New clues how life could have started from scratch:

http://phys.org/news/2013-07-natural-affinitiesunrecognized-nowmay-stage-life.html

Getting closer to creationists Zero, evolution and life from scratch 1.

Originally posted by sonhouse
http://phys.org/news/2013-07-natural-affinitiesunrecognized-nowmay-stage-life.html

Getting closer to creationists Zero, evolution and life from scratch 1.

It's always good to find the obvious being proved. You could almost use the anthropic principle. If generating RNA from scratch is hard then, since we are here to discuss it, there must have been an intermediate stage to make it likely. Happily for those of us stuck in this perpetual battle with creationists, the stage exists and we can all (apart from the creationisits) be happy with a minor victory.

Originally posted by DeepThought
It's always good to find the obvious being proved. You could almost use the anthropic principle. If generating RNA from scratch is hard then, since we are here to discuss it, there must have been an intermediate stage to make it likely. Happily for those of us stuck in this perpetual battle with creationists, the stage exists and we can all (apart from the creationisits) be happy with a minor victory.

Enough of those minor victories and we will be making new life from dead dirt. That might throw the creationist rabble for a tizzie but I doubt it. They will just move the goalpost, again.

Originally posted by sonhouse
Enough of those minor victories and we will be making new life from dead dirt. That might throw the creationist rabble for a tizzie but I doubt it. They will just move the goalpost, again.

Seems to me that you have an ax to bury in someone's back. You must really hate Christians. It is really rather sad.

Originally posted by Eladar
Seems to me that you have an ax to bury in someone's back. You must really hate Christians. It is really rather sad.

I am not a single religion hater, I dislike ALL of them, ESPECIALLY Islam and Christianity. They have been at loggerheads for a thousand years and no end in sight.

Both religions are based on Judaism (Abrahamic religions) and are based on plain lies and stories.

All the religious wars in the last 1000 years are totally unnecessary, millions of people dead over absolutely nothing but man made BS.

Your so-called god, if it were real, is nowhere to be seen, just right for humans to keep up the biggest ponzi scheme in history.

Stupid Muslims can't even keep their fight to christians and Hindi's. They fight each other, Sunni V Shia and other sects. Bombing each other's mosques and such, car bombs at funerals.

All that hatred just proves to me there is no bible god or said god has washed its rhetorical hands of humans, we are on our own. No god will come down and save our sorry asses if we off ourselves in whatever creative way humanity comes up with, climate change, bio warfare, nukes, you name it, we have come up with a jillion ways to kill and if we manage to off ourselves I think your god will just breath a sigh of relief and write us off as a failed experiment.

Right now there are literally millions of so-called christians who are fighting to force creationism to be taught in bible belt states in the US along side evolution as if creationism were a real science which it decidedly is not.

I want freedom FROM religion, not freedom OF religion. I've said it before and I say it again here.

Individual christians are for the most part ok but the extremists of all religions have effects far outweighing their numbers, they intimately effect every person on earth with their viscous attacks which leads to the right wing government nutters just frothing at the mouth with all the increase in their power, I'm sure they love the ability to dig into everyone's personal lives in their rabid attempt to kill extremism but they don't stop there, they want to control every aspect of human life, all made possible by the extremist religious movements around the world.

The terrorists have won my friend. Our world is not the same place anymore.

All brought to you by your local religion.

Originally posted by sonhouse
I am not a single religion hater, I dislike ALL of them, ESPECIALLY Islam and Christianity. They have been at loggerheads for a thousand years and no end in sight.

Both religions are based on Judaism (Abrahamic religions) and are based on plain lies and stories.

All the religious wars in the last 1000 years are totally unnecessary, millions of peopl ...[text shortened]... d. Our world is not the same place anymore.

All brought to you by your local religion.

Wars are fought by haters, religion is simply the excuse. Now you've created another one, science.

Haters of the world are the problem.

Originally posted by Eladar
Wars are fought by haters, religion is simply the excuse. Now you've created another one, science.

Haters of the world are the problem.

That is the standard excuse. Wars come in all varieties but religious wars cannot be thwarted by negotiation when one or both parties THINK they have some god or other on their side. When thugs fight wars, it is just the biggest and baddest who wins, but when religions conflict the little people are the inevitable victims because the leaders, every one, wants ultimately world domination.

Not even China tries to dominate the entire planet but Catholics and Muslims are trying and have been trying for over a thousand years.

Originally posted by Eladar
Wars are fought by haters, religion is simply the excuse. Now you've created another one, science.

Haters of the world are the problem.

Now you've created another one, science.

How is science used as an excuse for war? That doesn't make sense.
Wars have never been fort in the name of scientific method nor in the name of scientific knowledge but some have been fort, at least in part, in the name of a god or gods and over who's religion is the right one. Saying that religion is just used as an “excuse” doesn't change that fact so religion is partly to blame for some wars while acceptance of the principles of scientific method isn't.

Haters of the world are the problem.

-and the haters that have started wars have, in the main, with extremely few exceptions, been religious and also generally not atheist ( For example, Hitler and all the leading Nazis in WW2 where all theist without a single exception! They were mainly catholic, like Hitler was, or protestant i.e. they were virtually all if not all Christians ).
This is certainly no massive coincidence! It stands to reason -can you figure it out? Tell us, why do you think that is?

Originally posted by sonhouse
http://phys.org/news/2013-07-natural-affinitiesunrecognized-nowmay-stage-life.html

Getting closer to creationists Zero, evolution and life from scratch 1.

Scientists have long thought that life started when the right combination of bases and sugars produced self-replicating ribonucleic acid, or RNA, inside a rudimentary "cell" composed of fatty acids.

However, there is no way to account for how all the precise information is encoded other than by an intelligent designer.

The Instructor

Originally posted by RJHinds
Scientists have long thought that life started when the right combination of bases and sugars produced self-replicating ribonucleic acid, or RNA, inside a rudimentary "cell" composed of fatty acids.

However, there is no way to account for how all the precise information is encoded other than by an intelligent designer.

The Instructor

there is no way to account for how all the precise information is encoded other than by an intelligent designer.

In what sense“ no way to account for” and how do you KNOW this?
And why would the information have to be “ precise” in particular?
And why cannot “all” the required information be nothing other than what can be represented in the sequences of bases in a very short simple strand of RNA-like molecule?

Originally posted by RJHinds
Scientists have long thought that life started when the right combination of bases and sugars produced self-replicating ribonucleic acid, or RNA, inside a rudimentary "cell" composed of fatty acids.

However, there is no way to account for how all the precise information is encoded other than by an intelligent designer.

The Instructor

or RNA,

you obviously haven't been keeping up to date with the current and evolving thinking on this. We now are generally inclined to think from the evidence we have got that the first genes where probably RNA-like (called proto-RNA ) short of being true RNA because simulations and experiments indicate the necessary bases for RNA-like molecules must have spontaneously came first but not quite all the ones for true RNA. Then, later, the more advanced true RNA evolved from this proto-RNA.

Originally posted by humy

Now you've created another one, science.

How is science used as an excuse for war? That doesn't make sense.
Wars have never been fort in the name of scientific method nor in the name of scientific knowledge but some have been fort, at least in part, in the name of a god or gods and over who's religion is the right one. Saying that religi ...[text shortened]... coincidence! It stands to reason -can you figure it out? Tell us, why do you think that is?

How can science be used as an excuse for war? Easy, you make assumptions that can't be proven, then claim that science backs you up. It is the exact same way that some people use religion.

But since such people are 'true believers' they can't see what they are doing, so are immune to any sort of debate on the matter.

Originally posted by Eladar
How can science be used as an excuse for war? Easy, you make assumptions that can't be proven, then claim that science backs you up. It is the exact same way that some people use religion.

But since such people are 'true believers' they can't see what they are doing, so are immune to any sort of debate on the matter.

Interesting. How many wars can you name where a reasoning based on (pseudo-)science was the primary motivation?

Originally posted by Eladar
How can science be used as an excuse for war? Easy, you make assumptions that can't be proven, then claim that science backs you up. It is the exact same way that some people use religion.

But since such people are 'true believers' they can't see what they are doing, so are immune to any sort of debate on the matter.

you make assumptions that can't be proven, then claim that science backs you up.

Firstly, that isn't science because science is not about making “assumptions that can't be proven”. What you describe above is a good description of the creationist religion that pretends to be backed up by science.

Secondly, the only real war that was done to a significant extent was WW2 and done by the Nazis who were CRISTIAN and not atheistic and certainly did not use any real scientific method to back up their hateful beliefs.

Real science has never been used as an excuse for war -only pseudoscience in WW2 and, much more often than this in other wars, religion.

Originally posted by sonhouse
I am not a single religion hater, I dislike ALL of them, ESPECIALLY Islam and Christianity. They have been at loggerheads for a thousand years and no end in sight.

Both religions are based on Judaism (Abrahamic religions) and are based on plain lies and stories.

All the religious wars in the last 1000 years are totally unnecessary, millions of peopl ...[text shortened]... d. Our world is not the same place anymore.

All brought to you by your local religion.

"Stupid Muslims can't even keep their fight to christians and Hindi's. They fight each other, Sunni V Shia and other sects. Bombing each other's mosques and such, car bombs at funerals."

Many of these fights are fomented by Christians.

http://www.democracynow.org/2004/6/9/remembering_the_dead_reagan_armed_iraq

Other than that, I agree with most of what you said. Muslims are not stupid. Christians are just hypocrites, like Reagan and Bush.