About the time Ohio’s Board of Education refused to allow science classes to "investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory," an evolutionist scientist was busying knocking down one of Darwin’s key tenets.
What has long been the position of creationists and evolution critics is now being heralded as a scientific breakthrough because an evolutionists announced it.
A team led by David Deamer, of the University of California at Santa Cruz, essentially proved that life could not have emerged from hot volcanic springs.
Several factors prohibit the springs from being the breeding grounds for life. The clay prevelant in those springs attach themselves to organic material and prevent the needed chemical reactions. Soap-like molecules were also added to the pools and they did not form the required membranes.
Deamer, being a supporter of evolution, proposed shallow, cooler pools of fresh water as the more likely source for life on Earth. I await the future study of his hypothesis. It only took someone 140 to test out Darwin’s guess.
What is telling even in this experiment is that Deamer’s team had to add all of these ingredients into these springs to test the hypothesis. That had to add the "organic material" and the "soap-like molecules." I’m sure if and when they test his theory, they will again add these materials to the cooler pools.
Who added the materials the first time?
I understand this is an experiment and those things must be present, but the more accurate experiment would be to simply allow the pool to exist and see if organic material can find its way to the pool and then see if it can create the building blocks for life, then create single-cell organisms, etc., etc.
I know most people like to avoid the origin of life question, but it must be evaluated. We cannot simply start with life and then say it evolved. Life must have started somewhere and no one has ever been able to prove that something living can come from something non-living.
Until you do that, evolution is dead in the water [pun intended].
My point exactly. Evolutionists are shutting down all dissent, partly in fear of giving room to the creationists, and partly because they want to keep their hegemony.
And no one has been able to prove that some god or gods or alien intelligences created life either. And that's what ID and creationism boil down to: the existence of God. You can't disprove it. Evolution is a theory, testable and subject to disproof. It's not perfect and is still being tinkered with as new facts come to light and new experiments are being designed.
Can you design an experiment to prove or disprove the existence of your god?
Just a word of caution, Aaron, from someone who supports ID pretty strongly: it's not the case that one of Darwin's key tenets was knocked down in this research. One version of one possible implication of Darwin's thought was knocked down. Origin-of-life researchers have many more scenarios yet to test.
We don't want to claim more than the evidence supports here.
Louis, what do you think about the blatant statement of unsupported faith in this news article, that life may have come from outer space? Isn't that rather lame?
Stating that something "may have" happened isn't unsupported faith.
LOL. OK, God may have created everything. Evolution may not have happened.
Either of those statements ok?
Can I present the data that might prove that the earth was seeded from outer space? By intelligent aliens? By some intelligent force that I can’t idenfity yet?
The Intelligent Alien Design theory holds more water than your unsupported theistic creationism hobbyhorse.
By “one of Darwin’s key tenets” I meant his explanation by which life began. That was his best guess looking at his evidence and it has been part of the evolutionist dogma for 140 years and is only now being challenged.
Well it has been challenged before, but it is gaining traction this time because those doing the experiments were evolutionists.
Louis, please reread your last post again. Has it actually come to this that you would accept alien seeding as more scientific than the possiblity of an supernatural designer?
My comment was satirical. Can’t you even see that?
btw-evolutionary theory is not “dogma.” Far from it. What you advocate is dogma: religiously based and not challengable. Evolutionary theory is quite open to challenge. It’s telling that you can’t see that.
Darwin didn’t really venture a guess at how life began, nor did he have to. Evolution that we observe in real time is enough for the theory.
In point of fact, Darwin’s most serious statement about how life arose, in Origin of Species, suggests that life arose suddenly, by some entity “breathing” life into “one form or many.”
How life originated has nothing to do with the accuracy of evolution theory. Genesis of life is not part of the theory, and evolution theory is unaffected by any genesis model.
Claiming that not fully understanding how life first arose makes Evolution a bad theory is a really bad arguement. Evolution doesn’t deal with the origin of life at all, just like Organic Chemistry doesn’t deal with the origin or matter. Just because one can’t explain how something is there doesn’t mean we can’t build a model do describe what goes on with the object, or objects in question. There is no evidence that disproves or even comes close to disproving evolution currently.
No one, Darwin included, has ever had a solid theory of exactly where or under what conditions life began. And to say that a ‘key tenet’ of Darwinism has been disproved because someone argued that Darwin’s casual suggestion that it happened in a warm pond is unlikely, is quite a desperate stretch.
BTW, it wasn’t even ‘disproved.’ Different scientists take different positions on this. I’ve even heard it argued that life actually began deep underground. It’s not really news when one scientist defends his favorite candidate by attacking another. It’s been going on for a while, and will continue for the foreseeable future. In the words of Ayala, “It’s a VERY difficult problem.”