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Stephen Fry Does Something never done before
52! or 8.0658175e+67
Posted 12 years ago by boyt in category: interesting
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(guest) - 12 years ago [ Reply ]
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But people readily accept that in a primordial soup, DNA somehow arranged itself in the correct order, by chance. Apparently. Little more complex then a pack of cards I might add

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(guest) - 12 years ago
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  DNA doesn't necessary need to have been part of "life" from the beginning. Not to mention the length of the first DNA doesn't need to have been more than a couple of codons, not necessarily having the function of coding for proteins at all. Given the fact that humans now can create life from scratch in laboratories, and that we know that the fundamental molecules needed for life was abundant on early earth (amino acids, ribo-nucleic acids, phospholipids and so on), I'm confident life can arise in nature as well. 
(guest) - 12 years ago
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  Well we all have the fundamental building blocks in our homes for Fry's experiment. A pack of cards. Let me know when you match his sequence of cards via shuffling 
(guest) - 12 years ago
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  DNA (or RNA) has always been the basis for life. Scientists cannot create life from scratch. They can only create a sequence of codons which can then be implanted into, say, bacteria which then replicate with the modified DNA. 
(guest) - 12 years ago
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  Let me know how long it took you when you only used five cards. 
(guest) - 12 years ago
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  Scientists now can, and have, created life from scratch. We can fully synthetically assemble a DNA-ladder, insert it into an empty cell-membrane, and get it to come to life. We are not talking about simply transfecting bacteria with new genes. Don't talk about things you know nothing about.  
(guest) - 12 years ago
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  There are 2 sides to the argument of life's origin, random chance or intelligent design. Frankly, which camp does a scientist researching life and aiming to create life with the intelligence he has attained, sit in? It hardly promotes random chance when they set out to achieve something. That would be like Stephen fry showing us the sequence of cards he got and us looking at all the cards and selecting the correct sequence. Hardly the same has random chance. The insane probabilities that are needed for life to somehow make itself by random chance a simply staggering. Fred Hoyle for example researched how proteins were needed for life to begin. He estimated that at least 2000 proteins serving as enzymes are needed for the cells activity. What are the chances of obtaining all those at random? 10^40,000. Hoyle said this was "an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe was consisted of organic soup". To put that number in perspective, the number 10^113 is estimated to be larger then the total number of atoms in the universe. 10^40000. Try writing that number out some time. Makes it a little more real how ridiculous it is to claim life somehow assembled itself by chance. Oh, and comparing the structure of DNA to simply arranging 5 cards into order is one of the stupidest analogies I've seen 
(guest) - 12 years ago
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  Oh no, comparing a cell from our current day and age, to the first life on earth, now THAT is fucking stupid. Have you heard about evolution? The first life form would obviously not need 2000 proteins to work from scratch, to claim something like that is insane. (even seriously believing that's what other people believe is so fucking stupid I can't put words on it) Just like you can't assume that the first form of life was an elephant, albatross or a human, you can't assume it would be anything like our modern cells. But somehow this idea is stuck in stupid people's heads. People like you.  
(guest) - 12 years ago
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  Oh, and the number you mentioned is wrong. There are about 10^78 atoms in the universe, not 10^113 (lol). That you even believe those numbers to be even somewhat close to eachother shows how stupid you are. Smart people understands this, because they understand what it actually means. You don't. There are 10^80 protons in the universe. There are ONE HUNDRED TIMES more protons than atoms in the universe. The number you mentioned is one million billion billion billion times larger. Smart people would react when they see a number like 10^113. You don't. Because you believe anything you are fed from your creationist "scientists", who work with the premiss that the bible is true. "10^40000", you don't even realize what that number means. How does one come up with that number? "We need 2000 proteins. How likely is that they magically come to order? Uhhh.. it's like 10^40000 or something!" You must be so freaking retarded to believe someone who says something like that.  
(guest) - 12 years ago
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  DNA is information. I believe information comes from intelligence. You believe that DNA, the instructions for life, just came about by blind chance. It ends there with me. Lets just recap what you've taught me so far though; a bunch of amino acids and other matter can just swell about and bump into each other and create DNA. How? Well you might think DNA is really hard to create but actually, have you ever arranged 5 cards in order? You have? Well you can make DNA. WHY was DNA, the absolutely necessary instructions for life created? Dunno, it just did, we're here aren't we? That must just be what they do. Make DNA by blind chance. It's not hard at all. Here's a pack of cards try it yourself. No, not the whole deck silly, just 5 cards lol. Evolution. "Because creating life is a piece of piss" 
(guest) - 12 years ago
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  A bunch of amino acids bumping into eachother, forming DNA? Really? You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, do you? How the hell can you seriously sit here and think you know anything about cellbiology when you write things like that? Amino acids form PROTEINS, not DNA. DNA is very similar to RNA, one of many organic molecules that by all measures can form and was around on early earth. As was amino acids. Nucleotides (building blocks for RNA and DNA) and amino acids are found for example in meteorites. It's not hard for nature to form these molecules. The initial purpose of RNA does not need to have been to carry information, that ability may have evolved later. From the beginning it may have functioned similarly to how proteins function; simply being BUILDING BLOCKS in the cell, in one way or another making it more likely to successfully carry out the chain reaction that is life. RNA is also a molecule much more prone to rearranging its base pairs (by the way, the order of the base pairs decides how the molecule will look, and thus its function), which means it may have started as a molecule with maybe only 5 base pairs, making up for a small molecule, but still maybe giving advantages to cells without it. I'll end with saying that you are an absolute joke, and people like you, who don't know squat about what they're talking about, have zero education in the subject, but still believe they can tell people about the way it is, is the reason for all sorts of problems in the world. It's called ignorance. Goodbye.  
(guest) - 12 years ago
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  You believe DNA, information, the very important and necessary instructions for life simply came about by blind chance. Bye. 
qwqwqwqw - 12 years ago
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  It's not blind chance when it's natural selection. That's the opposite. 
qwqwqwqw - 12 years ago
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  and dna/rna doesn't need to have been important and necessary at the beginning of life. that's where you make a wrong turn. 
(guest) - 12 years ago
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  I don't believe early organic materials randomly create information. Let alone the right information necessary for life to exist. How it did it is one thing, why is another. Why was DNA produced in the first place. It isn't the goal for these proteins etc. to create DNA. Like I said before, the enormous probabilities of all of these factors, all the factors required for life to start are outrageous. I believe information comes from intelligence. To each his own mate 
(guest) - 12 years ago
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  No, it's not the job of proteins to create DNA. The job of DNA is to arrange amino acids in certain orders, which will make the chains look and behave in different ways. These chains do not need to be longer than 3-4 amino acids to have specific properties, like for example if it's going to place itself in the cell-membrane or stay within the cell, simply by if it's water soluble or not (which depends on the direction of the electric charges of the molecule when it looks like it does). Enzymes are chains of amino acids which speeds up certain reactions, for example putting two amino acids together. Now imagine if some randomly put together enzymes of only a few amino acids in length speed up the reactions needed for the enzyme ITSELF to be created. Does "chain reaction" ring a bell? Anyway, the bottom line here is that you are talking about stuff you clearly know VERY little about. You also seem to believe that it doesn't MATTER that you know little about it. At the start, DNA and/or RNA does NOT need to have had the purpose of carrying information at all. That ability may have came up tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years later, simply because it worked. No matter what your crazy creationist "scientists" say.  
Tony (guest) - 11 years ago
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  Primordial soup theory is obsolete now - now evolutionary scientists believe rocks held the molecules in place and allowed early life to feed straight off of them. 

waldo000000 - 12 years ago [ Reply ]
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"But people readily accept that in a primordial soup, DNA somehow arranged itself in the correct order, by chance." There is no "correct" order - the order that happened, happened. There should be nothing surprising about that. When making inferences about the origins of life (or anything, for that matter), the most likely explanation is, basically, that which explains the evidence most appropriately. The mistake I believe you are making is to conflate the improbability of an observed event with the impossibility of a logical explanation for that event. For an analogy, consider a machine that randomly generates a number between one and one trillion trillion trillion, and displays the number on a screen. A scientist then makes an observation and tries to figure out an explanation for what is displayed on the screen. If the scientist observes the number 23,043,253 on the screen, what do you think would explain that? The chance of the number generator producing that number is so infinitesimally small.....Would you therefore say that the number was "intelligently designed"?

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(guest) - 12 years ago
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  Picking a random number out of a machine isn't the point. Matching that number is the point. Cellular structure and genetics have to be arranged in a very very specific way in order for life to exist. So using your analogy, if the number 123,836,222,978,263,197,578,656 was the key for life (because no other number combination will produce life) then it's the probability of the events matching that number which is the probability we are interested in. Literally picking any number means nothing. However to hit that number, with its insane, utterly insane probability, yes that gives indication of intelligent direction. 
(guest) - 12 years ago
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  Genetics does absolutely NOT have to arranged in a "very specific way" in order for life to exist. This sentence alone really excludes you from being taken seriously. You can not compare our current environment (which is highly competitive due to billions of years of evolution) to an environment where there is no competition and free energy. You can not compare life as it is after 3.8 billion years of evolution to what might have been successful life forms back then. 

(guest) - 12 years ago [ Reply ]
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Check out the Lenski experiment for an example of a sequence of very unlikely events combining to lead to what one might describe as intelligent design. Also if you are referring to Craig Venter's experiment when describing artificial life, it is rather more full genomic sequencing than Frankenstein-esque synthetic life form. Signed the guy who doesn't know what he is talking about and yet is doing a PHD in molecular bioengineering at Cambridge

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(guest) - 12 years ago
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  Lol, I don't believe someone doing a PHD in molecular bioengineering would say something as stupid as "DNA (or RNA) has always been the basis for life." as if it is fact. If you really ARE doing a PHD in molecular bioengineering and say something like that, you are seriously retarded. And finally, yes, what they did was create life from scratch. End of story.  

waldo000000 - 12 years ago [ Reply ]
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@guest: "However to hit that number, with its insane, utterly insane probability, yes that gives indication of intelligent direction." No, I'm quite sure you've made a mistake. The "insane, utterly insane probability" that you refer to is the probability that any particular configuration of "cellular structure and genetics" produces life. Right? Correct me if I'm wrong. Now, given that we are alive, we already know that life has occurred. To use the analogy, the number 123,836,222,978,263,197,578,656 has *already* shown up on the screen. There is no need to "hit that number". It is on the screen. We can see it. We are alive. We know that we have certain genetics. In terms of probabilities, where X is the evidence, we are not interested in the prior P(X) (because we are already alive/we have already seen the number on the screen), but rather we are interested in the posterior probability, which is proportional to P(X diplayed on screen | screen connected to number generator) * P(screen connected to number generator), versus P(X diplayed on screen | screen controlled by intelligent designer) * P(screen controlled by intelligent designer). I'm happy to continue the discussion, or alternatively this might interest you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference

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(guest) - 12 years ago [ Reply ]
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You people are hilarious.

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guest (guest) - 12 years ago [ Reply ]
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your assuming DNA had randomly fall into place all at once. couldnt it have been just a few codons long and stable where upon it joined similarly smaller pieces of "dna" anything stable stuck through natural selection until the complexity grew.

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xxgrandxx - 12 years ago [ Reply ]
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This is simply wrong. This is probability calculation. Just because something is super unprobabil doesnt mean that it will not happen.

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Mario (guest) - 12 years ago
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  Maybe you should listen to what Stephen Fry said in the video again 

Steve McKay (guest) - 11 years ago [ Reply ]
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Lets see now. It is stated that the cards have never been in that order before. The chances are so slim. But, hey, there is a chance, none the less. So the statement is false.

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SpeakingIllOfStephenFryIsIllegal (guest) - 11 years ago
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  Bet you five pounds the statement is true. 

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