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From: dubois@uwmacc.UUCP (Paul DuBois)
Newsgroups: net.origins
Subject: Creation of Life
Message-ID: <1124@uwmacc.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 22-May-85 16:30:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: uwmacc.1124
Posted: Wed May 22 16:30:32 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 24-May-85 21:07:48 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: UW-Madison Primate Center
Lines: 65



>> [Mike Johnston]
>> Why would you define someone who comes up with another origins theory a
>> non-scientist. If science decides to base line everything it currently
>> accepts and define anything new as non-science then I think we've just
>> heard the death knell for true science.

> [Keith Doyle]
> I would agree on your last sentence.  However, science does not reject
> new ideas and theories.  However, scientists expect new ideas to have
> certain characteristics that make them worthy of adoption.  Science generally
> does not support several conflicting theories at the same time.

This is not true.  Comment has been made a number of times in this
newsgroup (by evolutionists) about dissent and controversy making for
interesting and healthy scientific endeavor.  One thinks, for instance,
of the concept of multiple working hypotheses.  If they are not
conflicting in some sense, there would appear to be little point in
calling this a method of "multiple" hypotheses.  And if they are not
each supported in some sense, they wouldn't be up for consideration.

> Creation however, suggests little,
> if anything that helps us move forward.  Creation for example, would
> indicate that it is impossible to generate new forms of life via
> experimenting with DNA.  Evolution makes no such claim, and may actually
> be of service in decomposing more exactly what effects the DNA protiens
> have on species etc.  

I doubt that most, or even much, research done today is motivated
either explicitly or implicitly by a desire to create life.  Nor is
that motivation necessary in order to produce worthwhile research.  For
example, the following concerns work done in connection with the
elucidation of the structure of the TMV protein.  It is a virtual
certainly that at least one of the authors harbors no desire to
create life:

  Duane T Gish, L K Ramachandram, W M Stanley, "Studies on the amino acid
  sequence of tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) protein.  I.  Fractionation of
  products of tryptic hydrolysis by countercurrent distribution."
  Archives of Biochemistry, 78(2), December 1958, 433-450.

Yet this was useful research.

By the way, what is a "DNA protein"?


> I'd like to take an example issue with the creationist 'special processes
> which are not now operating in the natural universe'.  This is how the
> creationists purport to explain the creation of the universe, and of all
> the animal and human 'kinds'.

It seems to me that abiogenesis scenarios suffer from a similar
problem:  the natural laws were supposed to be the same, but the events
that occurred were unique and unrepeatable.  (That is, historically
unrepeatable.  One may still hope to simulate the conditions thought to
prevail on the early earth and produce results similar to those thought
to occur then.  It is more difficult to conceive how one might simulate
creation.)

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Paul DuBois     {allegra,ihnp4,seismo}!uwvax!uwmacc!dubois        --+--
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