4 ms·

> never told us anything about the origin of life There are several steps to go from no life to life as we know it. This experiment illuminates one of those st

• dekhn 5y ago
  this experiment only reduces the uncertaintly that the building blocks are widely available. The big problem wiht this experiment is that it misestimated the nature of the early atmosphere and os they basically simulated another planet. We don't know if any other planets have life, so simulating another planet isn't useful to illuminate anything about life on earth.
  • ls612 5y ago
    Huh? We know whatever the early conditions of earth were they were clearly amenable to the formation of these organic compounds since life arose here. It's absolutely also interesting to know that in certain known conditions this can also arise, even if those conditions are not the only conditions capable of creating the phenomenon.
    • Socketier 5y ago
      That's circular reasoning. We're here so it must have happened in this specific way therefore it happened. Sure, an expertly guided experiment in a glass tube can make some basic amino acids but they had to be removed from the experiment immediately before the the product was ruined by further reactions. It was a guided process which we've got no further in accounting for in the wild. We've made no progress since these experiments to answering the questions posted by the theory of abiogenesis. We've got no concrete answers, only suppositions. This is not a popular thing to talk about but the fact remains that we are absolutely nowhere close to solving this in the manner in which we are proceeding in OoL studies. The track record for uncondendable conjecture is abysmal.
• ballenf 5y ago
  It's kind of like saying learning to jump really high is the first step to getting to the moon.
  • pfdietz 5y ago
    Or like saying "look, the monkey can sometimes make small words appear when it bangs on the keys of this typewriter. This tells us something about the origins of novels."
    • SavantIdiot 5y ago
      A better analogy, but it still can be steered toward, "...without a Writer. This is why there is a Writer." Capital intentional.
    • gliptic 5y ago
      Learning how writing was invented is certainly a step towards understanding the origin of novels.
      • FridayoLeary 5y ago
        studying the behaviour of a monkey when introduced to a typewriter doesn't. Studying the formation of a few molecules in a controlled environment hardly explains how living forms came to exist.
        • gliptic 5y ago
          If you never learn where a few molecules came from, how could you possibly make progress on the problem?
          • dekhn 5y ago
            we made substantial progress in biology before we understood molecules. this is because it's not necessary to be entirely reductive to understand larger systems.