Spontaneous Generation?
Reply to: comm-648970510@craigslist.org
Date: 2008-04-19, 11:45PM CDT
Why should I have to repeat the exact thing I just said? Spontaneous generation was disproved over 100 hundred years ago. That is a fact you cannot argue.
The first serious attack on the idea of spontaneous generation was made in 1668 by Francesco Redi, an Italian physician and poet. At that time, it was widely held that maggots arose spontaneously in rotting meat. Redi believed that maggots developed from eggs laid by flies. To test his hypothesis, he set out meat in a variety of flasks, some open to the air, some sealed completely, and others covered with gauze. As he had expected, maggots appeared only in the open flasks in which the flies could reach the meat and lay their eggs.
The debate over spontaneous generation continued for centuries. In 1745, John Needham, an English clergyman, proposed what he considered the definitive experiment. Everyone knew that boiling killed microorganisms, so he proposed to test whether or not microorganisms appeared spontaneously after boiling. He boiled chicken broth, put it into a flask, sealed it, and waited - sure enough, microorganisms grew. Needham claimed victory for spontaneous generation.
An Italian priest, Lazzaro Spallanzani, was not convinced, and he suggested that perhaps the microorganisms had entered the broth from the air after the broth was boiled, but before it was sealed. To test his theory, he modified Needham's experiment - he placed the chicken broth in a flask, sealed the flask, drew off the air to create a partial vacuum, then boiled the broth. No microorganisms grew. Proponents of spontaneous generation argued that Spallanzani had only proven that spontaneous generation could not occur without air.
The theory of spontaneous generation was finally laid to rest in 1859 by the young French chemist, Louis Pasteur. The French Academy of Sciences sponsored a contest for the best experiment either proving or disproving spontaneous generation. Pasteur's winning experiment was a variation of the methods of Needham and Spallanzani. He boiled meat broth in a flask, heated the neck of the flask in a flame until it became pliable, and bent it into the shape of an S. Air could enter the flask, but airborne microorganisms could not - they would settle by gravity in the neck. As Pasteur had expected, no microorganisms grew. When Pasteur tilted the flask so that the broth reached the lowest point in the neck, where any airborne particles would have settled, the broth rapidly became cloudy with life. Pasteur had both refuted the theory of spontaneous generation and convincingly demonstrated that microorganisms are everywhere - even in the air.
http://www.accessexcellence.org/RC/AB/BC/Spontaneous_Generation.php
John Tyndall later showed that ‘optically pure’ (i.e. extremely filtered) air contains no micro-organisms. He compared what happened when he left fish or meat sit in such pure air or in ordinary air. The preparations in ordinary air gradually went putrid and maggoty, but the preparations left in pure air did not deteriorate. These studies extended Pasteur’s demonstrations that life can only arise from pre-existing life and ruled out any spontaneous generation of life.
http://understandingscience.ucc.ie/pages/sci_johntyndall.htm
The DNA code, like a floppy disk of binary code, is quite simple in its basic paired structure. However, it's the sequencing and functioning of that code that's enormously complex. Through recent technologies like x-ray crystallography, we now know that the cell is not a "blob of protoplasm", but rather a microscopic marvel that is more complex than the space shuttle. The cell is very complicated, using vast numbers of phenomenally precise DNA instructions to control its every function.
Although DNA code is remarkably complex, it's the information translation system connected to that code that really baffles science. Like any language, letters and words mean nothing outside the language convention used to give those letters and words meaning. This is modern information theory at its core. A simple binary example of information theory is the "Midnight Ride of Paul Revere." In that famous story, Mr. Revere asks a friend to put one light in the window of the North Church if the British came by land, and two lights if they came by sea. Without a shared language convention between Paul Revere and his friend, that simple communication effort would mean nothing. Well, take that simple example and multiply by a factor containing many zeros.
We now know that the DNA molecule is an intricate message system. To claim that DNA arose by random material forces is to say that information can arise by random material forces. Many scientists argue that the chemical building blocks of the DNA molecule can be explained by natural evolutionary processes. However, they must realize that the material base of a message is completely independent of the information transmitted. Thus, the chemical building blocks have nothing to do with the origin of the complex message. As a simple illustration, the information content of the clause "nature was designed" has nothing to do with the writing material used, whether ink, paint, chalk or crayon. In fact, the clause can be written in binary code, Morse code or smoke signals, but the message remains the same, independent of the medium. There is obviously no relationship between the information and the material base used to transmit it. Some current theories argue that self-organizing properties within the base chemicals themselves created the information in the first DNA molecule. Others argue that external self-organizing forces created the first DNA molecule. However, all of these theories must hold to the illogical conclusion that the material used to transmit the information also produced the information itself. Contrary to the current theories of evolutionary scientists, the information contained within the genetic code must be entirely independent of the chemical makeup of the DNA molecule.
It is the equivalent of saying that a tornado that passes through a junkyard and lasts for 2.5 billion years would eventually pop out a working Boeing 747.
Your faith in these fictious events occuring several billion years ago is no different from your opinions about my belief in God. You say that God doesn't exist simply because there is no empirical data. At the same time, there is no empirical evidence to support the spontaneous generation of life. Although it might appear that we are in the same boat, I still have much better odds than do you.
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