Dunsapy Theory (DUNSAPY AND BLUEJAY ONLY)

Well, I'll do my best.

But, first, I need to make sure I understand exactly what it is you're saying and why it is that you're saying it.

You are arguing that, if a scientist does an experiment in which he or she tests how life arose and is successful at producing life, said experiment is not evidence of a non-intelligent origin of life because it is inherently artificial. Is this correct?

Are you familiar with Miller-Urey or any experiment like it?

If so, do you understand why it is that they chose the specific chemical conditions for their microcosm that they did?

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You also claim to have shown this to some other scientists. Did you mean actual researchers, or bloggers on other evolution/creation websites?

So you are aware who you are debating with, I am a PhD student in entomology (bugs), so convincing me of your hypothesis is not the equivalent of validating it scientifically, but failing to convince me will be a good sign of the failing of your argument.

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If you have a great deal of interest in abiogenesis, some of the things said in this thread might be useful for you to see. That thread is kind of mess in many places, though, but you can still find good information there.

Edited by Bluejay, : Clarification

Edited by Bluejay, : Added link to AOkid's topic.

Darwin loves you.

I think several people have already provided reasons why the idea isn't a perfectly valid one (pay particular attention to RAZD's argument), but I'll start from the perspective of experimental design.

Miller and Urey set up their apparatus with a mixture of chemicals that they believed closely approximated the early atmosphere. Also, they simulated lightning, which was a potential causative factor in the formation of life, using electrodes.

So, if their model of the ancient atmosphere had been correct, and they had produced life using that model in their apparatus, would you agree that their model would have been a pretty accurate reproduction of the possible origin of life?

Darwin loves you.

A lot of work has been done on the chemistry of rocks and minerals. I am not a geologist, but I was, once upon a time, a biochemistry major. Certain types of rocks and certain features in rocks occur under very specific circumstances. Looking at rocks that date the approximate ages of life's suspected emergence, a geologist could tell you a lot about what sort of chemical conditions existed at the time that those rocks were formed, simply because they know what conditions would cause those rocks to form.

An example I know about is banded iron formations, which form in the presence of oxygen. If oxygen is not present in water, iron simply dissolves in the water. But, if oxygen is present in the water, the iron bonds to the oxygen (creating iron oxides), and drops to the bottom of the sea. So, where banded iron formations are found, you can bet there was oxygen and iron in the oceans at that time.

Is it your argument that an artificial experiment could not simulate natural conditions?

Or, is it your argument that we can't really know what the conditions were like?

Darwin loves you.

No.

The experiment attempts to mimic the conditions of early Earth. Nothing was added that wasn’t in the early-earth environment. If the experiment succeeds, it will prove that early-earth conditions can lead to life on their own, because the experimental conditions are the same as the early-earth conditions.

The only question remaining is whether or not the {AbE: supposed early-earth conditions used in the study} are accurate. Miller-Urey's conditions have been found to have been inaccurate in several ways, but the same basic study concept has been repeated with corrected conditions, with pretty much the same results.

I have two complaints with this statement:

1. Science doesn’t claim to be able to produce absolute truth. It never did. But, just because we don’t know everything, doesn’t mean we don’t know anything. The inability to produce absolute, 100% truth does not cast everything we do in vast shadows of uncertainty. It doesn’t even constitute grounds for “reasonable doubt.” If you were to use this argument in a courtroom, your client would be going to jail for sure.

2. You are claiming that the only good evidence is direct evidence. If you live in the USA, you’ve probably seen a whole slough of courtroom dramas. In the courtroom, direct evidence is eyewitness testimony, photographs or video footage. Everything else is indirect evidence (DNA, a murder weapon, fingerprints, blood spatters, motive, allabies, etc.).

   When you advocate the position that science cannot answer how life began without seeing it directly, you are also saying that a prosecutor cannot find out who killed their victim unless they saw it happen.

   Do you really believe this?

Edited by Bluejay, : Alteration.

Edited by Bluejay, : Emphases

Darwin loves you.

If the early-Earth conditions included a "poison," and my intent was to determine how early-Earth conditions effected the development of life, then, yes, I would throw poison in with the mix. Otherwise, my results would not be able to answer my question.

It's curious that you should mention this, because many M-U-type experiments have included "poisons" in their concoctions: cyanide and UV radiation are two that I can think of off the top of my head. In both cases, the results were still the production of prebiotic chemicals.

Not me, personally. I'm not an atheist, so I prefer to hedge my bets and let someone else handle it. :D

And, why is this such an issue? to a theistic scientist like myself, the whole point of science is to figure out how God did it all. In order to do that, I'd have to "get into His shoes," so to speak, wouldn't I?

Darwin loves you.

The idea is quite elegant, actually.

Before banded iron formations (BIFs) are seen in the geological column, there isn't much evidence for the presence of free oxygen. But, when BIFs are seen, this is evidence of free oxygen, which produced oxygen, that immediately bonded to iron and precipitated out of the ocean, forming a layer on the seafloor. This is evidence that photosynthesis was occurring, because that's the way free oxygen is formed (I don't know the specifics here, so I don't know if there are alternatives to photosynthesis for oxygen-production, or how they ruled out the alternatives if there are any).

Once the oxygen extracted all the iron from the waters, it began to accumulate in the water and in the atmosphere. That's when conditions were right for other organisms to begin using oxygen to fuel their metabolism. Before then, it was likely that other chemicals were used instead of oxygen.

Keep in mind that oxygen is not actually friendly to organic chemistry: it causes all sorts of problems because of its high reactivity with many other chemicals. So, oxygen could (and most likely, would) be regarded as a "toxin" or "poison" if we hadn't figured out how to breathe it.

On the other hand, the machinery to utilize oxygen is common to all eukaryotes (plants and animals), but photosynthesis is only found in plants. This suggests either (a) that plants were initially animal-like, with mitochondria and oxygen-metabolism, then later obtained chloroplasts and photosynthesis, or (b) that animals were initially photosynthetic, like plants, and later lost their chloroplasts. So, when asking about eukaryotes, then it's quite likely (though not exclusively) that aerobic respiration predated photosynthesis.

But, in relation to the earliest lifeforms, photosynthesis probably predated aerobic respiration.

Darwin loves you.

I have already answered these questions, Dunsapy. You can learn a lot about an environment from the rocks that are formed in that environment, and we still have all the rocks. It's not too hard to understand that.

Yes, you could. But, Miller and Urey---nor any of their successors---did not do thisas I already explained to you. They used conditions from the time period in question, and those conditions produced prebiotic chemicals. They did not "make up" conditions that were conducive to the formation of life. When they set up the experiment, they did not know whether it would produce anything at all. The point of their experiment was to see if it could produce anything at all.

You could say a lot of things. I could say that the entire universe popped out of a giant toaster at 2:13 PM on October 17th, 17899765 BC, but that wouldn't mean it would be science's job to disprove it.

If you're going to make a new claim, you have to support it. Otherwise, scientists would be wasting all their time rebutting everybody's stupid ideas about toasters and fairies and spaghetti monsters, and they would never get any real work done.

Give me one good reason why science should consider your new hypothesis if all you're going to do to support it is say that science isn't 100% absolute. The obvious rebuttal to this is, "Even if I find scientific evidence for your hypothesis, it still wouldn't be 100% proof, and your own argument says that this isn't good enough, so why should you care if you have scientific evidence?"

Does it have to?

Does imperfection automatically invalidate the results?

Edited by Bluejay, : Punctuation

Darwin loves you.

I think this is the fourth time you have said this.

In what way do you think running an experiment would "compromise" the results?

I have no idea how long it took prebiotic chemicals to finally coallesce into true life-forms. I don't know whether the time issue is particularly important at this stage in the research. But, there are mountains of evidence in the form of fossils and geological layers that support a long, continuous history of evolution of that life once it did form. You're free to disbelieve this if you wish, but, if you want your ideas to be considered scientific, you have to support them with real evidence and experiments.

Darwin loves you.

Your argument still consists of the same two points that I have been addressing since the beginning of this thread:

1. Only direct evidence is good enough to prove something.
   
2. Anything short of perfection is worthless.

You have failed to address my courtroom analogies and failed to acknowledge that your argument has lots of consequences that you are unwilling to accept (e.g., by your argument, you shouldn’t believe in God, either), instead opting to just hammer out the exact same stuff you have written in every post so far.

But, you at least have one-up on most creationists: you have suggested an alternative proposal. Your proposal is that we must watch life as it forms on some pristine world in order to know how life arises.

Unfortunately, your proposal doesn’t ameliorate the problems you are complaining about:

• If you watched life form on a new world, you would not be able to prove that the process happened the same way here on Earth. It would still be indirect evidence, only the relevance would actually be less than indirect evidence from the rocks on Earth.
  
• If you watched life form on a new world without touching it, you would not be able to analyze the chemical reactions that are going on unless you could develop magical Star Trek “sensor” technology that can survey entire biospheres in under a minute from orbit, and there’s no reason to believe that such technology wouldn’t alter the processes that were going on, either.
  
• If you watched life form on a new world, you would still have to use science to monitor and diagnose the processes you see, and science leads to unacceptable imperfections (according to your argument).

Once again, all you have done is repeat your original argument. And, by the way, there is already a name for this “theory”: it’s called, ”God of the Gaps.”

In order to simulate millions of years, all you have to do is break the process into its component steps, and show, independently, how each step can happen spontaneously in prebiotic conditions, and then show that the conditions you used were present at the correct time.

Formation of amino acids: check
Formation of nucleic acids: check
Spontaneous homochirality in amino acids: check
Formation of lipid bilayers: check
Self-replication of nucleic acids: check

We don’t have to wait millions of years to see if all these things could have happened, because we have shown how all of these things can happen spontaneously under plausible conditions in very short periods of time. If they can happen in very short periods of time, then “millions of years” just points to long periods of waiting for the different molecules to stabilize into a working network of reactions.

The only things to really sort out now are the sequence of events and the stimuli that dictated that sequence. Once science has gotten that, you are right that we couldn’t prove that it did happen that way, but we will have removed any reason to believe that it didn’t. Basically, science will have shown that, even if God didn’t exist, life still could have happened: belief that God was involved would then only be a matter of personal taste, rather than prudence.

Darwin loves you.

No, this is not what science is about. Did you even read my forensics/courtroom example?

There is no rule in science about whether we should use direct or indirect evidence. Both work equally well: it’s just that direct evidence is easier. But, in the case of historical sciences, like palaeontology, archaeology and origins-of-life, the only thing you get is indirect evidence. In dealing with the diets of spiders (my research), I rely on DNA evidence from gut contents to tell me what the spider has been eating. That’s also indirect evidence. Science makes good use of indirect evidence all the time.

As much as you and many other people may dislike it, indirect evidence is perfectly valid and can be just as meaningful as direct evidence.

So, science would be much more credible if they... didn’t do science?

Why do you assume that we don’t know how to test for “interference”? It isn’t hard.

For example: if your experiment calls for you to cut off the wings of flies and glue different wings on, you would leave one group of flies uncut, and you would cut off another group of flies’ wings and glue the same wings back on, just to see if the cutting and pasting had any effect. That’s called an “experimental control.” (Reference: Greene et al, in Science magazine (1987), see here for an overview of the experiment).

No, it really can’t. Spontaneous:

quote:

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adj.
1. Happening or arising without apparent external cause; self-generated.
2. Arising from a natural inclination or impulse and not from external incitement or constraint.
3. Unconstrained and unstudied in manner or behavior.
4. Growing without cultivation or human labor.

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No, it doesn’t. Can you give me a good reason why a mixture of chemicals in the laboratory would respond differently to an environmental stimulus than the same mixture out in nature?

The only reason we have to use a controlled environment to study origins is because nature is no longer capable of producing and maintaining the conditions that were present at the time life began.

How does this stuff just bounce off you, man?

Do you not understand that the conditions produced by the experiment are the conditions of the environment as understood by the scientist?

If I use the same environmental conditions in my experiment as I found for the time period I’m studying, how could my results not be relevant?

No.

Darwin loves you.

Before I continue, I need to apologize for my rather arrogant and frustrated mood during that last post: it was the end of a long day of looking at dozens of almost-identical spiders (actually 4 different species) under a microscope and still not getting my data to show any obvious trends. And, I accidentally skipped lunch.

Thanks for not losing your cool back at me.

This was a dictionary entry for "spontaneous" (the word "spontaneous" was a hyperlink to the page where I got the definition).

I agree with you. But, the benefit of experimental studies is the ability to isolate a single variable and test it's individual effect on the organism or on the system that you're studying. So, for example, if we want to test the effect of water on the growth rate of fruit flies, we separate our flies into several groups, and feed all the groups the same thing, keep them all at the same temperature and humidity, rear them all from the genetic lineages, etc., then we only change the amount of water we give the different groups. Then, we can show how the amount of water individually affects the system.

The same is true for any indirect study. If we wanted to test what effect a volcano eruption would have (your example), we replicate the effects of a volcano eruption in our experimental setup. Granted, Miller and Urey didn't do this: they only had their one microcosm (probably because of cost restraints). But, if you've ever done chemistry experiments, you know that chemicals don't really display a wide range of different behaviors in relation to the same treatments (like spiders do).

So, since the rocks can tell us quite a lot about what chemicals were present at the time of their formation, we do[ know a whole lot about the environment during the time period where life first began to appear, because chemistry is chemistry---excess sulfur in the rocks indicates volcanism; excess uranium indicates meteorite impacts, banded iron formations indicate iron and oxygen in water, etc. It's quite good evidence, too.

It’s still not perfect, as you say, but this is by far the best way we have to find the answer to the question of how life came about.

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Your last sentence here doesn't follow from the preceding statements. That's called a "non sequitur."

What your argument doesn’t take into account is that intelligence has the ability to mimic nature.

You're an artist, so let's use an art example here. Say you're making a sculpture of a small aspen tree in the park. When you’ve completed the sculpture, it looks just like the tree, except it’s made of clay. You have shown that intelligence can create the complex shape of a tree. But, have you shown that intelligence created the tree itself?

Keep in mind that the tree grew from a tiny seed, over several years, into its current shape, but you probably molded/sculpted/pinched the sculpture into the same shape in just a few sittings. You used a different method, but you arrived at the same result (the shape of the tree). So, the fact that you reproduced the tree’s shape by molding/sculpting/pinching does not prove that the actual tree’s shape was produced that same way.

This is the same as the experimental design analogy I’ve been clumsily trying to express since the beginning of the thread. A scientist reproducing the conditions of early earth by intelligent design does not prove that the conditions of early earth were originally produced by intelligent design, anymore than your sculpting of a tree’s shape proves that the original tree’s shape was produced by sculpting.

Dunsapy Theory is a non sequitur.

Darwin loves you.

I felt this was important to address.

The experiments did not fail.

Creationists have always approached these experiments as if the point of them was to create life. This simply is not true: many of the scientists probably had hopes that they could create life, but none of them realistically expected complete and living cells to pop out of their flasks.

Life consists of lots of internetworking chemical reactions housed together in a discreet compartment. The ability to spontaneously initiate these chemical reactions by producing the right molecules, getting them into the right conformations, and causing them to form complex structures, is all that is required to illucidate the transition from non-life to life. We have not, so far, reproduced the processes by which the entire machine is assembled, but we have learned how to produce dozens of the individual parts, and how to get them into the right conformations and to get them to start interacting. And, we've done it all using stimuli that nature could easily provide for itself: that's the point of these studies---to see what nature could have done by itself, not what science can do.

As of right now, no one has uncovered any reason to suspect that anything but spontaneity is needed.

We have not had to add anything to the mix that nature wasn’t fully capable of supplying. So, of all the steps we've looked at extensively, we haven’t run into a single one that nature couldn’t do on its own.

I know this isn't quite applicable, but I'm sure you've heard of Kitzmiller v. Dover? Or the Scopes Trial? It seems that the courts disagree with you. :)

Darwin loves you.

Maybe we should try it your way: it sounds easier. :)

But, you're still approaching it as if origins scientists set up their experiments solely to create life. Granted, every one of them (and every one of us other biology people) hopes that the set of experiments eventually will produce life, but they aren't doing it to test their ability to create life: they’re doing it to test the early environment’s ability to create life.

If the point was just to create life, then everybody would probably be doing it the same way Craig Venter is trying. But, genetic engineering and nanoconstruction isn’t going to tell us anything about the actual origin of life. So, we’re not doing it that way: we’re trying to do it the way nature did it. It’s much more complicated this way, because we still haven’t figured out exactly how nature did do it.

How would you distinguish the results of the earthquake treatment from the results of the scientist-stirring and God-stirring treatments? In other words, what is the difference between a man shaking a liquid and nature shaking the liquid?

If you cannot distinguish the results of the human-caused and nature-caused trials, then you can’t make the claim that experimental manipulation changes the results. You also can’t make the claim that experimental conditions are required to make the process happen, because the effects of natural and artificial treatments are indistinguishable.

All you can say is that the conditions you subject your experiment to are capable of producing the results you got. And, if you can show that your experimental conditions would have the same effects as the early environmental conditions, you have proven that life could have been started by those conditions alone. Since the experimental conditions in the origins experiments are based on evidence from the time period in question, the experiments directly test those conditions. That makes the identity of the stirrer irrelevant to the question at hand.

Even then, you can’t prove it. What’s to stop God from sending an earthquake to stir up the puddle and start life? Furthermore, how would you know that any given earthquake wasn’t somehow God’s doing? So, all three of the ideas would be consistent with God. That’s what makes the “Goddunnit” hypothesis useless: if you wanted to test three ideas, and “Goddunnit” could be associated with any of the three, how could you use “Goddunnit” to distinguish between the three? You’d never know which of the three was right.

In the tree-sculpture analogy, you have shown how your sculpting methods could produce the complex shape of a tree. But, once again, the experimental set-up for the origins experiments is not the equivalent of sculpting a tree’s shape out of clay: they are the equivalent of trying to get an artificial seed to grow into the shape of a tree.

They are not mimicking the results of nature: they are mimicking the methods of nature.

Darwin loves you.

"People"? Yay! I'm plural! :)

I know that.

My arguments (so far) have all been about experimental design.

Let me try it again:

If you were to sculpt a tree from clay, you would have shown that intelligent design is a method by which the shape of a tree can be made. If you agree that this is Dunsapy Theory, then I have no argument.

However, you have claimed that Dunsapy Theory applies across the board: all lab experiments only show that intelligence can produce the results of the experiment.

But, in the tree-sculpting example, the methods for one example (the tree sculpture) are not applicable to the methods for the other example (the actual tree), so the process of sculpting a tree does not provide any insights into the way the shape of the actual tree was actually made. In other words, the experiment is irrelevant to the natural process.

So, science does not use a method analogous to sculpting in origins studies. Instead, they do the best they can to set up a process that is similar to the actual methods used in nature. So, it's like setting up an experiment to mimic the growth of a seed into a tree.

Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Fix "bold" code.

Darwin loves you.

I understand.

We can continue this later.

Thanks

Darwin loves you.