Out of Pod Experience

There's no "design" in evolution, there's just emergence.
Evolution does not "go towards" something specific, it just tends to increase "fitness" (it's actually much more complicated, but this approximation should do for the purpose of this conversation).
Evolution can lead to dead ends (where no further evolution is possible unless conditions radically shift), and it can even result in extinction if the right combination of condition shifts happen to occur.
Evolution is not a one-time process, it keeps going and going and going and going...

Who cares? If it was a design then I would call it pretty. And when you think it tends to increase fitness then it does go towards fitness. I think evolution supports life. Races then do not go extinct because of evolution, but because nature wins over the evolution (of life) and life itself. For example, if all goes well then prey and predator keep in a balance, and when draughts change the food supply, continents split apart or asteroids hit the Earth then it can happen for races to die out. You then do not see the evolution of life taking place on other planets, because nature did not allow for it to start.

This is only true in the middle. People who study evolution never want to talk about the beginning. Abiogenesis (SP?) is basically science doing a gigantic shoulder shrug because they have no ******* clue.

Everything in the known universe is dying. Every star is burning or flashing out, every orbit decays, all matter is going to end up drifting cold and dark forever. Every chemical reaction results in simpler and more stable results unless you add energy, which must be released from something else. Every time you store energy, it takes more to store it than you stored.

One day some little thing came about that did not break down, did not get colder, did not fall apart, and did not get simpler. It was a thing that metabolized something in it's environment, releasing stored energy for itself to use, and it replicated.

Natural selection principles fall apart INSTANTLY when something has no predecessor. Evolution does not apply to the FIRST example. Tat is not simply 'emergence'. That is a complete shift in the nature of matter that created a schism between what is alive and not alive. What is alive wants -WANTS- to live and continue to burn energy from what is not. It has wanted -WANTED- to and strived to since before there was such a thing as DNA. Since before there was a nervous system or a brain.

I am not religious, but if someone told me God stuck his finger in the muck a few billion years ago and named one little spec 'Adam' that'd be the most likely story I've heard so far, for the beginning of life. If you have some article where we can replicate that and make a self-sustained new beginning of life then do link it, but last I heard we were arguing about cell-like shapes in lava flows and stuck on 'what came first' between metabolism and something else.

Well, I'd say start at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis and keep going through the links.

"1952, in the Miller-Urey experiment, a mixture of water, hydrogen, methane, and ammonia was cycled through an apparatus that delivered electrical sparks to the mixture. After one week, it was found that about 10% to 15% of the carbon in the system was now in the form of organic compounds, including amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins.
[...] reanalysis of the saved vials containing the original extracts that resulted in the Miller and Urey experiments, using current and more advanced analytical equipment and technology, has uncovered more biochemicals than originally discovered in the 1950s. One of the more important findings was 23 amino acids, far more than the five originally discovered."

"Apart from the Miller–Urey experiment, the next most important step in research on prebiotic organic synthesis was the demonstration by Joan Oró that the nucleic acid purine base, adenine, was formed by heating aqueous ammonium cyanide solutions. In support of abiogenesis in eutectic ice, more recent work demonstrated the formation of s-triazines (alternative nucleobases), pyrimidines (including cytosine and uracil), and adenine from urea solutions subjected to freeze-thaw cycles under a reductive atmosphere (with spark discharges as an energy source)."

"Sol Spiegelman aimed to find the simplest life form by taking advantage of evolution's natural selection process. His new life form, Spiegelman's Monster, had a genome with just 218 bases. Manfred Eigen built on Spiegelman's work and produced a life form with just 48 or 54 nucleotides. M. Sumper and R. Luce of Eigen's laboratory accidentally discovered that a mixture containing no RNA at all but only RNA bases and Q-Beta Replicase can, under the right conditions, spontaneously generate self-replicating RNA which evolves into a form similar to Spiegelman's Monster"

"A simple mechanism to explain the replication of RNA and DNA without the use of enzymes can also be given within the same thermodynamic framework by assuming that life arose when the temperature of the primitive seas had cooled to somewhat below the denaturing temperature of RNA or DNA (based on the ratio of 18O/16O found in cherts of the Barberton greenstone belt of South Africa of about 3.5 to 3.2 Ga., surface temperatures are predicted to have been around 70±15 °C, similar to RNA or DNA denaturing temperatures). During the night, the surface water temperature would be below the denaturing temperature and single strand RNA/DNA could act as a template for the formation of double strand RNA/DNA. During the daylight hours, RNA and DNA would absorb UV light and convert this directly to heating of the ocean surface, raising the local temperature enough to allow for denaturing of RNA and DNA. The copying process would be repeated during the cool period overnight. Such a temperature assisted mechanism of replication bears similarity to polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a routine laboratory procedure to multiply DNA segments. Michaelian suggests that traditional origin of life research, expecting to describe the emergence of life from near-equilibrium conditions, is erroneous and that non-equilibrium conditions must be considered, in particular, the importance of entropy production to the emergence of life."

"While features of self-organization and self-replication are often considered the hallmark of living systems, there are many instances of abiotic molecules exhibiting such characteristics under proper conditions. For example Martin and Russel show that physical compartmentation by cell membranes from the environment and self-organization of self-contained redox reactions are the most conserved attributes of living things, and they argue therefore that inorganic matter with such attributes would be life's most likely last common ancestor."

"The question "How do simple organic molecules form a protocell?" is largely unanswered but there are many hypotheses."

"It is known that phospholipids form lipid bilayers in water while under agitation – the same structure as in cell membranes. These molecules were not present on early Earth, however other amphiphilic long chain molecules also form membranes. Furthermore, these bodies may expand (by insertion of additional lipids), and under excessive expansion may undergo spontaneous splitting which preserves the same size and composition of lipids in the two progenies."



So, yeah, we don't know EXACTLY how life on THIS planet started, but we have quite a few workable models as to how life COULD start in general.
It might be extremely slow at first (it literally took hundreds of millions of years to go from nothing to single cells, and several more to go to multi-cell) and maybe even unlikely, but once whatever you can call "life" kicks into gear, watch out.
:P

I think Akita T missed VKhaun Vex's point a little bit, but at least she did it in a wiki warrior sort of way. That's a good thing right?

Infinite tries vs infinite size could be an interesting conversation. The answer is not immediately obvious to me.

But code is not infinite. There are only so many characters available to type in any particular spot, and the code is only so many characters long. It is exactly like dice and coins, just more sides (characters possible in a location) and more dice rolled at once (number of characters that need to line up.). Binary especially would be a VERY large set.

You use the word Chaos like it's an elemental force, but there's really no such thing. When you flip a coin you have a one in two chance of getting heads. There is a calculable chance to flip a coin and come up with the exact combination of any program in binary. That chance will clearly be VERY slim, but given infinite tries it WILL happen.






A lot of bit. But Akita T is awesome, and the wall of text is worth reading for those who aren't familiar with the subject.

Well, I suppose part of the point was that if one REALLY wants to find circumstantial evidence for the existence of a deity, it might suffice to realize how unlikely it is anything resembling life as we know it would have arisen spontaneously in one fell swoop, and tend to conclude "somebody did it" would be an attractive answer.
The other part, I suspect, was how what we call "life" tends to seemingly try to oppose the laws of thermodynamics by maintaining or decreasing entropy in their immediate environment, whereas normally, entropy should only go up.

The thing is, while "life as we know it" is unlikely to be the only kind of life that can arise and then evolve. If nothing else, countless sci-fi examples try to drive the point across that life as we even barely imagine it might possibly exist, and at least a handful of those sci-fi examples have at least some basis in reality (not the uber-simplified sci-fi versions, but still, you get the idea). In fact, it might be that "life as we know it" is only a very small subset of "life as it could exist".
For all we know, the galaxy - or, for that matter, the entire universe - could be teaming, chock-full of life, of many different types, some which we haven't even imagined yet. Galaxies themselves (or even the universe itself) could as well be living beings, but on timescales so staggering we can barely comprehend even when pointed out, or each individual particle could be an entire universe in itself, but that's something best pondered in an intoxicated state. For now, let's stick to time and spatial scales more easily grasped by the human mind.

Also, what many people forget, the thing about entropy only makes sense when we're talking closed systems (isolated environments, no transfer of matter nor energy across the boundaries). Obviously, other than in theory, even if we don't quite go down to heisenbergian precision levels, there is no such thing as a "closed system" (maybe other than the entire universe, and even that is still up for debate). Even the eventual heat death of the universe is a thing we're not quite so certain to be inevitable anymore - in a roundabout fashion, for reasons best not explored for now, there are people that are convinced the universe itself goes towards a lower average entropy, sort of breaking the laws of thermodynamics, if we assume the universe itself is all that there is, but again, that's for other people to squabble over.

Back to stuff that resembles life...
Some inorganic entities DO replicate themselves, and so do some not-really-alive organic compounds.
Complicated patterns DO arise naturally from simple interactions.
Long story short, some traits of life can be found in entities that are generally agreed as not being alive in any actual sense.
You don't really NEED any kind of deity to have some life bootstrapped somewhere eventually - all you need is enough space and a long enough time coupled with an infinitesimally small but not quite zero chance of things happening in a certain way.
This of course does not mean a deity type entity could not possibly exist - it just means you don't necessarily have to assume one exists for things to have happened the way they did.

Evolution is not a concrete thing, it's a process, and a process that depends on the rules of the universe. Life itself (at least until it develops rudimentary sentience, then maybe later on also sapience) is not "motivated" to further itself, it just does it.
A virus does not "desire" to multiply, it just does due to its structure. Just like an oil slick does not "desire" to spread on open water. You need at least rudimentary sentience to "want" something.
Even sapient species such as ourselves are still strongly driven by our structure to further ourselves rather than because we "desire" to (or, better said, our desires are a result of our structure, but that's going too philosophical for my taste already).

Bottom line : while unlikely in small scale (time or space), going on a large enough scale, life (of some kind) is almost unavoidable given the conditions in our universe.
And even if you go the "perfectly fine-tuned universe" argument, that also falls flat under closer scrutiny - if the universe WOULD have had different rules (or, in a many-universe possible extended interpretation, you find yourself in an universe with vastly different rules), SOME type of life unlike anything that could even happen in our universe MIGHT have arisen, then evolved, and given again a large enough scale in time and space, would be still as good as unavoidable.

All im glad for is that the people who came after arisitotle weren't tortured and murdered when they disagreed with his findings and continued to search for the actual facts.

Imagine what kind of world we would live in if you couldn't disagree with the current dogma

Your kind of infinity is obviously very different to my kind then.

Personally ive never heard of an infinity that can be split to an end.

You will be surprised when you realize how close we are to reaching infinity. When you consider how gravity fields influence time might the discovery of the Higgs boson not only lead to a better understanding of gravity, but of time as well. Once we do might it only be a small step to creating something, which knows no time - infinity.