14 thoughts on “The Urey Variation”

  1. Here is something you might like .. a new study on vaxed versus unvaxed children.

    “Something is wrong with America’s children. They are sick – allergic, asthmatic, anxious, autoimmune, autistic, hyperactive, distracted and learning disabled. Thirty-two million American children – a full 43% of them – suffer from at least one of 20 chronic illnesses not including obesity. Across the board, once rare pediatric disorders from autism and ADD to Type 1 diabetes and Tourette’s syndrome are soaring, though few studies pool the data. Compared to their parents, children today are four times more likely to have a chronic illness. And while their grandparents might never have swallowed a pill as children, the current generation of kids is a pharmaceutical sales rep’s dream come true: More than one million American children under five years old takes a psychiatric drug. More than 8.3 million kids under 17 have consumed psychiatric drugs, and in any given month one in four is taking at least one prescription drug for something.

    Fast food, bad genes, too much TV, video games, pesticides, plastics – name the environmental factor and it has been implicated in the surge of sickness, although none adequately explains the scale or scope of the epidemic. There is one exposure, however, that has evaded the search, despite that children have received it by direct injection in steadily accumulating doses far beyond anything past generations ever saw: 50 doses of 14 vaccines by age six, 69 doses of 16 pharmaceutical vaccines containing powerfully immune-altering ingredients by age 18.”

    http://info.cmsri.org/the-driven-researcher-blog/vaccinated-vs.-unvaccinated-guess-who-is-sicker?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

    1. “Something is wrong with America’s children. They are sick – allergic, asthmatic, anxious, autoimmune, autistic, hyperactive, distracted and learning disabled. Thirty-two million American children – a full 43% of them – suffer from at least one of 20 chronic illnesses not including obesity. Across the board, once rare pediatric disorders from autism and ADD to Type 1 diabetes and Tourette’s syndrome are soaring, though few studies pool the data.”

      The cause for allergies is pretty well known. It’s because we live in a lot cleaner environments than in the past so when when exposed to allergens the body isn’t trained to have an appropriate response. Not vaccines. As for anxiety, or hyperactivity, and easily distracted it is because today psychiatrists have way too much power. Two decades ago if a child got bored in school we would just say the teacher couldn’t make the class interesting enough. Now it’s because the kid has attention issues and needs to be put on Ritalin. If a kid was hyperactive a century ago, he would get whipped into submission until he learned how to behave. Now it’s because he has anxiety issues and needs to be put into anti-depressants. Everything is classified as a psychiatric disorder. Also to a large degree kids today don’t know how to behave because they aren’t around adults like they were half a century ago when at least one of their parents was at home. Without proper role models to follow, it’s just a bunch of squealing little monkeys in a cage they call a day care facility.

      If you want to not get vaccinated and have a high infant mortality rate that’s your prerogative. I would rather get vaccinated.

    2. People always want to latch onto some pet cause to explain things that they cannot explain. Especially if it lets them off the hook for choices they may have made that contributed to the problem.

      We are currently running an uncontrolled experiment in human reproduction, with the age of parents continually being pushed out farther and farther as men and women prioritize their careers over childbearing. And, the children of older parents are significantly more prone to having health issues:

      http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/9928198/Are-older-parents-putting-our-future-at-risk.html

  2. Off topic, your title looks like a good name for an episode of “The Big Bang Theory.”

  4. The experiment tells us that if we start with a bunch of chemicals and add energy we get other chemicals which break down over time. Not very radical.

    Dust you are and dust you will be.

    1. These things always strike me as underwhelming because of all the baggage. If it were just, “hey we discovered something neat”, that would be fine and impressive. But, there’s always the subtext of, “you see, life arose from random chance”, which is always a massive non sequitur.

      In the first place, they are still a very long way from being able to create life from inert chemicals and energy. In the second, it’s a little like saying, “Hey, we know how cars work – you sit in front of the steering wheel, press the pedal down there, and turn the wheel to steer.” But, that only tells you how to use it, not how to build a car.

      There is a joke that’s told in religious circles which I think is fairly clever along these lines. It goes:

      A scientist shouts to the sky, “We don’t need you anymore, God. We can create life from dust!” And, the fellow is startled to hear a voice boom in answer, “Show me!” So, the scientist scoops up a handfull of dust, and begins to sift it into a petri dish. “What are you doing?” asks the voice. The man replies, “Well, if I take the dust like so…” The voice replies, “Mmm-mm. That’s MY dust. Get your own dust.”

      1. What annoys me about these stories is “these building blocks are common, therefore life must be common!” Total non sequitur, even if one doesn’t believe God Did It. Maybe life arises by random processes, but one or more of the steps are extremely rare.

        The key observation is that, unlike in every other field of science, hypotheses about where we come from don’t have to assume it was by some process with high a priori probability. Observer selection bias cannot be ignored.

  5. This is what puzzles me:
    Life, as far as we know, has only come from non-life once, based on the universal nature of DNA, and also on the common geometry of certain types of sugars.

    Yet, it now appears, based on the geology of extremely old rocks, that life has been in existence on Earth almost since our planet’s formation.

    If life were a matter of pure chance, and rare, would you not expect an astronomical amount of time before it formed?

    OTOH, if life were more or less an inevitable result in a planet like Earth, wouldn’t you expect many different and unrelated strains of life to emerge?

    1. Presumably there’s an anthropic explanation somewhere — that for some reason you wouldn’t have gotten intelligent life on Earth if simple life had not appeared relatively soon after planetary formation. My favorite idea is that the gradual dimming of the sun would have made Earth too cold for life to develop if it hadn’t gotten an early toehold. In that case the fact that we are here is sufficient explanation for why life developed early, no matter how improbable that was or how infrequent such an event is in the cosmos at large.

      One might set an interesting SF story on a planet that was closer to its sun, and thus started out too hot for life, but that then developed it a few billion years later. Would they even come up with anthropic explanations? My impression is that in our case it was the very early appearance of life that led to the notion that it must not be a hard problem, so life must be very common, and in turn to Fermi’s paradox even being a thing, before anthropic ideas ever occurred to anybody.

    2. It’s possible that the conditions under which life could arise only occur (or are much more likely to occur) when a planet is young.

      Alternately, it’s possible that panspermia can occur inside very young star clusters. Our solar system was formed in a cluster with about 10,000 stars packed into a cubic light year. If that’s the case, then life rarely originates on a young planet, but if it does, it may be able to spread to thousands of others (before the cluster comes apart). Those rare early originations will then get a vastly inflated statistical weight when counting the number of life-bearing planets.

      I like this second idea, because it implies there could be thousands of life bearing planets in our galaxy, with biospheres possibly compatible with ours, even if Origin of Life is an extremely rare event.

        1. Yes, it’s a very SF-friendly scenario. 🙂

          By this point the stars from our natal cluster will be spread in a ~180 degree arc around the galaxy, most being at very nearly the same distance from the center of the galaxy as our sun.

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