Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site cmu-cs-edu1.ARPA
Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!rochester!cmu-cs-pt!cmu-cs-edu1!hua
From: hua@cmu-cs-edu1.ARPA (Ernest Hua)
Newsgroups: net.origins
Subject: explanation granted.
Message-ID: <285@cmu-cs-edu1.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 10-May-85 05:28:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: cmu-cs-e.285
Posted: Fri May 10 05:28:24 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 12-May-85 00:28:18 EDT
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 151

___________________________________________________________________________

> From: garys@bunker.UUCP (Gary M. Samuelson)
> 
> Reluctant as I am to leap into discussions such as occur in this
> group, I want to ask Keebler (aka Ernest Hua) to explain himself.

Sure thing.

> Excerpted from Keebler:
> 
> >                  ... Evolution is a view of the natural flow of things,
> > which is assumed to always have happened and always will...
> 
> Clearly, this *assumption* is one of the main, if not the main,
> sources of disagreement in this group.  Why do you make this
> assumption?  Exactly what does it mean?  Why does it upset you
> that others do not choose to make this assumption?

1) I make this assumption, as scientists must do, because science becomes
a joke if this is incorrect.  (I am not saying that this is correct; I am
just making this assumption to make scientific study possible.)  Science
tries to find out about laws of nature.  Laws that change with time are
not laws themselves, but only sub-laws in a much bigger law, a dependency
of which is time.  It may actually be that no law really exist at all, and
in fact, all that we have gathered as data for evidence of laws is just
simple coincidence or, better yet, a cruel joke devised by some omniscient
being.  But until we figure that out, we have to live with the assumption
that nature is consistent.

2) This assumption means that laws that apply today have always applied,
and always will.  This is quite different from what you interpret into
my words below.

3) I really don't care if others do not make this assumption, but if
they want to push their opinions as scientific, they had better form
those opinions with this assumption, since allowing for an unpredictable
nature goes against a fundamental principle of science.

> Later, in the same paragraph:
> 
> >         ... By the way, where did I say that the evolution of life forms
> > did not occur under different sets of conditions than today?
> 
> This question is one reason I don't understand what your assumption
> means.  If the "natural flow of things" is "assumed to always have
> happened and always will" then it sounds to me like you are saying
> that the evolution of life forms occurred under the same conditions
> as exist today.  If the "natural flow of things" is always the same,
> then the conditions are not different.  (Maybe that's not what you
> meant, but that's what it sounds like.)

Nope.  That is NOT what I mean.  What I meant was that if F=ma today,
then F=ma when life forms first appeared.  Laws are not the same as
conditions.  I am certainly not saying that, because there is oxygen
in the atmosphere today, there was oxygen in the atmosphere when life
forms first appeared.  It follows then, that we can attempt to repro-
duce some primitive conditions, but we do not have to reproduce any
primitive laws, in order to see what may have happened "way back then".

> So what *do* you say about the origin of life (if anything) ?

I don't think I have mentioned my opinions on the topic of the origin
of life forms.  In short, I think life forms formed in some set of
highly chemically reactive conditions such as the one tested by
Stanley and Miller (did I get those names right?).  I think the
development went through hierarchial phases (e.g. molecular, macro-
molecular, organelle, cellular, etc ...).

> If you say that life arose from nonlife, under conditions
> radically different from those of today, then the statement that
> the "natural flow of things" has always happened doesn't mean much;
> the "natural flow of things" is broad enough to allow anything.

Interestingly, you raise the same complaint that I addressed in
the original post.  The "natural flow of things" is extremely
broad, but it is confined by natural law.  Of course, if apples
start floating today, there better be a law to explain it.  (In
a way, the basic assumption is quite circular, but there is no
other way around it.  If you want to find consistency, you have
to expect it to exist.)  In short, if something happens, scientists
will have to find a law to explain it; "God willed it to be so"
and other supernatural explanations are not valid scientific laws.

> { more of the same misunderstanding }
>
> If you say that life arose from nonlife, under conditions
> substantially the same as those of today, then I should expect,
> that, with a little tweaking, someone should be able to create
> the conditions under which life could arise from nonlife.

Actually, someone came close.  In fact, I mentioned that experiment
above somewhere.  There were others that dealt with conditions where
S & M left off.

> If you say that life did not arise from nonlife, but has always
> existed, in a form we would recognize as life, then I will eagerly
> await your explanation of your reasoning.

This is clearly not of my opinion.

> If you say that life did not arise from nonlife, but existed in
> a form we would not recognize as life, including the concept that
> life and nonlife are two regions of the same continuum, then I
> will have to find a different term and pose the same questions,
> because I think it is clear that there is something substantially
> different between a rock and man.

Certainly.  There are certain qualifications that we use to define
life.  A rock cannot satisfy any of them, therefore, we cannot con-
sider a rock as a life form.  However, what about a virus.  It is
capable of self-replication under certain circumstances, though it
is most often dormant.  Is it a part-time life form?

By the way, your first sentence in this past paragraph is self-con-
tradictory.  Life cannot exist "in a form we would not recognize as
life" because then we would not call it life.  There is also the
misunderstanding that there is some continuum which someone (perhaps
you are refering to me?) partitioned into life and non-life.  I am
not quite sure what you are talking about.  I guess that you can
metaphorically consider the development of life forms as part of
some continuum.  Aside from that, I am forced to ask you for a
clarification.

> (Besides, if you really think that life had no "origin," why are
> you posting to net.origins?)

Of course, I never said that life had no origin.  For the sake of
clarity, I must deal with the technicalities, so here it goes:

If one refers to "origin" as some point in time when a particular
form first appears, then I think there is no clear time though one
should be able to demonstrate some range of time in which the origin
may actually reside.

If one refers to "origin" as the actual source of a particular form,
then I think there are numerous possibilities, one of which has al-
ready been discovered.

There are other references to "origin" in some high-level contexts,
all of which are inappropriate.

Finally, net.origins is for the discussion of the evolution vs. creation
contraversy.  The most appropriate attack at the problem is through the
scientific end since that is what creationists are claiming to have but
that which scientists are consistently refuting.  "origins" does not
deal strictly with the origin of life.
___________________________________________________________________________

Live long and prosper.
Keebler { hua@cmu-cs-gandalf.arpa }