Re: Origin of Life Up in the Air -- Literally

From: Stephen E. Jones (sejones@iinet.net.au)
Date: Thu Jul 13 2000 - 09:36:27 EDT

  • Next message: Cliff Lundberg: "Re: Origin of Life Up in the Air -- Literally"

    Reflectorites

    Here are excerpts from web articles for the period 4 - 12 July
    2000, with my comments in square brackets.

    Steve

    ===================================================
    http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000712/sc/air_dc_2.html Yahoo! ...
    July 12 ... Origin of Life Up in the Air -- Literally LONDON (Reuters) The
    origin of life is up in the air -- literally, according to new scientific research
    .... A team of international researchers argues life may not have begun in
    the sea as previously thought, but in tiny droplets of water thrown up by
    ocean waves and drifting high in the sky. In an article in New Scientist
    magazine, the researchers argue such water droplets could have provided
    just the conditions needed for complex chemicals like DNA and proteins to
    form. They noticed that as opposed to just seawater, up to half of the
    material in the droplets was organic matter -- picked up from oily
    molecules on the ocean surface. As the water in the droplets evaporates,
    the organic matter then becomes more concentrated and with energy from
    sunlight, it could undergo chemical reactions to combine, they said. ... [I
    haven't yet read the article, but if this was dated April 1, I would have
    thought it was a joke! What is needed to be explained is not the
    concentration of chemicals (although to obtain *all* the right chemicals in
    pure optical isomer form at the same time is a problem enough) but the
    origin of *information* (see tagline). Another obvious problem is that all
    OoL simulations require there be no oxygen, but in that case there would
    be no ozone layer and high-energy UV radiation would break down any
    organic compounds in the air. Hopefully the take-home message that
    members of the public will get is that modern science has no idea how life
    originated, or even *could* originate. But at least it gives new meaning to
    the saying "raining cats and dogs"!]

    http://www.cnn.com/2000/LAW/07/07/schoolprayer.games.ap/index.html
    CNN ... Santa Fe schools end policy allowing student prayer before games
    July 7, 2000 ... GALVESTON, Texas (AP) -- Santa Fe school trustees
    voted ... to eliminate a policy that allowed student-led prayer before
    football games, declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court last
    month. "Although we, along with most of the people across the nation are
    disappointed with the ruling, in keeping with the district's pattern, we will
    comply with the ruling," school board president Denise Cowart said ... The
    policy had allowed students to deliver "a brief invocation and/or message"
    over a speaker before football games. The case originated in Santa Fe in
    1995 and resulted in a 6-3 Supreme Court ruling last month that bars
    students from leading stadium crowds in meditation but could go much
    further to restrict prayer in public schools. The court ruled that a school
    that gives students the public forum for prayer is effectively sponsoring
    the message. ... See also:
    http://www.cnn.com/2000/LAW/06/columns/fl.sekulow.schoolprayer.06.21/
    Living with the Supreme Court's mess ... June 22, 2000 (FindLaw) -- The
    decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the Santa Fe, Texas, "football
    prayer" case is a school administrator's nightmare. The court's opinion
    tells school districts at length what they cannot do but gives few clues as
    to how to comply with the Constitution when allowing student speakers at
    school events. Straightening out the legal mess unfortunately is going to
    take years of expensive litigation. The dilemma is simple to state: If a
    school censors a student speaker's message to prevent any religious
    speech, the school violates the student speaker's constitutional rights of
    free speech and religious freedom. If the school does not censor student
    religious speech, it faces intimidation from ACLU lawyers claiming an
    unconstitutional violation of "separation of church and state." The Santa
    Fe Independent School District, enmeshed in litigation over precisely this
    issue, tried the obvious solution: a hands-off approach. Let students decide
    whether to have a speaker, let students pick the speaker and let the speaker
    decide what to say. .... In Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, a
    6-3 majority of the Supreme Court struck down the student pregame
    speaker policy as unconstitutional. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for
    the majority, opined that because the elected student speaker might say
    something religious, the policy violated the Establishment Clause of the
    First Amendment. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, in dissent, charged
    that the majority opinion "bristles with hostility to all things religious in
    public life." Indeed, Stevens went so far as to rule that allowing student
    elections under the Santa Fe policy was unconstitutional because religious
    issues might become a subject of debate. (Stevens did not explain why
    student debate is healthy on every other topic, but not on religious issues.)
    .... In the wake of Santa Fe, however, school districts across the nation will
    need to reexamine their policies regarding student speakers at school-
    sponsored assemblies such as graduation and sporting events. In their
    efforts to reach a workable solution to the twin problems of forbidden
    censorship and forbidden establishment of religion, school districts face a
    daunting task. The very extreme nature of Stevens's opinion makes the
    challenge that much greater. Stevens called into question even
    scrupulously neutral policy wording. "Even if the plain language of the
    [football] policy were facially neutral," he wrote, "the Establishment
    Clause forbids a State to hide behind the application of formally neutral
    criteria and remain studiously oblivious to the effects of its actions." In
    the Santa Fe case, as a matter of fact, there were no untoward "effects" --
    the policy was challenged before it ever became operational. But this did
    not matter to Stevens either: "even if no Santa Fe High School student
    were ever to offer a religious message, the [football] policy fails a facial
    challenge because [of] the attempt by the District to encourage prayer,"
    Stevens declared. Further, Stevens dismissed the fact that the audience
    was free to ignore or disagree with the student speaker: "Even if we regard
    every high school student's decision to attend a home football game as
    purely voluntary, we are nevertheless persuaded that the delivery of a
    pregame prayer has the improper effect of coercing those present to
    participate in an act of religious worship," Stevens declaimed. Under this
    distorted reasoning, everyone attending the halftime concert becomes a
    musician. So the dilemma remains: How can a school district
    simultaneously avoid forbidden content censorship of student speakers and
    forbidden sponsorship of potential student prayers? There is, of course,
    one safe option -- simply ban all student speakers at school events. This
    would satisfy Stevens' concern that no religious words be uttered. This
    would also neutrally stifle secular as well as religious messages,
    eliminating any claim of content censorship. But clearly, that is not what
    the First Amendment requires. The Supreme Court has repeatedly
    recognized that students do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedom
    of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." The challenge for school
    districts will be to make that promise of student free speech a reality for
    every student -- including students who have a religious message ... [I
    apologise as an Australian commenting on the USA's legal situation, but
    this sounds absurd. Clearly the Founding Fathers did not intend by the
    Establishment of Religion clause to *outlaw* all public manifestations of
    religion! If 90% of the population believe that there is a God who, in one
    way or another, created mankind, it is amazing that the 10% who don't are
    able to enforce their will with the full power of the State. I agree with
    Chief Justice Rehnquist that this supposed neutrality is, in its effect, if not
    its intent, "hostility".]

    http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000708/sc/microbes_dc_2.html
    Yahoo! ... July 8 ... Scientists Find Super-Hardy South Pole Microbes
    WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a finding that could have an impact on the
    search for life on Mars and other planets, scientists say they have detected
    hardy microbes that seem to thrive in the radiation, cold and darkness at
    the South Pole. "If the team's conclusions prove true, the discovery not
    only has important implications for the search for life in other extreme
    environments on Earth, but also for the possibility that life -- at least at the
    microscopic level -- may exist elsewhere in the solar system," the National
    Science Foundation (NSF) said ... "While we expected to find some
    bacteria in the South Pole snow, we were surprised that they were
    metabolically active and synthesizing DNA and protein at local ambient
    temperatures of ... minus 12 to minus 17 Celsius ... the South Pole
    microbes may have enzymes and membranes that help them cope with
    their arid, frigid environment ... Also at:
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_827000/827063.stm BBC
    ... 10 July, 2000 ... Snow microbes found at South Pole ... The microbes
    have DNA sequences similar to a category of bacteria known as
    Deinococcus. ... first discovered in cans of irradiated meat in the 1950s,
    and is able to withstand extreme dryness and large doses of radiation. ...
    Deinococcus is thought to form one of the earlier branches in the bacterial
    evolutionary tree, and is much older than Antarctica in its present
    location.... it is unlikely that the newly discovered microbes evolved in
    Antarctica. ... [If these bacteria are in snow they may not be experiencing
    the extremes of UV radiation and temperature at the surface. The *mean*
    temperature of Mars is only -23C ("Mars," Encyclopaedia britannica,
    http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/1/0,5716,52341+1+51083,00.html),
    so it must fluctuate much colder than this. And it is even colder on planets
    further from the Sun, so it is wishful thinking to extrapolate this finding to
    "elsewhere in the solar system", if not to Mars. Deinococcus is not a
    simple bacteria-it achieves its resistance to radiation by redundancy and
    self-repair mechanisms. If it turns out that the earliest bacteria were more
    complex than later ones, and the later bacteria `devolved' from them, this
    would fit a creation or ID model better than an evolution model.]
    l.]

    http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000706/sc/space_hubble_dc_1.html
    Yahoo! ... July 6 ... Hubble Captures Black Hole's Cosmic Searchlight ...
    WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A blue blast of electrons, shining like a
    cosmic searchlight and powered by a gluttonous black hole, has been
    captured in images ... by astronomers working with the Hubble Space
    Telescope. What looks like a searchlight beam in space is actually a jet of
    electrons and other sub-atomic particles being emitted at nearly the speed
    of light from the heart of galaxy M87, 50 million light-years from Earth.
    The jet itself is about 5,000 light-years long. ... At its center, galaxy M87
    hides a supermassive black hole that has already gobbled up 2 billion
    times the mass of our Sun, the astronomers said. This monstrous matter-
    sucking space drain is invisible to astronomers except for the activity
    around its edges, where superheated gas swirls around before being
    gulped down by the black hole. The jet originates in this circle of gas and
    is concentrated and then thrown out into space by the intense, twisted
    magnetic fields in this region ... In addition to the visible blue jet, there is
    also a jet emanating from the black hole made of radio waves, which is at
    least 10 times longer .. many others may exist. But ... there does not
    appear to be one in our own Milky Way, where the central black hole is
    rather ordinary in size when compared with the supermassive one in
    M87. "If there is any jet (in the Milky Way), it's very, very weak," he
    said. ... [Another design parameter? If galaxies do normally have
    supermassive black holes at the centre and if these all have jets that
    sweep the whole galaxy, life may be impossible in them?]

    http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/070400sci-archaeo-greece.html
    The New York Times ... July 4, 2000 Greek Myths: Not
    Necessarily Mythical ... Adrienne Mayor regards ... evidence... that
    supports her theory that the natural historians and artists of early Greece
    understood fossils as organic remains ... Ms. Mayor found a striking
    resemblance between the monster on a Corinthian vase ... and the skull of
    an extinct giraffe, top. Because the monster is not typical of Greek images,
    art historians had assumed the vase was the work of an incompetent artist.
    ... Ancient texts contain stories about heroes and giants; the giants, Ms.
    Mayor says, could have been created by arranging the bones of a
    mammoth to resemble an upright human skeleton ... Mayor has
    nonetheless done some digging deep into the past and found literary and
    artistic clues -- and not a few huge fossils -- that seem to explain the
    inspiration for many of the giants, monsters and other strange creatures in
    the mythology of antiquity. "I have discovered that if you take all the
    places of Greek myths, those specific locales turn out to be abundant fossil
    sites," .... "But there is also a lot of natural knowledge embedded in those
    myths, showing that Greek perceptions about fossils were pretty amazing
    for prescientific people." Her years of research thus challenge the widely
    held view that natural historians in classical Greece and Rome lacked the
    knowledge to interpret large vertebrate fossils as organic remains of the
    past. That conceptual breakthrough, representing the start of the modern
    science of paleontology, was supposedly made by the French naturalist
    Georges Cuvier in 1806. Yet much like today's fossil hunters, Ms. Mayor
    found, ancient Greeks and Romans collected and measured the petrified
    bones they encountered and displayed them in temples and museums.
    They, too, recognized fossils as evidence of past life, now extinct,
    anticipating Cuvier by more than 2,000 years. Still, the ancients often let
    their culture-bound imaginations run in unscientific directions. ... Dr. Kate
    A. Robson Brown, an anthropologist at the University of Bristol in
    England, thinks that some of Ms. Mayor's fossil-myth connections may be
    a stretch. As she noted in the current issue of Natural History magazine,
    "Many cultures around the globe have colorful giant lore -- Norse fables
    and Australian creation stories come to mind -- without the benefit of rich
    fossil deposits." Ms. Mayor said her study of ancient texts revealed ample
    evidence of a "bone rush" among Greeks in the fifth century B.C. Every
    discovery of huge bones, it seems, prompted speculation that they
    belonged to this hero or that giant. ... showed that the perceptive ancients
    were able to relate a fossil species to living animals, well before modern
    paleontology. The revised myth of the war elephants showed that they
    were responsive to new zoological knowledge, adapting mythology the
    way scientists today sometimes have to reshape theory. [Another antidote
    to our modern hubris? If true, this would further blur the artificial
    distinction between religion and science. The comment about Australian lack
    of fossils is wide of the mark. For starters Australian aboriginal myths
    are usually about existing animals and natural features. Also, fossils of
    at least one huge species of marsupial has been found in Australia, and
    besides, the first aboriginal immigrants to Australia may have encountered
    them as *living*!]

    http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000706/sc/aids_conference_dc_1.html
    Yahoo! ... July 6 ... Little Hope on Horizon at AIDS Conference ...
    DURBAN (Reuters) - When 11,000 doctors, scientists, health workers and
    AIDS activists descend on this Indian Ocean port city later this week, they
    will not hear of any dramatic cures for AIDS. They will not hear about
    some new vaccine that will prevent its spread, they will not hear about
    new drugs that keep patients healthy and they will not hear of some
    miraculous new way to keep people from spreading it around ... Instead
    they will hear more of what they already suspect -- that AIDS is spreading
    at astonishing rates in the developing world and will keep on spreading for
    the next few years, no matter what anyone does. ... there is nothing else to
    test. There is no other product ready to move into phase III ... the last stage
    of testing before a drug company can seek approval from the U.S. Food
    and Drug Administration. ... doctors are intrigued by approaches aimed at
    helping the body cope with the virus on its own, such as carefully
    monitored interruptions in treatment and the use of natural proteins to rev
    up the immune system. ... Some won't come because they feel we have
    reached a plateau with the science. It is going to be a policy discussion in
    Durban." ... [This is exactly what Duesberg predicted!]

    http://www.kcstar.com/item/pages/local.pat,local/37749438.701,.html The
    Kansas City Star ... Kansas evolution decision got widespread criticism
    and praise ... 07/01/00 It was shades of H.L. Mencken. In the days
    following the Kansas Board of Education's decision last summer to de-
    emphasize evolution in state science standards, commentators from around
    the world gleefully proclaimed Kansas full of hayseeds. Like Mencken,
    who with biting commentary covered the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial" in
    ... the Baltimore Sun, editorial writers and cartoonists from Los Angeles to
    London found a plethora of ways to poke fun ... The Kansas evolution
    decision got prominent display in The New York Times, The Times of
    London, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The Economist ....
    Not to mention plenty of guffaws from late-night talk show audiences. ...
    National organizations, from the American Chemical Society to the
    American Association of University Women, condemned the board's
    decision as a giant step backward for science education. But the decision
    received its fair share of support from conservative quarters. ... University
    of California-Berkeley law professor Phillip E. Johnson, who has written
    books critical of the theory of evolution ... called the Kansas board
    "courageous" and predicted it would open debate about what
    schoolchildren would learn about the origin of life. Biochemist Michael
    Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box, said ... he was heartened by the
    Kansas board's decision. Far from ridiculing the Kansas board,
    conservatives across the country have been emboldened by the board's
    decision to question Charles Darwin's theories of the origins of life, said
    Wendy Wright ... of Concerned Women for America ... The negative
    reaction was disturbing and was engineered by the science community,
    which felt scorned by evolution's rejection ... "This almost was like a
    warning shot across the bow of anyone who would deviate from this hard-
    core evolution standpoint," ... [The `take home' lessons from Kansas were:
    1) the almost fanatical overreaction from all around the world about not
    making *macroevolution* examinable (it can still be taught) to school kids
    in one State of the USA, revealed a growing insecurity among
    evolutionists; 2) the heavy-handed use of ridicule and intimidation by the
    evolutionists rather than admitting there are major philosophical
    assumptions and scientific problems with macroevolution; 3) the steep rise
    in public awareness of the ID movement; and 4) the encouragement it
    gave to anti-evolutionists that their giant opponent really does have feet of
    clay! (Dan 2:33]
    ===================================================

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    "The problem of the origin of life is clearly basically equivalent to the
    problem of the origin of biological information. In accordance with this, the
    idea of biological information emerges as *the* fundamental concept in the
    physicochemical theory of the origin of life." (Kuppers B-O., "Information
    and the Origin of Life," [1986], MIT Press: Cambridge MA, 1990, p.170.
    Emphasis in original)
    Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------



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