clearly, all life preserves the nature of what brought it into existence, whatever it is. -
> Another aspect of evolution by reproduction and natural selection is the human retina is backwards. Is backwards more fit, or terrible design by the designer, as judged by Darwinists? We already know that this design provides the greatest amount of energy for the cells. Now we see that the backward cells actually refine vision!
> 
> http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v104/i15/e158102


> > They're ultimately stating that abiogenesis is impossible due to chirality alone. Far too simplistic to be taken seriously--which considering how much writing is here, they could have condensed this. 
> > 
> > Ultimately it's basing its argument on raw organic chemistry, and not the "pidgin" chemistry one would expect to find in the actual abiogenesis event. It's a strawman: "If we just toss a bunch of chemicals together, voila! We don't get life!"
> > 
> > Very unimpressed.
> 
> OK, agreed, but chirality is a major issue in OOL.-Don't worry, I read Shapiro this summer.


> They're ultimately stating that abiogenesis is impossible due to chirality alone. Far too simplistic to be taken seriously--which considering how much writing is here, they could have condensed this. 
> 
> Ultimately it's basing its argument on raw organic chemistry, and not the "pidgin" chemistry one would expect to find in the actual abiogenesis event. It's a strawman: "If we just toss a bunch of chemicals together, voila! We don't get life!"
> 
> Very unimpressed.-OK, agreed, but chirality is a major issue in OOL.

http://procrustes.blogtownhall.com/2010/04/27/homochirality_and_darwin.thtml
&a... > > 
> > 
> > Ah. I now know why I had an english teacher proclaim that "Pasteur proved that evolution didn't happen." 
> > 
> > I know that's not what the site said, but good god that guy could learn how to condense his writing. I'll analyze the math later.
> 
> Delighted you are back. I await the analysis-Well, the mathematics are pretty weak. Meaning, they don't discuss how they got their numbers, so it's more than a little vague. -So if life has spontaneously been created twice, there is a 50% chance of finding mirror life.-There's 4Bn+ years and far too many assumptions made here to give this claim any real validity. But theoretically, you'd have a p(1/2) chance of finding life in this instance. -If it has been spontaneously created three times, there is a 75% chance of finding mirror life.-There's two ways to interpret this. Life is created 3 times, and both L-R pairs are created every time. Or, life is created in one chirality once, and subsequently the other creation events are all the other hand. I use this second case because that's where his math goes down the s**tter. If life was created 3 times, and two of the times life was mirrored, than it's a 66% (total) chance of finding mirror life, not 75%. p(2/3). How he further extrapolates that to 88% boggles the mind. You'd need p(7/8) to get that. And at this point life would be exclusively "other-handed" in terms of chirality. -This guy's talking out of his blowhole. If the racemic nature of this chemistry is an equal 50/50, your chance of finding it is *always* p(1/2). It's a pure coin toss every time. If every time you get an L-R pair, the probability never changes. This is also of course, assuming that there isn't some property that favors one chirality over the other. -They're ultimately stating that abiogenesis is impossible due to chirality alone. Far too simplistic to be taken seriously--which considering how much writing is here, they could have condensed this. -Ultimately it's basing its argument on raw organic chemistry, and not the "pidgin" chemistry one would expect to find in the actual abiogenesis event. It's a strawman: "If we just toss a bunch of chemicals together, voila! We don't get life!"-Very unimpressed.

That article is just the same old same old whirlwind in a junkyard argument.
> What Pasteur showed was that life, in the form of grubs or flies, do not emerge by spontaneous generation. He did not show that chiral molecules cannot emerge from series of series of chemical reactions over long time periods and under many changing environmental conditions. Once life was established, using molecules of particular chirality, then of course it continued to reproduce molecules of the same chirality. That is what reproduction means.-I would just love to see the article in a biologic journal that shows a mechanism whereby chirality can be totally shifted from left to right or back again by any biologic process, when the coding that controls life's processes is so specifically one way. Evolution cannot explain why amino acids in life are left-handed and nucleic acids are all right-handed, 100%, or why that need be so through natural selection. Handedness describes fittedness? Great just-so story.-Another aspect of evolution by reproduction and natural selection is the human retina is backwards. Is backwards more fit, or terrible design by the designer, as judged by Darwinists? We already know that this design provides the greatest amount of energy for the cells. Now we see that the backward cells actually refine vision!-http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v104/i15/e158102

http://procrustes.blogtownhall.com/2010/04/27/homochirality_and_darwin.thtml
&a... > 
> 
> Ah. I now know why I had an english teacher proclaim that "Pasteur proved that evolution didn't happen." 
> 
> I know that's not what the site said, but good god that guy could learn how to condense his writing. I'll analyze the math later.-Delighted you are back. I await the analysis


> > George's belief in the theory that a universe can spring from nothing is consistent with his belief that life can assemble itself without any guiding intelligence.
> 
> Here is a discussion of chirality of amino acids from a math probability view that totally negates George's theory, using math, a field of George's expertise:
> 
> http://procrustes.blogtownhall.com/2010/04/27/homochirality_and_darwin.thtml
&a... -Ah. I now know why I had an english teacher proclaim that "Pasteur proved that evolution didn't happen." -I know that's not what the site said, but good god that guy could learn how to condense his writing. I'll analyze the math later.


> > I'm taking this off the "Laetoli footprints" thread because, as George says, if the Big Bang was the beginning of everything, there's no place for God. I'm not offering an opinion either way myself ... I'm simply railing against the definitive statement that there was no "before". No-one can possibly know that.
> 
> Yes they can, theoretically. Guth Borde & Valenkin presented a theorum in 2002 which was represented by Guth in the 60th birthday party symposium for Stephen 
> Hawking: simply there is no before, before the Big Bang. The theory of the Big Bang is a theory of what happened after the 'origin', whatever that was. To quote Guth (pg. 750 in the book)*, " the theorem...does show that any inflating model that is globally expanding must be geodesically incomplete in the past". His guess was: a beginning is some type of quantum event. Andrei Linde (multiverse proponent) agreed the theorem was correct. (Mike Martin 'Research News & Opportunities in Science and Theology, Vol. 3,No. 5, Jan. 2003)
> 
> * "The Future of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology, 2003, Cambridge U. Press-I'm late to the game here, so forgive me if I tread ground already traveled. -The big bang is a model that assumes a beginning and therefore precludes any talk of a before. Some models (String Theory) actually work to give some explanation on what would have caused the big bang, but where we're at now with the Standard Model--the only "real" answer is "we don't know." You can work the theorems back theoretically, but lets not forget that physics at this level completely ignores gravity, and therefore is incomplete. So, reasoning with an incomplete model, we can somehow say "nothing at all existed?" -The only way this makes sense is if you consider that the universe at time 0,0,0 to be one and only one quantum bit in superposition. But something had to have happened; wavefunctions don't collapse without some kind of "observation." There's still an explanation needed for what caused the first qubit to have inflated into the universe we see today.