Artifical life

Hi Mikey,Is this your way of not participating in EvC? You've got a funny old way of going about it... This has nothing to do with weird Christian delusions about blood. The Bible says that blood is life. In actual reality, there are countless living organisms that don't have blood, so the Bible is clearly wrong. Unless you happen to be a fundy Christian, then the idea of even such a tiny and trivial error is anathema, so one is forced to conclude that reality is wrong. Classy. For someone who endlessly brags about how logical he is, you sure seem to have a tenuous grip on logic Mikey. Just because result X is produced by process Y, does not mean that process Y is always needed to produce result X. To return to an example already covered up-thread, if I can make a pile of rocks, does that mean that all rock piles must be consciously created? Of course not.I think that this is a good model for how fundamentalists worldwide are going to react to advances in artificial life. For as long as we are unable to create wholly synthetic life, they will claim that only God can create life. As soon as any advance is made, they will do a heel-turn and claim that the new discovery proves the need for a designer. All pretty hypocritical really.Mutate and Survive

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"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod

Hi Flyer, A fair enough point. Of course, any attempt to create artificial life would have to make that life out of something... I don't think that this new process speaks directly to that kind of issue though. This was not an abiogenesis experiment. It took a pre-existing cell and gave it new DNA coding, artificial coding, but the experiment does not address the origins of that cell. It just seems to me that for as long as there is no artificial life, creationists will cite this as evidence for a "designer", but as soon as any scientist succeeds in any step towards artificial life, this too will be seized upon as evidence for a designer... Subbie has already mentioned some non-designed objects. I would also like to point out that this experiment was not about a genome being formed through unguided processes. It was all about producing a designer genome. That doesn't really have much bearing upon how naturally occurring genomes came about. Possibly it might impact on some kind of vitalist thinking. What about these rocks? Do they look designed? They're not. They are produced by frost.If you are going to say that something "looks designed", you need to have some kind of objective way of testing this, so that you can apply it to any ambiguous cases. It is not always obvious what is designed and what is not. By those standards, is there anything that does not look designed? Yes, that is true, but there are a couple of problems with applying this argument to the case of evolution; to most biologists, life doesn't look designed, it looks like it arose through unguided evolution; and if God had designed life in such a way as to look evolved, it would be deeply dishonest.Mutate and Survive

Hi Agent and since you're new, welcome to EvC Forum. I agree. It does nothing much for either "side" (and there are rather more than just two "sides" in this debate). It wasn't meant to. The experiment wasn't about providing evidence for evolution. It was about making an artificial genome. Agreed. That's because the experiment wasn't intended to show that life arose from non-living matter. That was not even on their minds. They inserted the genome they created into a pre-existing cell; that would rather undermine it's value as an abiogenesis experiment, no? But that's fine, because this wasn't an abiogenesis experiment.I'm not quite sure why creationist members seem so keen to talk about abiogenesis in this thread. This was not about abiogenesis. Completely wrong. There need be nothing atheistic about what you call "Darwinism". Plenty of theists believe in evolution. Also, I am curious as to where exactly "Atheistic Darwinist theory" suggests that life should be popping up all over the place. Perhaps you could help me out; who suggests that and where?Mutate and Survive