On Aug 29, 6:06 pm, Michael Gray <mikeg...@newsguy.com> wrote:

On Wed, 29 Aug 2007 14:59:28 -0700, Budikka666 <budik...@netscape.net>
wrote:

www.sciencedaily.com/posted this back in mid-August and it's already
been addressed in a thread on a.a., but it's so worthy of mention that
I'm including it in this series:
http://tinyurl.com/23v2c4
"Now, an international team has discovered that under the right
conditions, particles of inorganic dust can become organised into
helical structures. These structures can then interact with each other
in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and life
itself."
The article goes on to say: "Quite bizarrely, not only do these
helical strands interact in a counterintuitive way in which like can
attract like, but they also undergo changes that are normally
associated with biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, say
the researchers. They can, for instance, divide, or bifurcate, to form
two copies of the original structure. These new structures can also
interact to induce changes in their neighbours and they can even
evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down,
leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma.
"So, could helical clusters formed from interstellar dust be
somehow alive? 'These complex, self-organized plasma structures
exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for
inorganic living matter,' says Tsytovich, 'they are autonomous, they
reproduce and they evolve.'"

If dust can do this all by itself, where's the basis for claiming that
organic chemistry cannot? Or does some god have his little fingers in
there, tweaking and herding these particles?

Nope, it's all undirected, unplanned, unintelligent. Just like
evolution.

Budikka

Except that this is only a laboratory hypothesis at the moment.
No such structures have been found 'out there', if you read the papers
carefully.

I didn't say it had been found in nature, and I did read the

abstract. The point is that, aside from simply setting the initial
conditions (conditions which do exist in nature), no intelligence or
direction was involved, yet these structures did form.