Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

Inside microwave ovens at temperatures of 230 K or lower? Inside microwave ovens with atmospheric pressures of 12 millibars or fewer? It is the concatenation of surface conditions which leads me to doubt that life will be found on the surface of that planet (and i didn't say never, just that i doubt it). As you well know, certain chemical reactions simply won't take place in conditions of low atmospheric pressure--even the bond between hydrogen and oxygen in water molecules becomes unstable. To my mind, even the unrelenting bombardment of stellar radiation from Sol is not as likely a limiting factor as is the low atmospheric pressure. (Before you start citing instances of life found at high altitudes in mountain ranges, i would point out that at the summits of Everest and K2, atmospheric pressure is in excess of 330 millibars--even the bottom of the Hellas Basin on Mars doesn't reach 20 millibars of pressure, and the rest of the planet is considerably less.)

This is identical to the case in asynchronous Serial communications where the stop bit can be different number of bits in length.

YOUR error is the same as farmerman's, focusing on irrelevant details.

The INFORMATION in the data between start and stop bits is the subject here and that is VERY specific in its definition. And that is just one level of many in the protein's production cycle.

I have addressed your math arguments previously and don't intend to waste more keystrokes on that unless you can come up with a new argument.

Just another irrelevant bone you want me to chase. I have already agreed to the existence of and explained the reason for complementary pairs, which is the reason Chargaff's rule exists. That has nothing to do with the INFORMATION encoded in the DNA.

If you are not just playing dumb or sending me on wild goose chases, you tell me about mRNA. At least that is relevant to the discussion.

You do realize that the stop bit in serial communications is data and not programming, right?

Now you are arguing that DNA is only data and isn't a program. I am curious as to what is the program that is running the DNA under your idiotic analogy.

I suppose I must resign my interest within your frame of denialism. Ive always maintained the old Feynman rule that "The most difficult thing is to explain the obvious"
I should have backed off on my use of "preferred bonding". Its too weak a term. I should be saying "EXCLUSIVE" . We have names and means to predict what happens in these biomolecules. (We give em all sorts of names like hydrogen "bonding",methylation, polypeptide linking,amide bonds polymerization (several unique forms < 10 actually) etc etc. All occur with or without catalysis or focused chemical environment.

Youve denied the obvious structures of Uracil and Thymine as :Irrelevant" yet, with a ccaerful chemical view of these, youd have been able to see the biotic insertion of a methyl group results in a nucleotide with overreaching properties.
If you wish to deny these proven chemical facts of life, feel free but I say that you are merely trying to escape to the comfort zone of ID by engaging in a form of the Reverend Paley argument, about some bogus "evidence of a creator" .
However, your arguments start from a point where you appear to be obsessively compulsive in your acceptance of the improbable and the denial of the actual.
Ill continue to remind you of your apparent defiant denial of the laws of chemistry.

Im more a student of "phase Rule" in PT relationships. A cell wal and somatic cells and the nucleus, (ON MARS) probably arose at a time when the planet was less Hostile to all life. However, as there was an atmosphere and a hydrosphere of record, perhaps life had sufficient time to evolve into extremophilic species.
OF COURSE , I have no idea who's right. Im just betting on the observations that LIFE ENDURES, and that , "THE DUDE ABIDES".
Ill predict in a "conceptual model" basis that a complex cell wall and the excretion of other fatty acids , as the PT environment changed, could create a community cell wall to allow the extremophilic forms to endure.
There are nuclleii of life gathered at the edge of space, whats that about?

No dog in the fight , just an interest to see what JPL comes up with nxt. The next ROVER, (I think its due to go up in 2017 or 18) will be specifically set up to hunt ofr life, either as fossils, chemical fossils, or extant forms >
I think they stipulated that the search would primarily at the end of a drill stem.

My comment about the stop bit in serial communications was just targeted at the subject of stop codons in DNA, not the overall operation of the cell. But your nitpicking about data vs programming is just that. The data transmitted by serial could very well BE a program. This is in fact the case every time you download an app to your cell phone or computer.


No, just the opposite. Farmerman is the one who objects to the DNA - Program comparison. Maybe you are more familiar with IT and do see that there is no need of analogy or comparison there. I have often said that the coding in DNA is LITTERALLY a program. What that program runs on is the hardware in the cell. If you think that is an idiotic analogy it just shows your lack of understanding cellular biology.

What this thread is about is whether it is plausible or not that that program and the hardware that executes it could have been the result of unguided natural processes.

actually I have no argument about a program,(if that is what you need to understand the "apparent structure of RNA/DNA). The only thing not obvious is what Stephen Gould and Daniel Fairbanks hd asserted "Which comes first , coding or the organismal adaptation"
As Gould always said, "DNA is merely the bookkeeping of evolution , not its driver"

What I cannot understand, is that, despite the mountains of all sorts of evidence, how you use DNA as the "default to a Creator" argument.
At least that explains your denial of "preferred" bonding among organics . Itd be so damn UNCREATORLIKE to invest ina belief that requires every chemical step to be orchestrated (when science clearly shows that these linkages and reaction and bondings are more or less inevitable)

This is my way of thinking--that any life forms there would likely be survivals from the warm, wet period.



Yeah, that makes sense to me.

Curiosity seemed to have found a methane boom, but then the admin at JPL hurriedly issued a statement to the effect that it might have been an artifact of a calibration error. Those who hope life to be found are now hoping to have an unambiguous methane find (either that, or a meth lab).

The liquid water Curiosity found was on a south-facing slope, on a summer day, and Gale Crater is just three degrees south of the equator. As is the case on our planet, the southern hemisphere is the hemisphere of extremes--winter at aphelion are very severe, and summers at perihelion are very, very warm (by Martian standards). Daytime temperatures that close to the equator in summer can reach 70 F. They also pointed out (as most people probably don't know this) that as had been anticipated, Martian "soil" contains a lot of salts, which might prevent said water from freezing overnight. So the organism would need to be an extremophile which is also halophilic.

Nit picking? You are the one that keeps introducing a completely bogus analogy. It isn't nit picking to point out that your analogy doesn't work and then you completely undermine it yourself by changing it to be serial transmission instead of a program.

The data transmitted by a serial device could be complete garbage and it would still be transmitted and the serial connection would still work properly and not care. Under this scenario you are now presenting, DNA could be complete garbage between the start and stop codons and it would still be DNA if we accept this as your latest attempt at an analogy. (I could transmit totally random bytes for as long as I wanted to and the serial connection wouldn't care unless one of the random bytes ended up the one that stops the transmission.)


So DNA acts like a serial connection with a handshake and a sign off at the end of transmission with no worries about what happens between the 2? And you think I lack understanding of cellular biology?

Summer is a "short" season in the Martian southern hemisphere, but their year is almost 1.9 terrestrial years, so a busy organism could get a lot of reproduction done. The southern spring equinox this year will be on July 4, the southern summer solstice on November 28th, and the southern autumnal equinox will be May 5, 2017. That's more than four terrestrial months for the Martian southern summer. (Dates are courtesy of the Planetary Society.)

There was a word that escaped me this AM when we were taking about finding life on Mars. It was ENCAPSULATION. This is a feature that Archaea and other micro-organisms use to "slime" their ways through hostile environments that have extreme Temps, pH's, etc. The slimes are are actually bsed on a family "tree" of sugqrs that exponentially create chains, like a bunch of elephnts grqbbing trunk to til. What results, if the sugar capsule is eventually dessicated is that these form ribose sugar sructures that can surficially attract pyrimidine or purine "descendants ) such a sGATC. The clay "as a nursery" has a more complex story in that the clays, (smectites to illite) , with their high layer charges , can adsorb and hold these entire sugar/purine structures.
It seems now that successive wetting and dessication of clays is important to causeing these linkages to occur.

I allways wondered what coulda caused the RNA purine (Uracil) to take on a methyl group to become thymine . Perhaps the relatively high layer charges unique to clay mineralogy has a lot to do with more than just being a "COOH cell-baggie"

Im sure that someone who has a closer connection to these sugars and bases and "life experiments" will say Im all fulla **** but hey, I didnt say it was a theory, just a conclusion from reading some of the techy literature

I take it you're suggesting that this could have been a mechanism employed during the warm, wet period which kept Martian life going when the volatiles and atmosphere got blasted away on Mars. It might also explain how Martian life (if there is any) survives the 18 or 19 terrestrial months between southern hemisphere summers. I was thinking along the lines of a kind or spore which was dormant until temperature and water conditions were optimal. There are, by the way, what appear to be clay beds (now "hopelessly" desiccated) at various locations, although the ones that i know of are all in the northern hemisphere. Ecchus Chasma (canyon) is an example.



Here's a link to ESA's Ecchus Chasma page--I wish there had been such resources available when i first began researching what was known about Mars, which was in the '90s.

Eccbus canyon is at about one degree north, so it would have been just on the "edge" or northern summers and southern summers. I know nothing about the surface geology of Gale Crater, where the Curiosity rover is operating. Gale is about five degrees south of the equator, and therefore a prime candidate for both liquid water and signs of life. But i don't know if that's why the location was chosen. The central cone of the crater is about 18,000 feet in elevation, and is made up of many layers, some think suggestive of sedimentary deposits, and dates back more than three billion years--and i think that's why it was chosen (damned rock hounds). It's like pulling teeth to get anything more than the glossy brochure type of information out of JPL, so i've never found out exactly why they chose Gale Crater. I suspect, though, that it was because of the "mountain" in the center of the crater, Aeolus Mons--right now the rover is climbing the mountain. Finding liquid water, and the possibly chimerical methane bloom were just accidental discoveries on the way to the mountain. It's very frustrating for those interested in finding signs of life on Mars.

yeh, but I was more speaking about encapsulation and sugars as a simple mechanism used in earth's dim HAdean nd early Archean days. Freeze/thaw, dry. wet. Its the cycle, not just the mechanisms, that could hqve qccounted for life.
That photo of Ecchus Chsma is solidly weird. Its got all the trappings of a sedimentological sequence that defined the rocks, and these seem to be dipping almost vertically and striking from left to right on the scan. Im assuming that the aspect of this photo is directly overhead and is not some oblique projection, Am I right or is there q mid or low oblique angle to this?

I can understand why Id vote to choose this site. ALL the layering are belong to us (sorry). The Rover could drive across the dipping formations and travel back in time (as long as it dont fall off the roof).

Which Rover is on its way there.?
I am not following this nearly as close as you and am always surprised t the findings (Like the saturated water layer dumping out of a supposed discharge point last year).
NOW THIS, This is amazing.
Did they have a whole catalog of shots and then choose mission sites from some democratic process?
As one of the rockhounds I woulda had this site smack up there at the top. (Next to the one where they had layering and the blueberries). Id assume that they are trying to max out their collection of data through sedimentological time. Im gonna look over the Ecchus link for a while.

Well, i was perhaps unclear. I mentioned Ecchus Chasma because of the possibility of clays. That's about one degree north. Curiosity rover is in Gale Crater, about five degrees south. The photos are from the Mars Global Surveyor satellite, which is in a polar orbit, so yeah, the photos are from roughly directly overhead. The photos are B & W because that makes data transmission simpler.

did you or Edgar post ny similr res shots of Gale Crater? Im getting more interested in these overheads

Now i feel really stupid. Instead of going to JPL and using their really lame search engine, which never answered my question, i did a general google search and varied the search criterion until i got what i was looking for.

Why Gale Crater was chosen as the landing site for the Curiosity rover.

You might also be interested in the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has all manner of cool bells and whistles, like spectroscopy, infrared and UV imaging and laser altimeter mapping. I suspect they will not put a rover in Ecchus Chasma any time soon, though. The canyon walls on the east side are stupendous--from a thousand meters to four thousand meters at the outlet to Kasei Vallis. When storms roll over Lunae Planum, they get katabatic winds which are real howlers, sometimes with wind speeds of 200 or 300 miles per hour. That's significant even in that thin atmosphere. You'd want a tank, not a rover.

Here's a link to a search page of google:

https://www.google.ca/search?q=jpl+ecchus+chasma+photos&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&channel=rcs&gws_rd=cr&ei=dJr7VtbOBYOwe_uWltAK

As i said, the search engine at JPL is really lame. If you go there and try to get images of Ecchus Chasma, you get links to one image at a time.

Wow, looky here. Patterned ground of polygons . These things are active so theres gotta be a shallow 'periglacial' water table that was set up here. It rises, it freezes, It thaws and it shrinks. I was certain there were some glacial clues (a U shaped valley) in one of the photos. This is a ded giveaway for ground located just away from a glacier
I hope some wag from JPL does a book of "aero" features for remote sensing training.