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To: Amish with an attitude
Is not abiogenesis part and parcel to evolution? A brick wall is built with bricks, bricks with clay, etc.

Actually that's a good analogy. The properties of a brick wall -- for instance its structural soundness -- obviously depend (among other things) on the properties of the bricks used to build it. At the same time the method whereby the bricks were made has nothing to do with it, except so far as it influences the properties of the bricks.

For example suppose I make a pile of bricks by hand, mixing clay and binding materials, and carefully firing them in an oven. Now suppose I pray to God and He, miraculously and out of nothing, or by whatever divine means you might suppose, creates a second pile of bricks for me that have the same physical properties as the first pile.

Now I build two walls, one using the first pile of bricks and one using the other, and both according to the same design, using the same mortar, and etc. Obviously there is no difference in the structural soundness of the walls because, despite their vastly different origin, the relevant properties of the bricks in the two piles were the same.

The wall only "cares" about the properties of the bricks; not how the bricks came to have those properties.

By the same token evolution only "cares" about the properties of living organisms. Evolution occurs, and operates the way it does because living things reproduce, and exhibit properties of inheritance, and variation, and because they reproduce an excess of population, etc. It doesn't matter (to evolution) how it came to be that living things have those properties.

292 posted on 09/13/2005 12:08:21 PM PDT by Stultis
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To: Stultis

But...

What holds the bricks together??


339 posted on 09/13/2005 1:02:00 PM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going....)
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To: Stultis

"By the same token evolution only "cares" about the properties of living organisms"

If evolution's origin is assumed to be a cell capable of mitosis, I can indeed understand abiogenesis as being a separate issue.


525 posted on 09/13/2005 5:52:24 PM PDT by Amish with an attitude (An armed society is a polite society)
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