NASA finds proof that amino acid components in meteorites originate in space.
This is exciting news. NASA-funded researchers have evidence that some building blocks of DNA, the molecule that carries the genetic instructions for life, found in meteorites were likely created in space. The research gives support to the theory that a “kit” of ready-made parts created in space and delivered to Earth by meteorite and comet impacts assisted the origin of life. We may all be immigrants on Earth.
By Bill Steigerwald
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
NASA-funded researchers have evidence that some building blocks of DNA, the molecule that carries the genetic instructions for life, found in meteorites were likely created in space. The research gives support to the theory that a “kit” of ready-made parts created in space and delivered to Earth by meteorite and comet impacts assisted the origin of life.
“People have been discovering components of DNA in meteorites since the 1960’s, but researchers were unsure whether they were really created in space or if instead they came from contamination by terrestrial life,” said Dr. Michael Callahan of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “For the first time, we have three lines of evidence that together give us confidence these DNA building blocks actually were created in space.” Callahan is lead author of a paper on the discovery appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
The discovery adds to a growing body of evidence that the chemistry inside asteroids and comets is capable of making building blocks of essential biological molecules.
For example, previously, these scientists at the Goddard Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory have found amino acids in samples of comet Wild 2 from NASA’s Stardust mission, and in various carbon-rich meteorites. Amino acids are used to make proteins, the workhorse molecules of life, used in everything from structures like hair to enzymes, the catalysts that speed up or regulate chemical reactions.
In the new work, the Goddard team ground up samples of twelve carbon-rich meteorites, nine of which were recovered from Antarctica. They extracted each sample with a solution of formic acid and ran them through a liquid chromatograph, an instrument that separates a mixture of compounds. They further analyzed the samples with a mass spectrometer, which helps determine the chemical structure of compounds.
The team found adenine and guanine, which are components of DNA called nucleobases, as well as hypoxanthine and xanthine. DNA resembles a spiral ladder; adenine and guanine connect with two other nucleobases to form the rungs of the ladder. They are part of the code that tells the cellular machinery which proteins to make. Hypoxanthine and xanthine are not found in DNA, but are used in other biological processes.
Also, in two of the meteorites, the team discovered for the first time trace amounts of three molecules related to nucleobases: purine, 2,6-diaminopurine, and 6,8-diaminopurine; the latter two almost never used in biology. These compounds have the same core molecule as nucleobases but with a structure added or removed.
It’s these nucleobase-related molecules, called nucleobase analogs, which provide the first piece of evidence that the compounds in the meteorites came from space and not terrestrial contamination. “You would not expect to see these nucleobase analogs if contamination from terrestrial life was the source, because they’re not used in biology, aside from one report of 2,6-diaminopurine occurring in a virus (cyanophage S-2L),” said Callahan. “However, if asteroids are behaving like chemical ‘factories’ cranking out prebiotic material, you would expect them to produce many variants of nucleobases, not just the biological ones, due to the wide variety of ingredients and conditions in each asteroid.”
The second piece of evidence involved research to further rule out the possibility of terrestrial contamination as a source of these molecules. The team also analyzed an eight-kilogram (17.64-pound) sample of ice from Antarctica, where most of the meteorites in the study were found, with the same methods used on the meteorites. The amounts of the two nucleobases, plus hypoxanthine and xanthine, found in the ice were much lower — parts per trillion — than in the meteorites, where they were generally present at several parts per billion. More significantly, none of the nucleobase analogs were detected in the ice sample. One of the meteorites with nucleobase analog molecules fell in Australia, and the team also analyzed a soil sample collected near the fall site. As with the ice sample, the soil sample had none of the nucleobase analog molecules present in the meteorite.
Thirdly, the team found these nucleobases — both the biological and non-biological ones — were produced in a completely non-biological reaction. “In the lab, an identical suite of nucleobases and nucleobase analogs were generated in non-biological chemical reactions containing hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, and water. This provides a plausible mechanism for their synthesis in the asteroid parent bodies, and supports the notion that they are extraterrestrial,” says Callahan.
“In fact, there seems to be a ‘goldilocks’ class of meteorite, the so-called CM2 meteorites, where conditions are just right to make more of these molecules,” adds Callahan.
The team includes Callahan and Drs. Jennifer C. Stern, Daniel P. Glavin, and Jason P. Dworkin of NASA Goddard’s Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory; Ms. Karen E. Smith and Dr. Christopher H. House of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pa.; Dr. H. James Cleaves II of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, DC; and Dr. Josef Ruzicka of Thermo Fisher Scientific, Somerset, N.J. The research was funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute, the Goddard Center for Astrobiology, the NASA Astrobiology: Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program, and the NASA Postdoctoral Program.
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Stop the presses! David Falkner has discovered the Meaning of Life!!
My stance is that there is no inherent meaning, other than what we attribute to it, unless one can show otherwise. You got proof that there is a “meaning” to the universe? I’ll wait…
anorak2 says:
August 12, 2011 at 2:34 am
@Ron Cram
If it seems like natural processes aren’t up to the task, then it means we don’t know enough about them, or there are some we haven’t discovered.
This is a statement of faith in atheism.
No it isn’t. It’s a statement of faith in the scientific method as the best tool to investigate nature. Bringing god into the equation whenever something inexplicable comes up is unscientific, and rejecting that notion is defending science.
Well, that’s a faith position. You don’t have any scientific proof by the scientific method that the scientific method is even capable of being the best tool to investigate nature. That is you have bounded nature into the constraints of science method and then claim that is nature.
It is, however, not a statement about the existence or non-existence of god. God is outside the realm of science, and science makes no statement about him at all.
Because you have excluded God from nature is no proof that God is outside the realm of science, and science can make no statement about him at all.
Even believing Christian (or ) scientists ought not to involve god in their work. That would make them bad scientists, as well as Christians. The latter, because religion is not about god interfering with natural processes. It is about much more fundamental issues outside the realm of science.
That comes from a particular view of God which ‘excludes God from creation’. The majority in the West may well believe there isn’t any other view of God, but they are wrong. You are imposing your view of God on your view of science and nature and that is merely faith, a belief system posing as reality when it isn’t even a hypothesis – provide a falsifiable hypothesis offering proof that God is as you say and that nature is as you say otherwise you can’t make the claim that God isn’t amenable to the scientific method, but only that your God isn’t amenable to scientific method in your belief system.
Ron Cram says:
August 11, 2011 at 2:23 pm
“Jim G,
You write:
Depends upon what you mean by “the confirmation of the big bang theory”. Have not read your citation but if we are referring to the big bang coming from an infinitesimally small point as in a singularity or from nothing at all then I do not believe there is confirmation. The possibility still exists that the universe has been here all along and simply rebounds after a big crunch causing the microwave background that we can see then expands only to crash again.
The confirmation is found in the book “God and the Astronomers” by Robert Jastrow. He describes how they discovered the location of the Big Bang. It has been a while since I read the book, but I believe Jastrow considered confirmation at the time. I suppose the theory of a rebounding universe is possible, a theory which arose after the events described by Jastrow. In my view, the rebounding theory is a grasping at straws by men who desperately want to NOT believe in an Intelligent Designer. This was the only method the atheists could come up with to get back to the view the universe was eternally existent.”
Many “religious” people need a concrete answer. But, in fact, God could have set up the universe in any way he wished. That is why it is called faith, no proof required. An eternal universe does NOT obviate the necessity of a God and I continue to believe He wants us to continue to grow by making the search go on.
@Myrrh
Well, that’s a faith position. You don’t have any scientific proof by the scientific method that the scientific method is even capable of being the best tool to investigate nature.
Yes, I have to agree. The scientific worldview is “just another belief system”, it cannot be “proven” in any meaningful way. Nor is it necessarily superior to other belief system.
That said, it has many advantages over other belief system, such as being open to criticism, being based in rationality and observation, and that it’s vastly expanded our knowledge. Also, while it cannot be proven to be “correct”, it can theoretically be refuted, e.g. by an observation of supernatural phenomena. But so far none has materialised. Humanity has attempted to investigate an endless number of subjects using the scientific method, and they all were open to it and produced results. That is quite a good cause for that method.
Because you have excluded God from nature is no proof that God is outside the realm of science, and science can make no statement about him at all.
I agree. I can’t prove that god is outside the realm of nature or the observable universe. All I’m saying is that it would be unscientific to consider god as a valid explanation for natural phenomena. If we allow supernatural explanations any time we feel like it, we can as well give up and stop doing science, because the answer “it’s god” always fits. But I believe the scientific method is worth defending. And anyone who thinks so must never allow unscientific explanations at all.
Even believing Christian (or ) scientists
This should have read (or any other religion), the system swallowed it because I used <HTML-like> markup there.
That comes from a particular view of God which ‘excludes God from creation’.
Agree again. The defense is that it’s a well working view which so far has produced excellent results, and that it could easily be refuted by the observation of a god doing something obviously god-like in our universe, which has never happened.
You are imposing your view of God on your view of science and nature and that is merely faith, a belief system
I’d prefer the wording “belief system” and agree. I do strongly believe that involving god to explain natural phenomena is a naive view of science as well as religion, but I cannot “prove” this to you.
For your comfort, I also believe that supposed “rationalists” who believe that they refute the existence of god by refuting creationism or any similar belief of “god did it”, which unfortunately the Christian curches used to defend for centuries, are exactly as naive. They have not refuted god, but merely a naive fairy-tale belief system. But actual religion is not about that, and it cannot be refuted. Believing in god is still worthwhile even with a scientific world view.
Tucci78,
Regarding your comment of 9:10 last night, I can see you are very emotional about this topic and it is affecting your ability to think clearly. I think I can see why you are so emotional. You have been lied to. It is very disconcerting to find out that you have been lied to, very emotionally upsetting. But believe me, it is much better to face facts than to try to deny them.
So let’s go over the lies you have been told.
1. You were told Intelligent Design was an idea put forward by Christians (a group of people you obviously don’t like and feel you have every reason to distrust and insult at every turn) to advance creationism in schools.
I have demonstrated that Intelligent Design did not really start with Christians at all, but with agnostic astrophysicists and rocket scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies several decades before the founding of Discovery Institute. (Some might argue a philosophical precursor existed in the Watchmaker Analogy of William Paley in 1802, but the existence of this analogy had zero affect on Jastrow and others at NASA. The work of Jastrow and others was the first that was strictly scientific.)
2. You were told Intelligent Design had zero scientific backing.
I have demonstrated that Intelligent Design comes from the confirmation of the Big Bang, when the actual location of the Big Bang was discovered. Again, Jastrow’s short book tells the story in a fascinating way and can be enjoyed by all no matter their religious point of view (although some atheists have become agnostic after reading it). I have also provided a peer-reviewed article by Granville Sewell title A Second Look at the Second Law. It is very definitely worth reading and considering. Yes, the paper was withdrawn but not because of any errors in it. See http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/AML_3497.pdf
3. You have been told that those who affirm Intelligent Design and/or are involved at Discovery Institute are all Christian.
This is not true. I suggest the book “Nature’s IQ: Extraordinary Animal Behaviors That Defy Evolution,” by Hungarian Hindus Istvan Tasi and Balaz Hornyansky. See http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/php/book_show_item.php?id=129
4. You have been told the atheist comes to the question of origins with a “clean slate.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. Atheists come to the question with a strong bias against any evidence of the supernatural. Arthur Eddington, an expert in General Relativity Theory and an atheist, found it personally “repugnant” to admit “The beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural.” He made that comment about the Big Bang BEFORE the theory was confirmed by observation as described in Jastrow’s book. Eddington is rather unusual in his ability overcome his personal bias. Jeff Alberts, in comments above, made statements confirming his belief in atheism regardless for what the evidence showed. Jeff would rather put his faith in unseen natural forces than admit the laws of physics were broken at the Big Bang. Without doubt, atheists come at the evidence with their own biases. Some are able to overcome them and some are not.
I wish you success in your quest for the truth. If you are on such a quest.
from KITP biology presentations
“……where is it that biology chooses selectively the physics it follows. It is consistent but of a narrow range…”
“………..THere is a concentration gradient across the membrane. Lots of calcium outside and none inside. And there is a pump and gradient level sensing system–if calcium is detected in the cell, the pump switches on and pumps out the calcium. Question is: what (or who) sets the intra-cellular gradient?? ……….”
Jeff,
You write:
My stance is that there is no inherent meaning, other than what we attribute to it, unless one can show otherwise. You got proof that there is a “meaning” to the universe? I’ll wait…
I believe it is possible to demonstrate meaning to the universe, but such a discussion goes beyond science into history, psychology and other topics. It would be off topic to this blog, but if you are serious about having the discussion we can do it by email or Facebook. I comment under my real name and invite you to send a friend request on Facebook if you are interested in discussing it.
JimG,
You write:
An eternal universe does NOT obviate the necessity of a God and I continue to believe He wants us to continue to grow by making the search go on.
If you are saying we need to continue the search for scientific truth, I fully agree. Was there something I said that made you think I would not agree?
Theo,
Here is a summary of many of the things that I have been talking about:
Darwinian evolution in the light of genomics by Eugene Koonin
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2651812/pdf/gkp089.pdf
also,
The fundamental units, processes and patterns of evolution, and the Tree of Life conundrum
http://www.biology-direct.com/content/4/1/33
Note that this paper was subject to open review: four reviewers with their comments and author responses.
A final comment. One must always be careful with analogies and metaphors in scientific writing. Their meaning in the context of science is related to but is not equivalent to their meaning in everyday language. Nevertheless, they are useful and probably necessary in communication. When I made the transition from mathematics to biology, analogies were useful in understanding the new concepts which I was exposed to. But, I knew the analogies were not the real thing, and thus, my usual approach would be to bash the analogy with experimental results until it broke. Gradually, my analogies to everyday life grew into analogies derived from experimental results. Catchy terms such as “junk DNA”, “selfish genes”, and “tree of life” find their way into popular and scientific writings, but along the way, their link to observation and rigorous abstraction gradually becomes more and more tenuous. For me, the classic example is from thermodynamics: a “spontaneous” reaction, i.e. a reaction that releases free energy. To understand the term “spontaneous”, we have to throw out our common notion of what spontaneous means. Perhaps, scientists in the past should have just stuck to exergonic, but spontaneous is easier to say and remember, and it is now so much a part of scientific language that it is here to stay. Perhaps, Dark Energy should have been called Upsidaisium. 🙂 Just remember to keep bashing analogies, metaphors, hypotheses, models, and theories until they break. Nature is always more interesting than you can imagine.
At 8:44 AM on 12 August, anorak2 had written:
Egad. And this is supposed to be a Web site that cozens the readership and participation of the scientifically literate?
anorak2, have you considered that your confusion of science as “just another belief system” might be resolved by simply defining your terms? You might ask yourself what the word “science” means and what the expression “belief system” signifies. They’re different.
Then you might try thinking of science as a tool of thought, the abstract equivalent of a micrometer or a set of Johansson blocks, setting a standard of conduct in reasoned consideration of the phenomenal universe that tends with good confidence to guide the user toward the acquisition of new information providing greater insight into the understanding of how things work.
Just as there’s no need to vest “belief” in a Johansson gauge for it to work within specified parameters, there’s no need to profess a “belief” in science for scientific method to operate successfully.
One of the great advantages conferred by Jo blocks and science is that – within their respective parameters of function – they’re utterly and wonderfully indifferent to “belief” so that anybody – Christian or Muslim or animist or Satanist – can follow the instructions, do the work, and get results that a colleague should be perfectly capable of duplicating at some time or place else.
A “belief system,” on the other hand…. Well, what with witch-burning and temple prostitutes and apostate-decapitating and ritual circumcision and child brides and human sacrifice and suchlike, that hasn’t been working out so well down through all of recorded history, has it? Consider expressions like “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius,” f’rinstance.
Another difference between “science” and most every “belief system” is that in doing “science” “no one would have to get nailed to anything.”
Takes a lot of the excitement out of your average “belief system,” but as I’ve said, I’m an individual-human-rights-respecting kind of guy with a high regard for the non-aggression principle. Continuing with anorak2‘s post, right into where it gets really bloody awful:
Nope. Wrong-o. LOUD RUDE BUZZER NOISE! and if you’re not ashamed of yourself, anorak2, you really ought to be. Tsk. Not “theoretically,” not hypothetically, not conjecturally, not even yanking-it-out-of-the-proverbial-prat and proclaiming that it smells like Chanel No. 5. Science and the supernatural have nothing at all to do with each other, and that’s by definition of both terms. If it’s “supernatural,” it ain’t “science,” and nothing of “science” is ever “refuted … by an observation of supernatural phenomena.”
That’s because “science” – real science done by honest and disciplined people instead of “Cargo Cult Science” clowns peddling that “intelligent design” crap – doesn’t pertain to the evidence-bereft hallucinatory confabulations of the mentally unhinged that religious whackjobs classify as “supernatural.” To be “phenomena,” anorak2, stuff has to be real, and that which lucid folks term “supernatural” are at most pure abstractions without material instantiation in the natural physical universe, which is how the word comes by that “super” prefix.
Do you think you might be less prone to errors like this if you were to substitute the expression “extranatural” for the term “supernatural“? Both convey the connotation that they have nothing to do with the real, natural world in which human beings are born, live, and die, and there’s a bunch less of the hoodoo connotation to “extranatural.” But then back to your post:
Yep. Same argument for micrometers and telescopes and Jo blocks and power tools. Not so much, of course, for any “belief system” unless you’re trying for a “Kill ’em all! God will know His own!” excuse for slaughtering people who’ve surrendered to you instead of fighting to the death. But there’s a nugget of the laudable in anorak2‘s post:
While I’d advise the replacement of “I believe” with “I think,” it works fairly well, the sentiment continuing in:
It’s correct that “railing against god” with the tools of science is an exercise in stupidity, analogous, I suppose, to using a Jo block instead of a sugar cube to sweeten your coffee. With regard to that last sentence, though, absent some very convincing exegesis, I’m still inclined to go with Smith’s wager, of which we read in one of the concluding paragraphs:
Well, let’s see how I’ve screwed up the HTML this time….
anorak2: “Your argument is like saying that if a brick falls down from a roof and splinters in thousands of chips and pieces, the breaking up of the brick must have been by design, because the likelihood of the same chips and pieces in their exact shapes and locations forming by chance is microscopically small.”
You are misunderstanding the design argument, so your analogy doesn’t hold. Of course improbable things happen by chance all the time. The question is whether, in addition to being improbable, there is specification (which can be an integration of functional parts, specified information, etc.). Only then can design be inferred. To take your example, if the brick falls and breaks into splinters and the splinters fall into place spelling the first half dozen lines of Shakespeare’s sonnet, then we would have a closer analogy. In the protein case, it is not simply that the arrangement of amino acids is improbable; it is that the arrangement results in a functional protein (the vast majority of arrangements do not) that integrates with other proteins into a functioning whole.
Eric @ur momisugly10:53 p.m.: “Well, I’m not sure there is much more worth discussing. It is clear that you are very angry and upset about the idea of intelligent design, seeing an imagined evil religious conspiracy under every rock. ”
Tucci78 @ur momisugly 4:29 a.m.
Exhibit A. Thanks for proving my point. 🙂
Sorry, I was supposed to be signing of, but I’m still getting the emails and I’m curious on this one:
Tucci78 says (from anorak2’s post)
“Just as there’s no need to vest “belief” in a Johansson gauge for it to work within specified parameters, there’s no need to profess a “belief” in science for scientific method to operate successfully.”
Can we define “belief?” It seems we create and use tools such as micrometers and Johansson Gauges, and the such; but even though we’ve proven they work, don’t you still have to use the tool? Where I work we have to calibrate tools and even a gauge can be manufactured wrong or worn down over time. So don’t you put a little trust into that device that it is going to give you what you need (plus you have human error in everything so you are placing trust in the person doing the measurement, or if we have to the person who wrote the computer program which takes the measurement).
It goes back to the chair example I’m sure most of us have heard: we can take a chair and analyze it to death. Verify its support structure and materials and put weights on it to make sure it will hold the maximum amount of weight, but in the end you still have to sit in it. Sure the analyzing it proves it will hold you, but I think you will find words like trust and faith always hold a certain amount of understanding first (otherwise it is blind and possibly foolish). See the link http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/belief and you will find one definition of belief is “a state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing.” Seems even science requires a certain amount of belief, otherwise we would never launch ourselves into space just because math and science shows we can.
#
#
George E. Smith says:
August 11, 2011 at 10:41 pm
You must be either a liberal, have problem with English, or you are insufferably dense. You have a nasty tendency of re-framing everything I write, so as to supply your own distorted interpretation, reading into it things I am not saying and even thing that are opposite to what I am saying.
Frank Drake proposed his equation explicitly to demonstrate the absurdity of it all. How many time to I have to say it? It you brain dead liberals who are trying to read into it other stuff. BTW, that is straight from Frank Drake himself. SHEESH!
For the record, I work in an area of engineering that is at the cutting edge of mathematics, because, even though I work as an engineer, I am trained as a mathematician. What part of “depending on what your are doing” don’t you understand ( or did you just do the liberal trick of seeing what you want and ignoring the data that is inconvenient)? Anyways, in most branches of mathematics, zero*inf IS a real which does not preclude it being indeterminate (confusing existence with indeterminacy looks like an example of the liberal penchant for invalid dichotomy). I use this property all the time. The fact that a number exists, even though that value is unknown, permits the employment of some very powerful theorems.
If you bothered to read any of my other posts, I explain were the 10^-20 comes from. What part of “less then” don’t you understand? I suspect that I could have easily have said 10^-200, knowing that this number would also be larger then the actual, but I SWAGed a number that would give the benefit of the doubt to the moonbats, yet was small enough to demonstrate what I was saying. But I guess some are just too dense to understand. Seeing as you think you are such the hot mathematician, you should realize that, considering the domain we are in, this is a frigging small number, or did you suddenly forget granularity. OY! There are only 10^23 stars. That means that even given my obnoxiously large number, there would only be 10000 star systems in the entire universe with intelligent life! A more realistic number would result in less then 1. Considering the absurd misreading of my post, I suspect that the number of stars supporting intelligent life is zero.
I don’t think you have anything to tell me about modern physics because you fail at basic science, which is predicated on the ability to accurately observe.
RandomReal[],
Regarding your post at 10:41 this morning, thank you for the links to Dr Koonin’s paper and his opinion piece. Both are interesting reading.
It appears Dr. Koonin is going through the same type of mental exercise experienced by Jastrow and Eddington before him – trying to find a way to cling to science without mentioning the supernatural. Koonin sounds like he was very surprised (and maybe a little upset) to discover that many mutations over time did not lead to significant changes in the genome or greater complexity of life. Koonin is still clinging to a shred of hope that a modified evolutionary theory will emerge which can survive further scrutiny. You might call this future theory Darwin Plus, although he prefers Evolutionary Biology in the Light of Genomics.
I found this quote interesting:
For instance, recent genome sequencing of primitive animals, sea anemone and Trichoplax, revealed extensive conservation of the gene repertoire compared to mammals or birds, with the implication that the characteristic life span of an animal gene includes (at least) hundreds millions of years (84–86).
If the genome persists unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, what does that observation do to the theory of evolution?
I take the opposite view from Koonin. I believe the evidence discussed by Koonin shows Darwin was likely wrong and that future research will prove Darwin wrong.
Koonin appears to be an atheist whose faith in atheism may have been shaken but he is not willing to give up on it yet. Thank you again for both articles.
Tucci78,
“I’m not trained or experienced in the theories of “pattern recognition” per se, but I’ve sure as hell gotten to see lots of “repetitive, non-random, coherent information that is highly unlikely to be created by chance” over the decades.
Under the microscope and in the pathology laboratory particularly,”
Funny thing Tucci, none of us saw your paper describing where they EVOLVED!!!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Ron Cram says:
August 12, 2011 at 12:05 pm
…
Koonin appears to be an atheist whose faith in atheism may have been shaken but he is not willing to give up on it yet.
——–
Atheism is a faith only if “bald” is a hair colour 🙂
John B conflates atheism with agnosticism. Atheism is every bit as much of a belief system as any religion.
RandomReal[] says:
August 12, 2011 at 10:41 am
Thanks so much to you. I will read what you suggest.
Your advice is excellent. In fact, I give the same advice at every opportunity. The key is to bash the analogy with experiment.
I hope to see many more posts from you.
@Smokey
Nope:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism
What definition of atheism do you use?
Serves me right for posing an analogy in the knowledge that analogies are always suspect. At 11:28 AM on 12 August, mattweezer finnicks:
Of course you “still have to use the tool.” Neither a Jo block nor scientific method is going to do your measuring – or your thinking – for you. That’s not what they’re for, nor did I make any such implication. As for “words like trust and faith,” the proper response is “Not really.” Anybody who puts uncritical “trust” in anything or anyone – a tool or a person – is setting himself up for trouble. Maybe disaster.
And if what he’s doing with that tool (or that person) is of importance to the health, lives, safety, or even the comfort of other people, he’s failing in his duty to those folks. That’s malpractice, plain and simple.
In clinical medicine, too, there is always the need to calibrate and re-calibrate instruments and systems, to test and to validate the testing method, lest diagnosis and treatment go astray. I drew the analogy to simple gadgets of which most of us have either direct experience by way of high school shop classes or conceptual appreciation predicated on didactic education and/or independent reading because I kinda doubt that most folks know the nuts and bolts maintenance required to keep an arterial blood gases analyzer or a hemodialysis machine running.
The real moral of the “chair” story, remember, is simply the old Russian proverb: “doveryai, no proveryai” (“trust, but verify”).
Even in “shipbuilding-in-a-bottle” laparoscopic surgical procedures, we still do instrument and sponge counts. Verify, verify, verify, and even then something will slip past. I’m old enough to remember when the surgical team to which I’d been assigned had to go back into a belly to retrieve a laparotomy sponge that’d gotten tucked into the wound while the patient was being exigently (and bloodily) managed in the Emergency Department prior to getting him up on the table in the operating room.
Ever wonder why doctors have this reputation for calm in a crisis? I suspect it’s because we’re always anticipating worst-case scenarios, something going horribly wrong. Hell, I can’t even pick up one of my infant grandchildren without making sure my hold on the kid can’t be quickly converted to a cervical-spine-protecting airway-clearing position suitable for resuscitation.
It is therefore profoundly wrong to speak about “trust and faith” in real-world activities, particularly as they bear upon the well-being of real human beings, and that includes not only machine tooling and surgery but science, too.
The doctor who accepts a proposition on “trust and faith” – like, for example, Dr. Wakefield’s effort to link childhood vaccinations to autism in 1998 – is failing of his professional duty to his patients. Ditto for the scientist who neglects to keep hard hold on his observational and/or experimental and analytical procedures so as to conform consistently to scientific method.
Oh, yeah. That a dictionary reflects popular imprecision in the interpretation of a word like “belief” is nothing more than the acknowledgement of a lamentable tendency seen among large numbers of people. Might be considered a form of the argumentum ad populum fallacy. It has damn-all to do with what the word really means in scrupulously precise usage, and to assert otherwise is deliberately to defeat the purpose of language as a tool for the accurate conveyance of conceptual information.
Key to the concept of “science” is that it does not require “a certain amount of belief,” but functions instead by doubting everything, considering every accepted proposition as susceptible to disproof if the evidence supports that contention.
Done properly. science is self-correcting. That’s one of the reasons for my hatred of the creationists. They’re trying to screw up that self-correcting function by introducing their unquestionable Great Sky Pixie crap as if it were in any way a legitimate part of science curricula in the schools.
In matters such as this, I tend perhaps to over-quote, but I’m conscious of the fact that I’m not only not much of an original thinker but that others before me have put their cases well. I can’t take credit for their work. With that in mind, let me plug in a careworn pull from the writings of Richard Feynman:
So much for the religious whackjobs’ incessant idiocies about citing respected scientists’ opinions on the “supernatural” as primum movens.
Ron Cram,
” Jeff would rather put his faith in unseen natural forces than admit the laws of physics were broken at the Big Bang.”
Mostly I agree with what you are stating. There are a couple of exceptions. This is one. It would be more correct to state that current laws of physics were not in existence at the time of the Big Bang, at least, that is how I understand the many writings of Cosmologists. They were set during the BB.
Another issue is that finding the location of the Big Bang tends to detract from the currently accepted Cosmology. In theory every direction we “observe” from earth should show us a consistent pattern little different from any other direction. A Cosmological equality of outcomes. Being able to tell where the BB happened would conflict with this theory. Just finding that the Cosmic Background Radiation is not within very narrow limits has set up quite a bit of consternation in the community to the point that some are now claiming that the CBR is locally generated all over the universe and should not be considered as the “afterglow” of the BB. After all, it was not found in the range it was predicted anyway!!
Here are a few explanations of the BB which seem to be congruent with current Cosmology.
http://en.allexperts.com/q/Astronomy-1360/2008/1/big-bang-5.htm
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=126881
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980327a.html
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=2473921
In other words, finding a center for the BB would actually disprove current thinking!!!!
At 1:01 PM on 12 August, kuhnkat finally decompensates completely (heck, you could see it coming, couldn’tcha?), gibbering:
Well, there goes kuhncat, proving that if he can’t think and speak and write in a rational manner, he can always blow chunks all over the keyboard of his Amiga.
How wonderfully evocative of the religious whackjob creationist – can we call it “intelligent design” when the proponents in the forum keep demonstrating how stupid they are? – position on life, the universe, and everything.
John B,
Atheism is a Belief. Deal with it.
John B says:
August 12, 2011 at 1:42 pm
Atheism is a faith only if “bald” is a hair colour 🙂
Bad analogy. You are conflating a belief in something with the actual existence or nonexistence of said thing.
No god is analogous to no hair. Atheism is analogous to a worldview of someone who grew up in a small village of bald men and who had never seen or heard of hair. Such a person could be called an ahairist.
An atheist is analogous to an ahairist. Both are a belief system or worldview.