No life created from scratch

[biblear...@hotmail.com]

This is a spin-off post from the original entitled "have you observed
abiogenesis."

Darwin123 stated that DNA was created from scratch and provided the
following link and short excerpt:

http://www.embo.org/documents/report02.pdf

"‘Synthetic’ viruses
It was noted that it is now possible to synthesise simple
viruses from scratch. For instance, US researchers
recently announced they had synthesised viable polio
virus using only commercially available chemicals and
publicly available genome sequence."

However, the rest of the message makes it clear that preexisting
genetic material was used:


"They did this by
ordering short sections of DNA from companies selling
made-to-order sequences, and then ‘stitching’ these
together to obtain a DNA copy of the polio virus genome.
This was converted to RNA using an enzyme, and this
synthetic polio genome was used (along with cell
extracts) to manufacture virus particles. This research
has shown it is possible to synthesise simple viruses, but
it is not clear what the implications are for developing
BW (polio virus would not be a particularly effective BW).
Viruses such as smallpox are of greater concern, but
would be much more difficult to synthesise. This is
partly because they are bigger (smallpox virus has
200,000 base pairs in its genome compared with 7,500
for polio virus) and partly because some of the virus’s
pre-formed proteins are needed to start replication."

The idea that life - or a virus was created from scratch is a complete
myth. Even Craig Ventor stated that he did not create life from
scratch. That's a myth.

http://articles.cnn.com/2010-05-21/health/venter.qa_1_synthetic-chromosome-genetic-code-synthetic-life?_s=PM:HEALTH

CNN: Did you create new life?

Venter: We created a new cell. It's alive. But we didn't create life
from scratch.

In other words they used preexisting life - and injected DNA and made
life out of it. From life came life. No life from scratch.

[Richard Norman]

On Sun, 5 Feb 2012 16:53:29 -0800 (PST), biblear...@hotmail.com
wrote:

There is a misunderstanding what "commercially available chemicals"
means. The biochemical supply houses make commercially available all
sorts of biochemicals that are extracted from living organisms and
then purified.

I don't think any scientist would ever claim that creating a living
entity, whether a virus (if you choose to think of viruses as "living"
or ultimately some protobacterium, by this technique is in any sense
abiogenesis in the usual sense. Indeed it characterizes what is truly
"intelligent design". Natural abiogenesis is rather a different
story. Still, these techniques help suggest patterns and pathways
that natural abiogenesis might have taken.

[Darwin123]

> http://articles.cnn.com/2010-05-21/health/venter.qa_1_synthetic-chrom...

>
> CNN: Did you create new life?
>
> Venter: We created a new cell. It's alive. But we didn't create life
> from scratch.
>
> In other words they used preexisting life - and injected DNA and made
> life out of it. From life came life. No life from scratch.

So you are claiming that virus particles aren't truly alive. You
are pointing out that the genome of the virus isn't sufficient to
ensure the reproduction of the virus particle. The DNA by itself is
not alive, according to you.
Okay, this is arguable. However, it is impressive.
As you were told before: If a virus is alive, then humans have created
life from scratch.
They created complete genomes from scratch. Those fragments of DNA
that they bought from chemistry manufacturers were created from
scratch, or could have been.
The short sequences of DNA were made from monomers such as
nucleotides. These nucleotides were made from "scratch", or could have
been made from scratch. The nucleotides were assembled into short
segments with other monomers.
The scientists then took these short segments of DNA and assembled
those into the genome of the virus. The genome of the virus is all
that reproduces. The capsid and other associated proteins are used for
protection and as enzymes.
However, assembling the genome is a considerable part of the
manufacture of life. The enzymes and substrates necessary for a cell
to function are also being decoded.
My conjecture is that someone will have assembled an entire cell
from basic constituents within a few decades. I predict that they will
use some enzymes extracted from a living thing, since that is still
the easiest way to acquire these enzymes. Even if one knows how to
make such an enzyme, it is easiest to get them from a living thing.
However, the structure and composition of these enzymes will be known.
Therefore, they could be made from scratch.
Your point about making life is rather weak, since we know how to
make most of the constituents. More relevant to your point is the
following.
The procedure and environment used to make those viruses are not
"natural". That is, it is extremely improbably that the sequence of
steps that led to the manufacture of these viruses could be found on
any planet which did not already have highly evolved or designed life.
The detailed procedure required either human beings or an organism
behaviorally similar to human beings.
These viruses could not have formed by complete chance. However,
they can and were formed as a consequence of natural selection. The
probability of 500 nucleotides in the ocean jumping together
"randomly" in a precise order is effectively zero. However, the slow
polymerization and selective degradation of nucleotides is not random
in the strictest definition.
Suppose you had a bag full of balls of different sizes. Then you
select balls one at a time and but them in a vertical wrack one at a
time. The probability that they will be in the order of bigger balls
on top of smaller balls is negligible. However, take that bag, shake
it, and pour those balls one at a time. The shaking will place the
bigger balls on top due to selective processes.

[biblear...@hotmail.com]

On Feb 5, 5:40 pm, Richard Norman <r_s_nor...@comcast.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 5 Feb 2012 16:53:29 -0800 (PST), biblearcheol...@hotmail.com

> >http://articles.cnn.com/2010-05-21/health/venter.qa_1_synthetic-chrom...

>
> >CNN: Did you create new life?
>
> >Venter: We created a new cell. It's alive. But we didn't create life
> >from scratch.
>
> >In other words they used preexisting life - and injected DNA and made
> >life out of it. From life came life. No life from scratch.
>
> There is a misunderstanding what "commercially available chemicals"
> means.  The biochemical supply houses make commercially available all
> sorts of biochemicals that are extracted from living organisms and
> then purified.
>
> I don't think any scientist would ever claim that creating a living
> entity, whether a virus (if you choose to think of viruses as "living"
> or ultimately some protobacterium, by this technique is in any sense
> abiogenesis in the usual sense.  Indeed it characterizes what is truly
> "intelligent design".  Natural abiogenesis is rather a different
> story.  Still, these techniques help suggest patterns and pathways
> that natural abiogenesis might have taken.

If evolutionists spent more time correcting misconceptions spread in
the pro-evolution press and amongst evolution advocates, nobody would
believe in evolution except the diehard. I get continually hounded by
evolutionists telling me that life was created from scratch.

[Richard Norman]

On Sun, 5 Feb 2012 17:58:47 -0800 (PST), biblear...@hotmail.com
wrote:

That is different from saying that abiogenesis has been accomplished.

[Rolf]

Really? If that's the case, there are many 'evolutionists' unaware of the
fact that evolution is not abot how life was created form scratch. Funny how
such a misconcpetion persists, already Darwin made it clear that his project
did not include the process of creating life from scratch.

Please try to understand and accept that we are dealing with two very
different subjects:

1. Evolution as Darwin had in mind when he wrote 'Origins': "The origin of
species by means of natural selection: or, the preservation of favored races
in the struggle for life".

Please note alse what Darwin wrote at the end of 'Origins':
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been
originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this
planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so
simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have
been, and are being, evolved."

With that settled, we may proceed to

2. Abiogenesis. The process leading up to the existence of the first living
and reproducing cell. Nobody knows, not even Christians or sny other
religious people. Whereas religious people want to believe god did it,
science by its very nature is unable to say anything about it. What we do
know, however, is that most religious concepts about nature have been proven
wrong. Most people today accept the scientific worldview, but believers in
creations stories stop before abiogenesis. Fine, let them have their faith.
But science, by it's very nature (or rather mankind's insatiable curiosity)
doesn't stop there. We solved the mysteries of the firmament, gravity, the
solar system. It turned out that it was not governed by divine spirits, but
by natural forces.

So what can we do but keep digging, to see if there may be ways in which
natural forces might be the (sole) source of the first life on earth? We do,
and we are still at it. Who knows what the outcome may be? We still have a
long way to go, but we don't think we have met fundamental barriers against
further exploration of the possibility.

Unexpectedly, we have found many organinc compounds and biological building
blocks in outer space. What more still remains to be found?

We know that after a time when the planet couldn't possibly have any life
there came a time when primitive life was present.

We also know that with respect to science, religious scriptures contain very
little of value.

[Steven L.]

"Rolf" <rolf.a...@tele2.no> wrote in message
news:jgojgk$n2p$1...@news.albasani.net:

In his TV series "Cosmos," Sagan definitely included the advent of the
first life from nonliving molecules as part of evolution:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZpsVSVRsZk

So while scientists may not regard abiogenesis as part of the theory of
evolution, it would seem that some scientific popularizes have chosen to
cast the whole time sequence from non-living molecules to humans as an
evolutionary process.




-- Steven L.

[Paul J Gans]

I'm sorry, but this is stupid. We can synthesize short stretches
of DNA with ease, but the process is relatively slow and expensive.
It is faster and cheaper to use pre-existing short strands of DNA.

I don't expect you to understand this, however, because you know
nothing about chemistry or the fact that there is no distinction
at all between compounds produced by living entities and compounds
produced in the laboratory.

--
--- Paul J. Gans

[Paul J Gans]

I think there is need to give this emphasis. Creating, from scratch,
an organism that lives is one thing and demonstrates that living matter
can indeed be made by mechanical processes other than "normal
reproduction?

The other pathway is to recreate the primordial conditions under which
life came into being and then sitting and waiting for it to happen.
This is a very impractical process. First, we do not know the primorial
conditions, but, second, we do think that the process took a long
time measured in thousands if not tens of thousands of years.

To my mind it is sufficient to demonstrate that the creation of
life is possible. That alone proves that no supernatural event is
needed.

[Paul J Gans]

Actually, you don't. The study of the creation of life is called
"abiogenesis". Evolution is something else entirely. Evolution
is based on observable facts, the leading ones being that there
are living things today that did not live long ago.

Either god has indulged in continuous creation (in which case the
Bible is quite wrong in its origin stories) or present life has come
from modifications of life that existed long ago.

The *theory* of evolution is the set of ideas expressing how those
modifications came about. Even if wrong, the *facts* of evolution
still remain.

[Eric Root]

On Feb 5, 7:53 pm, biblearcheol...@hotmail.com wrote:

> http://articles.cnn.com/2010-05-21/health/venter.qa_1_synthetic-chrom...

>
> CNN: Did you create new life?
>
> Venter: We created a new cell. It's alive. But we didn't create life
> from scratch.
>
> In other words they used preexisting life - and injected DNA and made
> life out of it. From life came life. No life from scratch.

What's it a myth _for_?

[Richard Norman]

In the popular mind, the origin of life and its subsequent radiation
by means of biological evolution all are part of one concept. However
science notes that the original origin of life occurred through very
different mechanisms then its subsequent evolution and the latter
process is given the title "evolution largely but not completely by
means of natural selection". That is, Darwinian evolution suitably
extended by what we have learned since he wrote does not include
abiogenesis.

I don't have any problem saying that we should all consider
abiogenesis as well as biological evolution and acknowledge that,
although we know a tremendous amount about the latter with massive
evidence for it, we know very little about the former (abiogenesis)
with several different ideas still being formulated and evidence
searched out. Nevertheless, the fact that abiogenesis is still beyond
our ken makes absolutely no impact on the validity and reality of
biological evolution for which we do have excellent well tested and
validated mechanisms and pathways and tons of indirect evidence of
several different and quite independent types.

[Frank J]

On Feb 5, 7:53 pm, biblearcheol...@hotmail.com wrote:

> This is a spin-off post from the original entitled "have  you observed
> abiogenesis."

Where you have yet to answer my question.

Running away and starting a new thread tends to give people the
impression that you know you're wrong. Is that what you want?

(snip)

[Frank J]

Such as Pope John Paul II, who described the evidence for evolution as
"convergence, neither sought not fabricated." Apparently aware that
the peddlers of pseudoscientfic alternatives do nothing but seek and
fabricate "evidences," and even then can't find convergence.

The irony is that if the public took a long look at the evasive games
that anti-evolution activists play to avoid confronting their own
hopeless internal contradictions (e.g YEC vs OEC) only the diehard few
% would believe in any of those failed "theories."

Which one is yours by the way?

> I get continually hounded by
> evolutionists telling me that life was created from scratch.

So you should be able to name some, maybe even bring them here to
debate.

[Paul J Gans]

We are not bound by the mistakes of others.

But you have a point. It is like my eternal fight to get
folks to realize that there are facts of evolution as well
as a theory of evolution that binds those facts together.

There are no facts yet found about what I shall call "original
abiogenesis". That does not impinge on evolution in any way,
Evolution and abiogenesis share almost nothing. There is no
real reason to connect them, no matter what folks like to do.

[SkyEyes]

Excuse me, that life was "created from scratch" is what you
creationists believe. We of the reality-based community rather think
it was the natural product of chemistry.

Brenda Nelson, A.A.#34
skyeyes nine at cox dot net OR
skyeyes nine at yahoo dot com