[net.origins] what is meaning of "life"?

hua@cmu-cs-edu1.ARPA (Ernest Hua) (05/30/85)

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> { from: miller@uiucdcsb.Uiuc.ARPA (A Ray Miller) }
>
> Keith Doyle writes:
>
> > Simple organic molecules have been seen to form from elementary
> > constituents (ammonia, methane, etc.), and assemble themselves into
> > self-replicating nucleic acids which mutate and are altered in
> > frequency by natural selection, all in the laboratory under conditions
> > resembling the prebiotic earth.  Note that all 'specific work' has to
> > mean is replication.
>
> Hello?  What's this?  I believe that any organic-based widget which is
> "self-replicating" would in fact be called LIFE.  Now if evolutionists have
> demonstrated LIFE arising from "conditions resembling the prebiotic earth" it
> would indeed be news.  Has Keith chosen net.origins to make a Nobel Prize
> quality announcement?

The definition of life does not even go that far since at the present time
there exists no other class of entities that can self-replicate in some
macro sense.

life: self-sustaining, self-maintaining, self-replicating forms.

"Organic" limits life forms to strictly carbon-based units.  There are
numerous suggestions of silicon-based life forms that can arise else-
where in the universe.  I don't see why carbon should be the only
allowable base element.

Hence, the experiments that he referred to do not qualify as creating life
in the labs.  They were not meant to demonstrate some creation of life in
the labs.  They were meant to demonstrate the various steps that evolution
of life forms might have gone through in the beginning of biological
evolution on earth.

Your criticism is not relevant to the discussion, however.  How about
answering the real questions that a lot of readers have asked you?  You
have done nothing more than make sidetracks and repeat old complaints.
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Keebler { hua@cmu-cs-gandalf.arpa }