I know how it started. I watched Prometheis. Great special effects but not really all that good a story. A shame because I normally like Ridley Scott’s stuff.
But at least he explained the origin of life on earth. Well, human life, anyway...
Robert M Hazen, “genesis: The Scientific Quest For Life’s Origin”. He also has some interesting lectures on youtube.
BTW, I’m a deep believer in God and The Bible.
Why is it so hard to understand that evolution is a theory on how organisms change and adapt after they already exist. How life came to exist is a separate question entirely. Obviously things like natural selection cannot occur before life begins, just like you cannot tune an engine before an engine exists.
Uhh, actually, this is exactly what Darwin said in Origin of Species.
It is at least a little bit humble, unlike the really stupid guys who claim evolution "disproves" the existence of God.
Darwin said directly that he had no idea how life originated but proposed a theory about how it evolved. If Miller can’t get something so easily verifiable right I’m not inclined to listen to much else he has to say. There are research standards, you know.
Quote is from Darwin's Ghost (page 170) by Steve Jones, a well-done, full of facts, modern update of each and every chapter in Darwin's "Origin"
“Therefore, abiogenesis (i.e., life arising from non-living materials) is impossible, according to the scientific evidence.”
That’s not true, according to the scientific evidence. While the individual asserting this is a mechanical and biomechanical engineer, his expertise is not in genetics or biology.
Let’s start with the famous Miller-Urey experiment of 1952.
It was was an experiment that simulated the conditions thought at the time to be present on the early Earth, and tested for the occurrence of chemical origins of life.
in 2007, scientists examining sealed vials preserved from the original experiments were able to show that there were actually well over 20 different amino acids produced in Miller’s original experiments. That is considerably more than what Miller originally reported, and more than the 20 that naturally occur in life.
Moreover, some evidence suggests that Earth’s original atmosphere might have had a different composition from the gas used in the Miller–Urey experiment.
There is abundant evidence of major volcanic eruptions 4 billion years ago, which would have released carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrogen (N2), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), and sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the atmosphere.
Experiments using these gases in addition to the ones in the original Miller–Urey experiment have produced even more diverse molecules. Meteorites have been found to contain over 90 different amino acids, nineteen of which are found in Earth life.
So how do amino acids become life? By joining together.
When a few amino acids join together, which happens spontaneously, they form peptides. And peptides act as the “glue” that hold chains of amino acids together forming proteins, a class of molecules. And primitive proteins can replicate themselves.
An example of this process today are “prions”, like “Mad Cow disease”, in which a corrupted protein can make other, similar, proteins modify themselves to become corrupt as well. This happens at even a smaller scale than the tiniest viruses.
Eventually, proteins become so complex they become RNA, which encapsulates itself to effectively become a virus. Still questionable if it can be called “alive” yet.
However, this is pretty much the start of evolution. As viruses became more complicated, the eventual result was the three “domains” of life. The simplest of these are the Archaea, which look like bacteria but are much simpler, and have a completely different evolutionary path.
They are so simple that these microbes have no cell nucleus or any other membrane-bound organelles within their cells. An organelle is is a specialized subunit within a cell that has a specific function, and it is usually separately enclosed. Thus Archaea are so simple that they consume “raw materials” like hydrogen gas.
Next up, in a huge leap of complexity, are the bacteria, whose RNA has become complex enough to be DNA, which reproduce by dividing themselves, forming near identical nuclei and organelles, over and over again. But they still retain their individuality as single celled organisms.
Finally, when bacteria started to band together, with groups of them performing specialized functions, the final domain of evolution was created, the eukaryotes, which includes all plants and animals other than bacteria and Archaea.
So if you look at a human, their cells could be described as groups of bacteria that specialized into organs, and whose DNA is the same in all their cells, which assures that they reproduce almost identically to their parents.
The split between the animal and plant kingdom was simple enough. The plants adopted a hard shell for their cells, but animals still use soft cells.
The only reason evolutionists are claiming this today is that they’ve been unsuccessful — without massive intervention by intelligent design provided by abiogenesis researchers themselves in the laboratory — in demonstrating how a living, self-replicating organisms (such as a cell) could have formed by itself, by means of purely physical forces, plus lots of time.
The two best books on this subject are long out of print but still available if you search for them: “The Mystery of Life’s Origin: Reassessing Current Theories” by Charles Thaxton, et al.; and “The Creation of Life: A Cybernetic Approach to Evolution” by A. E. Wilder Smith. Among other things, they both show that all theories of abiogenesis violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, as well as violating its statistical-mechanics interpretation (i.e., left to themselves, systems always move from configurations of lower probability to configurations of higher probability; that’s why things decay; that’s why a nice straight wall made of brick and mortar (a low-probability configuration for clay and mortar to take) always, over time, turns into one of many possible piles of rubble (one of many high-probability configurations clay and mortar can take). I’ve never seen any intelligible response from abiogenesis enthusiasts to this objection.
Additionally, there are mathematical coding-theory objections to many abiogenesis scenarios: i.e., since 64 possible codons in DNA/RNA represent, or map to, 20 amino acids that build various proteins, the 64-symbol alphabet must precede the 20-symbol alphabet; i.e., you can map 64 symbols onto 20 symbols (with redundancy), but you cannot map 20 symbols onto 64 symbols (without ambiguity, which is the death of the code system). So a “proteins-first” scenario is mathematically impossible; i.e., DNA would (mathematically) have to have appeared first, followed by protein synthesis. The problem here, however, is the DNA itself requires the environment of a pre-existing cell (with all of its proteins) in order to function. I’ve never heard any intelligible response by abiogenesis enthusiasts to this chicken-egg paradox between DNA and proteins.
Finally, there’s another basic coding-theory problem that remains unsolved by abiogenesis: in order for a code to function as a code, both the sender and receiver must have PRIOR knowledge of what the code means, i.e., what the code is supposed to code for, and how it is supposed to be decoded. In the case of the living cell, both the DNA molecule and the ribosome must have “communicated” with each other in the distant past in order for both of them to “understand” the same code, i.e., that 64 possible 3-letter arrangements of nucleotides represent 20 possible amino acids that can be combined into many different polypeptide (proteins). This, too, remains unsolved... and perhaps unsolvable by purely naturalistic, material explanations.
Evos are backtracking or walking back the more extravagant claims of evolution a little bit. They will still teach it in their Universities in all its improbablity but this once for public consumption they will back off a tad. Then later when faced with a particular absurdity they can say will I said back in June 2013.... That’s covering your ass with your hat.
Let's just tear it all down and burn the books.
1. Functional InformationHow could such a system form randomly, without any intelligence, and totally unguided?
2. Encoder
3. Error Correction
4. Decoder
What would come first - the encoder, error correction, or the decoder? How and where did the functional information originate? IOW did the hardware create the software - or did the software create the self-replicating hardware?...
Biogenesis is a law that has never been falsified. Abiogenesis is wishful thinking.