Posted by Andy™ on May 14, 2002 at 13:59
(24.31.228.139)
Re: salty water? (DA Morgan)
And no one is ramrodding anything down your throat. You need to learn the difference between a guess, an idea, and a theory. There is no such thing as a theory with zero supporting evidence. The statement demonstrates more about your lack of understanding what a theory is than anything else.
A guess and an idea are fundamentally the same thing. Both don't have supporting evidence, both are the beginning for looking for supporting evidence. You may notice I put theory in quotes, if you check again you'll see that, as well as a little scoff in parentheses. I did so because more and more people are treating guesses, hypotheses, and theories as the same thing.
Show me the evidence supporting this guess, or idea if you prefer to call it such. Since we like to say we know what the general configuration of the primordial ocean was, show me the succeeding experiments to spontaniously generate DNA in it. Oh wait, we've moved away from the deep sea vents, so we have to change the experiment again. It still doesn't work.
Now add on to that the fact that there's no way on this green earth or that primal one that something as complex as a cell could simply hodgepodge itself together randomly, no matter how much heat you added or electricity or any other energy source.
This is a guess. No experiments can support it, and it doesn't even qualify as a hypotheses. Guess, idea, notion, supposition, whatever you choose to lable it, it's still unsupported.
Whether or not it will be proven to be true, is another thing. Experimentation will continue and will continue to fail. If they can make it succeed ONCE, just ONCE, that's all it'll take to kick this thought out of the guess category and into the "declare it as fact" category.
As for it being forced upon me, you're right no one's making me learn it at gunpoint. However grades are based on it in school on tests. If a kid marks something on a test and gets it right, that means the answer was correct. I've seen the questions, they don't pose it as an idea, guess, whatever, or even as a theory. It's a true or false question. True or False. Right or Wrong. Happened or Did Not Happen. I'd be satisfied if they re-worded the question and kept it true or false.
Re: salty water? DA Morgan 20/5 16:36
(2)