I’m agnostic about abiogenesis, but lean towards a materially self-sufficient explanation. In principle, I think it’s far too early in our scientific understanding to declare the process either by improbable or inevitable. But I do appreciate the challenge of working on this problem.
In another post on Craig Venter, I came across Jack Szostak (2009 Nobel Prize winner) and the Szostak Lab. They’ve been wrangling with this for some time, and in their latest paper; We propose that the initial genetic polymers were random sequence chimeric oligonucleotides formed by untemplated polymerization, but that template copying chemistry favored RNA synthesis; multiple rounds of replication may have led to pools of oligomers composed mainly of RNA.
Granted RNA first might be the wrong approach, though it’s interesting to see what chemistry/physics alone is capable to of producing.
I did not say that, the problem is it increases the chance of the sort of chemical reactions bad for life. Example, turn up the heat, and something gets fried. You’ve increased the chances of chemical reactions all right, the WRONG KIND.
Tour even points out the issue of Carmelization type reactions. Enough heat will cause denaturing of proteins and melting of DNA, etc.
Which has nothing to do with Brownian motion as you are portraying things in this thread:
This statement predicts that Brownian motion will prohibit any sort of chemical reaction from occurring.
You need to decide, @stcordova. Which mistaken line of reasoning do you wish to pursue - “Brownian motion, thus NO LIFE” or “chemistry, thus NO LIFE”? As you are portraying Brownian motion here, these two options are mutually exclusive, and your switching between the two is making no sense.
Turn up the heat too much and for too long and you might get asphalt. But there’s a pretty broad range of temperatures between those that are too slow and those that yield asphalt. You are talking as if there are only those two extremes. It’s prototypical dichotomous thinking that lies at the heart of so much inadvertent science denial.
That is one type of misguided thinking. Another one is to point at some outliers in a strongly correlated data set and ignore the fact that a clear signal still comes through. As if a S/N ratio must be 1.000 before valid conclusions can be drawn.
As per my question to Sal in the beginning of this thread: "Why then don’t you believe the findings of radiometric and other dating techniques that clearly indicate that the earth is billions, and not just thousands, of years old? "
Some radio metric dates indicate youth of the fossil record. Further there are problems with nucleosynthesis models and serious anomalies in physical distribution of uranium that don’t agree with the stellar origin of Uranium, not to mention the stratification of the fossil layers had to be laid down fast as a matter of principle.
That’s why. That’s good enough for me to then suspect/believe a literal reading of the Genesis account is reasonable.
I certainly don’t believe abiogenesis nor evolution could happen naturally. Believing in God is no more outrageous than Koonin’s acceptance of multiverses, and if one accepts multiverses, one could just as well postulate we happen to live in a universe where Noah’s flood actually happened.
I believe in alternate nucleosynthesis models and nuclear transformation mechanisms.
Supposing that to be true, what is its relevance to radiometric dating?
Again, say what now?
That’s only because it doesn’t take much. A few scraps that you can hold onto while you ignore the vast preponderance of the evidence.
Multiverses are predicted by some theories of physics, but God is not. Big difference.
And no, multiverses don’t imply the possibility of Noah’s flood, particularly when one has to account for the physical evidence that must be implausibly deceptive.
God is predicted by some theories: examples are theories by Richard Conn Henry, John Barrow, Frank Tipler, FJ Belinfante, etc.
But, if this is a purely academic question, then there is no reason argue so fervently on matters that probably can’t be resolved either formally and/or practically. But on a personal level, I wouldn’t be my soul on mulitverses I can’t see.
Please do mention the principle to which you refer. The layering of the fossil record is remarkably consistent and flood geology proposals, such as fleeing critters and floating carcasses sorting by size being responsible for that pattern, do not work at all. There is no need to overthink it, even for those who fled high school science at first opportunity can identify the problems there.
I have no idea who those people are except for Tipler. Are they scientific theories?
But you would bet it on a God you can’t see? Where’s the consistency in that? My point isn’t that multiverse theory is true, only that it’s less outlandish than a God theory, contrary to your claim.
There are dino fossil that were buried in 50 feet of mud rapidly. That means not millions of years at least for that stara.
Next the strata extend for huge areas (like states, continents, sometimes across continents) so “local floods” seems a bad explanation.
Further, I look at stuff like this:
For even larger systems, like the grand canyon, permian basin, etc, do we have one huge mountain of a certain color and composition erode and then suddenly another one starts eroding after the other one is eroded away. What is the mechanism for making each of the eroding sources of sediments sufficiently homogenous.
Fast mechanisms seem in play. There are lots of smooth contact zone between strata, and the bending and folding looks recent, not to mention clastic dykes.
I used to be an evolutionist, but stuff like this makes it hard for me to trust the mainstream on this topic. I’d trust the mainstream more, if they were willing to say “we don’t know for sure”. They should say this for abiogenesis theory and evolutionary theory, but they don’t.
Well, you just suggested multiverses are scientific theories. We can’t test them, observe them, or otherwise confirm they actually exist! If you allow multiverses as scientific, then God-theories can be said to be scientific, though I personally wouldn’t go that far.
Richard Conn Henry in very guarded language stated the case for God in an opinion in the prestigious scientific journal Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/436029a
Koonin puts his faith in unknowable entities like multiverses, so how is God substantially more outrageous as a hypothesis?
I could say the same for the faith put in normative mechanisms creating biological complexity, even though nothing in terms of theory and observation makes a convincing case for such mechanisms to operate as claimed. Whatever created biological complexity, like say a Eukaryote, would entail a statistical miracle. At what point will someone consider a statistical miracle is a theological miracle?
Just because some fossils were buried rapidly doesn’t mean they all were, or that they were buried at the same time.
Then we have Lagerstätten fossils, exquisitely preserved because they were buried very quietly and delicately in slowly deposited sedimentation. They’re found all over the world and at ages from a few million years to Precambrian.
Konservat-Lagerstätten, on the other hand, are deposits known for the extraordinary preservation of fossilized life forms, especially where the soft parts are preserved. Such exquisite preservation require specific environmental conditions, such as anoxic (little or no oxygen) mud and sediment that inhibits bacterial decomposition processes for enough time for mineral exchange, precipitation, and other chemical processes to form casts and films of delicate softer body parts.
Then there are things like angular unconformities which are physically impossible to form in a one year one time Flood. They’re found all over the world too.
Agreed. But what of it? Fast burial can and does happen from local floods, mudslides both terrestrial and sub-sea, simply sinking and hitting a murky bottom, collapsing river banks, and wind drift. Fast burial is not a stretch paleontologists cooked up to evade Noah’s flood, it is a common, regular occurrence which is going on somewhere pretty much all the time. So why wouldn’t some fossils, in some instances, be buried quickly in the normal course of affairs? Others are buried slowly. It is finding them that is the challenge.
Incidentally, I have personally viewed your pictured nodosaur specimen at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, and it is a thing of beauty, which paleontologists place at 110 million years of age. Avail yourself if you get the opportunity.
“Local flood” for huge areas would indeed be a terrible explanation, and you have to wonder, why geologists would teach such a thing? Well, they don’t. Widely exhibited strata happens with the rise and fall of sea levels and inland sea incursions, climate and biosphere variation, volcanic activity, tectonic crumpling and overlay, and much more. Here is a picture I took of extensive strata at Drumheller, Alberta.
Note the several layers of widely separated coal seams, which you can follow for many miles beyond the frame of this shot. These formed over geological time as water waxed and waned east of the present Rockies. How would floating vegetation mats from Noah’s flood do this? If the flood water laid down one mat, it would not be there for the above mats - trust your eyes, that makes no sense. In any case, we have a detailed and extensive exploration of the geology of the era and it does not involve global floods.
If you ever have occasion to visit a resource company office, check out the huge geological maps pinned on walls. You will see lots of color coded formations, representing extensive strata of limestone, dolomite, sandstone, flint, chalk, shale, and much more. All these mineral types have their own formation story; they cannot all derive from one event. They do, however, all represent time.
I see you’re back on your game. That wasn’t a scientific paper, which would generally be called a “letter to Nature”; it was an “essay”. And it appears not to be a scientific theory at all, just a misunderstanding of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Again, because God is not a prediction of any theory.
That is your claim, but is there any evidence for that claim? On the other hand, we know how mutation works, and we observe the differences among species to be of the sort (and with the distribution) typical of mutations. Your knowledge of biology is only a few steps ahead of your knowledge of geology.
That doesn’t actually answer my question. What you say here is why you ignore the results of radiometric dating, not why you don’t accept them.
These results are what they are: thousands of published old dates, derived from careful analysis of individual minerals and whole rock samples. These show relative proportions of radiogenic parent and daughter isotopes that, when consistent across a range of measurements, leave no doubt about the indicated ages.
Individual measurements can contain errors, but when a suite of measurements show internal consistency such as falling on an isochrone, this is not mere coincidence. This is precisely the predicted outcome of a decay system that has remained closed to both parent and daughter isotopes over the time since the rock cooled through its closing temperature.
Just one example of radiometric dating, taken at random from thousand of such analyses published in numerous professional journals for over at least half a century now:
This Rb-Sd dating comes from a series of measurements of a granite in France. Analysed samples were taken from the same granitic body but from outcrops several kilometers apart:
The age of this rock body (295 Million Years, within the limits of the cooling time) is given by the slope of the line defined by the data points. Rb87 decays to Sr87, wheras Sr86 is a naturally occuring non-radioactive Sr isotope.
Originally, at the time of formation, these points would lie on a horizontal line defined by the original Sr87/Sr86 ratio in the melt, at abcissas given by the original Rb87/Sr86 ratio in each sample (before decay). Over time, as decay takes place, each point migrates diagonally towards the top left of the graph towards a lower Rb87/Sr86 ratio and a higher Sr87/Sr86 ratio, at rates according to the decay rate of the system. This migration is proportional so that at each point in time the points will still line up, but along a line of increasingly larger slope.
The question is now, how to you get these points to line up so nicely if they do not form part of a closed radiogenic system? If there were losses or gains of parent and/or daughter material these points would never line up. No assumption has been made about the amount of daughter material originally present, in fact, the original ratio of Sr87 over the also present non-radiogenic isotope Sr86 comes out the analysis itself, it is the intercept of the Y axis at 0.71050.
This technique is self-diagnostic. Normally, measurements will be repeated a number of times for each sample to increase precision, and the points would show error bars (not reported in this particular study). The line of fit is constructed through the points, taking into account these error bars, and is only accepted if the errors satisfy ordinary statistical criteria.
This is just one example. There are thousands. Very often, researchers repeat measurements on the same rocks using different techniques (i.e. different decay systems such as U-Pb) and more often than not, the results of different techniques are in close agreement.
This is the reality of the body of scientific evidence you have to consider when it comes to the age of the rocks. Why don’t you accept these results?
BTW, arguments about fossil preservation and rates of sedimentation do not make these radiometric results go away. Others have already responded about your simplifications when it comes to those topics. I could add a lot more, but let me just say that the Earth is a very complex system where many different physical and chemical processes are constantly at work simultaneously. Attempt to reduce such a system to simplistic sound bites are doomed to fail.
Sedimentation is sometimes is rapid, sometimes slow, and sometimes absent altogether, at the same spot on Earth at different times. There is probably no spot on Earth that hasn’t been flooded at least one in its life time, and most points have been flooded (and exposed again) many times over. The record is in the rocks.
