Darwinism

[SenseiOtho]

Even the basic building blocks and basic forms cannot be made in the lab under semi realistic conditions

You mean, apart from the scientists who have formed some basis building blocks in semi-realistic (and realistic) conditions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_experiment
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/0...cleotides/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/o...matechange

Or read a large summary of them here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

The Miller-Urey experiment has long been down played because they did not use O2 in the "atmosphere" which has long been thought to be present. O2 has the nasty side effect of reacting against the formation of amino acids and other bio-molecules. I know some scientist are trying to dispute this, but the evidence still seems in favor of O2 being there.

the Guardian web page only supports my point that it takes intelligence that used "lab-made chemicals" and "painstakingly" worked at putting a chromosome together. Interesting otherwise and thanks for helping make my point.

as for the wired webpage, there's not enough information to know what they did and how they did it, though that might be your best bet so far if it really worked out as they reported. My guess is that they to did not include O2. I haven't heard of that experiment yet, so there's not much that I can say about it. Time will tell.

Regardless, that was a minor point in my argument. It is a huge step from some amino acids that don't get destroyed by the same forces that created them to a useful sequence of them that have any part in making life. And sorry I didn't read the abiogenesis on wiki, I've read the arguments before and I still think there are a number of major hurtles that it cannot overcome. Since that seems to be the focus of replies I might reply on the major problems of abiogenesis that science has not been able to overcome or figure out how nature supposedly overcame it.

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ok, so with gene duplication followed by point mutation or something like that. That seems to be one of the leading theories for how the "fact" of evolution happen.

1) I've read of the extreme specification of certain proteins and their amino acid placements. Where changing the amino acids destroys its function, because it destroys the structure of certain folds in the enzyme. It has been shown that the structure of a protein is extremely important, not just the sequence. The significance of extreamly specific structures and bonds is that they are unevolvable. (B-lactamase studies by molecular biologist Douglas D. Axe, "Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequence Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds," Journal of Molecular Biology 341 (2004). maybe that will count as "evidence" since it is from a scientific journal) the idea that it evolved gradually change by change is unexplainable in structures like this where the exact structure, not just sequence of amino acids is required for it to work. B-Lactamase confers antibiotic resistance to bacteria, so it also has an immediate payoff when it works.

2) the actual evidence of gene duplication and point mutation having long term survivability and fixing in the gene pool is not good for the evolutionist, even in simple cells. Here is a quote from one such paper:

Gene duplication and lateral gene transfer are observed biological phenomena. Their purpose is still a matter of deliberation among creationist and Intelligent Design researchers, but both may serve functions in a process leading to rapid acquisition of adaptive phenotypes in novel environments. Evolutionists claim that copies of duplicate genes are free to mutate and that natural selection subsequently favours useful new sequences. In this manner countless novel genes, distributed among thousands of gene families, are claimed to have evolved. However, very small organisms with redundant, expressed, duplicate genes would face significant selective disadvantages. We calculate here how many distinct mutations could accumulate before natural selection would eliminate strains from a gene duplication event, using all available ‘mutational time slices’ (MTSs) during four billion years. For this purpose we use Hoyle’s mathematical treatment for asexual reproduction in a fixed population size, and binomial probability distributions of the number of mutations produced per generation. Here, we explore a variety of parameters, such as population size, proportion of the population initially lacking a duplicate gene (x0), selectivity factor (s), generations (t) and maximum time available. Many mutations which differ very little from the original duplicated sequence can indeed be generated. But in four billion years not even a single prokaryote with 22 or more differences from the original duplicate would be produced. This is a startling and unexpected conclusion given that 90% and higher identity between proteins is generally assumed to imply the same function and identical three dimensional folded structure. It should be obvious that without new genes, novel complex biological structures cannot arise.

I'm sure you don't want to read more, but just in case here is the online paper.

I guess part of what I am arguing for in this post and the other one is specified complexity within DNA. Where the genes are specific in what they do and they are extremely improbable of forming by Darwinian or naturalistic mechanisms. In other areas of life, specified complexity unquestionably points to intelligence, and I would argue that it does apply in biological systems as well. I'm sure you've heard the term before so I suspect that it will bring a wave of replies.

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Whilst there can be no doubt that the above has problems and is largely speculative, that life spontaneously formed is beyond doubt...

I thought this was a science discussion not pseudo-science speculation (where's the evidence), which seems to be what a lot of abiogenesis theories are about. Thanks for being honest though about what the evidence actually shows. I could just as easily assert that life spontaneously formed by God's intervention though we don't know exactly how he did it.

IOW you're too wrapped up in your pathetic belief system, in being a dumbass creationist, to actually envisage that something naturalistic could have led to the nucleic acids?

IOW you're too wrapped up in your pathetic belief system, in being a dumb* atheist, to actually envisage that something supernatural could have led to the nucleic acids? -- save your insults for someone that cares, their annoying. and I don't actually think your dumb, I just think your foundational assumptions/beliefs about life are wrong and it has led you to the wrong conclusions.