Re: Re: Re: Is Life Just Chemistry?
Originally posted by JesusIsAlive
With all of our superb technology, knowledge, skill, ingenuity, and education scientists (plural which means that many heads are better than one) should be able to [B]at least (at the very minimum) duplicate (deliberately) what scientists believe that random, chance occurrence did by fortuitous happenstance right? What is the hold up? Why should it take billions of years to create life with our smarts, technology, supercomputers, etc. In fact, which part evolved first the chicken or the egg--oops, I mean the brain or the foot? Why don't scientists simply make a toe? That's all, they don't have to make a brain, just create a big toe, and I'll be satisfied. [/B]
You have no idea how complex the human body is. The tools we have are the best they've every been, but we don't know everything. Try making an oragami crane with a jackhammer. It should be easy to make an oragami crane.
We can only manuipulate proteins we can isolate. We can only interpret code we can understand.
There is a lot we don't know. There is likely even more we don't know that we don't even know we know. You ignore many issues that are simply a result of how complex the situation is. No machine on earth is as efficient or complex as natural biological systems.
We're making progress, especailly at the genomic level, we have a much better understanding of how DNA works and what it means. Still, we don't really know what the function of many parts of DNA. Proteins are a whole different story.
Big toe? Come on, you're talking about the interaction of millions of cells that need to be creaded from scratch and then developed into multiple organ systems and have functional significance.
Lets start with a cell, which would be a more realistic goal at the current time. More specifically, a prokaryote organism, a single cell that doesn't require the interactions with others. We can thow a bunch of structures together and a bunch of proteins et al, but we'll be missing other compounds that we haven't identified yet. Compounds necessary maybe even during only one part of its life cycle.
Its just simply not a practical area of research at this point.
So, why the f*ck does this even matter?
Originally posted by JesusIsAlive
But I didn't. I asked a valid question (it is valid because of the abundance of knowledge at our disposal and fingertips).
They said the same thing in 1000 CE about flying machines. They sat back and marveled at how advanced they were.