Could the Mona Lisa have spontaneously generated?

[rowen]

Explain how

[C-Nub]

Lot to cover in this thread, although I'm going to skip over pretty much everything the author asked or challenged me (us?) to accomplish.

First off, while evolution (rocks to sponges, apparently) is not at all the simplest principle in science, it's distinctly more understandable (and verifiable) than 'God did it! YAY Jesus!' as far as valid theories go. While I would be hard pressed to turn a rock into a sponge, you would find it far more difficult to produce a god that can create a sponge from nothingness. If you insist science prove what (you seem to think) it claims, then I insist on the same from you. Even if evolution were wrong (it isn't) that doesn't somehow indicate that God is by default the answer, far from it.


But more importantly, I wanted to talk about the concept of an inanimate universe, or rather the fallacy of it.

The universe has never been, and will probably never be, inanimate. It is full of motion and energy, and has been growing more and more complicated since milisecond #1. Hydrogen and helium from the big bang moved around, eventually gathering to make massive proto-stars, which were huge and very short lived. They (probably) exploded, generating the materials from which the first galaxies formed, leaving super-massive black-holes around which those galaxies could orbit.

There's no 'life' here, but the distinction between the living and the non-living is only significant because we think it is. A rock is made of much the same things you are made of. It isn't arranged to have a nervous system, but it certainly has or been in contact with the necessary atoms or compounds.

You are not made of anything different than none-living things, you are just combined differently. The chemical reactions that you think of as 'thought' and 'feelings' are no different from those that occur in volcanoes or tidal pools. We are not separate from the universe, we are not different or removed from it, we are the recombined atoms of long-dead stars that reflect and demonstrate the growing complexity of nature, nothing more than that. It isn't difficult to explain or understand, and only our pre-conceptions and indoctrinations make it difficult to absorb.

This is an animate universe, it is a giant, ever more diverse machine of interacting cogs and gears on a scale we cannot begin to comprehend, and we are simply a facet of that, a result of that, and not a creation unto ourselves or somehow above that which we observe.

[Jura]

Explain how

your trik question is not that complicated

you ask if the spontanious generation of the Mona Lisa painting by Leonardo Da Vinci is possible
the siple answer is NO
Mona Lisa is a painting
a painting is a product of human labour
labour is a product of conscious action

this obviously intales the conscious action of an intelect, and, if im not mistaking, you are atempting to prowe by this that complex things cannot come to be without conscious actions of an intelect
meaning, this arguments in favor of inteligent desing, or creation

simultaniously you refuse all posibility of consciousness and/or intelect developing spontaniously from matter

how do you sugest consciousness and/or intelect come to be then?

[nygreenguy]

Explain how

No.

However, assuming your going where I think you are (life) this question is irrelevant on a couple points.

1) Things in nature come from less and less complex things. You simply cant, and do go from simply to complex in a single step.

2) Nature doesnt work like paintings. Life has a totally different chemistry, and therefore, operates differently.

These 2 reasons make your point moot.

[QED]

Explain how

No.

However, assuming your going where I think you are (life) this question is irrelevant on a couple points.

1) Things in nature come from less and less complex things. You simply cant, and do go from simply to complex in a single step.

2) Nature doesnt work like paintings. Life has a totally different chemistry, and therefore, operates differently.

These 2 reasons make your point moot.

Unfortunately rowen hasn't replied lately. It's perfectly reasonable for an ordinary person without the relevant scientific background to pose such a question as "X obviously can't have generated itself spontaneously, so I find it difficult to understand how Y could have" (which is, I hope, what rowen is thinking).

Clearly if X and Y are sufficiently different then there's no reason to suppose that what applies to X should apply to Y. An oil painting on canvas shares some common features with life: it's mainly composed of organic compounds for example. But it has no facility for its own means of replication, no DNA or RNA instructions from which to construct its proteins. All known biological organisms, on the other hand, do have DNA/RNA. This can be considered as a "marker" for self-organising organisms: because organisms are assembled from instructions that can be randomly modified to a degree they are liable to change from generation to generation.

Viewed at a frozen instant in time, it may seem that a particular animal has been spontaneously generated but we know perfectly well that it has an ancestry and a logical mechanism to get it from A to B.

[nygreenguy]

Clearly if X and Y are sufficiently different then there's no reason to suppose that what applies to X should apply to Y. An oil painting on canvas shares some common features with life: it's mainly composed of organic compounds for example. But it has no facility for its own means of replication, no DNA or RNA instructions from which to construct its proteins. All known biological organisms, on the other hand, do have DNA/RNA. This can be considered as a "marker" for self-organising organisms: because organisms are assembled from instructions that can be randomly modified to a degree they are liable to change from generation to generation.

I would go a step further. Molecules self-organize all the time. Their have neither consciousness nor life. Not only can molecules self-organize they can replicate. Simple molecules!

We also have think like proteins (prions) which can replicate, spread, cause disease, etc and they are nothing more than folded polypeptides. They dont even contain nucleic acids.

So, life doesnt need instructions like DNA to come about. Life is simply a consequence of the natural, inherent properties of molecules.

[QED]

I would go a step further. Molecules self-organize all the time. Their have neither consciousness nor life. Not only can molecules self-organize they can replicate. Simple molecules!

Julius Rebek has demonstrated that autocatalysts (self-replicating molecules) can undergo a form of natural selection. This could indeed explain the beginnings of life, which is possibly the real inspiation behind rowen's question.

We also have think like proteins (prions) which can replicate, spread, cause disease, etc and they are nothing more than folded polypeptides. They dont even contain nucleic acids.

So, life doesnt need instructions like DNA to come about. Life is simply a consequence of the natural, inherent properties of molecules.

One feature of life that stands-out clearly in the geology is the 'curve' of complexity. This curve (plotted as biological complexity against time) aproximates to an exponential such that at the origin complexity was effectively zero. From this point on the curve takes billions of years to get off the line. Only half a billion years ago did anything exist that we could possibly enjoy in a sandwich (unless we were vegan). This kind of escalation is indicative of constraints (on the biological system) and echoes our own cultural experience of information-technology gathering. I've always been surprised that our gracious host otseng seems to fail to recognise this pattern despite his own expertise in computer programming.

[Sjoerd]

One feature of life that stands-out clearly in the geology is the 'curve' of complexity. This curve (plotted as biological complexity against time) aproximates to an exponential such that at the origin complexity was effectively zero. From this point on the curve takes billions of years to get off the line. Only half a billion years ago did anything exist that we could possibly enjoy in a sandwich (unless we were vegan). This kind of escalation is indicative of constraints (on the biological system) and echoes our own cultural experience of information-technology gathering. I've always been surprised that our gracious host otseng seems to fail to recognise this pattern despite his own expertise in computer programming.

Here I disagree with you. Bacteria are incredibly complex things. The difference in complexity between a bacterium and a human is much much smaller than the difference between a bacterium and self-replicating molecules like prions, transposons or even viruses.

[QED]

Here I disagree with you. Bacteria are incredibly complex things. The difference in complexity between a bacterium and a human is much much smaller than the difference between a bacterium and self-replicating molecules like prions, transposons or even viruses.

I take your point, however is it really reasonable to say that most of evolution took place in the first few hundred million years of life on this planet? Given that prokaryotes (simple cells) have been around for 4 billion years, while eukaryotes (complex cells) have a 2 billion year history and with 1 billion years for multicellular life, of which things we might classify as being animals only really make an appearance in the last half billion, there seems to be no getting away from an exponential curve for something.

Is it complexity or diversity or just plain size? I think it's a reflection of the changing nature of the feedback from the biosphere. Each organism is in a competition and the only direction around comes from the amount of innovation needed to stave-off extinction. This gets off to a lazy start when everything is pretty much operating under the same conditions but as a little diversity emerges the conditions change, and inevitably, escalation sets in.

Whatever the constraints, as a universal building block, the cell has it's own internal evolution story with its own time-line. These private developments could well outstrip the subsequent developments in the structures made out of cells in terms of complexity, but we're still left with a system subject to some kind of exponential path -- which couldn't be further from the typical creationist account.

[Sjoerd]

Here I disagree with you. Bacteria are incredibly complex things. The difference in complexity between a bacterium and a human is much much smaller than the difference between a bacterium and self-replicating molecules like prions, transposons or even viruses.

I take your point, however is it really reasonable to say that most of evolution took place in the first few hundred million years of life on this planet? Given that prokaryotes (simple cells) have been around for 4 billion years, while eukaryotes (complex cells) have a 2 billion year history and with 1 billion years for multicellular life, of which things we might classify as being animals only really make an appearance in the last half billion, there seems to be no getting away from an exponential curve for something.

Unicellular organisms are and have been always the dominant life forms on earth, accounting for 90 % of the biomass and a similar percentage of DNA sequence diversity. Compared to that, multicellular organisms are nothing but cream on the cake.

I think that the evolution of prokaryotes was indeed the step that dwarfed all others, and that multicellularity is greatly overrated by the general public. The fact that you can't see intracellular signalling networks doesn't make them any less complex.

As soon as prokaryotes had evolved, most of the evolutionary action was already over. The universal genetic code and the central dogma were already established: DNA as the primary carrier of information, proteins as the molecules doing the chemical work, and RNA mostly reduced to the role of messenger. It is amazing how delicate and complex this machinery is, much more of an achievement than anything evolved since then. It is speculated that in earlier life forms, all of these roles where carried out by RNA, but evolution has not preserved these life forms.

Eukaryotes are nothing but a symbiosis of three prokaryotes: an ancestral archaeal cell that evolved cellular compartments and swallowed two kinds of bacteria, mitochondria and chloroplasts (in plants). Compared to evolving a fully functional ribosome, that's an evolutionary breeze. Multicellularity is even easier to evolve, since you can start with the chemotaxis involved in yeast mating and work your way up from there. Once you have multicellularity, you can evolve anything by modulating cell signals, because the foundation has already been laid.