DNA .... the atheist's kryptonite

It was banned. When multiple accounts are uncovered, all of them get banned.

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Oh, okay! Fine! Have it your way. Which of my beliefs would you like to discuss?

  1. I believe puppies and kittens are adorable.

  2. I believe rainbows are caused by the refraction of sunlight through rainwater.

  3. I believe the aroma of baking bread is wonderful.

  4. I believe it is never a good idea to go skinny dipping in a crowded public pool. (Unless, of course, you are on fire and it’s the only way to douse the flames.)

  5. I believe it’s not healthy to cuddle with rattlesnakes during camping trips.

Please feel free to choose either of those beliefs, and I’ll be happy to discuss it with you.

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Uh, on Uranus, maybe? :thinking:

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There’s a little girl who plays with Cobras and sleeps with them in her bed.

“I trust god, and if god wants her to die, there’s nothing I can do.”

I stopped watching at that point, she’s 8. You could try and keep her away from danger as much as is possible, and have anti-venom on hand in case. Just off the top of my head.

As fascinating as it is to see something as deadly as a cobra kept docile as a pet by a child of 8, I doubt the girl fully understands the dangers, and tragedy is always only seconds away. Invoking superstitions and appealing to mystery just makes my skin crawl, when it puts a small child like this in danger unnecessarily.

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Bullshit. First, because atheism, in its rigorous formulation, is nothing more than suspicion of unsupported mythology fanboy assertions. That is IT. Equivalently, it consists of “YOU assert that your magic man exists, YOU support your assertions”, preferably with something better than “my mythology says so”.

Second, the question of the origin of life is NOT part of the remit of “atheism”, it’s part of the remit of SCIENCE. And, since you decided to wade foolishly into the requisite discoursive waters, I’m here to tell you that over 100,000 peer reviewed scientific papers document in exquisite detail, the laboratory experiments establishing that every chemical reaction implicated in the origin of life works. Oh, and your resurrection of the Pasteur Canard is merely one of numerous creationist canards I cover in detail here.

Indeed, life IS chemistry writ large. Millions of chemical reactions are taking place in your body right now, and if some of those reactions stop, then you die.

If fatuous assertions by mythology fanboys about magic from a cartoon magic man being purportedly “necessary” for life on Earth, were something other than ex recto fabrications arising from ignorance, then the pharmaceutical industry as we know it would not exist. That industry has successfully synthesised tens of thousands of chemical compounds that are effective at treating a wide range of human diseases.

As for the aforementioned research in prebiotic chemistry (which you obviously knew nothing about before I stepped in here), that has now moved on to experiments with synthetic model protocells. You can learn more about this from here, here and here.

In addition, I was recently made aware of four peer reviewed scientific papers by a team of Japanese scientists, who demonstrated in the laboratory that not only can RNA strands undergo self-replication, but that they can produce a molecular ecosystem via Darwinian evolution.

Oh, and I devoted a nice little article to the origin of life, and the current scientific findings on this matter, in this handy Google Docs document:

Note that I cite no less than eighty two peer reviewed scientific papers supporting the statements made in that document.

As for DNA, we have known for decades about its chemistry. Indeed, I have in my collection no less than nine peer reviewed scientific papers, devoted to the prebiotic synthesis of nucleotides. Here are the citations:

[1] Chemoselective Multicomponent One-Pot Assembly Of Purine Precursors In Water by Matthew W Powner, John D Sutherland and Jack W Szostak, Journal of the American Chemical Society, 132(46): 16677-16688 (24th November 2010). This paper can be found here:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ja108197s

[2] Selective Prebiotic Formation Of RNA Pyrimidine And DNA Purine Nucleosides by Jianfeng Xu, Václav Chmela, Nicholas J Green, David A Russell, Mikołaj J Janicki, Robert W Góra, Rafał Szabla, Andrew D Bond and John D Sutherland, Nature, 582: 60-66 (4th June 2020). This paper can be found here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2330-9

[3] A Prebiotic Synthesis Of Canonical Pyrimidine And Purine Ribonucleotides by Hyo-Joong Kim and Justin Kim, Astrobiology, 19(5): 669-674 (2019). This paper can be found here:

https://www.liebertpub.com/suppl/doi/10.1089/ast.2018.1935

[4] A Prebiotically Plausible Scenario Of An RNA-Peptide World by Felix Müller, Luis Escobar, Felix Xu, Ewa Węgrzyn, Milda Nainytė, Tynchtyk Amatov, Chun‐Yin Chan, Alexander Pichler & Thomas Carell, Nature, 605: 279-284 (12th May 2022). This paper can be found here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04676-3

[5] A Prebiotically Plausible Synthesis Of Pyrimidine β-Ribonucleosides And Their Phosphate Derivatives Involving Photoanomerization by Jianfeng Xu, Maria Tsanakopoulou, Christopher J Magnani, Rafał Szabla, Judit E Šponer, Jiří Šponer, Robert W Góra and John D Sutherland, Nature Chemistry, 9(4): 303-309 (April 2017). This paper can be found here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nchem.2664

[6] Prebiotically Plausible Oligoribonucleotide Ligation Facilitated By Chemoselective Acetylation by Frank R Bowler, Christopher KW Chan, Colm D Duffy, Béatrice Gerland, Saidul Islam, Matthew W Powner, John D Sutherland and Jianfeng Xu, Nature Chemistry, 5(5): 383-389 (May 2013). This paper can be found here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nchem.1626

[7] Selective Prebiotic Formation Of RNA Pyrimidine And DNA Purine Nucleosides by Jianfeng Xu, Václav Chmela, Nicholas J Green, David A Russell, Mikołaj J Janicki, Robert W Góra, Rafał Szabla, Andrew D Bond and John D Sutherland, Nature, 582: 60-66 (4th June 2020). This paper can be found here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2330-9

[8] Synthesis Of Activated Pyrimidine Ribonucleotides In Prebiotically Plausible Conditions by Matthew W. Powner, Béatrice Gerland and John D. Sutherland, Nature, 459: 239-242 (14th May 2009). This paper can be found here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08013

[9] Synthesis Of Aldehydic Ribonucleotide And Amino Acid Precursors By Photoredox Chemistry by Dougal J Ritson and John D Sutherland, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 52(22): 5845-5847 (27th May 2013). This paper can be found here:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/anie.201300321

Looks like your assertions are crumbling to dust.

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Bullshit, religion was created by humans, and atheists don’t “practice” any form of religion. We simply don’t believe any of it is true. You’re making the claim, where’s your evidence?

We have lots of degrees right here where I live, right now. A whopping 30 of them. They all go by the name of Celsius. They usually don’t come here in such big numbers, but when they do, I don’t like it, and it makes me feel uncomfortable.

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It’s just a matter of time.

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You literally believe in a magical invisible guy, miracles and do so with absolutely no empirical evidence to support it.

And you talk about credibility?!?!?!?!

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Uh, hellooooo… I said rattlesnakes. Cuddling with cobras is fine. Duh! :roll_eyes:

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I’m wondering if you can define non-life? To what are you actually referencing. What defines a living organism? Is it having a conscience? No, insects and bacteria are considered living, but don’t have a conscience so far as we know. Does having a genetic code, such as DNA, define if an organism is living? Also, no, because there are “things” that have genetic codes, but are not traditionally considered “alive”. These “things”, for lack of a better term, are viruses. I am wondering where you draw a distinction between that which is living and that which is most certainly not living?

Why do you think a question about the origin of life would have anything at all to do with atheism. How does pretending any of the creator gods Category:Creator gods - Wikipedia created life actually demonstrate that there ever were or could be such a thing? How is a ‘creator god,’ anything more than a simple blind assertion?

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Ok . . . here we go again.

If you argue that life is too complicated to arise from simpler materials . . . let me ask you to consider a pot of boiling water that’s overly saturated with dissolved sugar.

The sugar molecules are moving around randomly, yet when you put a wooden ice cream stick in the water and turn off the heat, sugar will crystalize on the stick with the molecules in nice, neat, orderly rows. You now have rock candy that is much more orderly than the dissolved sugar.

There are several chemical processes that lead to life. We have gone–perhaps-- 1/3 of the way between starting with inert chemicals as a foundation, and turning these substances into a living cell.*

There are things in science that aren’t yet known . . . but we shouldn’t automatically invoke God just because we’re unhappy that we don’t know everything.

As an example that I often use, lightning was considered to be from God. This is why it was wrong to put lightning rods on church steeples (usually the highest place in town).

The people of Brescia, Italy, were especially pious . . . so God would never strike the local church, which is why the church was the safest place to store all of the gunpowder, which amounted to about 90 metric tons.

When the steeple was struck by lightning, the explosion killed about 2,000 people and destroyed almost 20% of the town.

Using God to explain things that we don’t understand can actually be very dangerous . . . as it is a form of self-deception that lets us see what we want rather than what is.

  • I say 1/3, as we can make amino acids and nucleic acids from scratch, and we’ve also recently figured out why life-based amino acids tend to be left-handed isomers, and amino acids in the lab form in equal (or racemic) proportions of right and left-handed molecules.We still need to figure out how to arrange the nucleotides and amino acids so that they can work together to carry on the mechanics of life, and how to arrange this machinery into a cell membrane . . . but we’ll get there.
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Maybe @dadman was @LadyTin. Why is that thread closed? Did it get unusually dirty?

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I agree 100%.

I have seen similar bullshit here in Florida with Pentacostalists who handle snakes as part of their religion.

However, as a skeptic . . . I’m not convinced that this video is everything that it seems to be.

People can be repeatedly injected with minute quantities of snake venom in gradually increasing doses until they become largely immune.

A Florida man named Bill Haast died of natural causes at the age of 100 after having been bitten by venomous snakes more than 170 times over the course of his life. See below:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3D4Tk7wwthDXI&ved=2ahUKEwjLyaLQ6cf_AhWPRTABHaIEBn4QtwJ6BAgREAI&usg=AOvVaw2XYe6MJlkVPudtFdErzfSy

Bill Haast was actually a source of serum that he donated to treat snake bite “victims” (which I put in quotation marks, because it’s almost always the human’s fault when someone gets bitten . . . alcohol is usually involved).

In any case, these people are poverty-stricken, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve engineered all of this to bring money into the household by playing a religious and/or spiritual angle. This happens in the United States all of the time when a child movie star becomes famous. Brooke Shields is an example, as is Danny Bonaduce.

This little girl could be made immune to the cobra bite by regular and increasing injections of venom, and the rest is showmanship.

And just so everybody knows, I am a reptile enthusiast, and the aggression of snakes is vastly overestimated. I do believe that many snakes become tame with regular handling, as they are cold-blooded, and can come to associate people with being warm.

Interestingly, the most venomous snake known to science is the Australian Inland Taipan. It is a large snake with relatively long fangs, huge venom glands, and the venom is very potent. A single bite from an inland taipan can kill as many as 100 adult men.

Yet here’s the interesting part: It has never been historically documented to have killed a single human being!

And almost all known bites (except for 2) were of reptile handlers who were manhandling live snakes.

This is because the snake is very peaceful and docile, and is non-aggressive (it also inhabits remote areas). If it wasn’t for the fact that it’s horrifically venomous, it would probably be an ideal pet for a kid.

The king cobra has a reputation for intelligence (as far as reptiles go), and I don’t dismiss the idea that these animals may actually be tame and like her company . . . due to body warmth and gentle handling.

Even so, this is inexcusable and I do not approve.

As an afterthought, I’ve wondered if snake venom (paradoxically) contributed to Haast’s longevity and vigor in his old age.

Copperhead venom contains “contortostatin,” which keeps cancer cells from metastizing, and other snake venoms destroy cells by removing cholesterol. Gila monster venom (a venomous lizard) contains substances that are used for diabetes, and the cardiac meds Integrilin and Captopril come from rattlesnake venom.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.research.va.gov/research_in_action/Diabetes-drug-from-Gila-monster-venom.cfm&ved=2ahUKEwj0w-O_-8f_AhX5QjABHYG3B1oQFnoECCsQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0usgy6H0fG3MZBi_4HK2fj

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Generating bad retorts to a bad arguments is an art; I await the next version of our sock puppet to gain practice but here is the current iteration:

As any true Superman movies fan will know, if one adds a fluorine element to Na2OLi2O(SiO2)2(B2O3)3H2O, one will then have kryptonite.

This looks nothing like DNA, C15H31N3O13P2! Haha!

We stumble over the blocks of degrees of faith it takes to believe that atheists need to explain stuff to atheists on exam tables. We do not answer with rest! Dictate.

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Also it would seem that the snake’s venom sacs can be removed and/or fangs pulled or clipped. It sounds like the father is a professional snake hunter/handler. I’d think that he’d know all the tricks. I’d be surprised if they weren’t trying to get money from the spectacle in some way. I can only hope the girl is okay and can reap whatever benefits that may come from this. Her opportunities and choices in this world seem slim.

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Just to add, girls have died in this part of the world from being bitten by snakes when forced to sleep in unsafe places when they are menstruating and considered unclean. As if I need another reason to dislike religion.

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You can’t do that. Cobras, since they’re venomous, very rarely constrict their prey. They are very reliant on their venom to do the work for them.

Removing the venom sacks will only cause the snake to die from starvation. They don’t kill their prey like pythons and anaconda’s do.

Non venomous snakes will always wrap around their prey and constantly constrict until the heart stops beating. Every time the mouse or rat tries to breathe, the snake will squeeze tighter. Most venomous snake species don’t constrict at all. They will snap at their prey, the venom does the work and then they eat it.

Watch how a Copperhead (venomous) eats.

Watch how a king snake (non venomous) eats.

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First off EWWWWWWWWWW. Anyway, unless hundreds of websites are pulling my leg a Venomoid, a snake that’s had it’s venom glands removed or cauterized, is a real thing. Fangs apparently sometimes get removed too, though they might grow back . Maybe they can cripple a mouse, or render it helpless in some way that the snake can still eat it, or maybe they just don’t care if the snake starves to death since in a place like rural India there must be plenty where those came from.

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