OT: How life came to Earth

You're not a biologist, and furthermore you weren't there.

We talked about DNA and Thai food and stuff.

You're not an electronic designer either. Your profession seems to be "nasty."

Well (I say modestly) we do tend to be charismatic and inspirational.

Good choice on her part.

Of maybe "great minds think alike"?

There's a proverb for anything and everything

(not that those numbers are entirely believable. 100% is impossible.)

There's no dispute that things were bad once everywhere. The remarkable point is that western culture basically invented progress.

Google Street View is cool. Towns and cities all over the world look like Dallas and its burbs, paved streets with SUVs and power poles and boring houses and all. Lots of signs in English.

The biggest change in human history was electrification.

Then electronics.

Similarly competent? Picking up where you've gone wrong on biological questions isn't exactly difficult.

It doesn't mean that our opinions are all that well aligned - just not as far off the wall as yours are.

No. RNA viruses are manufactured by DNA.

In a host.

That would of course be intelligent design. The next step would be to demonstrate how the same situation might have happened naturally.

People. Designer. Not soup.

Is there evidence for that?

They produced the agricultural revolution, which less a smaller proportion of the population feed the rest, which made universal education possible. Then they produced the industrial revolution, where the redundant agricultural labourers were put to work in factories.

<snipped Thomas Sowell getting it wrong>

It wasn't exactly western culture as whole that did this - the scientific method played a significant role.

So what?

Not exactly. The big change was the move away from muscle power. Electrification is a neat way of moving power from where it is generated to where people want to use it, but generating the power is the crucial element.

Again, not exactly. Electronics gave us computers and rapid high volume communications, which have changed society a great deal. Electronics was a vital part of that, but not the whole of it by any means.

Precisely. Especially in response to people who are neither designers nor biologists; people unqualified (and rude enough) to call reasonable suggestions stupid and ignorant.

Face it: most people let their emotions whiplash their thinking.

I'm enormously interested in all sorts of things. Curiousity is a basic component of invention. I have to donate boxes of books to make room for more.

Right now I'm reading Wilson's classic On Human Nature. That guy could sure think.

I sometimes make suggestions about physical reality, with no personal content, and get in response not serious criticism or alternate ideas, but barrages of insults from admitted amateurs. I try to be friendly and helpful to anyone who asks questions where I can help.

This ain't Facebook, but most people here who don't design electronics want to my-o-my about personalities. Especially mine, which is a weird waste of peoples time. Don't you have anything more interesting to do?

Wrong. The Covid-19 has it's own replicator enzyme, encoded in it's RNA genome. It infects cells in a DNA- based life-form (us) but uses the resources lying around inside the cell infects to manufacture new copies of itself, starting off by churning out it's replicator enzyme.

The host provides the raw materials. It doesn't manufacture the new copies of the virus - the virus does that for itself.

Probably not. You've got to put energy into the system somehow, and the easiest way of doing it in the lab isn't all that likely to be one might show up in n

ature.

You said that some lab jock should invent some, so you needed to be told that it had been done.

I have no idea how much or how little you know about Thai food. You could be an excellent Thai cook or food critic for all I know (or care).

Everyone here realises that you have many major gaps and faults in your understanding of evolution and DNA. I don't need to be a biologist to know that, nor do I need to have been at your lunch to know that it's highly unlikely that you realised your deep-grained mistakes in just one lunch. (But if you did, or made progress, then great.)

Yes, that makes sense because those are the only two professions.

Your ideas about biology are incoherent enough that what I learned in first year biology in 1960 is enough to clue me into the stupidity of ignorance of your posts in the area. I've read quite a lot about biology since then, and you don't seem to have done any reading in the area at all at all. The intelligent design crap that shows up in your output may be from creationist propaganda, so you may think you have done some reading, but it clearly hasn't been from reliable sources.

You certainly do.

But you get your ideas about global warming from Anthony Watts. It's easier and cheaper to get access to self-serving propaganda than it is to get reliable information from reliable sources.

Whether you will get the right message from it is uncertain. Flyguy has remarkable habit of citing stuff that doesn't support his bizarre points of view at all, and claiming that it does.

The formulation is usually "I don't know much about X but I do know enough to know that John Larkin's suggestion is flat-out wrong" That doesn't make them an "admitted amateur".

I can't say I can recall an example.

You do have funny ideas about what constitutes electronic design, and tend to take criticism (or insufficient admiration) very personally.

For years you posted a lot more than anybody else. That makes your personality interesting

That's the question we ask ourselves quite often.

That does not include historical rates, which would be the interesting figures.

You can come very close. But often it depends on how the counting is done, and countries vary in that respect (despite UN attempts at standardising). A certain proportion of the population will be unable to learn to read and write competently, due to handicaps, very low intelligence, or extreme dyslexia. You will get closer to 100% if you only count people who should be able to read and write, omitting these groups - or if you are a country like North Korea where such people just "disappear" and the state denies they ever existed.

Pure and utter nonsense.

There's no doubt that Western culture has lead science and technology for the past few hundred years, and that the pace has increased during that time. Equally, there is no doubt that "progress" has been made ever since the first person thought it would be a good idea to help food plants grow in one place rather than moving around all the time.

(I haven't looked at that - perhaps I will later.)

The turning point for the west was /steam/, not electricity. If you are going to make a list of the most important game-changing technologies and inventions for human civilisation, then electricity would be on it (as would electronics). But they would not could as "the biggest", not by a long way.

(I don't follow advert links.)

Ha!

I think that is what the psychologists term "projection".

Retroviruses insert their genes into the cell's DNA, and thus use DNA as an intermediary. Other RNA viruses do not - the RNA is copied directly using RNA enzymes supplied by the virus itself. The animo acids, lipids, RNA bases, etc., that are used as raw material are created by the DNA-based host, but that doesn't matter. The virus doesn't care if they were made by a DNA-based host, an RNA-based host, or an alien robot.

We have not found any organisms alive today that are not DNA-based. RNA viruses are the nearest we have (and there are lots of them), but viruses have no metabolism. (Some biologists classify viruses as "living organisms", but most do not - it's a matter of your choice of definition.)

It is reasonable to hypothesise that RNA-based lifeforms existed in the past. The move from RNA to DNA in metabolising organisms is evolutionarily plausible, and the DNA-based organisms would quickly outcompete the RNA-based ones. The pros and cons of RNA vs. DNA give a different balance in viruses, so we have both types today.

We all have to live somewhere.

Sure. But it was what you asked for.

Lab-made organisms (or chemical precursors) do not prove that a particular development path happened in the early history of life on earth. But if the lab conditions mimic reasonable estimates of what might have been around at the time, then they can show that particular pathways were plausible - without the need of any kind of "intelligent design".

"Soup" - real, natural abiogenesis - takes a planet-sized experiment running for a hundred million years or so. (It might take longer on average - we only have the one sample point, and perhaps the earth got lucky early on.) So scientists cheat a little to save time.

I don't see people calling reasonable suggestions stupid and ignorant in this thread. I see people calling stupid and ignorant suggestions stupid and ignorant.

(Perhaps that's because I have filtered out some of the most unpleasant characters in this group, or perhaps they are not interested in threads like this one.)

I don't believe that anyone here is a trained biologist. That does not mean there isn't a range of levels of knowledge, with many here being interested amateurs with a fair grasp of a lot of the points in question. (And much of the contention is about basic scientific principles, rather than the specifics of the topic being discussed.)

I don't think that is true. But some people certainly post without letting rational thought get much involved, especially in subjects they know little about.

Curiosity is a good thing, and I think many here read or learn about a wide range of subjects. You are not outstanding in that regard by any means. But for a guy who claims to read a lot about evolution, you have failed to grasp the critical foundations.

You might be better finding something that covers basic scientific principles - something that will help you understand the need for evidence, consistency, rational justification, predictions, testability, falsification, etc., in science. Maybe then you'll see why people laugh at you when you make stuff up out of thin air.

You have had /countless/ explanations and help, with advice, corrections, references, and facts. But you respond to these by whining that we don't like "ideas", or are not "designers". You could take the biology threads in this group over the years and edit it into a book about evolution - and pretty much all of it has been written to try to help /you/ understand.

Major gaps! Good grief, nobody understands how DNA life originated. Or how cells or brains work. But it's all encoded in DNA.

DNA is encoded in DNA.

Steam didn't power washing machines or lights or anything in common residences. Electricity distributes energy to the population, whether it comes from steam or hydro or solar cells.

Big factories abandoned steam as soon as they could get electricity. Steam doesn't distribute well.

Electric washing machines made an enormous difference to women. It freed them from hours of nasty labor per day.

The giant factor that brings people out of extreme poverty is electrification.

Nobody understands where DNA came from or how it creates people.