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.
It should also be noted the total failure of evolutionist "science" to produce anything worthwhile. In fact science, real science, has disproven just about everything that evolutionists have claimed from the stupid brachyocephallic index, to the moronic 'size of the head shows intelligence of organism', to the traits of the parents 'meld' in the progeny, to the appendix and the tonsils are useless organs, to non-coding DNA is junk. It has all been disproven. Evolution is total garbage. It is junk food for atheists.
If gravity is not a natural force that is real, then let's you and me go to a 100 foot building and you jump first. If you fall up, I will follow you.
Yup, and like the thousands of experiments on abiogenesis they failed. Are you claiming that failed experiments are proof that something exists? Are you making the moronic claim that because something has been scientifically disproven by experiments it is scientifically true?
You overlooked the prizes awarded to Leland H. Hartwell, R. Timothy Hunt, and Sir Paul M. Nurse. The Nobel Committee claimed to have awarded these prizes for work on evolution.
Really? What prizes did they get? For what did they get the prizes?
Don't you ever look up things for yourself?
Don't you ever try to confirm or verify any facts, ideas, or theories for yourself?
Are you always this intellectually lazy?
Do you ever think about the actual horsesh!t that you post here?
Impossible or unlikely?
Do you purposefully seek not to understand?
God created everything, yet creationists have zero explanation of how, nor do they appear to seek one. Beyond that, they don't have even hint of how God came into being, and no hope of getting one, because they don't seek one. The creationist's explanation is basically "magic".
It would be helpful if you could tie the magic in with the fact that humans seek understanding with the brain we were created with in a way such that magic is an unsatisfying answer.
Creationists have an excellent explanation of how. You simply refuse to open up a Bible, and your heart to understand how it all happened.
Evolutionists believe that a one in 12,000,000,000,000^10 random occurrence JUST SO HAPPENED to touch off life on the planet, and that another random occurrence of a mutation with even higher odds than that above is what separated Man from all other life on the planet.
We won't even go into the discomboobulated explanations for flawed "science" such as carbon dating, which itself has proven pencils to be hundreds of thousands of years old.
I would suggest the only ones purposely NOT seeking the truth are the evolutionists. You're entitled to your opinion, I'm entitled to mine. Why is that so offensive to people like you?
I have my own theory. I believe that an organism can alter its DNA within its own lifetime in response to environmental changes and then pass those changes on to its offspring. Takes the randomness out of Darwinian evolution.
We don't have a lack of data, just a lack of data that supports naturalist contentions. My position: once we know enough about a subject that we should reasonably have found any naturalistic explanation, the total lack of such explanation suggests the possiblity of a supernatural explanation.
Which will still not be relevant to science because science is fundamentally unequipped to say things about supernatural (by which I assume you mean immaterial) explanations.
I suspect that material knowledge about the universe that finite beings such as ourselves might ever possess, will still be a distinct minority of the knowledge that might possibly ever exist--for all time into the future.
But whether that is true or not, it is unwarranted, and not backed up by any sensible statistical calculation to say that our present knowledge is so comprehensive that present failures to explain natural abiogenesis make a case for immaterial abiogesis--the landscape of potential natural explanations has hardly been anything close to exhausted--and exhaustion is what you would have to demonstrate to make a case in the natural world for immaterial abiogensis.
But this is a stupid argument in an even more fundamental way. Suppose you are correct, and that immaterial abiogenesis is given, by unambiguous divine relevation to be the correct explanation. Will science care? No. Science will want to ask: "ok, so, exactly how did God do it? Did it happen pop-bang all at once? Are there traces of material phenomenon that grew at a rapid rate into the first cellular? How long did that take? What stages did it go through? If it happened pop-bang, what did that do to the material that used to be where the cellular is now?
Please explain how this would be different from what science does now? You guys keep insisting that there's an intellectual wrestling match between science and God over abiogenesis. This is not a correct perception. The two occupy pretty much unconnected planes of concern. God could very well be at the root of life, and that would not prevent science from finding pretty persuasive natural explanations for abiogensis.
This is a fruitless and unresolvable debate bacause it is a pitched battle between non-opponents, and I would prefer to move on at this point.
This is not your own theory. It is Lysenkoism, and it dominated Soviet biological science. It is also exactly what the immune system does.
Never heard of that, thanks. I just based it upon my own observations and musings.
...just like thousands of observations over thousands of years did not reveal that continents drift over the surface of the planet.
...just like thousands of observations over hundreds of years did not reveal the einsteinean discrepencies in Newtonian calculations.
...just like thousands of observations of thousands of years did not reveal the atomic nature of matter.
If gravity is not a natural force that is real, then let's you and me go to a 100 foot building and you jump first. If you fall up, I will follow you.
Is this your proof? Let me cast it formally for you:
QED
A very succinct proof indeed.
Lets try another experiment. You attempt to breed with a pig, and if God intervenes and produces viable offspring, in contradiction with the predictions of micro-evolutionary biology, I will follow suit.
No working micro-biologist believes this. No presently proposed serious theory in micro-biology related to abiogensis proposes this. This is a strawman regularly offered up by creationists which has little or nothing to do with actual science as she is currently practiced.
Once again, you had better get a note off to the Curators of the nations museums, and the writers of our nations biological text books, as we have just revised the Tree of Life, due to work by Woese that points unmistakably at a pre-cellular RNA world. Oh, the perfidy of all those scholars, teachers, and scientists. Oh, the immensity of this conspiracy against TRUTH. What an incredible payroll the perfideous scum at the heart of the RNA-world conspiracy must maintain to keep bribing all these people into silence.
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