h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Also, one has to remember that Hoyle was an athiest turned theist. He coined the phrase 'big bang' as a put-down for the notion that the universe had started from one point. Strangely, that pu-down has become the standard phrase for decribing the theorised start of the universe.

Shall we try another one, then?

How would we go about deriving a scientific answer to:
'Is capital punishment wrong?'

'Is capital punishment wrong?'
Define wrong and its context (personal level? societal level? species level? under what context) then model said environment with those values and match the outcome with that specified by the context of wrong.

The actual question as it stands is meaningless. We have to bring something else to it in order to give it some meaning. whether that be objective absolutes or subjective relatives.

So how does science help us to define the question, then?



Admittedly I phrased it rather vaguely. Maybe tighten it up to:
'Should we write capital punishment into our penal code?'

That's a good, practical question, no?

Well, the scientific method does provide us with certain criteria for a valid test - such as defining our variables and noting any confounding ones.

>'Should we write capital punishment into our penal code?'
>That's a good, practical question, no?

But again it is missing the qualifier, or rather it is implicit
the question is actually:
'Should we write capital punishment into our penal code if we want X?'

everyone answering the question will replace 'X' with whatever fits their agenda or understanding.

Again, define the 'X' then model then match results to the goal.

So 'X' might be 'deter criminals from commiting crimes' and then the answer after study and use of the scientific method would be a qualified 'no' since the evidence is that it doesn't do this.

If 'X' were 'save our society the cost of keeping certain criminals for till natural death' the answer may well be 'yes' since it may do that. I say 'may' since I don;t actually know the costs involved in each case.

Re: capital punishment.

Statistically, you are bound to execute innocent people. If this is acceptable or an unfortunate outcome you could make an acceptable level of innocent person hanged/x people hanged (not a scientific judgment..more moral(yes! I know but this is how science can be used).

You then see whether the statistics of known innocent people hanged is more or less more and you don't hang people less and you do.

You have made a human moral/ethical judgement but allowed statistics...science to make the final decision for you.

Your both still missing the point, I fear - but in slightly different ways.

Ic:
Surely it's a multivariate question, though. Not '...if we want X' but '...if we want X, Y, and Z and any other variables that any individual member of society things is important.' How do we define them? How do we *weight* them?

Dots:
No - you have *not* let science/ statistics decide for you! How do you set the decision criterion? ie:
'I am prepared to risk X innocent people hanged for Y positive benefit.'
The best that science can tell you is what *is* the ratio of X:Y, not what it *ought* to be.

Hi Ed, Icky, 3D,

I think the disjoint here may be that Icky and 3D are taking it as read that 'making people happier' means 'is better', i.e. they're utilitarianists. Or at least that if we understand the chemical processes in the brain that lead to a feeling of happiness, we'd understand something about morality. Whereas Ed is asking 'how do you know that'?

The third option is that I'm lost too

Gif

Hi Warner,

Ooh goody, a biochemistry question! The answer is 'yes and no'.

If you're asking 'did Urey-Miller create life', then the answer is definitely no. The products of their experiments are not alive, and there's (probably) no simple reaction that will make them alive. No-one is likely to create a living organism from scratch in the lab any time soon. No self-replicating artificial molecule has ever been identified. So 'no'.

But prior to Miller-Urey (and remember we're only talking 1950s here - not that long ago), it was generally accepted that biological molecules were far too complex to form from simple reactions. We have people like Fred Hoyle making the calculation you referenced that it is fantastically improbable for a biological molecule to form 'by chance'.

Then - bang! Miller goes and makes a whole flask full of (essentially) DNA fragments by taking some of the simplest known chemicals and looking at how they react in the simplest way possible. All you need to do is join those fragments together (which is easy - they do it themselves under some conditions) and you'd get a prion, which is sort of alive. Coat it in protein and you get a virus. Wrap that in a lipid bilayer (also a self-forming structure) and you're not far off a cell.

The point is that prior to Urey, amino acids were firmly in the 'definitely biochemistry and far too complex to form by chance' camp. I'm trying to think of an analogy. OK, imagine you have a bunch of monkeys with typewriters. They'd never write the Complete Works of Shakespeare. It's so obvious you've never even checked. Then one day you actually go and look at what they're typing, and you find they're all - every single one - typing a different extract from some of Shakespeare's plays (plus some Milton and Master Duncan thrown in for good measure). All of a sudden you wouldn't be so certain, right? You'd start thinking 'someone's trained these monkeys' or 'these monkeys are smarter than they look' or whatever - but you wouldn't be so sure that between them they couldn't produce the Complete Works, right?

Well, that's what happened to biochemists in the 1950s. They went from 'we are totally separate from inorganic chemists' to 'crikey, where do we draw the line between chemistry and biochemistry'? These days, there really is no line. And then bear in mind that they have trillions of 'monkeys' that have been producing thousands of pages per second for billions of years. All of a sudden it doesn't seem so much like 'will they produce the Complete Works' so much as 'how do we find the Complete Works in among all this typing'?

So in a way, the answer is 'yes', because Miller produced chemicals that previously would have been taken as unmistakable evidence of life. In other words, he showed that life is far, far easier to form than people like Hoyle thought. Prior to Miller, we couldn't see how life could form, even in principle. Now it's hard to see how it could *avoid* forming! So the answer is also 'yes'.

Make any sense?

Gif

Gif:

'No-one is likely to create a living organism from scratch in the lab any time soon. No self-replicating artificial molecule has ever been identified.'


You've not seen this, then?

'The researchers, at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., created molecules that self-replicate and even evolve and compete to win or lose. . .

Specifically, the researchers synthesized RNA enzymes that can replicate themselves without the help of any proteins or other cellular components, and the process proceeds indefinitely.

"Immortalized" RNA, they call it, at least within the limited conditions of a laboratory.

More significantly, the scientists then mixed different RNA enzymes that had replicated, along with some of the raw material they were working with, and let them compete in what's sure to be the next big hit: "Survivor: Test Tube."

Remarkably, they bred.

And now and then, one of these survivors would screw up, binding with some other bit of raw material it hadn't been using. Hmm. That's exactly what life forms do ...

When these mutations occurred, "the resulting recombinant enzymes also were capable of sustained replication, with the most fit replicators growing in number to dominate the mixture," the scientists report.'
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,479777,00.html

sorry that it's a crappy faux news page, but, still . . .

Tsk. Why is it that no matter how many times I read through a post before I hit the button I never spot the mistakes, but a cursory glance afterwards and they leap out?

Miller and Urey produced amino acids (protein precursors), but not nucleic acids (DNA precursors). Other similar experiments have since produced nucleic acids, but Miller/Urey didn't.

Gif

Hi Anhaga,



No, I hadn't.

Gif

I have a hunch that when (not if) we find the/a mechanism by which life bootstraps itself into being it will be remarkably simple, remarkably obvious in hindsight, and remarkably quickly evolving in the initial stages. It might be wise for the science ethics people to be coming up with protocols for containment, if they've not done it already.

Hi Anhaga,

I doubt they'll get anything capable of out-competing the products of 3.5 billion years of evolution.

Then again...

Gif

I agree with you doubts.

all of them . . .

Hi Warner,

If the reference in the Quran to an 'expanding universe' is a 'correct and more literal meaning', can you explain why *not one single English translation* of the Quran refered to an expanding universe until 1976? Isn't it in fact the case that this verse was 'reinterpreted' by Muslims in light of science?

Any word on the muddy spring that the sun sets into?

Gif

There is also such a thing as this:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2539-scientists-build-polio-virus-from-scratch.html

I wonder what would happen if you stuck a monkey in a bath of primordial soup?

"Your both still missing the point, I fear - but in slightly different ways."
Possibly so and I do appreciate your patience in discussing this!

Ic:
"Surely it's a multivariate question, though. Not '...if we want X' but '...if we want X, Y, and Z and any other variables that any individual member of society things is important.' How do we define them? How do we *weight* them?"

I think I might begin to see. What we're really asking, in full, is
"How should we resolve this question given that there is no absolute and no single concensus on the issue. Given that different people will arrive at different answers, and that we can only implement one answer, which answer of the many should we choose?'

yes? (I'll await confirmation before continuing - thus giving me some time to think on it )

Yes. I think.

Some kind of machine to help us answer this sort of messy question would be useful. But...