Reddit mentions of Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion

Alright, so first, let me offer an apology for 17thknight. S/he isn't particularly representative of people who know and enjoy science, and I wouldn't want you to think that s/he was.

>You know, you could tell us why it's wrong instead of being a fucking douchebag.

Do remember, though, that if you want to get something useful out of someone, it's best not to lead with a statement like this.

>I'm not a Creationist, but I found their argument thought-provoking.

Me too!

>Of course, I don't think life can show up in fucking peanut butter, but why don't we see it emerging from, say, swamps?

Alright, this is great question.

There are a couple of issues to disentangle, which17thknight already did, but which I'll reiterate:

First, the video is off base because evolution is a change in allele frequencies over time; it's not abiogenesis.

(And really, the video seems to be discussing spontaneous generation in particular).

A popular strategy (either through ignorance or purpose) is to conflate evolution with all manner of other things; they'll conflate biological evolution with cosmic evolution (thus bringing the big bang in to the mix), abiogenesis, morality, and so forth.

A large part of this actually stretches back to a schism that happened in protestant churches in the 20s:

Around the 1910s or 1920s, more liberal Christian churches had emerged that believed things like the Bible being fallible, the virgin birth not having happened, the bodily resurrection not having happened, and so forth. Fundamentalist Christianity emerged as sort of a backlash to this, and they lumped 'everything bad' under the progressive Christian banner:

This included a lack of belief in the true god, immorality, sin, and yes, the idea of evolution (which they viewed as some sort of conspiracy meant to spread liberal, irreligious thought).

If you want more information on this, read Summer for the Gods. It's awesome.

So it's important that you recognize that abiogenesis has little to do with biological evolution.

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Now that you do, your question was about abiogenesis, so we'll head down that road.

If life emerged from non-life once (and yes, that is the prevailing idea), why doesn't it happen again?

It happened around 4 billion years ago. We have problems solving murders that happened ten years ago, and call them 'cold cases'.

You want to try figuring out what happened with a bunch of soft bodied organisms (actually, just organic molecules and early cells), four billion years ago?

It ain't easy. So the real answer is, we don't know.

But our best guess would be that it has something to do with the fact that conditions on earth (or wherever) (composition of gasses in the atmosphere, average temperature, composition of materials in the ocean) four billion years ago were substantially different than they are today.

Numerous experiments have been done attempting to simulate early earth conditions, and scientists have managed to observe self-assembly of a variety of organic molecules (including amino and nucleic acids) that could have been components of early life.

It's known that under the proper conditions, phospholipid membranes (the membranes that surround our cells) will spontaneously form (like bubbles).

The question is, what is the precise right set of conditions and chemicals that were present in the early earth atmosphere that led to the origin of life? We seem to be able to get close, but we certainly haven't dialed it in well enough to replicate the event, at least not yet.

TL;DR You put pizza dough in your oven. It bakes, because your oven is 400 degrees. You turn the oven off.

Tomorrow, you come back, and put pizza dough in your oven. Why didn't the pizza dough bake? Conditions are different, so the same chemical processes that happened before can't happen now.

This one won a Pulitzer Prize, but I'm afraid it is non-fiction

If you need it to be fiction, here's one of the best plays ever written about a trial on the same subject

I also agree with KosherDev - go see a real one.

Edit - to add another link....