Posted on 06/17/2002 4:40:34 PM PDT by Nebullis
| His argument is built around evidence "from the three main cellular information processing systems" – translation, transcription and replication – and he suggests that cellular evolution progressed in that order, with translation leading the way. |
| Oops! Darwinians will even like that less. Replication is supposed to have the honored position. That also implies something on the order of RNA world. |
It's just amazing that some people here really don't get it.....
Oh, come on, narby. Don't hold back!
The three primary divisions of life now comprise the familiar bacteria and eukaryotes, along with the Archaea. Woese argues that these three life forms evolved separately but exchanged genes, which he refers to as inventions, along the way. He rejects the widely held notion that endosymbiosis (which led to chloroplasts and mitochondria) was the driving force in the evolution of the eukaryotic cell itself or that it was a determining factor in cellular evolution, because that approach assumes a beginning with fully evolved cells.I would have guessed that truly separately-evolved (no common descent) organisms couldn't really do lateral transfer with any hope of compatibility. I gather that the soup takes the place of the usual common ancestor in this case. Same soup, three lines of "offspring," lateral transfer works.
Woese doesn't address the point, unfortunately. Nor does he explain here what his theory does better, or even differently. What are the consequences, the tests?
And now for the old 64 million dollar question........were did all that stuff come from? ...and were there deck chairs beside the pool?
Mel
I exchanged jeans once, but it was in high school.
Matter of fact, we did evolve differently...
One became a business owner, another a lawyer and alas the third has passed on to her final reward.
Then in fact it is nothing new. Shhh. Don't tell the creationists -- they'll be all disappointed that science already knew about this.
That's interesting - I had a roommate in college who was trying to get his jeans to evolve. Basically, all his clothes went in a giant pile on the floor of the closet, apparently in hopes that they would evolve bacterial cultures that would eventually walk themselves to the laundry and jump in the wash on their own. He had a lot of clothes, and was able to keep this up for some time.
I finally persuaded him to wash them himself by pointing out that any culture that evolved to the point of being able to wash the jeans for him was unlikely to be self-destructive enough to actually go through with it...
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