RE: So your an Athiest
December 5, 2015 at 4:51 pm
(This post was last modified: December 5, 2015 at 4:56 pm by God of Mr. Hanky.)
(December 5, 2015 at 3:34 pm)AAA Wrote: God of Mr. Hanky
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Whether or not that uncited claim is true is not above debate, but the possibilities they imply for life under a broader range of conditions remain strong.
That you call them "extremophiles" is rather interesting, considering how life, when it first began 4 billion years ago, did so under similar conditions - the atmosphere and ocean was choked with volcanic activity and no oxygen. It was hardly extreme to these life forms, which made do with what it had available. That's what life does.
Yeah, but I don't think life could form under those conditions. It obviously can live there now, but we don't know if abiogenesis could occur there. They would need to have very rigid peptidoglycan walls to prevent the degradation of any nucleotide chains that somehow formed. These complicated cell walls require enzymes to form. They would also need metabolism that allowed them to convert the toxic chemicals around them into substances that they could use, and have a way to incorporate them into themselves. That's just the tip of the iceberg.
(December 5, 2015 at 2:59 pm)Stimbo Wrote: I just want to point out that the beliefs of scientists are completely irrelevant to the work that they do. Sir Isaac Newton was a practicing alchemist as well as a mathematician and physicist, but it's his work in the latter fields in which he made the greatest contribution. Scientists like everyone else have to show their work, or it doesn't mean a damn.
Agreed
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AAA - you should understand that abiogenesis under any conditions can only produce the most simple, self-replicating strands of molecules which are far from the relative complexities of genetic material in its simplest modern form (RNA). It would therefore get through very few replication cycles with the available material which it feeds on before becoming itself consumed by a life form which is billions of years up the tree for its survival traits. So if you're holding your breath waiting to see this happen anywhere in the present natural world, don't - it can only happen where no pre-existing life which would munch it up before it gets the chance to evolve!
Stimbo - Going that far back, what people declared of themselves publicly didn't mean much - very few were secure or balsey enough to incite the ire of intolerant church officials who could and did end people's lives for challenging their ideas. Therefore, as you probably know (but AAA doesn't), many of the early scientists who were declared Christians were secretly atheist.
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