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OK, thanks for asking.

Your buddy Vade pointed out to me that we a have fossil record that points to a single ancestor that arose from the goo see post #207. He even sent me a cute chart showing life as we know it started 4 billion years ago. Yet, I've seen you post several times if I'm not mistaken that Darwin never said we have a single ancestor. Is that what Darwinists believe or is that just what Darwin didn't say.

Then I have another poster saying no, it's 600,000 million years. And asks "do you know what 600,000 million years is?"

I have another smart guy refer me places to prove his contention that life began from the goo. He sends me to Urey-Miller. When I find a condensed version I get, they set up some test tubes that when sparked by extremely high doses of electricity produced some different forms of carbon based goo. It goes on to state that this might or may mean that life began from goo.

I have more, but this is a good start. Can you see all the issues here? Do all EVOS believe we all evolved from a single ancestor or don't they? And if we have groups of scientists with diverging "opinions" then how can a lay person believe either?

Now don't go on as you have in other posts about how you don't have time to teach me grade school chemistry yada yada yada. I don't want to be a microbiologist or a chemist. If you can't give me a general explanation then give me the standard "you're to dumb to understand" response and I'll move on. I would think that if those of you in these threads are as smart as you appear, that you could answer plainly and logically some of the questions we ask without calling us names, ignorant, lazy learners or trying to put us in box and dismiss us as zealots or maybe counters. When you do that you give credence to the "your belief ain't no better than my belief crowd". If you really wanted us to learn, you would find a way to teach us.

You do not seem to be aware of how much simplifying is already going on.

Most of the scientists on these threads post for the lurkers and want to make the information accessible to those who might actually be interested in learning. I am continually amazed at their patience.

And, by the way, if you really wanted to learn, you would find a way to do so.

Yes, most evolutionary biologists believe all life has a common ancestor, although because that ancestor was a prokaryote, and prokaryotes exchange genes with each other, it might be more correct to speak of a population of common ancestors. If you take a protein or piece of RNA that's essential to all life, such as a fragment of the ribosome, and you compare it over a large number of organisms, you find the gene sequences of all lifeforms are similar, and if you map out the difference, you find they have the form of a tree. There is no reason why independently created organisms would show interrelationships in the form of a tree. Here are a couple of trees; one for the 16S RNA, the other for myosin.

The nice thing about the 16S RNA tree is that that gene is not exchanged, so there really is a single common ancestor for all 16S RNA.

You can find a number of 16S RNA genes on this link and construct a tree from them yourself, if you don't believe me. There is also an online link to the full 16S tree of life, which contains at least 10,000 different sequences and is growing every day.

Warning: the full 16S tree is huge!