I Had to Submit This Video - DNA Replication

[Zircon]

After you view this video and read the short description of it below, just think, anything and everything that has DNA - from an earthworm to you here on Earth - operates in the same manner.

So, how special are we? We are each unique from one another in our specific code but we're all built the same way. This viewing makes me wonder about how common DNA really is? The process it works ... how universal can it be? On the surface it seems like a big, "No Way" does this exist process anywhere else.

Would this support "creation" or just our particular method of cellular/organism reproduction with equally amazing processes yet to be discovered elsewhere in the universe?

If we are truly fortunate, perhaps one day we'll find amazing biochemical/"genetic" processes on other planets orbiting other stars?

Truly fascinating video. The beauty of how this stuff works is awesome.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120821.html

[Roger]

Great link, and thanks for that. I'm not sure what your point is though. The big problem for chemists, biochemists and physicists is defining 'life'. Current practices of any of these fields presumes only three fundamental or primal factors: time-space, matter and energy. Creationists want to introduce 'intelligence' or 'pre-design'. Life or some aspect of reactivity that is neither 'brainy' nor 'non-selective' is never considered as a fourth possible primal factor. Neither created, nor destroyed.   Evolution has to begin with life or a selective reactor before any possible series of 'choices' can begin. This concept means that life learns.  The the question becomes: what allows learning? Some structure has to evolve that can preserve memory of past events for the sake of comparison and judgement or some means to avoid past mistakes. The results can mean many false starts and perhaps total extinction of any developed form. Yet as long as 'life' is a primal principle.  A rather stupid or non-intellectual principle, any possible process will begin again. The only hope for any evolved form is that that form can utilize energy-matter and time-space to preserve memory. Hence knowledge.  It wouldn't have any idea what went on ere such structures allowed it to know.  It is no 'original creator', but it could create once it got the basics down for continuance.

[ziznak]

Roger- post more
Zircon- Aliens

if DNA is basically chemical and chemicals are universal then life must be universal and EVERYWHERE
Panspermia is my favorite word and describes both my view of life in the universe and a Friday night with the stripping Ex.

[MV/Liberace!]

gets a chuckle every time i see it.

[Zircon]

Ziz, what? You a Zacharia Sitchin advocate?

Roger, an outstanding analysis. I agree learning is a biochemical process and this leads to the purest application of "survival of the fittest" - in this case what can remember and repeat.

We also share 98% of our DNA with a Chimpanzee I do believe so I can see growth and major branching. Having said that ...

Larger brains mean more protein. Being hungry came first and eating meat, in the absence of abundant plant life, filled our stomachs so our brains boosted. Mutations occur. Most have no negative effect. Some do and some enable a species to move forward. That is how I think it progressed. Learning and chemical change. Biochemistry in action. It all is at a molecular level.

I include "creation" and thus "God" to suggest all options. If divine intervention was employed I think it may have just "jump started" the process and moved on. With this universe, we have no true special place (except in our own minds as we're currently ALONE in our experience and therefore SPECIAL by default - human rationale being employed). If God exists He may very well have a lot more things to do than babysit us.

God may have been "contrived" in an effort to counter the fear of "aloneness" and hence vulnerability and to reduce/control the actions of early society. Basically, "if you do this or that then you're in a world of shit when the MAN gets wind of it - so behave - code of conduct".

[Roger]

Er, well, I think it reasonable to entertain the idea that some very ancient element of life can exist in which memory obtains, enabling comparisons of past choices that, obviously, were not terminal but also not, necessarily, preferable.   If any action were truly terminal, there would be no memory. No regrets.

Who has not rued some action?  What conscious person hasn't thought: 'if only' they had not done this or that, how the outcome might be different? This ruing or regret is retrospective, based on memory and possession of new information, perhaps an expanded emotional knowing.

Nevertheless, we have this ancient saw: 'live, and learn'. This, if anything, puts 'learning' at a premium.  I think learning or expansion of personal knowing at a very high value.  And at basis, that is not intellectual. It is emotional. And, life, I truly believe, is at basis emotional.  And the nature of what life does the least harm to or attacks the least boils down to what works best.  And mutual love, I think, works best. I make no conclusions, but I'm pretty sure that any form of life that resorts to warfare or belligerence has pretty good odds of being sequestered and left alone. Run from.  Starved.

Now if life is 'all knowing' at the outset, how could such belligerence ever get a foot-hold? It must be elementary. Life learns the better mode.

Some portion, as of yet, have not. And if consciousness has anything to do with anything: would one not think, rather than doom such atoms of such motives to extinction, they might be taught into the greater bounty of present learning?

That being a position, the big question will obviously be: what is the majority? What the minority? The obvious answer is that ignorance, so far as conscious life is concerned, is by and far the majority.

Why? Because consciousness is a resultant, not a primal cause.  Life is primal. And life has no concept of 'sin'.  'Sin' is entirely a concept of consciousness.  Therefore, all war is about competition between forms of consciousness. Well, if time-space and matter-energy are infinite, why be cheap? The best form of consciousness will be that which is most hungry to learn, least vulnerable to attack or harm by seminal forms of consciousness and the least harmful to any seminal states or forms of consciousness.

Yet life is most primal. Exists before consciousness. The best consciousness is that which gives life the greatest freedom and does the least harm to it.