Modularity, A distinguishing property of life

No, you can't (not joking): You could prove that you made it practically impossible for us to discover how you bought a pizza yesterday. Evolution makes many predictions. Any one of these could falsify evolution. Evolution predicts that baboons can not give birth to starfish. If a baboon troop starts giving birth to starfish evolution, as currently formulated, is history just as soon as the observation is confirmed.However, this would still not wholesale abolish evolutionary theory. What ever new theory comes into play will have to include all the natural history currently known, and there is a pant load of evidentiary fossil remains that very strongly suggest that the vast majority of life on Earth has followed a course of gradual change. How one adds the new observation that baboons, at the very least, are able to violate the random mutation and natural selection parts IOW, all of it would be difficult, to say the least.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them.

I said (a statement regarding Ā) wrong. Let me rethink it. Better yet. This is off topic: I'll shut up.Well, not shut up, per se: Mr. Jack said nothing of the sort. He merely said "life was not and now it is. It came into existence." God popping it into existence during those 13.7 billion years isn't ruled out by the statement.Edited by lyx2no, : Negate myselfEdited by lyx2no, : To regate myself.Edited by lyx2no, : Clarity.Edited by lyx2no, : Disable smilies: " Ā)" produces and unintentional winky.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them.

Who is using the term as coined by T. H. Huxley in 1870? We've had updates, ya' know.Edited by lyx2no, : Time to wake up yet?

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them.

But we do.There was no quarter under my pillow when I went to bed last night. There was a quarter under my pillow when I got up this morning. It is without doubt that a quarter came to be under my pillow during the night. There is nothing in the slightest iffy about it. It is an absolute certainty.However, that my mum put it there can be doubted. There was always my dad, siblings, wider kin, strangers and you-know-who. Edited by lyx2no, : Retitle.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them.

Please, we don't have a clear cut distinction now, yet alone at the beginning. Are viruses alive? How about prions?

1. Abiogenesis is an empirical event.
2. Abiogenesis is a field of study into an empirical event.
3. Abiogenesis is a synonym for spontaneous generation.

A is absolute: Life come into existence.
B is tentative: The nature of the scientific process disregards the god hypothesis as nonproductive; however, it does not currently claim to have resolved the issue.
C is equivocation: It is disingenuous to use one definition to discredit another.AbE: To next post:Not true, not true, not true, not true, not true. Nothing nearly so complex as a prokaryote was the first life.Edited by lyx2no, : No reason given.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them.

Because it is true. You yourself just said so:Presto! abiogenesis if fact.Do you not recognize your equivocation? Fascinating.AbE: Sorry, I guess I should explain: A≠B. In your first statement you agreed to A. By definition A "Life came into existence" equals "abiogenesis". In you second statement you're referring to two different definitions:So long as you refuse to separate the two you'll be running in circles. One can agree with the first without regarding the god hypothesis as nonproductive.Edited by lyx2no, : No reason given.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them.

Abiogenesis has only one possible connotation (as defined by Hyroglyphx in Message 69) from the beginning of the world to the end, padlock, no key. You win.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them.

I have made no either-or argument, false or otherwise; nor by way of an unrelated issue or otherwise. You are creating word salad. No, I'm saying you are referring to two different definitions. If I make a statement using definition A, and you counter using definition B, it is not counter to the statement I made. No one has disagreed with the statement that the study of abiogenesis is unresolved. I'd bet you'd have a hard time finding a qualified someone to contend that we're on the cusp of resolution.As to your analogy; I am not the one having a hard time getting around this. Is there someone denying this? For either you or themselves? This is yet a third bit of catawampus thinking. A-bio-genesis: Not-life-beginning.Mr JACK in Message 18:

Wrong. Abiogenesis is an empirical fact. We know that there was no life 13.7 billion years ago, and no life on Earth 4.5 billion years ago. We also know there is life on Earth now. Thus, by simple deduction, at some point in the last 13.7 billion years life formed from non-life - abiogenesis - further, given the remarkable unlikelihood of life surviving to cross space and seed earth, it's most likely to have formed on Earth in the last 4.5 billion years.

This is the statement you have been arguing with. Mr Jack has defined his meaning within his statement. He was not referring to the study of abiogenesis coming into existence within the last 13.7 billion years, but life coming into existence.Near the end of RAZD's Message 72 he says "Personally, I am not in favor of equating supernatural creation of life with abiogenesis" This is perfectly acceptable to me, and I would incorporate this restriction into any argument I had where RAZD set the stage. But Mr Jack clearly meant otherwise.If this were not just the silliest semantic argument I've involved myself in in a coon's age it should have been its own topic long ago. As it is, it shouldn't be a topic at all.AbE: I've just gone back and read Message 1 and want to apologize to Filameter for the large part played in this distraction. Sorry, Filameter. You had an interesting perspective, and I should not have stepped on it.Edited by lyx2no, : Style.Edited by lyx2no, : AbE and a few other bits of stuff.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them.

I pinched this image from JonF over in the polonium halos thread. I can easily distinguish red from yellow, but where is the transition point? This is the same problem we have with life now when we can investigate it closely and 3.5 billion years ago when we can catch mere glimpses of it. We can say that is life, and that is not. but only if we reduce our resolution to The cow says ‘moo’. level of understanding. This seem incongruous. Here you make up, This is him hiding behind a chair so that you can't kick him in the jimmies again. In 1642 he grew a tree in a container of soil. Five years later he uprooted it, knocked all the soil out of the roots, and weighed it at 162 pounds. He also weighed the soil and discovered that none of the soil was missing. Now, Jan mistakenly came to the conclusion that the tree was made of water, not knowing about CO₂ and all but at least he knew it didn't come from the soil 362 years before you wrote the above.and,How is it possible that this thing could move under its own power? It has no headlights, taillights, turn signals, wind shield, wind shield wipers, seat belts, air bags, cd changer, navigator and the list goes on, yet Cugnot managed to crash into a wall with it. I guess the rules for automobiles were different in the beginning.Over here you make up this,And this You made several excuses for this purely imaginary natural history that actually put you in a worse light then the original statements. These are not, as you seem to suggest, simplifications for the laymen: they are flat out, stupefyingly wrong. I'm not just bringing this up to rag on you. Anyone who starts out with these kind of erroneous premises is going to end up with even more erroneous conclusions. You have succeeded in doing just that.Another premise you'd do well to be rid of is that science is common sense. Aristotelian style, arm chair reasoning went out with Galileo. This is one of the sleaziest bits of reasoning one can resort to. You have proven Lincoln right when he said "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."*Does "I just mean the people who refuse to think there is any way other than their own." sound familiar?

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Hi slevesqueI sorta’ think you’re kidding, but for others: i is, indeed, a number. It is an imaginary number: i=√-1. Because a negative multiplied by a negative is positive; i.e., -2-2=(-2)²=4, one can not get a real value for √-4. However, √-(y²) can be rewritten √(-1(y²)) = √(y²)√-1 = y√-1. For ease of use √-1 has been given the symbol i; ∴, y√-1 =iy.Edited by lyx2no, : Remembered my pal Jan.Edited by lyx2no, : Typo.Edited by lyx2no, : Better quote.Edited by lyx2no, : Typo.Edited by Adminnemooseus, : First link - change "m=81#97" to "m=97#97". Works much better that way.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them.

Opps! An irrational number is one that cannot be written in the form p/q, with p and q being whole numbers.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them.

Why make it up when you could look it up. Taking Percy's Message 140 into account I hid my contribution on decaying rock. So, if I go out and cut a flower, when is it dead?

• When I show it the knife?
• When I sever the stem?
• When the petals begin to fall off three days later?
• When my mum throws them away after a week?

Can you tell if my great-grandfather is dead? judging by the smell, he's well past the petels-falling-off stage.Edited by lyx2no, : My grandfather can still catch me.Edited by lyx2no, : Swept some dirt under the rug.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them.

No one has made this claim. You're still equivocating after a dozen explanations. Where do you think dirt comes from? No one has done this.No one has done this.Instead of incessantly repeating simplistic positions you could investigate, rather then ignore, what everyone has been telling you.What have you claimed?Life is black and white; and abiogenesis is unproven.What answers have you received?Life is fuzzy about the edges. Do you even know what the edges are? I asked in Message 63 if a virus or piron was alive. I'm still waiting for an answer.And that life must have at some point developed from non-life as evidenced from there having once been no life in the Universe and the now there being life in the Universe. If life did not come from non-life what is another option? Even God made man from decayed rock I mean, dirt I mean, dust.Almost any non-magical, just-so story about how life came into existence would be better then the god theory. There would be evidence for the existence for the parts of a naturalistic event. We know atoms and their interactions actually exist. No god has that much going for him. But still, No one has made a claim as to how it did happen except for tentative generalities. What certain explanation for abiogenesis are you riling against?You've a screwed up understanding what science is. You insist scientists makes claim to inviolable truth out of fear of the unknown when in fact they revel in it. You clearly do not. At every turn you demand absolutes. You enter a debate asking two concessions. The first being our application of your equivocation of abiogenesis with the study of abiogenesis. The second being the premise from which you construct your erroneous conclusion. What, exactly, is it that you would have Percy sugar coat? Your propensity for filling holes in you understanding of natural history with whatever sounds good at first blush? many of the piece of the puzzle you are trying to put together are out of a different box then the rest. That little red diamond that you are trying to fit into the Kreb's cycle is SpongeBob SquarePants' neck tie. You're getting simplistic, wrong answers that, though easy to understand, don't match reality. Matching reality is the end all and be all of science.Edited by lyx2no, : "mad mane"?Edited by lyx2no, : Change titleEdited by lyx2no, : Typos.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them.