Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

I noticed you didn't address my point. Again.

I have nothing against science. I earn my living in science. It just looked like you were implying that science WILL eventually have the definitive answer about abiogenesis. That to me is a religious belief when you assume you already know the answer. If that was not your implication, my apologies.

And speaking of straw men, what answers have I raised that can't be questioned?

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IDK, the account in Genesis has no contradictions with science's current views about the universe.

That is interesting. So science says woman came from man's rib?

@Leadfoot,
how about double helices of quartz ? They contain
cations in a tetrahedral arrangement and can bond with several types of chem bonds . Silica can carry HUUUGE amounts of information also, and it generates power by merely squeezing the crystal.

Same thing, supr heated water vapor with silica makes all kinds of quartz arrangements.

The problem with us all is that we ascribe some kind of magical powers unto a mega- organic-molecule, when we can create silica shells, networks, chains, helices, etc etc. with just a very hot muffle oven and a beaker

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Crystalline structures like snowflakes are marvelous in their own way. But they have no encoded information in them

Says you, noone here was talkin about "snowflakes". Theyre not helices , whereas, several hundred minerals ARE and thousands of proteinaceous compounds, alkanes and aromatics ARE also


ANYWAY, most scientists think that life wasnt at all dependent on the nucleic acid series for its inception

@Leadfoot,
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IDK, the account in Genesis has no contradictions with science's current views about the universe.

That is interesting. So science says woman came from man's rib?

You stepped pretty lightly over abiogenesis there. My point was that yes, microbes ARE very complex and evolution does not explain where the first one came from.

Now, researchers say they may have solved these paradoxes. Chemists report today that a pair of simple compounds, which would have been abundant on early Earth, can give rise to a network of simple reactions that produce the three major classes of biomolecules—nucleic acids, amino acids, and lipids—needed for the earliest form of life to get its start. Although the new work does not prove that this is how life started, it may eventually help explain one of the deepest mysteries in modern science.

“This is a very important paper,” says Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist and origin-of-life researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who was not affiliated with the current research. “It proposes for the first time a scenario by which almost all of the essential building blocks for life could be assembled in one geological setting.”

Scientists have long touted their own favorite scenarios for which set of biomolecules formed first. “RNA World” proponents, for example suggest RNA may have been the pioneer; not only is it able to carry genetic information, but it can also serve as a proteinlike chemical catalyst, speeding up certain reactions. Metabolism-first proponents, meanwhile, have argued that simple metal catalysts, as opposed to advanced protein-based enzymes, may have created a soup of organic building blocks that could have given rise to the other biomolecules.

The RNA World hypothesis got a big boost in 2009. Chemists led by John Sutherland at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom reported that they had discovered that relatively simple precursor compounds called acetylene and formaldehyde could undergo a sequence of reactions to produce two of RNA’s four nucleotide building blocks, showing a plausible route to how RNA could have formed on its own—without the need for enzymes—in the primordial soup. Critics, though, pointed out that acetylene and formaldehyde are still somewhat complex molecules themselves. That begged the question of where they came from.

For their current study, Sutherland and his colleagues set out to work backward from those chemicals to see if they could find a route to RNA from even simpler starting materials. They succeeded. In the current issue of Nature Chemistry, Sutherland’s team reports that it created nucleic acid precursors starting with just hydrogen cyanide (HCN), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), and ultraviolet (UV) light. What is more, Sutherland says, the conditions that produce nucleic acid precursors also create the starting materials needed to make natural amino acids and lipids. That suggests a single set of reactions could have given rise to most of life’s building blocks simultaneously.

Sutherland’s team argues that early Earth was a favorable setting for those reactions. HCN is abundant in comets, which rained down steadily for nearly the first several hundred million years of Earth’s history. The impacts would also have produced enough energy to synthesize HCN from hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen. Likewise, Sutherland says, H2S was thought to have been common on early Earth, as was the UV radiation that could drive the reactions and metal-containing minerals that could have catalyzed them.

That said, Sutherland cautions that the reactions that would have made each of the sets of building blocks are different enough from one another—requiring different metal catalysts, for example—that they likely would not have all occurred in the same location. Rather, he says, slight variations in chemistry and energy could have favored the creation of one set of building blocks over another, such as amino acids or lipids, in different places. “Rainwater would then wash these compounds into a common pool,” says Dave Deamer, an origin-of-life researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who wasn’t affiliated with the research.

Could life have kindled in that common pool? That detail is almost certainly forever lost to history. But the idea and the “plausible chemistry” behind it is worth careful thought, Deamer says. Szostak agrees. “This general scenario raises many questions,” he says, “and I am sure that it will be debated for some time to come

@Leadfoot,
So now you are arguing that science's view of evolution is outside the universe?

Scientists cloned a sheep using the same exact DNA of an animal belonging to a species that has been mating and producing offspring for thousands of years after having evolved from ancestors. How did man appear? Or are you arguing some god creature made him full grown out of mud?

We DO have the mathmatecal tools to examine the probability of those things happening but I'm guessing you wouldn't like the results.

I'm not interested in another theory of where the materials came from.

As far as how the nucleotides bond in the DNA molecule, scientists hve known how that works for several decades. You seem to believe that the nucleotides for single nucleotide polymorphs are "selected " as a series of specific chain. Its more like "whatever;s hanging on the rack of the double helix gets assigned a role. Nucleotides are going in and out all the time. We understand how they bond an link and we know which nucleotides must bond with each other (red Watson's book DNA-its quite readable and is meant for the student or the interested layman. It lists the 5 nucleotides in RNA and DNA, the 20 amino acids that combine in groups of 3 and multiples thereof, and it identifies all 64 proteins that are coded for.

What I will Not give you is how the very specific LANGUAGE of RNA/DNA and the complex program written in that language came about... If you come up with ANYTHING that hints at solving that problem, let me know.

I never said that man appeared full grown from the mud.

IDK, the account in Genesis has no contradictions with science's current views about the universe.

I'm ignoring all you unsupported assertions like 'all your arguments are ****'

I expect you would immediately see how this approach would require even more intelligent design than if the intelligence designed the DNA language from scratch. 'Something' had to assign those roles

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"I expect you would immediately see how this approach would require even more intelligent design than if the intelligence designed the DNA language from scratch. 'Something' had to assign those roles"

Why so? is adaptation to rising temperatures "Intelligence"?

Now I think youre losing the point of how evolution actually works in the world.

the more convinced I am that natural causes can't account for life as we know it

I do think there are shortcomings in Evolution