Which is what I also have been taught, which is why I am confused when folks use Darwin in the same sentence with an origin of life idea.
"I'm not sure there have been any serious experiments attempting to replicate the origin of life on earth in any of the ways it has been believed to have happened. Many experiments have tested components of it. The reason for not replicating the whole shebang is pretty simple - you'd need a lab the size of the earth in which you recreated the primordial atmosphere. If you could do this, I suspect you'd get your replication in a fairly "short" time, like maybe a hundred million years."
Ah, the special ingredient: time ..."a hundred million years." And that's supposed to do the trick? Somehow? While nobody is looking? In some isolated place? When in fact we cannot replicate such a perfect primordial ennvironment in any lab?
That is why ID says the sophistication of what has begun points to the need for more than time and chance, i.e., a designer.
Time plus a lab can't do it but a primordial environment plus time could?
It sure appears to me that in this case time is being given too big a job, one that it cannot accomplish. That's why I am sympathetic to ID as an observation from nature (not Genesis) that the problem and the solution don't match.
> Ah, the special ingredient: time ..."a hundred million years." And that's supposed to do the trick? Somehow? While nobody is looking? In some isolated place? When in fact we cannot replicate such a perfect primordial ennvironment in any lab?
We'll never be able to replicate the way fusion happens in the sun (through compression just from having a lot of hydrogen in one place) in a lab either, so I guess we'd better "teach the controversy" on that one too. Actually I guess we'll probably need to throw away any science that can't be replicated in a short time in something the size of a science lab, which throws out pretty much all of astronomy and geology too. whoops, I guess we can't sustitute ID and creationism since they can't replicate that in a lab either.
>Time plus a lab can't do it but a primordial environment plus time could?
Yes. If the primordial earth was only a few gallons of water and organic molecules in a lab and it only had one year to create life, we all accept that life was created in some other fashion (either the creationist "poof" hypothesis or aliens). If it was instead the whole earth and there were millions upon millions of years available (as there were), than I accept the scientific explanation. If you don't understand how having millions of years and the whole earth as a lab changes the probabilities, well then I don't know what to say.
Likewise, if you are an young earth creationist, you have no argument with evolutionary biology - your argument is with geology, physics, and astronomy - no biologist believes in common descent happening in only 6000 years. In fact, biologists won't even accept the ridiculous rate of evolution that the noah's ark creationist "theory" relies on.
>Which is what I also have been taught, which is why I am confused when folks use Darwin in the same sentence with an origin of life idea.
Darwin didn't have much to say about the subject. It would have been hard to say much at the time, since they knew essentially nothing (compared to now) about the chemical structure of life.
The reason people say this is:
(a) the first replicators didn't come into existence through evolutionary mechanisms (natural selection, mutation, etc).
Biological evolutionary mechanisms rely on reproduction and inheritable traits.
(b) if it were discovered that abiogensis were impossible on this planet or evidence were discovered that the first replicators came from elsewhere, evolution and common descent would still be just as true.