LIFE; What is it?

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evidence please.

The thread Title is Life. what is it? Now you can go down the natural philosophy route if you like, we did that for over 1500 years and it got us almost nowhere. Aristotle and the others who you no doubt would call "free thinkers" held us in intellectual stagnation for millennia. Philosophy is not science, it teaches us bugger all about the natural world. Logic and thoughts that are not tested against nature get us nowhere.

On the other hand there are many scientists who, working in the field of Origins of life, have come up with plausible scenarios based on what they believe could have happened, coupled with how they know chemicals and minerals react. These hypotheses are being backed up by experiment. It turns out there are many very plausible scenarios leading to biology from organic chemistry and non of them require any form of metaphysics.

So stay with your philosophy, but realise it will give you no answers to the question posed in the thread title.

Last edited by DentArthurDent on 03 Jun 2015, 5:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It would be nice if there was tangible evidence of metaphysical phenomenon.

Metaphysics is an interesting premise--but, from my schema of things, very dubious.

Another almost clever attempt to side-track the issue.

Do commonsense, always and everywhere observable phenomena need "experiments" to "prove" them?

Why don't you do an experiment yourself? Take your favourite pet, kill it, and put it into a jar with sunlight, sparks and agitation and whatever else you fancy and see if it come back to lick your face.

philosophy is not a container for science, it's the study of the rationale surrounding science, but is not science itself. saying science is philosophy is like saying bricks inside a house are windows because they hold up windows themselves.

yah, because single-celled organisms and multi-celled complex animals are the same thing, right? (you're being disingenuous)

Again, rather than post ridiculous strawman defenses, please provide evidence for your claims. For someone who claims to have an interest in particle physics I am surprised you would include common sense as evidence for your claims.

In spite of all the fatuous assertions to the contrary, commonsense observations of reality are not rendered null and void by mere ideological speculations.

The old metaphor of a tornado in a junkyard assembling a sophisticated jet airliner is more possible (if there are degrees of possibility) than a series of tornadoes sweeping up dust which assembles itself into a great airliner.

We know from the most practical observations of reality that even a wonderfully ingeniously engineered aeroplane will deteriorate into the lowest potential of the elements of which it is made if it is exposed to time, air, water, turbulence, sunshine, etc.

Now, a most sophisticated jet airliner is vastly less intricate and complex than even the "simplest" living organism. Yet the "scientists" expect us to believe that a living organism is a product of random chance. And not just one but squintillions of them all different by degrees and within their orders.

Just think... even as a most sophisticated machine wears out and begins to deteriorate back into its original elements so organisms die and revert to their simplest elements. Sunlight doesn't even stop, let alone reverse, the process; it helps it on its way.

Empirical evidence is easily available to verify the above... just watch, and wait, and measure.

tornado in a junkyard

Are you a schoolteacher? You seem very accustomed to dishing up nonsense as though it will not be challenged.

Hey! The spontaneous generation of a live organism cannot occur! Why are you waffling on about "natural selection"?

The spontaneous generation of even a fragment of DNA has never been seen.

Your building blocks of life is the box Lego came in, but it is empty.

Iron exposed to air and water will rust, therefore it will produce life.

If it was that easy, it would have happened more than once in the last billion years.

Life appears once, all life is formed from the first.

Evolution claims gradual change, but after each of the nine extinction events, there was a burst of life radiating into new forms.

Life has properties which do not fit the claims of evolution.

Evolution does not exist leading up to the formation of life. It could not evolve into being.

The question being 'did life form only once and if so, why?'

Here are some possibilities:

did life form only once or several times?

Categorized like so:
1)life formed only once
1A)and then environmental conditions changed, no longer favoring it but existing life was "in before the lock"

2)life formed multiple times
2A)it formed multiple times but only one cell line survived to become our ancestor, sort of like how we are the only surviving hominids (but unlike single cells, the hominids that didn't make it left bones we found)
2B)it formed multiple times and there were multiple survivors but later convergence makes it seem like we all branched off from a single line

3)life formed once or multiple times but not here on earth and was brought to earth by crashed asteroids




Evolution has different schools of thought. One school of thought is 'gradual change', another school of thought is 'gradual change except when it's not'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium

An extinction leading to a burst of life radiating into new forms isn't a challenge to the theory of evolution, it is recognized as an important factor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event

HaHa good call. I did teach biology to adults in continuing ed for a couple years and my posting style is rather similar to my lecture style. But it was on top of my day job and that burned me out. But it was an interesting couple of years.

But the thing is, the students did challenge me. But they did it asking "how" and "why" questions, not yelling "you suck" from the back of the room. They were adults after all and wanted their money's worth in biology education. If they asked a question I couldn't answer on the spot, I researched and came back with the answer at next class. This did give me the habit nof research and citations.

In any case, I don't think you are making any distinction between the gradual envelopment of RNA to become a cell and a multicellular animal popping out of the ocean fully formed. When you say "spontaneous" it makes it clear you aren't appreciating the slowness of the process.

Well, you had the luxury of being able to bamboozle a few who credulously thought you knew what you were talking about.

I have been one of those credulous who was taught "biology" by a teacher that was much more systematic and persuasive than you are. And I wasted the best part of my life being "sucked in" by the specious nonsense he presented. I don't need to ask you "why and how" about your impossible ideology because I already know more about it than you do. My business here is showing up the impossible contradictions inherent in that ideology.

Try to patronise me if you like, but you will only deceive yourself and the naïve.

The "gradual development of RNA" (gradually spontaneous, if you like) is impossible because the very conditions necessary to sustain organic life rapidly destroy RNA outside of a live organism. Life creates and maintains RNA, not the other way round.

This is utterly, exasperatingly, boringly, tedious for me. I make considerable effort to explain why and how only to be "countered" by ridiculous, evasive, irrelevant mere assertions.

You've made several far-fetched claims in this thread, but that one tops the lot.

You don't understand why oxygen deprivation kills. You do not know more about biology than Janissy. Have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect?