Posted on 06/17/2002 4:40:34 PM PDT by Nebullis
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Life did not begin with one primordial cell. Instead, there were initially at least three simple types of loosely constructed cellular organizations. They swam in a pool of genes, evolving in a communal way that aided one another in bootstrapping into the three distinct types of cells by sharing their evolutionary inventions.
The driving force in evolving cellular life on Earth, says Carl Woese, a microbiologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been horizontal gene transfer, in which the acquisition of alien cellular components, including genes and proteins, work to promote the evolution of recipient cellular entities.
Woese presents his theory of cellular evolution, which challenges long-held traditions and beliefs of biologists, in the June 18 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Cellular evolution, he argues, began in a communal environment in which the loosely organized cells took shape through extensive horizontal gene transfer. Such a transfer previously had been recognized as having a minor role in evolution, but the arrival of microbial genomics, Woese says, is shedding a more accurate light. Horizontal gene transfer, he argues, has the capacity to rework entire genomes. With simple primitive entities this process can "completely erase an organismal genealogical trace."
His theory challenges the longstanding Darwinian assumption known as the Doctrine of Common Descent – that all life on Earth has descended from one original primordial form.
"We cannot expect to explain cellular evolution if we stay locked in the classical Darwinian mode of thinking," Woese said. "The time has come for biology to go beyond the Doctrine of Common Descent."
"Neither it nor any variation of it can capture the tenor, the dynamic, the essence of the evolutionary process that spawned cellular organization," Woese wrote in his paper.
Going against traditional thinking is not new to Woese, a recipient of the National Medal of Science (2000), and holder of the Stanley O. Ikenberry Endowed Chair at Illinois.
In the late 1970s Woese identified the Archaea, a group of microorganisms that thrive primarily in extremely harsh environments, as a separate life form from the planet’s two long-accepted lines – the typical bacteria and the eukaryotes (creatures like animals, plants, fungi and certain unicellular organisms, whose cells have a visible nucleus). His discovery eventually led to a revision of biology books around the world.
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.
His theory follows years of analysis of the Archaea and a comparison with bacterial and eukaryote cell lines.
"The individual cell designs that evolved in this way are nevertheless fundamentally distinct, because the initial conditions in each case are somewhat different," Woese wrote in his introduction. "As a cell design becomes more complex and interconnected a critical point is reached where a more integrated cellular organization emerges, and vertically generated novelty can and does assume greater importance."
Woese calls this critical point in a cell’s evolutionary course the Darwinian Threshold, a time when a genealogical trail, or the origin of a species, begins. From this point forward, only relatively minor changes can occur in the evolution of the organization of a given type of cell.
To understand cellular evolution, one must go back beyond the Darwinian Threshold, Woese said.
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.
The pivotal development in the evolution of modern protein-based cells, Woese said, was the invention of symbolic representation on the molecular level – that is, the capacity to "translate" nucleic acid sequence into amino acid sequence.
Human language is another example of the evolutionary potential of symbolic representation, he argues. "It has set Homo sapiens entirely apart from its (otherwise very close) primitive relatives, and it is bringing forth a new level of biological organization," Woese wrote.
The advent of translation, he said, caused various archaic nucleic-based entities to begin changing into proteinaceous ones, emerging as forerunners of modern cells as genes and other individual components were exchanged among them. The three modern types of cellular organization represent a mosaic of relationships: In some ways one pair of them will appear highly similar; in others a different pair will.
This, Woese said, is exactly what would be expected had they individually begun as distinct entities, but during their subsequent evolutions they had engaged in genetic cross-talk – they had indulged in a commerce of genes.
doesn't suddenly throw the election into default.
Sorry.
Have a nice eternity!
Science has NOTHING to do with the politics which have MANDATED this, along with much other MANDATED stupidity in public education! TRUTH is NOT baseless inference and assumption, which is all the lie (NOT truth) of darwinism is, and NONE of darwinism has EVER been proven by ANYBODY, in spite of herculean efforts by SO many people since darwin died!
NONE of the efforts of ANY of these misguided souls, who have WASTED their lives in this FAILING endeavor, have EVER proven even the SLIGHTEST tenant of the lie of darwinism.
Wow, this capitalization of SOME words is FUN - breaks up the monotony of TRYING to spread REASON where ONLY passion and NO fact reside....heh-heh!
Proof is not a requirement of a scientific theory. I asked you for your proof of the theory of gravity the last time you posted this meaningless, orotund prattle, and you refused. Apparently you are preening yourself to be another mindless, unresponsive post-bot like f. christian.
No, its because of your displayed ignorance of the basic nature of scientific reasoning. Kindly post your long-awaited proof of the theory of gravity.
Nope, it was just a friendly exchange of information between opponents. Glad you liked it.
Oh piffle. Lets try some more of these on. If DNA code is like earwax, we can remove it with alcohol, so it clearly could not have evolved. If DNA code is like silk yarn, we can weave with it, so it clearly could not have evolved. Give me a break.
You cannot dismiss my statement so easily. You have already agreed that DNA code is like a program. Are you going to make the ridiculous assertion that you can write a computer program at random? Are you going to assert that a computer program can be changed in a positive way by randomly changing bits and bytes? Seems you have a big task before you if you wish to refute my statement above.
Well I for one do not see it. And I must contradict you directly when you say you are not saying you can write a better code, just pack the data better. If you can take the same data, but packed better, that is better code. You are making the claim, and you are making the claim that it is obvious. I am telling you that it is NOT obvious, it is only obvious that you could benefit from a little more humility.
You have little or no idea what effect your data-packing methods would have on the whole system, so you have little or no idea on whether your more tightly packed data would result in a functional system. Also, please point to a computer or any other data storage system made by man that can pack all the information in the human genome into the space of a single cell. If no one else on Earth has managed to 'pack the data' that well I greatly doubt your claim that it is 'obviously true from even a casual inspection' that YOU can!
For abiogenesis, the evidence is extemely weak. The evidence show it is hard to do even though somehow it happened at least two times in a very narrow window in Earth's history. It is clearly your belief system that counts here. You have no "evidence" for abiogenesis, only a series of speculations that get ruled out in the lab a year or two after they get proposed.
Proposing that because there is an element of unavoidably subjective evaluation of the strength of any given set of evidence does suddenly throw the election into default. We like naturalistic evolutionary explanations because of their track record so far,
An "element" of subjectivity my big toe, on this issue the subjective far outwieghs any positive evidence on either side - every honest reader of this forum knows it. I can't make God appear on command in your lab (absurdly high hurdle to jump in the name of 'positive evidence') to make a new cell, and you can't make nature or the lab do it. And even if God did that one time in front of a dozen Noble Prize winners you still would not count it unless He did it on command every time for donh in a repeatable fashion.
Sorry, our ID hypothesis is that the creation of new life ended after the creation of Man. We are the ones saying it won't happen again, you are the ones saying it will happen again in a repeatable fashion every time conditions are right. You can't repeat it, or even peat it, but somehow evolution 'has a better track record' than ID.
All this and the failure of creationists or IDers to provide a definitive countervailing example. The instant you guys come up with something definitive, it will become part of science--
At the start of this thread you were saying we had to make supporting predictions for ID that could be tested and still panned out. I made some and you started raising the bar by throwing in vague and subjective demands. What is your definition of 'something definitive?' Does God have to come to your lab and perform tricks as in the example I cited above? Why can't we be held to the same standard you want for yourself, making testable predictions and seeing how well they fit the FACTS?
just taking potshots at our feeble attempts to explain Everything given the tiny amount of data we have isn't going to do the trick until you have an explanatory paradigm that works better--make that works at all--which you presently have not got.
Feeble attempts? Feeble attempts? This from a man who can pack code better than God? Maybe your explanations are so feeble because they are just plain wrong. The 'tiny amount of data' argument loses merit when the more we learn the less likely abiogenensis becomes. It would work if we were slowly understanding how it could be done, but we are quickly learning that it is more difficult than we thought.
That is a cute way of saying we are to dogmatically rule out in advance the possibility that anything from outside our three-space dimensions plus time universe could ever effect anything inside our universe.
That is dogma, not science. It is true that almost by definition miracles cannot be repeated in the lab, but that does NOT mean they cannot or have not happened. Thay can and have happened, they just cannot be repeated by science. The best science can do is rule out any natural explanations, and then, as Sherlock Holmes said, 'whatever is left, no matter how improbable, is true".
Our universe itself is a miracle from a place beyond its dimensions. Matter and energy can neither be created or destroyed, they can only change form. Right? That is right in our 3D + time universe, but that universe and all the matter and energy in it was created somehow, from somewhere. Hence from the very beginning this idea that something must work according to natural laws or it is impossible is shown to be false. A miracle has happened, the universe has sprung into being in violation of its own natural laws about matter/energy creation. Sounds like there is a place unobservable to us that has higher laws, ergo a 'supernatural' realm.
I beg to differ. A loose analogy is most distinctly not the same sort of thing as a carefully framed analytical argument.
Analogies are a good way to explain things to the choir--they are not good ways to advance an argument in the face of critical resistance.
You have already agreed that DNA code is like a program.
Well sure, it is "like" a program in a number of ways. It is discrete, it is read in serial order. However, this does not constitute carte blanche for you to go off on a wild hair. There are substantial ways in which it is NOT like a program. If you want an analogy to the programming world, it is more like jumbled off-line tape storage than it is like a program.
Are you going to make the ridiculous assertion that you can write a computer program at random? Are you going to assert that a computer program can be changed in a positive way by randomly changing bits and bytes? Seems you have a big task before you if you wish to refute my statement above.
Calm down. I have no idea how writing a program "at random" entered this discussion. I offered to compress the data in the storage media a little better. That is all I offered to do. Contrary to what you and ahban seem to think, this is not really any kind of awesome offer at all.
You both seem to be suffering from the conception that DNA is some kind of masterfully tuned magical computer. It is not. It is where a bunch of patterns for enzymes are stored kind of like op amp gates in more or less independently controlled chemical feedback loops. It shows no signs of a Master Control--it is just a big bag of accreted enzyme patterns. If there is any kind of a master control, it resides in the RNA that decides when to suck stuff out of the DNA, not the DNA.
Re-compressing that data is not remotely as difficult or fraught with peril as you and ahban want to make it out to be. Retro-viruses muck with the dern thing all the time, and it still keeps cranking along. How could that be?
That is a cute way of saying we are to dogmatically rule out in advance the possibility that anything from outside our three-space dimensions plus time universe could ever effect anything inside our universe.
How many different ways are you going to make me repeat this? Science operates in the material realm. Therefore material explanations are what science is about. Science has no opinion about any flavor of immaterial realm. That is not it's job. In the ordinary course of affairs we do not to take this fundamental limit of science as a failing. If that bothers you, stay away from laboratories & science museums & field digs, & go to church instead--you'll get little mileage insisting that what you learned in church should stand on equal scientific footing with what you learn in the lab or the field.
I won't respond in detail to your last couple of posts because you chewed up way more verbal yardage than I have the patience for to say the same fundamentally incorrect thing over and over.
In no manner has ID or creationism ponied up the disciplined artillary of facts and problems that are forever unapproachable by the current paradigm, to give it the sort of footing, say, Copernican astronomy needed to replace ptolomaic astronomy. Our present take on how things work may, in the end, prove as useless as ptolomaic astronomy, but as long as it seems reasonably useful, we aren't giving it up for a big bag of undisciplined, fact-free wind created by antideluvian tinhats with an obvious agenda, no matter how many big words strung together in profound-sounding vague oratory they produce.
Oh, yea, vague and subjective demands, like--the experiment has to be affordable, has to be observable, has to produce results better explained outside the current paradigm than in it.
In other words: has to follow the same rules the rest of us plodding scientific types have to follow in order to be published. Current scientific paradigms are not cast in concrete, however, overthrowing a currently usefully employed scientific paradigm requires more than aggressive rhetoric in an appeal to "fairness". Rightly or wrongly, we have a big investment in our current paradigm. This might strike you as an unfair prejudice, but it strikes most scientific workers as the only alternative to intellectual anarchy, and an end to scientific progress.
For abiogenesis, the evidence is extemely weak.
...and, correspondingly, abiogenesis is not a science. RNA-world may arguably be a science a-borning, with the change in the Tree of Life brought on by Woese's work. However, how RNA-world came to exist, and whether even that would constitute abiogenesis, still stands well beyond the realm of present day science.
Science operates in the material realm. Therefore material explanations are what science is about. Science has no opinion about any flavor of immaterial realm. That is not it's job.
I don't have a problem with that. But it is one thing to say science only answers questions about the material realm, and another to insist that the material realm is all that there is. That is naturalism disguised as science.
It is one thing to say "Using science, we don't know how the universe was created, if God did it we don't know how He did. We only measure things that are in the natural world to start with." That is different from saying, "God could not have done this, or anything else, as all actions have a natural cause". That is NOT science. Science can, to a high probability, rule out a natural answer, leaving the supernatural as the most probable explanation. Naturalism disguising itself as science insists in advance that no supernatural explanation is possible (even while admitting that the creation of the universe itself is in violation of its known laws).
We are beginning to make guesses about extra dimensions that may exist. Once we understand them, what we once thought of as 'supernatural' may simply be places where these higher-dimensional realms interacted in a way that touches ours. This could happen in strict accordance with the 'natural laws' of that realm. In other words, todays 'supernatural' is tomorrows 'natural' explanation.
You argue that as we learn more and more about our 3-space dimensions + time universe we will come to understand how cells can bootstrap themselves from non-living matter. I claim that as we come to understand more about the extra-dimensional world and how it operates we will come to understand better how God made cells from non-living matter.
Not really so much different, except for the Sagan mantra,"The cosmos is all that is, or was, or ever shall be." That is a dogma, not a scienctific truth. By your own definition of science it is impossible to verify that statement scientifically.
I don't have to prove what is so readily observable, unlike ANYTHING having to do with darwinism!
I'm outta here - you're confusing me with someone who cares!
ROTFLOL!
I already gave you two tests (in post #62)that meet your first two criteria. The third criteria you list is the mind-shutter- the one that insures science will never break through to the next level, but always stay mired in a 3-space dimensions + time box of naturalist making. If you are the one defining "better", then once again the most senseble ID theory will always be judged less fit than even the most wacked-out naturalist hypothesis.
You even admit in your next post that the current speculations about abiogenesis may not qualify as science. Right, there IS NO valid scientific explanation for something that was not wholly done by the laws and forces of this natural world.
Rightly or wrongly, we have a big investment in our current paradigm. This might strike you as an unfair prejudice, but it strikes most scientific workers as the only alternative to intellectual anarchy, and an end to scientific progress.
Where did you get the idea that nature moved according to natural laws instead of chaotically? From men with a theistic worldview who saw One Creator God as the Lawgiver. Our job was to discover the laws, and we could trust trial and error results precisely because the laws were created by the One Unchanging God who ruled over all. Going back to the worldview that produced Western Science will not destroy is, it will take it to the next level and back to its own roots at the same time. You are find of citing the Copernican view as being better than the Ptolemic view. Did you know that Copernicus was a Christian Cleric? That Ptolemy was most likely a naturalist?
Returning to a theistic worldview will not bring anarchy The biggest threat to progress today is natrualistic dogma that insists that, "The universe is all there is, was, or ever will be." You are afraid we will just say "God did it" and quit searching. I am afraid there are things we will fail to search for also, because they are outside the 'paradignm that so many natualists cling to.
Funny you should say that because it was you who originally made the analogy before I started discussing this matter with you. You volunteered the analogy that the DNA code operated like a program.
Calm down. I have no idea how writing a program "at random" entered this discussion.
I brought it up. I said that if you considered DNA a program, then that is completely contradictory of life having developed in an evolutionary manner. Programs are designed by intelligent individuals, they do not arise at random. They cannot be altered at random in the way that evolution says we got from bacteria to men. So yes, if you wish to insist that evolution is true then you need to show how you can alter a program at random and make it better and more complex.
Kindly inform me where you observed Gravity working in the intergalactic vacuum between Andromeda and the Milky Way. Gravity Gaps are larger than fossil gaps by several orders of magnetude. You cannot PROVE things by observing them to happen over and over. That is induction, not deduction, and inductive proofs don't prove anything except that humans are suckers for nature's 3 card monti games. We had that kind of proof that continents were nailed down to the earth for 5000 years--than, a few decades ago, we decided they were moving. Like most creationists, you have no idea what a real proof is, or how utterly irrelevant they are to science.
I'm outta here - you're confusing me with someone who cares!
No, I've confused you with someone who is willing to stand behind what they say with detailed facts and related reasons arising therefrom.
Those cotton-polyester blends are uncomfortable. Stick with pure cotton.
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