I strongly suspect that given his incoherent emphasis on reagent purity, @Geremy doesn’t understand precipitation either.
The full precipitation is only possible because of the pH above 9.5 Ni is pretty inert in lower pHs. Making mistakes is not the same thing as not understanding.
Also the Nickel chloride are easier to break than nickel hydrate ionic bonds that bond to the oxygen part of the water molecule directly, but all of that is besides the point.
Full precipitation is not necessary.
No, but there’s a very high correlation between them, especially for people who clearly lack relevant expertise.
So why mention it?
I’ve been thinking about why I have been making so many mistakes while talking about Lane’s hypothesis, and I have decided that I am going to refrain from commenting on the alkaline vent hypothesis until I have taken the time to reread both Nick Lane’s book, and my notes on it from several years ago. I will also take the time to review my old chemistry notes from college, and read more recent articles on subject. I don’t what to either undermine legitimate criticism of the hypothesis by making factually incorrect statements, or worse make unwarranted criticism of reasonable aspects of the proposed processes.
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I don’t see that as a reasonable “why” in the context of design. Relative inefficiency would dictate that ribozymes wouldn’t be used at all.
Yes, those exceptions are notable, because there aren’t any extant protein alternatives. The RNA World hypothesis explains/predicts these relics very well.
That’s an objectively false claim.
Even if it were true, it doesn’t do anything to falsify the RNA World hypothesis, because these ribozymes have been evolving for billions of years. There’s no reason why peptidyl transferase wouldn’t acquire a frame of proteins. Again, the reaction center has zero protein participation. How do you explain that in the context of design?
That’s another objectively false claim, as @Rumraket pointed out recently:
I don’t, but then I have significant experience working in biochemistry, unlike Tour. Your bizarre personalization of science (“hurt”) is revealing in its polemicism. Normally, real scientists tend to depersonalize these matters and refer to supporting or falsifying hypotheses, not people.
Again, you’re dead wrong.
Why should anyone seeking truth treat Tour as some sort of expert? Is he a biochemist?
What is the basis to think ribozymes are the product of evolution?
The alternative is that they just consistently assemble by sheer chance alone, without any mechanisms favouring their development out of simpler molecules.
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Ahh, but have you considered magic?
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Observers inside our universe are the result of?
A. Magic
B.Assembly by chance
C.Some guiding force that arose by chance
D. An intelligent design behind the universe.
I would propose that B and C are belief in A.
What’s the source of D?
ZOMBIE THREAD EAT YUR BRAINZ 
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E. A Natural physical processes, such as evolution.
Since D has no more content than A—as it is just an appeal to “it just happened”—I’d say that’s a stupid statement. At least B, where things just happen to come together in the right way, still has some explanatory content. A contingent explanation is still more of an explanation than the magical “intelligence made it happen.”
Throwing a giant handful of dice and getting some specific result by chance still has a sensible explanation. The dice landed like they did because of the circumstance of how they were thrown at the time. There’s a causal, physical explanation there for the outcome.
“Intelligent design behind the universe” has no such content. It’s literally just magic. Magic made it happen just right. You can take out “magic” and replace it with “intelligent design behind the universe” and the explanation has no more detail, nor any more reason why the result obtained.
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I would propose that A is impossible, B is grossly implausible, but at least technically not impossible, and C and D are incoherent and as such also impossible. I would also propose that some demonstration is due that between these four propositions all possibilities are covered. Since you brought them up, would you care to provide one, please?
This I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with either. It treats chance as a black box for any phenomenon too complicated to keep complete track of. And sure enough, many colloquially chance-like things, like dice throws, are like this to an extent. But that’s not to say all chance (or genuine chance, as it were) is also. Some things, as far as we can tell, are fundamentally random.
The upcoming lecture is not addressed directly at you, @Rumraket, but is rather a general commentary on how this discussion, and many like it, go.
What does or does not have explanatory power accounting for a phenomenon is not a function of how satisfying of a story it is. If it were, then to the sufficiently inquisitive no account has explanatory power, for there is nothing to stop them from asking their why’s and how’s until they arrive at the inevitable “it just is”. How quickly one can get to that point is not what we measure the quality of an explanation by. Not a scientific one, anyway. And I’d submit even outside of science it is a crude approximation.
When we say someone understands, say, a machine, we mean that they can assume control over its function. Someone who understands it even more may be able to maintain or repair it, or construct one like it from resources that have no semblance of the final product. They are familiar with the parts of it and how they affect one another. In essence, given some state of the machine, they can predict its future states to within some sufficiently tight margin of error.
Likewise, someone who understands some mechanism of nature is someone who can predict how a system caught in one state will evolve in the near future. They can predict the outcomes of experiments with great accuracy, and with lesser accuracy the development of systems out in the field, where relevant factors are not controlled so tightly. An explanation, then, is something that serves in rendering predictions. It is better if the predictions rendered from it better match observations than the predictions rendered from an alternative, and it is better if rendering such predictions is cheaper, given comparable accuracy, than rendering them from an alternative.
So, to get back on topic, saying “it’s random” is better than “goddidit” only insofar as assuming randomness to act through the whimsy of a divine actor is arguably more costly than assuming said randomness to act directly on nature. Of course, this difference may become more interesting once more is known about the distribution than merely that it is one. Say, if the probabilities can be measured, if what affects them one way or the other can be discovered, with a god in the middle one has to ask why its random whimsy is so specific, where without the assumption of something being-like there, “it just is” remains at worst as much as can be said.
And which if either path grows to be more emotionally satisfying will be an individual matter no debate can ever settle. What will not depend on personal taste however, is that with more gathered data, with more modeling, will come better predicting and, at least as I’d define it, better understanding.
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Agreed. There is a point where chance as an explanation basically stops being an explanation at all and becomes functionally equivalent to god did it. Like chance did it.
That’s if we assume randomness obtains at some fundamental level (which sort of assumes things could have been otherwise, and that they could have been otherwise in an infinite number of ways, and that the current circumstance obtained by a random draw from the entire set of possibilities). I think those kinds of chance “explanations” (if we can even call them that) are very different from a contingent “chance” explanation, like a fistful of dice being thrown.
At least we have some sort of physical explanation here(with dice) that involves initial conditions and then, if we have sufficient knowledge about the state of the system, we can sort of model the throw and through that explain the outcome of the throw using physics. The explanation for the origin of life isn’t going to be “chance did it”, it’s going to be contingent on all sorts of stuff we learn from geology, astronomy, physics and so on. It’s going to involve a lot of deterministic stuff where we can sort of predict general features of the environment from preceding geological and astronomical history of the Earth and solar system, so we know how those conditions that favored life’s emergence deterministically followed from even earlier times.
Nobody is actually positing the sort of chance explanation creationists like Bill Cole is halluscinating, where things happened “just because”. As if a supernova happened and then by some miracle the atoms all just assembled themselves into a living cell or whatever. Nobody believes in that, nobody posits such a hypothesis. It is a creationist strawman and, ironically, in a way more like what they are positing. The miracle actually happened, the atoms did assemble into a living cell, it’s just that “the ability to think without a brain coming from outside of space and time made the miracle happen”.
You are not going where the evidence is leading.
The first person to suggest the idea of atoms is credited to a Greek philosopher named Democritus. More than 2400 years age, Democritus asked whether it is possible to divide a sample of matter forever into smaller and smaller pieces.
Inductive reasoning generated this hypothesis of a particle that for thousands of years would be invisible to the eye. The hypothesis came from inductive reasoning.
Intelligent cause comes from abductive and inductive reasoning from what we are observing. No other explanation makes sense of the data. The alternative does put you in a probability nightmare. Science is about explanations with a high probability of being right.
The God of Abraham.
Democritus’ “atoms” are nothing like actual atoms. What they share in common scarcely extends beyond the name, and that was chosen specifically because there was this historical precedent.
Which, if true, may go some way to explain why it was so awfully wrong, come to think of it. In Democritus’ model the atom is two things: A chunk of material too small to be divided any further and the smallest chunk of the bulk material it may hypothetically have been chipped off from. What is of course left unaccounted for is that fundamentally, no chunk of material is obliged to have all or any of the bulk’s properties. So while there may be a minimal amount of some stuff, it does not follow that therefore that amount is an atom in the sense that it cannot be further subdivided, at the cost of losing the properties that made the bulk.
And, mind you, these ideas were not in any sense beyond the ancients’ minds. How many grains of rice it takes to make a pile is just as old a philosophical conundrum. They were already perfectly comfortable in separating the pile-ness from the rice-ness. It is very easy to judge in hindsight. But if you are going to present the philosophies of Democrit as having any kind of relevancy to ancient or modern scientific modeling of nature, then I suggest you do yourself the favour of actually familiarizing yourself with them, at least superficially, lest you embarass yourself like you do on pretty much every other topic you speak on.
Please, demonstrate that.
No, it is not. Until philosophers have come up with a consistent and reliable way to separate rightness and wrongness, science would be entirely wasted on trying to reach one or avoid the other. A scientific model’s merits begin and end with how efficiently it can render predictions and how accurate those predictions are when compared to observations. That’s it. Whether the explanation is “right”, “likely/probably right”, or satisfactory in any other sense that is not defined by predictive power in this sense is entirely irrelevant to the scientific discussion. It may please or displease us aesthetically, and as a fellow human I appreciate that aspect of any human endeavour such as science, but in terms of whether it is scientific, whether it is what science is about, predictive power is the only metric there is.
I asked for the source. I don’t see how anything can be the source of itself, do you?