Haven't they just published something to this effect recently? I mean XNA which is a synthetic polymer (not particularly new). Apparently, it's recently been demonstrated that XNA is capable of DNA-like functionality. I think this is the link to the abstract: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6079/341.abstract Not quite creating a new life form, but it looks like it's getting there.
What rarely gets mentioned is the fact that within a few hundred years man will be able to totally manipulate and engineer life and biological processes. This will give us the ability, among other things, to essentially become immortal. It might be a hundred or five hundred but it will definitely happen. Of course, for a while, only the wealthy will be able to be immortal, but eventually everyone will. This will open up a whole new area of morality and ethics and will force mankind to consider things it has never thought about before.
My experience is that once a person decides that [macro] evolution is a farce, complete with a three ring circus of circular reasoning. bad assumptions, and pure fantasyland adventures, then the person's mind is freed up considerably to get a life.
Gastropod has offered his scientific education as credentials for his religious stance. He is a an electrical engineer, he sees complexity in biology he can't envision without an intelligent creative hand. Therefore, there is a God, a creative force for our existence. But must we accept gastropod's intellectual limiitations as a finality on questions of ontology? His argument is that science has reached a end. There are questions that cannot be explained by science; therefore there is a God. Existence is the result of divine creation by default. But science is a process that we cannot determine today has reached an end. It is no more logical to say that since science cannot fully explain existence and human evolution, than it is to declare an unsolved crime is the result of the actions of a ghost. Evolution does not negate the possibility of a creator. It does not jibe with literalist views of the bible, which dates the universe at about 6000 years. And this is the rub. It is the literalists burden to reconcile the inconsistencies of the datings in the biblical texts with evidence. And as these inconsistencies appear insurmountable, science has been hijacked by a literalist fundamental world view. Sophistry rules the day for the Creationist. The world is what it is. If God created it. Great! If there is another explanation. Great! Frankly, It's hard to see how our creator called Abraham up the the mountain for a talk and then went silent to this day. And all he got out of that talk was 10 commandments? Not one credible witness has emerged that claimed to have heard directly the word of God. Except Peter O'Toole in the move the Ruling Class. When asked why he thought he was God, he answered, "Every time I pray I find that I am talking to myself"
This is true more generally, in fact... Once a person decides that propositional logic is a farce, philosophy is a farce, quantum mechanics is a farce etc, then the person's mind is freed up considerably to get a life. Just sayin'...
I read the article and it got me thinking about the numbers...which led me to this site... http://michaelgr.com/2008/04/06/how-many-atoms-to-encode-the-human-genome/ Using that info and (another unknown quantity of a site...) http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=186794 ...from the first article...there are 204 billion atoms in "average" DNA. The second article states that humans share about 99.9 of their DNA...would mean that the "average human" would take... 204,000,000,000 * 0.999 = 203,796,000,000 atoms in common...meaning random chance and energy...and the presence of the right atoms had to align in the right way to form a human...and more searching on the net led me to this article about Steyer and "information" entropy...and I am tired and have to go...flying 6,000 miles tomorrow....have to pick up another day...but, here is the article... http://www.theologyonline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=53199 Ciao, gastropod
The main problem of evolution is that many people seem not to understand it, or rather, they think they have an idea of it but it consists of grotesque misconceptions. You can find them on the websites you linked. Evolution has nothing to do with "random forces" and can not "break entropy" or go "from chaos to order". You're confusing this with mutations, which are indeed random. If you come from engineering, you might know an analogy in Thermodynamics. Molecular movement is completely random, but it results in temperature, pressure, and energy. They can be calculated with precision and without any randomness. Or do you also believe that temperature, pressure, and energy can not exist because they are based on "random forces"? Evolution is meanwhile well understood, there are several mathematical models for it. It is based on mutation rate, selective pressure, and other factors that are, at least in the case of mutation rate, well known and measured with good precision. There is nowhere a "random force".