The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #151677   Message #3547111
Posted By: Steve Shaw
08-Aug-13 - 08:33 PM
Thread Name: BS: Reinforcing respectful 'boundaries'
Subject: RE: BS: Reinforcing respectful 'boundaries'
Well we don't know enough about the origin of life. "Random" worries me a bit. I can imagine differential survival of compounds, or associations of compounds in droplets, in a process not far removed in nature from natural selection (which I prefer to reserve for non-random survival of heritable traits so as not to gainsay Darwin). There might have been millions of potential sites, but one got lucky. A bit like your millions of universes, or planets in Goldilocks zones. A million times, the right compounds were around but it just didn't happen. Then one day, in one puddle of warm soup...? I do love to speculate. But at least I'm speculating about the highly-improbable, not the damned impossible. After that, we have nucleic acids and alleles and mutation as givens - no need for speculation there. Natural selection is such a brilliant explanation for all of life because we need to make next to no assumptions. We have the materials and the mechanisms and we can see how it works. Bang for bucks a-plenty. Creationism makes massive assumptions before it can run at all, and burdens itself with having to do far more explaining that it explains. Useless!