Mystery of how life on Earth began solved?

[mice34]

Very cool. I'm sure the creationists have their fingers in their ears.

www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/space/5322903/Mystery-of-how-life-on-Earth-began-solved-by-British-scientists.html

"The trouble is, the human eye sees the three components of RNA and so the human brain assumes that to make the molecule you should combine those three components. People have found that they can make the sugars and the bases but the key thing they can't do is to join them together," Dr Sutherland said.

"And so for 40 or so years they have worked on the problem and have become so frustrated that they have decided that RNA, although very desirable, is just too complicated and so there must have been a simpler molecule that spawned RNA. We've just changed the order of assembly of the pieces, but it's overcome the dogma that it cannot be done," he said.

Carl Zimmer: blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2009/05/13/in-the-prebiotic-kitchen/

Nature: www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7244/full/459171a.html

[Oriet]

That's a pretty cool article. Thanks for sharing!

[Tiger]

They didn't solve it so much as find new evidence for what we've already suspected since the 1960's. I hate how the media sensationalizes every single new discovery made.

[Shano]

May 17, 2009 11:46:29 GMT -5 Tiger said:

They didn't solve it so much as find new evidence for what we've already suspected since the 1960's. I hate how the media sensationalizes every single new discovery made.

While as a scientist I certainly see the point of being cautious about sensationalism, some people say "fight fire with fire". If the opponents are employing sensationalism left and right with a great effect is it that wrong to use it too?

[Tiger]

May 21, 2009 15:22:19 GMT -5 Shano said:

May 17, 2009 11:46:29 GMT -5 Tiger said:

They didn't solve it so much as find new evidence for what we've already suspected since the 1960's. I hate how the media sensationalizes every single new discovery made.

While as a scientist I certainly see the point of being cautious about sensationalism, some people say "fight fire with fire". If the opponents are employing sensationalism left and right with a great effect is it that wrong to use it too?

To take your analogy a step further, you don't set another wildfire to fight the one that already exists. You set several carefully controlled smaller fires so that the wildfire burns itself out.

I also have problems with the logic of "The enemy does it, so we should too." We are not the creationists, and we do not need to stoop to their level in order to win this. When people realize that the scientists are rational people who know what they're talking about and the creationists are a bunch of idiot blowhards, they'll come around to our side. Allowing ourselves to be represented in the media by similarly idiotic blowhards only fosters the perception that we're on equal intellectual footing with Kent Hovind and the Discovery Institute.

Edit: Found a quote on Rapture Ready that isn't good enough for the main page, but illustrates my point rather well. (emphasis mine)

I've studied evolution and I've studied Creationism. ALL of the evidence for evolution either was fabricated (some out of thin air) or on very shaky grounds, even within the evolutionism camp! There's not only no evidence of missing links in the HUMAN branch of evolution, there's no evidence of transitional forms for ANY macro-evolution of ANY creature! They've created mass hysteria over "missing link finds" over nothing more than a tooth, or a couple of half-an-inch fragments of jaw bone!

[antichrist]

I blame the media for the hype. Scientists come out with a finding, professors are in the publish or perish quagmire, PhD. students have to come up with a thesis so all of this stuff hits the web, and the media picks up any story they want and run with it.

It may be the only study out of a million that shows a link between breast cancer and abortion, but it's plastered all over the news as fact. They get away with it with those famous lines "a recent study shows..." not "scientists believe" or anything like that. Well I had tests go weird in highschool, back when we could play with our own blood, we did blood testing on ourselves and I came out as AB+ when I knew I was type O. We had a really good instructor who taught me to report my findings and add a paragraph afterwards explaining how it could of been screwed up. If the media got hold of it, they'd probably spin it that I proved that blood types could change.

Slow news days are always good for that kind of shit.

[Vene]

Oh, I must have missed this thread. Yeah, I've got another interesting journal article, one which offers an explanation of the origin of the sugars and bases of nucleic acids. Oh, and it's open access, yay for free peer review.
www.springerlink.com/content/aq10866526v08u65/

Just gonna add, due to limitations of history, it's only really possible to show that abiogenesis can happen, not the exact method in which it did happen. Unfortunately, chemical reactions don't fossilize.

[Admiral Lithp]

May 15, 2009 16:12:38 GMT -5 mice34 said:

Very cool. I'm sure the creationists have their fingers in their ears.

I'm not sure they'll have to. This is all Geek to me. And THAT'S saying something.