Artifical life

I agree.Technically, they only FORMED life,by plagiarizing God's DNA coding.Basically, they are replicating God's designs and seeing if those principles work to give you an artificial replicating cell.The bible also says that God formed man from the dust of the ground, which tallies with the use of arranging certain matter to get synthesis of proteins etc...It seems that the account suggests that a nefesh being with blood and nostrils requires God's breath of life. Whether this means His literal breath or air which he provides, it is hard to know. But the spirit or soul -element would be the real problem.If, for example, humans could create an artifical human, would God give it a soul and spirit? Would he be obliged to give it a spirit because he has ordained the principles of nature?We can atleast conclude that yes, at this level, there needs to be somebody there to put in the coding. Because afterall, that's what happened - scientists created synthetic DNA.I do not know any examples of spontaneous generation as of yet.So my opinion is that this shows intelligent input is required, whereas it leads to difficulty for believers, in that we don't know if lifeforms can be purely mechanical.Ofcourse, this is a long way off a human.

hi RAZD, have to say I disagree with you on this one. The only time we see results is when men mess with DNA.I don't see that mutations have any part to play here in this example.Unless we see a mutation that produces a new species, that is new morphologically speaking, then the ToE claims still remain unproven.You see, technically, we have to see something new. With the fruit flies example, no mutation actually led to something other than a fruit fly.I don't want to see a new better more efficient hand, I want to see something better than a hand, that has never before existed, if the claim is that every single limb came from NS + M.It is not too much to ask, in my opinion, given the scale of the claim.All the best. (just popping in to give my two cents)

Unlike most here, I think this is perfectly reasonable. After-all, if in just over one third of a billion years, evolution has taken us from an extreme of four limbs, a body, a head and a tail to our modern human four limbs, a body, a head, BUT NO TAIL, just imagine what we should be able to do in the lab

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

---

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

I'm too lazy to go look the verse up right now or to see what context it was used, but I otherwise agree with you on this point. I think there is life everywhere around us, not just in blood. I believe an insect is life and I believe whatever was created in this scenario is life or a building block of life. Yes, you are right again....we will always claim that God is the only one who can create life, but there's a stipulation to that. We don't believe that he's the only one that can create life, we believe that he's the only one that can create life out of nothing. I guess I don't see the heel turn in this. Are you denying in your post that thus far, in science, everything that has been created has had a designer (a scientist)??? I mean, this is certainly a scientific feat we are talking about here and it should astound us all, but it did require a PhD scientist, who's name will be forever linked to the discovery, to come up with this. It also took known matter from our universe.As far as the rock scenario goes that Rhavin spoke of, my answer to that is yes, I would conclude a designer, if the rock pile showed design. I personally feel that even the smallest know particle shows design. A random rock pile at the bottom of the ocean doesn't show design...a rock pile made by Rhavin to look like a pyramid shows design. The problem with this scenario is that one could design a rock pile, to look like it wasn't designed in the first place, yet it was still designed.My only point was, that Rhavin thought was absurd, and maybe I wasn't clear, is that so far, in anything that science has ever discovered, or I should say created, it had a creator. We have yet to enter into a vacuum of a room and watch life spontaneously start to create itself. This new discovery doesn't prove God created all life, it does continue to prove that everything we know is designed.Edited by Flyer75, : No reason given.Edited by Flyer75, : No reason given.Edited by Flyer75, : No reason given.

Emphasis added.Please explain why you think we need to see a mutation that creates a "new morphologically speaking" species to prove the ToE when the ToE doesn't predict such a thing to begin with. Are you of the opinion that the ToE expects a fruit fly to mutate into something other than a fruit fly? Please find me one scientist who actually thinks that the ToE predicts a fruit fly mutation to produce anything other than a fruit fly.

---

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus. -- Thomas JeffersonFor we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and non-believers. -- Barack ObamaWe see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- PhatIt has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

I'll add for the record that I don't think there are any evolutionists claiming this proves evolution in the sense of soup to man evolution.Am I right about this?To me this is a phenomenal scientific discovery that should/could benefit mankind.

I'm not going to speak for Granny Magda, but I will deny that everything that has been created in science has had a designer. The good people at NASA created more efficient antennae without designing them. You can read about it here.Here are pictures of the antennae: Isn't that fascinating? Those antennae were created by a completely random process, but are more efficient than anything man has designed.

---

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus. -- Thomas JeffersonFor we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and non-believers. -- Barack ObamaWe see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- PhatIt has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

Actually that is quite fascinating subbie. The materials were already provided of course, but you are correct, it wasn't designed. I book marked the page to read the article....may be way over my head at a first glance but I'll give it a shot.

I'm not aware of any. But then again, I'm not aware of any nonfundamentalist scientists who deny that that had already been well-established long before this achievement, so it would be exceeding strange for one of them to now claim that this is the proof we need.

---

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus. -- Thomas JeffersonFor we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and non-believers. -- Barack ObamaWe see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- PhatIt has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

I would say so, yes. I certainly wouldn't claim it as evidence of that. Most certainly.

This artificial genome didn't really have a designer in the lab either. It was created using a sequencer to duplicate an existing genome. Sticking a document in a xerox and making a copy of it, does not make you the designer of the second document.Furthermore, no life was created. The sequenced genome was placed in an already living cell, whose own nucleus had just been removed. A PC analogy would be, to swap out the hard drive while the computer is up and running. That's correct. The abiogenesis version of this experiment will have to start with raw materials, simulate relevant environmental conditions, and use no living material it does not itself generate. This is probably still years away, and will almost certainly be a long series of separate processes rather than a single experiment.Much of it is already done, however. I currently lean toward soup to nuts on top, the sandwich down below, bubble wars involving both PNAs, and a fairly normal DNA World as the hybrid sole survivor. Recent advances by the RNA people are making me squint though.

This is a proof of concept with designer organisms in mind. Molecular biologists have been inserting short sequences of genes into bacteria for ages now, but this technology is quite limited. You have to use the bacteria to replicate the DNA of interest and you are usually limited to about 30k bases. You are also stuck with the background genome which can include genes you don't want.What this work has shown is that you can make an entire genome syntheticially. This is huge. You can now control the genetic background and the genes of interest at the same time. I would expect that there will soon be a new commercially available synthetic E. coli specifically designed for molecular biological research. I would expect that the genome will be stripped down and be tailor made for a specific medium. A company could make quite a bit of money off this type of bug and it would be a great tool for the lab.

Hi, Mikey. And it should also be noted that a lot of evolutionists would consider this to be a "no true Scotsman" argument, because it is a redefinition of "life" that demands that scientists meet additional, arbitrary conditions that are not particularly meaningful.

---

-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

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