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Author | Topic: Does Death Pose Challenge To Abiogenesis | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Jumped Up Chimpanzee Member (Idle past 4970 days) Posts: 572 From: UK Joined:
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Hi Cedre
Bluejay's example of a car is a good one. Complex bodies like the human body require a number of systems to operate. Just like a car, a body can cease to function if it runs out of fuel, develops serious faults, parts wear out, or if it suffers a serious accident. A newly dead body may appear to have everything necessary to sustain life, but if the heart won't work, or the arteries are blocked, or there is insufficient energy available, or the brain is badly damaged, it just won't function. For various reasons that others can probably explain much better than I, after it stops functioning the body deteriorates almost immediately to a point where it cannot be resusitated.
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Jumped Up Chimpanzee Member (Idle past 4970 days) Posts: 572 From: UK Joined:
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Hi Meldinoor
You raise a question to Cedre asking him to define "life". I'm interested in simple definitions of "life" and "death" (not as a sort of weird hobby, but in the context of this discussion). Would you agree that life could be defined as "a functioning organic system" and that death could be defined as "an organic system completely ceasing to function"?
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Jumped Up Chimpanzee Member (Idle past 4970 days) Posts: 572 From: UK Joined: |
Hi Cedre
You say: "the only way for parts to fade from a corpse is through decay and like the Wikipedia article said decay can take a few days even years." That is not correct. Parts can "fade" from a corpse instantly by being eaten or damaged in any number of different ways. Even if the body is not obviously decayed or damaged, as a layman I don't have any difficulty in understanding why a life cannot normally be resuscitated. Forgive the lack of technical terminology, but the blood "dries up" very quickly and will no longer be oxygenated. The brain suffers irreversible damage when it is deprived of oxygen. And very often, the cause of death will be the reason why the body cannot be resuscitated: for example, organs become damaged through age or disease. How would you be able to "kick-start" a life again, if the heart is seriously faulty and the brain is irreversibly damaged? Surely you can see that the processes required to repair and kick-start a fully-formed organism that has died are totally different from the gradual series of processes that would have led from a situation where no life had ever existed to the formation of the very first simple lifeform (abiogenesis).
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Jumped Up Chimpanzee Member (Idle past 4970 days) Posts: 572 From: UK Joined: |
Hi Cedre
Well, I will leave it to someone with better medical knowledge than me to explain what happens to a body to make it impossible for life to be resuscitated more than a few minutes after death. However, you ignored the point I made that a life often ends because of a failure of some part, such as the heart. So even though it might appear that you have everything in place for a body to live, if the heart won't work, life is impossible. You still seem to be confused about how the first life emerged. You may term it as "an assembly of life-giving components" but obviously it wasn't an assembly of life-giving components in anything like the same way that a human body may be described as an assembly of life-giving components. Again, the process that led from a situation where there was no life to one where the first simple life emerged, is totally different to the process that would be necessary to get a once living body back from the dead! I suppose in theory it is possible that decomposed materials that were once part of a body might be used in a new process of abiogenesis. Just don't expect to see it happening before your eyes! Edited by Jumped Up Chimpanzee, : No reason given. Edited by Jumped Up Chimpanzee, : Typo
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Jumped Up Chimpanzee Member (Idle past 4970 days) Posts: 572 From: UK Joined:
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Hi Cedre
You say: "a car won't have speed unless it is driven by somebody" What about if it is driven by a computer? Does the computer have a soul? You keep ignoring the points that many have made that the "parts" or materials that were present for abiogenesis were nothing like an apparently intact dead body. They would have been chemical elements or compounds that, under certain conditions of chance, went through a non-random process of reactions that eventually led to what we would consider to be self-replicating lifeforms. That is a TOTALLY different situation to repairing and resuscitating a fully formed but deceased body. Going back to the car analogy, if you had all the raw materials to build a car (iron ore, rubber, oil, glass, etc) and processed those materials from scratch and assembled them to build a car, that is a totally different series of processes than those that would be needed to repair and kick-start a car that was already fully built but had developed some sort of fault (say the engine was seized up by rust). You also seem obsessed with certain parts of the body not deteriorating quickly after death and wondering why we can't therefore resuscitate the body. Well, if there was a serious fault with your heart, brain, or vascular system, for example, it wouldn't matter how perfectly preserved the rest of your body was, you wouldn't be able to live. Yes, we can live with some faults, like a car. But a car won't have speed just because it's lights are working perfectly or it has beautifully preserved leather upholstery. If it develops a serious fault with the engine, or runs out of fuel, it won't have speed.
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Jumped Up Chimpanzee Member (Idle past 4970 days) Posts: 572 From: UK Joined: |
The "driver" in the human body may be considered to be the brain, or some other organ - no need for a soul, whatever that is.
You STILL don't get it! The "parts" as you call them, that would have been necessary for abiogenesis, are not the same as body parts! They would have been chemical elements or compounds that came together by chance UNDER CERTAIN CONDITIONS and went through a series of reactions that eventually led to self-replicating lifeforms. There is NO REASON why the parts of a newly deceased body should go through the same process!
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Jumped Up Chimpanzee Member (Idle past 4970 days) Posts: 572 From: UK Joined: |
Cedre
Why do you have to go all the way back to abiogenesis? And exactly where do you draw the line indicating the end of abiogenesis? All the "parts", as you put it, that were necessary for MY life to start were present at the moment of my conception and during my development in my mother's womb. Does that mean that if I die and cannot be resuscitated, it proves that my gestation never took place?
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Jumped Up Chimpanzee Member (Idle past 4970 days) Posts: 572 From: UK Joined: |
Cedre
Let’s try another analogy to demonstrate how and why you are talking about completely different processes and there is no logic to your argument. ANALOGY - STALACTITES These are mineral deposit formations that hang from the ceilings of caves. They require the presence of limestone and water to form. However, they do NOT form wherever limestone and water happen to be present. It requires a particular set of circumstances and processes to occur. It requires the water to run through the limestone rock and pick up minerals from that rock. It then requires the water to drip from the ceiling of a cave and leave a deposit of the minerals at the point of the drip. The water must continue to drip from this exact point over a long period of time for an obvious stalactite to form. If that stalactite falls from the roof of a cave and smashes into the ground, breaking into many pieces, even though all the same parts that formed the stalactite are still present, they will not immediately reform to make the stalactite. It would require a complex and maybe impossible set of processes to reform that same stalactite using the same parts. If it proves to be impossible to re-assemble the stalactite and fix it back on the roof of the cave, that does not disprove the long and gradual process that formed the stalactite in the first place — because that was a completely different process!
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Jumped Up Chimpanzee Member (Idle past 4970 days) Posts: 572 From: UK Joined: |
Cedre
You are still confusing yourself by talking about "parts" being present at the start of abiogenesis and also when a body has just died. As I have already explained, the "parts" that would have been present at the start of abiogenesis are completely different to the "parts" that make up a living or recently deceased body. Completely different. The "parts" that would have been present for the process of abiogenesis to begin would have been chemical elements or compounds that began a process of reactions. They would not have in any way resembled the "parts" of a living or deceased body. And the process of abiogenesis the led to the very first simple self-replicating lifeforms would have been totally different to the processes that keep a fully-formed body alive and that can sometimes resuscitate a body. So, we are talking about: - COMPLETELY DIFFERENT KINDS OF "PARTS" and - COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PROCESSES ACTING ON THOSE DIFFERENT "PARTS". There is no connection between your difficulty in understanding the reason for death, and your difficulty in understanding the process of abiogenesis. They are completely different things.
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Jumped Up Chimpanzee Member (Idle past 4970 days) Posts: 572 From: UK Joined: |
Cedre
You say: "So again parts are not all that's needed for life to begin, a life force is needed..." Let's stick with the car analogy to see where the "life-force" comes from. Consider a set of jump-leads attached between 2 cars. Car A is already running, and you use the leads from that car to get Car B running. You may compare that directly to your mother's umbilical cord, which was like a set of jump-leads that got you running. There is the "life-force" that got you started. Your mother got her "life-force" in the same way, as did her mother, etc, etc. It is completely irrelevant how the first life-form came into existence when you are considering why the life-force that someone derived from their mother comes to an end. The fact that someone dies does not in any way prove or disprove how the very first beings came into existence. To go back to the car analogy, if Car B suddenly stops running, does that in any way prove or disprove what started Car A?
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Jumped Up Chimpanzee Member (Idle past 4970 days) Posts: 572 From: UK Joined: |
Cedre
I think this is going to be my last try! As Drosophilla says, I'm probably wasting my time. You say: "It is not irrelevant seeing that car A itself had to be started by a driver, so there's no way of escaping the need for a driver or a "life-force"." I made the point about you obtaining your "life-force", which I would replace with the word "energy", from your mother. And she from her mother, etc, etc, back through time. The Theory of Evolution is that as you follow your ancestors back through time you would get to simpler and simpler lifeforms, and the basic hypothesis of Abiogenesis is that the simplest life-forms emerged from a series of chemical reactions. Now, as a layman, I have no understanding of exactly how that might have happened, but I don't have a problem at all accepting that in principle it could happen. Do you accept that chemical reactions occur all the time without any need for "a driver"? (This was why I used the analogy of stalactites earlier in the discussion, to show that things can be formed through chemical reactions, in a chance situation, without any human or other intelligent involvement, and that the processes that formed them are totally different to the processes required to repair or rebuild them.) Edited by Jumped Up Chimpanzee, : No reason given.
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