Does the theory of abiogenesis violate any scientific laws or principles?
480098
First of all, there is no single theory of abiogenesis.  Rather there are several competing hypotheses.  Which ones are likely is a matter of some debate.\n\nBut there is no scientific law that abiogenesis violates in general.  At it's simplest, we know that RNA monomers can form.  We know that RNA monomers can form chains (RNA polymers).  We know that randomly formed RNA chains can sometimes self-replicate.  We know that randomly formed, self-replicating RNA chains can compete with each other to reproduce efficiently.\n\nAfter that, it's all evolution.\n\nThe rest is just details.  Details that, I point out, scientists are working on exploring.  This is unlike creationism where the question of how oak trees got to the top of the fossil record has remained unanswered and uninvestigated for 200 years.  Why should they look into the details when blind, empty, abject denial works?
346312
Before answering the question definitively, I think it may important to be aware of a few important details.  When we speak of "evolution" we are generally referring to the notion of species evolving by means of natural selection.  Many evolutionary biologists argue over the details, but all agree that natural selection is part of the evolutionary mechanism.  And so, there are actualy more than one "theory of evolution" when it comes to the details.  \n\nLet's assume for arguments sake that your question therefore could be slightly rephrased into: is evolution by means of natural selection truly happening?  The answer, I think, is a clear yes.  You may have heard some say that evolution is a controversial theory among scientists.  That is actually not the case.  what is controversially discussed are, as I pointed out above, the details of the evolutionary mechanisms.\n\nNow, assuming that evolution by natural selection is real, and therefore, that not only we as human beings evolved, and that we furthermore are still evolving, does that mean that therefore religious believes are impossible?  Again, I think the answer is clear.  And this time it is no.  science and religion are absolutely reconcilable.  But as always the devil is in the details...  When some scientists say that science is the only way to the truth and therefore evolution has done away with God, the problem is that they are making a metaphysical, that is anon-scientific, philosophical statement: The statement cannot be tested by a scientific experiment.  Consequently, if the statement were true, it would prove itself false, since it is not scientific.  It is, what we call in philosophy, the liar's paradox (If I told you I am a San Franciscan, and all San franciscans are liars, am I telling the truth?).  On the other hand, when a biblical literalist tells you that the Bible has told us how the world was created in six 24 hour days (and one Sunday of rest...), the problem lies in reading the biblical text literally.  The Bible is full of what in theology we call obscure text passages...  There are contradictions, there repetitions, etc.  For example, if Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, how come he dies at the end of the fifth book and writes about it?  I could list more examples, but I think you get the point.\n\nSo, we can conclude that indeed a materialistic interpretation of the world (i.e., science is the only way to the truth) and a biblical literalism (i.e., the biblical text is to be read literal by the mere literal meaning of its words) would present two irreconcilable positions.  But as we have seen, both positions are problematic.\n\nIf we allow for science and religion to communicate with one another, they can actually inform each other and in there dialogue provide one interpretation of the human experience of reality.  Accordingly, religion would thus attempt to interpret the world in light of Scripture, but also its tradition.  Science on the other hand tries to attempt the same using its own very particular methodologies.  The concepts from both disciplines are then brought to a dialogue with one another, and from that dialogue one new understanding can emerge.  And with this new understanding we engage yet once again in a new cycle of interpretation.  As such, even religion science, and definitely our overall understanding of our human experience of reality grows continuously, or if you like, evolves.\n\nI hope that helps.
642658
I find it interesting how everyone ASSUMES the writer is religious just because he disagrees with evolutionary theory.  Actually, belief in God (yes, it's capatilized) is more reasonable than belief in no higher being.  See the gamble in philosophy: if there is a God and you believe you get your reward, if you believe and there is no God then the same thing happens to you that happens to everyone, if you don't believe and there is no God you have the same situation as above. Finally, if you don't believe and there is a God you're SCREWED - yes, that's the technical term).  \n\nEvolution is definitely NOT proven, in fact, I have not seen any convincing evidence for the theory and it has turned out to not be very predictive. Unlike the theory of Gravity, which has not had any evidence against it yet and therefore is a good theory, evolution is a bad theory because it does not explain the observed facts.  Yes, here comes the wailing about the fossil record, finches in the Galapagos, etc...\n\nConsider this for a minute:\nThe Miller Experiment produced a racemic mixture of amino acids whereas living systems take almost primarily L-amino acids.  It is also extremely difficult to produce polypeptides in the lab without the required enzymes.  Plus, it has been accepted that oxygen was in the early atmosphere.\n\nThere are no known transition forms in the fossil record (maybe the winged lizard which I don't know how to spell).  If Darwinian evolution occurred the fossil record should be full of transition forms, but it's not.  Instead, it is characterized by rapid appearance of fully-formed organisms (like the Cambrian explosion or the appearance of flowering plants).  This led to theories like puntuated equilibrium, which is just an evolutionary form of intelligent design/abrupt appearance.\n\nThere is not a single proven mechanism by which ANY biological system has formed from inorganic matter.  How did an eye form?  What about just a bacteria?  These are much more complex than previously thought and is not a "lower" organism.\n\nFinally, most (if not all) mutations are either harmful or have no affect on the organism due to junk DNA.  It is unlikely that the great diversity present at this time could have occurred due to accumulation of mutations.  The age of the earth as accepted by most scientists do not give enough time for this to have occurred (I think it's about 4 billion years or something like that).\n\nYou want to know why it is still taught?  It is a pseudo-religion of materialistic atheists and allows atheists to comfortably believe there is not a God.  This is the same reason why there was resistance to the helocentric model of the solar system depsite the accumulating evidence.  People liked the earth and our civilization having a special place in the universe.
654030
No and it was never claimed to be true by Darwin or evolutionary scientists.  This is part of the misinformation spread about evolutionary theory.\n\nThe theory of evolution supports the idea that monkeys and humans have common ancestors.  And likewise that all life on earth evolved from common ancestors if you go back far enough.
49268
I think more than any other thing--more than all other things combined, perhaps--there is a single, most important fundamental that must be understood: The Law of Mass Action.  The barrier to understanding evolution stems from the word "random."  We hear "random," and the instinct is to say, "Bull pucky."  But randomness, applied to the law of mass action, becomes every driving force in the universe, and the origin of all order.\n\nThis is a ubiquitous law in nature.  The hardest part of understanding something like evolution is trying to wrap your mind around the NUMBERS.  Those huge, infinitely-large number that are used to discuss propability are truly mind-boggling.  Once you realize that there are other examples of driving forces overcoming immense odds, your whole perspective on the probability of evolution changes.\n\nTake biochemistry.  This is some stuff that's completely undisputed.  A protein starts as a chain--or several chains--of amino acids, all strung together.  Miraculously, this protein folds into the specific conformation necessary to perform its function by the simple process of RANDONLY banging around.  That's it!  It just bangs this way and that, folds left and right, over and under, driven by nothing more than the RANDOM bumping and shifting caused by thermal energy bumping tiny articles against eachother.\n\nBUT!!!  Once it gets to a thermodynamically-stable conformation, it basically stays put.  It takes a million random bumps left and right, up and down, for each of the two joints connecting every individual amino acid on the thread, but once it goes the right way, it's mission is accomplished.  And all of this happens in the blink of an eye!  We have no concept of how incredibly quickly these minor bumps and bangs occur until the target reaches its mark.\n\nOr take diffusion.  This is an extrodinarily powerful driving force, and the law that governs it is so simple that it sounds absurd!  Here it goes:  It is more probable that something will go from where it is to where it isn't, than it is for something to go from where it isn't to where it is.  Done!  That's it.  I've just told you in a tiny nutshell what chemical engineers spend two years studying with differntial equations, labs, and computer models.  That's thermostatistics summed up.  And yet because I understood that very basic fact, I was able to understand the complex functions of the nerve cell far better than 99% of my molecular biology classmates.\n\nBear with me a bit longer: when a neuron fires, ions rush in and out of the cell in ways that depolarize and repolarize the electrical charge of the membrane.  It's really complicated-sounding stuff.  But what it really boils down to is that potassium ions (K) are concentrated in one place (mostly inside the cell), and sodium ions (Na) are concentrated somewhere else (mostly outside the cell).  All of these ions are banging around, this way and that.  Some go left, and some go right, but the membrane staps them from going through.  The special channels open up.  Na ions, being mostly outside the cell, will be far more likely to go inside the cell--where they aren't--than they are to come out of the cell--where they already are.  THat's all it is--you're more likely to go from where you already are to where you aren't than vice-versa.  It's so simple it stupid.  Yet the movement of any GIVEN ION is COMPLETELY RANDOM--and yet this action happens so quickly and so consistently and so reliably that this become the driving mechanism of all biological activity.  This random ion movement, taken applied to a massive system where thermal bumping happens millions of times per second for biliions of billions of ions happens in a reliable and concerted way every time you blink.  Every pixel you see on your screen right now is the product where trillions of random molecular collisions happened, but a handful of signific
33692
Beatz, Beatz, Beatz.  What were you thinking?  You should have known that there would be nothing but appeals to ignorance poffered as evidence as answers to your question.  What's worse is that, even though people like Behe make those continual suggestions that a lack of evidence for evolution is evidence for creation, so much of what creationists claim has not been explained has been.  From immune systems to eyeballs, it's all been done in the journals.\n\nI'm not sure which is more pathetic... the fact that the creationist position is based off of a logical fallacy, or that they aren't even right when they keep chanting their "Science hasn't explained this" mantra.  I used to be a Christian, and from that I can say, absolutely, that the kind of lazyness and willful dishonesty displayed by people of this sort is NOT a good way of emulating Christ.\n\nAnyway, I've seen some of your posts, and I like them a lot.  Keep up the good work.\n\n[EDIT]: Jesus Christ Rob... before you open your mouth to talk about thermodynamics again, you might want to, you know, actually learn something about thermodynamics.  You have completely botched both the first and second laws of thermodynamics.  You cannot draw conclusions from flimsy, qualitative, and innacurate paraphrasings of precise quantitative laws.  I'm getting tired of putting this old chesnut back down every time one of Hovind's lackeys digs it up again, so I'm going to send you here:\nhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/thermo/probability.html\nand here:\nhttp://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=an6JrBwCTk&isbn=0226075745&itm=1\nand I'll mention these:\n"Considering the earth as a system, any change that is accompanied by an entropy decrease (and hence going back from higher probability to lower probability) is possible as long as sufficient energy is available. The ultimate source of most of that energy, is of course, the sun." (See Rob? That's what happens when you ignore that whole "closed system" part of the Second Law).\nand:\n"Evolution no more breaks the Second Law of Thermodynamics than one breaks the law of gravity by jumping up." -Michael Shermer\n\nAnd one other thing: that "mutations are always fatal and not beneficial" stuff is utter bunk.  Everyone reading this now is carring multiple mutant genes.  Can you taste litmus paper?  Or see the 3-D images in the magic eye pictures?  Congratulations: you're a mutant.  There are many very harmful mutations, yes.  But by admitting that, you are also admitting that natural selection does indeed happen.  As for beneficial mutations, those happen also, and have been exhaustively documented:\nhttp://www.gate.net/~rwms/EvoMutations.html\nhttp://www.gate.net/~rwms/EvoHumBenMutations.html\nhttp://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB101.html\nAnd I'd also like you to ask yourself what makes a mutation beneficial.  And then think about your answer.  And then realize that that is ALSO exactly what is meant by natural selection.
267868
No.  Obviously life exists despite the second law of thermodynamics.  The chemical processes associated with living organisms use energy from the surrounding evironment to create more order.  Our evolutionary ancestors did that too.  I see no way in which evolution contradicts the second law of thermodynamics any more than the existance of life does.
1053858
So far, the laws of nature have been constant wherever we look. This includes astronomical observations of events long ago and far away. Therefore, the assumption that the laws do not change is a reasonable one and is generally accepted. If you want to argue otherwise, you need to specify what laws you think were different, in what way, and how could we tell. Otherwise, your argument is no better than "science doesn't know everything; therefore, pigs can fly".
684403
As a scientist, I try not to "believe" in something because it is appealing, but rather to consider the available evidence and use that information to reach a flexable conclusion that will change as additional information becomes available. Based on the available scientific evidence, I think it extremely likely that the principles underlying the theory of evolution are accurate. I therefore "believe" the theory of evolution, but not in the sense that one believes in God, but rather in the sense that I can assume it's true as necessary but I'm prepared to accept an alternate version of the theory or even to reject it if there is scientific evidence that is sufficient to warrent this change. \n\nHere's some of the evidence that supports the theory of evolution:\n\n\n1. Vestigial structures\n\nOne example of a vestigial structure in humans is the appendix. It has no function. Removing it is harmful only in so far as any surgery is associated with certain risks (so I wouldn't have it removed just for fun, but it's because of the surgery not the absence of the appendix). An appendix is found in several mammals. In humans it is small and has no known function. In rabbits and many other herbivores it is large and is used in the digestion of cellulose.\n\nAnother example of a vestigial structure is the hipbones of snakes. Snakes evolved from quadrupeds, and some species still retain not on pelvises, but tiny protrusions of bone in a location that corresponds to the location of the legs in other quadrupeds.\n\n2. Microevolution can be observed in both a controlled laboratory setting and in nature.\n\nCreationists will tell you that microevolution does not prove macroevolution.  This is true.  However, it does provide evidence that macroevolution may be possible. Taken in the context of the other evidence for evolution, microevolution provides a mechanism by which macroevolution could occur. On its own, it doesn't prove that macroevolution occurs, but it does suggest that it is possible.\n\n3. The fossil record.\n\nAlthough the fossil record does not provide a “complete” record as fossils form only under certain conditions, it does show a gradual change in the morphology of species as well as numerous extinct species.  There are a number of methods used to date fossils, and the time period from which a fossil comes can be determined with reasonable accuracy.\n\n4. Imperfect structures (the blind spot of the mammalian eye, for example).\n\nI want to mention the bind-spot of the mammalian eye specifically because creationists often hold up the human eye up as an example of something that is too perfect to occur by "chance" (i.e. as the result of the natural selection of beneficial changes among random mutations).\n\nThere are also numerous examples where the morphology of a species is constrained by similar patterns in its ancestors (quadrupeds, vertebrates, etc.).\n\n5. Developmental biology reflects evolutionary lineage.\n\nCreationists like to bring up a man named Haeckel in response to this argument.  Haeckel suggested that development reflects evolutionary origin.  It was later discovered that several of the sketches he used as evidence over-exaggerated certain features, and some were of different embryos all together. However, many of his sketches do accurately reflect the morphology of the embryo. Haeckel's methods were sometimes wrong and his ethics were poor, but it just so happens that his theory turned out to be fairly accurate.\n\nAny developmental biologist can tell you that embryos of related species show similar morphology in the early stages of development. The point at which their development begins to diverge shows a strong correlation with the relative point at which the evolution of the two species diverged. Human embryos look similar to chimpanzee embryos for a lot longer than they look similar to cat embryos, but all three develop similar structures in the
423680
Not always.  A concept can be based on purely science.
136070
I doubt it.\nEarth is the perfect place in the Universe for life forms to take root and live.\nMan is created to live on Earth and to take custody of it.\nSorry, no such thing as Evolution.\n\nBesides, Man is the greatest creation. Why should there be other more greatest creation?\nIf so, there is no greatest creation and the law of balance is disturbed. The law of balance can never be disturbed.\n\nGod is Omniperfect.\nTrust me, I am not joking.\n\n\nTo independant_009...\nIt is how you describe Omnipotential is wrong, not mine.
1115159
It is 100 percent right :o).\n\nhttp://www.creationevidence.org/
1132375
Whether the 6 days of creation are seen as literal 24 hour time periods, or as an age/era (possibly constituting billions of years), the fact remains that God is the Creator of all.\n\nI find it rather ironic that the Atheists will contend that Creationists are being dishonest with the facts...that we somehow skew them to support or own conclusions.  Yet these same people will turn around and try to cloak theories of abiogenesis as being "scientific".  How about simply being honest?  Abiogenesis has never been observed, and there is no plausible rationale to think that it is even remotely possible.\n\nAtheists put their "faith" in mutated DNA somehow producing new species, I put my faith in a Creator...
812157
The  theory of evolution is based upon  many well placed assumptions. this theory means we guess......................There are undisputable  Laws of Thermodynamics,when understood, that smashes the theory of evolution into a million little pieces. Then we have to look elsewhere for the real source of life!........The two Laws of Thermodynamics stated:1)the first Law is energy conservation. Energy can be converted from  one form to another, yet the total amount of energy remains unchanged .Energy is neither being  created not destroyed at the present  time. 2) the second is the Law of decay. It affirms that although the total amount of energy  remains unchanged there is always atendency for it to become less available for useful work.There is a universal tendency toward DECAY and deteriation,a transition from a more orderly state, to aless orderly  state, finally to deenergization. In other words, the earth is running down...........Notice  the absolute Law fo Thermodynamics that has been proven  and the theory of evolution that CANNOT be proven.Evolution says we are evolving upward  to a better condition. the second absolute  Law of Thermodynamecs proves we aredecaying-not evolving to a better state....The  theory of evolution implies  increasing  organizaton and complexity in the universe and is in effect a doctrine of continuous creation. The first Law of Thermodynamics arrirms that creation is no longer occurring,while the second Law states that the original creation is decreasing in organization and complexity.
755030
Technically, and scientifically it is a theory. Theory doesn't  mean that it isn't true though, it simply means it is the most widely accepted opinion of the scientific community until someone can come along with a better theory or disprove the theory.\n\n"God created Us" is not a scientifically accepted proof against the theory of evolution. This is because without evolution DNA mutation makes no sense, even though it is a well observed phenomena.\n\nFossils also would have no explanation.\n\nAnd as a teacher, it would be best to say that it is okay to not believe every theory, because many past theorems have been proved wrong, but that he or she should maybe look into evolution a little more before casting a judgement.
617998
Yes. There are absolute, eternal laws that exist in the universe. You break them at your own peril.
1136881
As usual, there are a number of people who do not seem to know what a theory is, claiming that something is 'just' a theory, as though there is some higher category to ascend to when something is crowned a 'law' or something.\n\nScientific laws are descriptions of things that are observed, factual and proven.  They DO NOT provide an explanation as to WHY that observed factual process occurs.\n\nThe 'law' of gravity is that things fall.  That's it.  It doesn't provide any explanation of why things fall, or how they do it, just that they do.\n\nThere is indeed a 'law' of evolution, and that is that organisms are different than their parents.  It doesn't provide any explanation of why that might be, it is simply an observation.\n\nThe 'theory' of evolution is any attempt to explain this observation, just as the 'theory' of gravity attempts to explain why things fall.  Evidence is then gathered to either support or disprove this theory.  \n\nNow another big misconception comes in when people discuss 'The Theory of Evolution'.  What they are usually refering to by the 'Theory of Evolution' is the theory of speciation through natural selection that was first proposed by Charles Darwin as an explanation for the diversity of life on Earth.  This theory is indeed a theory, but it is not 'only a theory'.  There's no higher level to a theory.  It is either a valid theory, or it is disproved through contrary evidence.\n\nThe theory of speciation through natural selection is one of the most important theories in biology, and ALL evidence collected to date, from the fossil record, to genetic testing, to the biogeographic distribution of living species, to potassium/argon dating of rocks in the Canadian shield, to bacteria in hospitals developing resistance to antibiotics, to the pattern of magnetic reversals recorded in the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, to the wide diversity of different kinds of beetles, to the physiological similarities between leopards and jaguars ALL support the theory, and there hasn't been a single piece of evidence presented which has disproven the theory.\n\nSo evolution is both a fact (the fact that offspring differ genetically from their parents), and is also a theory (usually refering to the theory of speciation through natural selection, but there are actually dozens of additional, complementary theories of evolution as well).