The Origins Of Life Bristle With Puzzle And Paradox

I don’t think this story actually means what Excitable Chucky thinks it means

Some 3.9 billion years ago, a shift in the orbit of the Sun’s outer planets sent a surge of large comets and asteroids careening into the inner solar system. Their violent impacts gouged out the large craters still visible on the Moon’s face, heated Earth’s surface into molten rock and boiled off its oceans into an incandescent mist.

Yet rocks that formed on Earth 3.8 billion years ago, almost as soon as the bombardment had stopped, contain possible evidence of biological processes. If life can arise from inorganic matter so quickly and easily, why is it not abundant in the solar system and beyond? If biology is an inherent property of matter, why have chemists so far been unable to reconstruct life, or anything close to it, in the laboratory?

The origins of life on Earth bristle with puzzle and paradox. Which came first, the proteins of living cells or the genetic information that makes them? How could the metabolism of living things get started without an enclosing membrane to keep all the necessary chemicals together? But if life started inside a cell membrane, how did the necessary nutrients get in?

The questions may seem moot, since life did start somehow. But for the small group of researchers who insist on learning exactly how it started, frustration has abounded. Many once-promising leads have led only to years of wasted effort. Scientists as eminent as Francis Crick, the chief theorist of molecular biology, have quietly suggested that life may have formed elsewhere before seeding the planet, so hard does it seem to find a plausible explanation for its emergence on Earth.

So, what does Darwin’s theory say about this? Can it explain how life arose? Might there be more to the Universe that science can now explain? Could there be some guiding force? There is no doubt that species change over time, but, how? Where are all the mistakes? Why does everything seem linear? Why is the makeup of water so perfect? Why is gravity set at just the right degree? How did tiny little one cell life become a marvelous thinking species?

Science is about testing, retesting, changing one’s hypothesis, seeing where it takes you, until there is no doubt. Darwinism is a religion, practiced as dogmatically as Islamic fundamentalists practice their version of the word of Mohammed, in which no dissension is allowed

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3 Responses to “The Origins Of Life Bristle With Puzzle And Paradox”

  1. Duncan says:

    When did the comments section of at LGF become “private” to read?

  2. John Ryan says:

    But the bible says that teh earth is less than 10,000 years old.It sounds to me like you are next going to start doubting Moah’s Ark and the Great Flood. A slippery slope you are embarking on Teach.

  3. About a week or so ago, Chucky started playing with a method to make them private, pretty much to block them from sites such as Little Green Footballs 2.0 and all the other people he has banned. He has basically almost become Andrew Sullivan.

    I probably lean more towards ID, John. I am not a big believer in Creationism. But, hey, you never know, right? Don’t put me in a box without knowledge of what I think, please.

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