| Current Replies for "The Creation of Life" |
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The Creation of Life
(Richard)
Posted: 22/12/2002
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The creation of life
The UK’s Guardian newspaper recently carried a piece about the attempts to create life in the laboratory. The author was Paul Davies who has written a book called ‘The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin of Life’. Davies argues that the oft-replicated Stanley Miller experiment, in which amino acids were created by passing electrical discharges through a mixture of water and gases, is something of a false start to the trail which will lead to the laboratory generation of life. Davies says that ‘Trying to make life by mixing chemicals in a test tube is like soldering switches and wires in an attempt to produce Windows 98. It won’t work because it addresses the problem at the wrong conceptual level’ He suggests that the proper place to investigate the origins of life is at the top but argues that Craig Venter’s startling reconstruction of genomes is still not likely to lead to the production of new life. Davies writes, ‘If artificial life is manufactured it will be by applying the lessons of information technology and nanotechnology rather than organic chemistry’. He alludes to ‘the hottest property’, quantum computation, which attempts to harness the ‘weird’ abilities of electrons and atoms to process information at the molecular level. Davies concludes that we will not know how the universe produced life until we understand the nature of information ‘and the principles that govern its dynamics and complexity.’
I think that all this is interesting from the Alphomist point of view because it suggests that at the most fundamental levels of energy there is huge complexity and an element of design which can perhaps be explained only by the idea that Alphoma was highly organised and, to an extent, in control of the Big Bang explosion and its aftermath.
Richard.
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start of life
Siegfried
Posted: 22/10/2015
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sceptics say that trying to create life in a test-tube by applying electricity/gammaray’s/UV light/what-else-have-you-got-in-the-shop to a mixture of likely carbon containing molecules is like waiting for a hurricane passing through a junkyard to assemble a functioning Boeing 747. All too true I’m afraid, and probably worse than that. The 1st reliably self replicating molecule would have to be a DNA or at least an RNA molecule and either is complex enough to be compared with a fleet of Boeing’s and Wilber and Orville Kitty Hawk’s plus Starship Enterprises and Star Dreadnoughts. Nevertheless it happened, and interposing ‘God’ as ‘cause’ only multiplies, vastly, the problem.
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I like the image of the junkyard - some heap of junk, some clever breeze! and, of course, agree absolutely with your remark about ';god';s'; role. When are we going to grow up?
Richard
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