CNN Gets 'Synthetic Life' Right in the Headlines

[The_Flying_Skeptic]

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2) you accused me of defending a position that only a creationist would defend: you almost accused me of being creationist. my remark on you 'almost' accusing me of being a creationist is a joke, i don't mean for you to respond to that part in seriousness but you did accuse me of defending a straw man of my position.

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Again, I have never accused you of defending a position only a creationist would defend. I never almost accused you of being a creationist. I never accused you of defending a straw man of your position.

you accused me of being willing to defend the position that if scientists don't create 'something from nothing' they aren't creating life from scratch and that is a position only a creationist would defend.

What I did do was create a hypothetical and offer an assertion based on your argument at the time. At no point did I say in that argument that my hypothetical was true at this point in time, or that you had argued this. That is why it is a hypothetical.

I know that it was hypothetical but it was still a straw man of my position that you framed as a position I would defend.

You accuse me of refusing to see common ground (which is untrue by the way) and yet here you are still accusing me of something I didn't do, despite the fact I have now explained what I meant multiple times. If there are any strawman arguments here, they come from you; you've taken a hypothetical and argued against it as if I accused you of actually being in support of it. All you had to do was object to my hypothetical and argue against my assertion, but you seem content at playing the victim and constantly appealing to emotion.

I did object and I did argue against your assertion.

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I was only questioning your state of mind because I expected better.

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Really? It's odd, because you accused me of being drunk, and then once I told you to not post stupid comments, you told me that I was the one being stupid. All I did was express my opinion; who is really the one not trying to find common ground here, I ask you again.

I thought maybe you were drunk because my concerns on the first post of your blog were perfectly reasonable... i wasn't trying to insult you as you did me when you called my comments 'stupid'. sorry for thinking you might have been drunk. sheesh.

You continually ask me to be "nice" and given you the "benefit of the doubt", but this isn't how debates work. If someone attacks your position, and you realise that they have a misunderstanding of your position, you correct them on it. I'll be "nice" in a debate when my opponent is nice to me; otherwise I'll be nasty like I have been in this one. If my opponent decides to make a snide comment about my state of mind rather than actually attack my argument, you'll be damned sure I'll be just as nasty back.

you were the first to call my posts stupid on your thread and treat me stupid on this thread even when I've tried to clarify my position. I feel the same way, the more you treat me as if I'm stupid saying i fail to understand something or my comments are stupid the more I'll emphasize your stupidity.

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i said http://atheistforums.org/thread-3742-pos...l#pid71515
summary: 'scientists created synthetic life' as a headline is vague and will confuse theists and atheists. if atheists go around saying 'scientists created life' assuming that 'synthetic' means artificially and is implicit when saying 'humans created x', atheists will eventually look stupid since synthetic does not describe that not all the parts of the cell were manufactured and creationists will use that fact and we simply need to be prepared.

you responded:

This had nothing to do with abiogenesis. What they did was start from a bunch of chemicals in the lab, and synthesize the genome from scratch. They even coded specific markers (they call them "watermarks") which contain encoded lists of the researchers names, and website urls

you didn't even entertain that 'scientists created life' would be misunderstood by atheists and theists. i'm not the only one that thinks 'created synthetic life' is ambiguous and that 'created a synthetic species' is more accurate. Caecilian even came up with a good analogy. I tried talking to you but you continued to treat me as if I was stupid instead of trying to find some common grounds:

Firstly, your summary doesn't match the post you linked to. Nowhere in that post did you mention the headline as vague, nor did you mention that atheists will look stupid. The only piece of recognisable summary from your post is the part on "not all the parts of the cell were manufactured", but even this isn't accurate, since in your post you only talked about the individual DNA strands (which *were* all manufactured).

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I responded mentioning abiogenesis because *you* mentioned the Miller-Urey experiments, which were to do with abiogenesis and had nothing to do with what these scientists had done. I didn't entertain that "scientists created life" would be misunderstood for two reasons:

1) You never mentioned it in your post (despite your "summary" above).
2) I made sure to put the word "synthetic" before the word "life" in my original post. They did not create life, they created synthetic life. As long as that word is there, I can't see how any confusion can come out of this.

Caecilian came up with a good analogy to explain why 'synthetic life' is ambiguous. You don't think that Venture's research may aid in abiogenesis research?

You say 'chemical synthesizers existed for years...' as if I was ignorant of chemistry and had no place in this discussion; but the only reason I thought that they maybe bought pieces of DNA rather than assembled (a plausible proposition) the chromosome base by base or nucleotide by nucleotide was because in the BBC video posted on your thread there was a whole 1 minute discussion on how you can buy strands of DNA and how the company Venture works for bought DNA. I explained this and you continued to bash me rather than say "oh, well I can see where you got confused, but they did create the whole chromosome, connecting every single nucleotide in the genome according to page 5, paragraph 4 of the research paper by Venture's team.", you continued to refuse to find any common ground.

I said that chemical synthesizers had existed for years because when I told you they encoded specific information into the genome, you said you "knew that", but were still wondering how they got the DNA. You even said they "bought" it at some point, which is untrue because they made the entire genome themselves, hence me saying the stuff about the chemical synthesizers.

I'm not sure which BBC video you watched, but the 12 minute one that I linked to explained how they made the genome from scratch. So no, I didn't see how you could have been confused. If, however, you'd watched a different video, then confusion can obviously occur. I don't see how your confusion is suddenly my fault though.

My confusion isn't your fault. Whether or not they created the DNA 'from scratch' (base by base) isn't really an issue now. In an earlier post on your thread about this sub issue, I posted the link and time where they said that DNA was bought. I trust your 12 minute video of Venture's explanation is a much better source, so my question about whether or not they created the chromosome, molecule by molecule, is/was answered.