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AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHH!!!!!!!
Now I've got that out of my system. We have a problem, you see it took him about ten seconds to say that. It's going to take me an awful lot longer to point out how wrong he is. Its not even an issue that evolution actually addresses, its one that theories of abiogenesis investigate. For this you need to understand some pretty advanced organic chemistry, something I don't know too much about, but I guarantee Chuck here knows an awful lot less.
Life appearing from non-life, well, leaving aside the issues of how one actually defines life, isn't likely to happen again on this planet. You need replicators and some form of metabolic reactions running before you can get to a stage where you have something I'd be happy to say was "alive". You need all sorts of interesting chemistry occuring on tiny scales that will be gobbled up by any passing bacteria as soon as it rears its head. It just isn't going to happen except in very special places. (Like in the various permutations of the original 1950s Miller-Urey experiments, where amino acids and DNA bases have been produced from simpler constituents like ammonia, carbon dioxide and water.)
In a jar of peanut butter? Not bloody likely. In order to get ammonia from air and water you need high temperatures, and a catalyst. Nitrogen likes being nitrogen, water likes being water and they don't want to combine to form ammonia. You need to put a lot of energy into the system in order to push the reaction in the direction you want it to go. Exactly the same is true in the jar of peanut butter. Put it in a reducing atmosphere, pass a few thousand volts through it and you might get some DNA bases out of it. How you'd tell the difference between this and any DNA already in the peanut butter itself I'm not entirely clear.
"The food industry is founded on the fact that evolution doesn't occur". Nope, the food preservation industry is based on the fact that abiogenesis isn't happenning now. Modern medicine is however rather screwed over by MRSA because evolution certainly has happenned.
See how long that took to read. And I certainly glossed over an awful lot of stuff (I bet I made stacks of errors too.)
Now I've got that out of my system. We have a problem, you see it took him about ten seconds to say that. It's going to take me an awful lot longer to point out how wrong he is. Its not even an issue that evolution actually addresses, its one that theories of abiogenesis investigate. For this you need to understand some pretty advanced organic chemistry, something I don't know too much about, but I guarantee Chuck here knows an awful lot less.
Life appearing from non-life, well, leaving aside the issues of how one actually defines life, isn't likely to happen again on this planet. You need replicators and some form of metabolic reactions running before you can get to a stage where you have something I'd be happy to say was "alive". You need all sorts of interesting chemistry occuring on tiny scales that will be gobbled up by any passing bacteria as soon as it rears its head. It just isn't going to happen except in very special places. (Like in the various permutations of the original 1950s Miller-Urey experiments, where amino acids and DNA bases have been produced from simpler constituents like ammonia, carbon dioxide and water.)
In a jar of peanut butter? Not bloody likely. In order to get ammonia from air and water you need high temperatures, and a catalyst. Nitrogen likes being nitrogen, water likes being water and they don't want to combine to form ammonia. You need to put a lot of energy into the system in order to push the reaction in the direction you want it to go. Exactly the same is true in the jar of peanut butter. Put it in a reducing atmosphere, pass a few thousand volts through it and you might get some DNA bases out of it. How you'd tell the difference between this and any DNA already in the peanut butter itself I'm not entirely clear.
"The food industry is founded on the fact that evolution doesn't occur". Nope, the food preservation industry is based on the fact that abiogenesis isn't happenning now. Modern medicine is however rather screwed over by MRSA because evolution certainly has happenned.
See how long that took to read. And I certainly glossed over an awful lot of stuff (I bet I made stacks of errors too.)
