Self replicating and evolving RNA molecule created

Oh, is "the origin" always an identifiable item, with a possible "comes from" answer?

The question 'where does current come from' often has an answer, because charge is a conserved quantity, and it flows, if at all, FROM a source, TO a sink... Hearing 'where does voltage come from' , though, I want to write down Poisson's equation and try to explain that 'voltage' comes from a theoretical model for a vector field's nature as a conservative force field.

So, lots of those questions we will never understand are less than meaningful. Godel, famously, has proved that there are mathematical truths that we cannot prove. He did it mathematically...

That wouldn't be so poignant, if it weren't for the fact that Godel also proved that our mathematics is not (and can never be) proven to be consistent.

The 'nobody understands' means we need more research? That's a given, in LOTS of fields. It doesn't mean we don't have an ongoing body of knowledge.

Sometimes; it usually is the case that experts agree.

... remember the game of gossip; there's EVERYTHING under the "Hearsay" label: knowledge, fantasy, garbled syllables, rumors, lies, distortions...

Science (formal knowledge and understanding) has no need of that because another observation, tomorrow, is allowed to change it all. That's the contingency that defines an open mind, also, and denies implcitly any absolute human authority.

Trickster! No one, and never, both mean the matter is beyond human capacity. But, we don't know everything about human capacity.

I'm willing to say that division by zero IS beyond human capacity, though. In mathematics, we aren't making observations of nature every day... so math things are not contingent on events, observation, experiment.

The attempt to put 'current knowledge' of any significant branch of science into the pigeonholes "concensus", or "faith" or "hearsay" is doomed. None of those fit.

The possibility that we live in some sort of say ancestor-simulation is plausibly testable, at least indirectly, making some assumptions about how the creators of an ancestor-simulation would operate it.

Unlikely to provide absolute answers of course, but the outcomes could provide bigger or smaller weights to ontological propositions regarding stuff like the lifetime of intelligent civilizations, whether intelligent civilizations find value in running ancestor simulations, whether it's theoretically possible to run ancestor simulations on computers that can plausibly exist in our Universe, etc.

On a sunny day (Tue, 22 Mar 2022 23:17:45 -0400) it happened bitrex snipped-for-privacy@example.net wrote in <ujw_J.188552$ snipped-for-privacy@fx46.iad:

I do not follow the Pope's utterings, those have no value for me, Considering all the harm that club has done to people and science over the ages. War criminals Neither have Biden's utterings any value for me, Military Industrial Complex making war and selling weapons is their business a defective brain puppet is their perfect tool. War criminals

I'm an Episcopalian - we left the Church of England behind quite a while ago, and the Pope's authority quite a while before that.

On a sunny day (Tue, 22 Mar 2022 15:48:30 -0700) it happened John Larkin <jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote in snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

As to evolution, would you ever expect that an ape-like colony as we are would self evolve to produce microchips? Communicate via radio? It is the same mechanism at work!

In your view that probability (apes making nano nano micro chips) would be zero...

In reality things come together, form new things together, use things found by other things, sustain each other, pick up methods, get more and more complex. what works persists. And a hundred zillion times all over again in this universe at any moment.

Several people have pointed out that you have repeatedly said thing that /are/ *equivalent*. They have given reasons for the equivalence.

You have only asserted, without justification, that they aren't equivalent.

whit3rd's response to that is to the point.

You didn't say it. That doesn't mean it isn't the case.

If you don't understand that then you couldn't be trusted to produce correct javascript.

Cheap insults don't help.

Cite a statement where I said that God created life on earth.

And "several people" ? That's your call to authority? Several people on usenet!

What is the origin of DNA-based life on earth?

Do you actually ever do anything useful? Or original?

Tell us.

Darwinian incremental evolution happens in plain sight, although it is surely more efficient than random mutation and natural selection.

The big unknown is how the first, incredibly complex, reproducing DNA-based cells came to be, and survived. That couldn't have been an incremental process.

No, we are involved in EUV lithography so of course it works.

On a sunny day (Wed, 23 Mar 2022 07:43:37 -0700) it happened snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Depends what you mean by 'incremental' All nature is incremental, strange basic particles - like what CERN is looking for - combined to form quarks combining into atoms that then formed elements (neatly described in the periodic system) that then combined into all sorts of things RNA, DNA, that then combined into .. apes .. humans making microchips, whatever is next...

sigh :-)

I will leave it a this.

Darwinian incremental evolution is random mutation and selection. There's nothing efficient about it.

The RNA-world hypothesis says that RNA-based cells came first, and DNA got grafted on later. The silicon that replaced to the RNA-germanium, or the DNA hard disk that replaced the RNA floppy.

The first cells won't have been incredibly complex.

Why not?

It worked before you were involved, when the minimum feature size was rather larger.

We had useful (if crude) electronics before we had integrated circuits. or even transistors, but you'd have fun deducing the previous existence of valve/tube circuits by looking at a modern integrated circuit.

What the *bleep* are you talking about? Only the "God did it" lot think scientific abiogenesis hypothesis suggest that a modern day cell turned up fully functional, by chance in a slime pool. I keep telling you that you have /no/ idea what the RNA World hypothesis is, or any other aspect of abiogenesis research, or how basic science works. You think it's an insult - it's simple fact, and you prove it again and again.

What do you think Darwinian evolution is, if not random mutation plus natural selection?

That key question is currently not well answered, but several plausible natural mechanisms have been suggested.

I have faith that mankind will continue to refine both understanding and questions about that topic.

Why not?

Saying aliens might have created life on earth, or robots from space, or some kind of god, "intelligent design", or that DNA designed itself - it's all the same pointless non-argument. As Tom says, its trying to avoid understanding - avoiding thought, learning, experimentation. And despite your obsessive claims, your "God did it" piddle is avoiding having ideas. It's giving up.

Yes, we all know you used different names and expressions for the "god" of your "argument". It doesn't matter - it is the same thing.

Your response to the big questions is "Scientists don't have all the answers. I don't understand anything they are trying to say or do, so clearly it is incomprehensible and we know nothing. I've an idea - let's say God did it. Then we don't have to think any more".

Scientists' response is "Scientists don't have all the answers. Let's see what we can do to get more answers - or at least more useful questions!".

What has that got to do with anything? You don't need to keep demonstrating that you don't know what "abiogenesis" is, or what the RNA World hypothesis is. We already know.

You keep claiming to have read "books by biochemists". I don't really believe you here - at least, I don't believe you have read and understood modern books written by serious respected biochemists that cover topics such as abiogenesis or evolution, dealing with the current approximate consensus amongst scientists of that field, and with current research in the field. Perhaps you've cherry-picked books by the tiny fraction of a percent of biochemists who believe "God did it" (usually wrapped as "intelligent design", or "look at these numbers I pulled from my ass - they prove evolution is wrong and therefore God made us"). Perhaps you've read good books, but in the eyes-wide-shut manner you use in this group - nothing actually goes in. I don't know what you've been doing, but you've been doing it wrong.

I would recommend that you start by trying to read and understand what people post here, before going on to books that are beyond your level - or that are actively dragging you down.

No "authority" is required, merely reading your posts is sufficient.

"Several people" merely serves to show that my reading of your posts isn't completely wrong, no more.

OK, you can't do math.

You are making an unwarranted assumption here, by your use of the word "think" in the question.

Because John says it couldn't - because he read a book once that said DNA-based cells are "irreducibly complex". He doesn't know what the phrase means, but it sounded right to him - after all, it was an "idea", and all ideas are holy.

Of course you and I and the world of science knows that is bollocks. The article linked at the start of this thread showed reproducing interacting RNA, and the Darwinian evolution of DNA-based cells from RNA-based cells is quite easy to imagine.

OK, you can't cite any such thing that I said. Maybe because I never said it.

Tell us about your biology experiments.

I think you are just another twitter-level flamer. Do you still work?

Probably something more like AI, prototyping more complex things than random base-pair damage.

If some programmers can claim they have AI after a few years of coding, imagine what a planet full of cells can invent in a few billion years.

A folded, squirming protein sounds like a pretty good cross-correlation machine. Looking for viable protein sequences could be done by some better way than seeing if random mistakes help offspring survive.

In other words, evolution evolves, even if neo-Darwinists don't want it to.

But not demonstrated. And other suggestions are mocked.

Because a minimal DNA reproduction mechanism needs complex-programmed DNA surrounded by complex support mechanisms. None of that is useful until it all works.