OT: How life came to Earth

whit3rd snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Think about the tardigrade. They have sequenced its DNA.

It is very strange however as it "adds" DNA elements via "horizontal gene transfer" as in not via reproductive hand off, but by adding DNA elements of others into its own. They are trying to figure out why it is so hardy.

from nearly absolute zero to very hot temps, and from the vacuum of space to very high pressures it lives. even through radiation exposure.

They had to do it twice though because they think the first set of scientists may have accidentally included DNA from bacteria that was on the animal when sampled.

We may have arrived here this way. I mean whatever we evolved from, that is.

I found a very interesting piece y'all might like...

Funny that the random YouTube link has a Q in it. :-)

That is the same Max Planck who published all four of Albert Einsteins "annus mirabilis" papers in 1905 without bothering to send them out for peer review.

He was being rude about some of his contemporaties, probably mainly Ernest Mach - who "famously declared, after an 1897 lecture by Ludwig Boltzmann at the Imperial Academy of Science in Vienna: "I don't believe that atoms exist!" From about 1908 to 1911, Max Planck criticized Mach's reluctance to acknowledge the reality of atoms as incompatible with physics. Einstein's 1905 demonstration that the statistical fluctuations of atoms allowed measurement of their existence without direct individuated sensory evidence marked a turning point in the acceptance of atomic theory. "

Does it matter? We know that John Larkin isn't one.

That's about as much as you can manage.

Coward. Give an example, at least. The 'upset' and 'resists' are just the exact same observation, repeated. A force that upsets your balance, is one that you resist, if you have any will at all.

Science is a philosophical branch, not a 'social system', it organizes only knowledge, not persons.

Yeah, THAT's why we know science isn't social; the social pressure to conform effectively doesn't exist in the sciences.

How do these errors continue to creep into JL's discourse?

This is all just the "watchmaker argument", wrapped up in pseudo-scientific nonsense about alien robots and quantum mechanics.

Nobody thinks the first lifeforms on earth were DNA-based.

Most likely, they were RNA-based - or something similar. It could have been a somewhat simpler nucleic acid, and it was not necessarily exactly the same nucleobases that we have now. And yes, many bits and pieces of the chemicals involved have been found in space, or produced chemically in simulated early earth conditions. It is entirely reasonable to suppose that they came about chemically.

But even if we did not have that support for how nucleic acids came about, a hypothesis involving alien robots or divine intervention is /not/ "as legit a theory".

To start with, it is not a /theory/ - in science, "theory" means there is a lot of evidence for the idea, a strong hypothesis with internally consistent logic that fits at least reasonably with existing scientific theories, that makes predictions, and that is falsifiable. It does not "just some random thought I had".

If there is a question to which we really don't know the answer (and there are many such questions in science), the appropriate response is "we don't know". You don't just make up whatever twaddle crosses your mind and say "that's as good as any other idea" - it is /not/. When there is zero evidence for an idea, no logic, no predictions, no way to test the the idea, it answers no questions, it raises far more questions that could not possibly be answered consistently, then it is of no help, interest or relevance to anyone. If it leads anyone to waste their time considering it rather than looking for new evidence or considering new ideas based on evidence, then it is /worse/ than useless.

whit3rd snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

I call it a moderately BENT perception.

Revealing, but not surprising.

The key word there is "imagines".

His statement doesn't fool the rest of us.

David Brown snipped-for-privacy@hesbynett.no wrote in news:su9jdj$sfr$1@dont- email.me:

Huh?

Bacteria was first, up to 3.22 billion years ago.

It may have started as RNA based, but very early on in their existence everything was DNA based. We will never know if there was RNA "originals".

Just so.

I've previously pointed John to "The Blind Watchmaker", and he indicated he would read it.

There is no indication that he has read it - or if he has, then he hasn't understood it.

Tom Gardner snipped-for-privacy@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in news:su9k35$ugc$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

When I was living in Virginia, I was doing work for various three letter agencies in a $500k research lab in my Boss' basement.

Larkin is a dork because he has no grasp of what the main courses of discourse in these groups are, despite the group's name. Many Usenet news groups are the same.

When cornered, he likes to act as if he is "The scheme police", presumeably as a diversion. Similar to how certain politicians behave.

We pass time here. There are on topic discussions and posts but we do not get in their way and they do not get in ours unless one is a pedantic antisocial twerp.

It is a quantum thing. Upon observation he breaks down. Upon our observation of him we break down. It's all one big fat crappy breakdown.

He probably ate too much Jimson weed too many times at his frat house.

Than someone should find or make a non-DNA life form.

All you need is faith.

I read some of it. It's a lot of repetition. And a lot of hand waving.

Finding modern life forms is easy. Finding ancient ones, which have survived to modern times, is like looking for last year's Xmas cookies.

Usually, someone has eaten those already.

whit3rd snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Tardigrade... over 500 million years old and counting... that we know of.

I posted here just a couple of months ago about complex self-replicating molecules (that self-align to form something very like *cell walls*) recently found in the edges of geothermal springs. Once a bubble like this can form a boundary between inside and outside, it can isolate other processes from the outside world, providing a framework that could (conceptually) easily evolve into a self-reproducing organism. That seems to be the most likely way that life got started, to my mind.

But it didn't fit your mindset so you ignored it, just as you ignore all the other science that discredits your fantasies. Just as you'll probably ignore it again now, or scoff at it. I'm not even going to repost the URL, because you don't care. You can find it in my recent post anyhow.

CH

Covid-19 is an example. It's a strictly parasitic life form, but it does rely on an RNA genome

All John Larkin has to offer is faith. More complicated and useful ways of looking at the data available are beyond him. and he imagines that everybody else is as intellectually crippled as he is.

That's a rather rude way of saying that he couldn't understand it.

Both sources suggest that a lot of people have a rather higher opinion of it than John Larkin has expressed. It was first published in 1986 and is still in print.

On a sunny day (Sat, 12 Feb 2022 15:19:00 -0800 (PST)) it happened Anthony William Sloman snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote in snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Actually it did

It came up with correction mechanisms, but they aren't the error-detecting and correcting codes you find every last hard drive.

They depends adding an extra string of bits to the data string you are storing and retrieving, and can absolutely correct small numbers of errors anywhere in the string data read back, and detect larger numbers of errors so you at least know that you need to discard what you have read back.

The math is neat.