On 4/13/2011 3:31 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:18:41 +0200, andrel wrote:
>
>> - nobody (at least no scientist) knows 'the chemical origins of life'
>
> Now I didn't actually take high school biology, but I thought there had
> been some progress made in this area - autotrophs create organic
> compounds from inorganic compounds through photosynthesis - and I thought
> I had read a couple of things recently about some advances that had been
> made in understanding photosynthesis and even (maybe) in creating
> something that is capable of photosynthesis.
>
One of the original early experiments was even uncovered, and its sealed 
contents retested, finding a larger number of the precursor organics 
than the original experiment was able to (do to a lack of ability to 
measure small amounts at the time). Never the less, the problem is, we 
don't have something showing a) all of them b) how they would have 
organized to produce necessary forms, or even c) what the most simple 
"functional" organic compound looked like, from which others eventually 
derived. There is this nasty thing called life on this planet, which 
tends to "eat", or degrade, anything that would come at all close to 
those originals. We are not even sure what the conditions really needed 
to be, for how long, what the odds where of the result happening, etc.

Never the less, given that we are even making limited progress in 
producing "synthetic" genetics, which use different chemicals than our 
own, there is no real reason to assume you can't get life from non-life. 
And, it wouldn't help their case anyway, since such life wouldn't have 
needed to "know" how to make every other species on the planet, nor been 
"guided" after it formed, or anything else. Their god would end up being 
the guy that turned on the switch to the bread maker, after loading the 
ingredients. Additional messing with the system being unneeded after 
that. But.. understanding that requires understanding why, and how 
evolution works, and is inevitable, once you have life, and they can't 
even get the "how does it work" bit right.

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