Posted on 06/17/2002 4:40:34 PM PDT by Nebullis
How so? This saves Darwinian hours of public time trying to answer the thesis that you can't expect random interactions to suddenly create a prokariote. The "whirlwind can't build a 747" argument.
Think about it. What is necessary for Darwinian evolution?
Well, there's such a thing as similarity by convergent evolution, where in different places or times similar forces sculpt initially dissimilar life forms to outwardly similar adaptations. The classic case is Australia and Tasmania, where marsupials radiated into ecological niches we find held elsewhere by placentals. Thus there were small marsupial predators (the Tasmanian Devil), large marsupial predators (the Thylacine), a marsupial "flying squirrel," etc.
While the similarities between, say, thylacine and timber wolf can be striking, the underlying unrelatedness is also there to see. More importantly, the unrelatedness only goes so far. They still have a common ancestor way back there in time.
The less commonality the original organisms have, the more improbable any parallelism becomes. For instance, I'd be surprised if any alien lifeforms that we ever encounter use DNA for replication. All the lifeforms of earth use it, but that's generally considered a historical accident and an artifact of common descent. There figure to be other possibilities.
Woese's theory--that the archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes evolved separately--struck me as improbable in the same way and for the same reason. (There's also the problem that the fossil record for eukaryote life doesn't go back very far at all comparted to the other two.) But there's a major difference between the Woese scenario and my alien example. Woese's life forms would still presumably have evolved from the same "ancestral" soup.
The first molecule to form a suitable basis for self-replication triggered three "abiogenesis" events, if I understand Woese correctly. It's nowhere near as big of a deal as the same parallelism would be in the alien example, where you have to believe that a different soup on a different planet did exactly the same thing as on earth.
Nothing related to the beginnings of cellular life as we know it. Darwin was quite explicit about this. Darwinian evolution applies to the fossil record. What might has set it all off was beyond Darwinian ken, and he was quite careful to say so quite often, to avoid being embroiled in the abiogenesis debates.
Of course something way different, to which the Darwinian rules do not all apply, was going on before Prokariotes and Thermatoga made their debute. The only people surprised by this are the staunch proponents of the "whirlwind kind build a 747" argument as applied to Prokariotes.--who are, alas, mired hopelessly in last century's active debates on this subject.
No, I'm NOT pushing creationism (or anything else)! I'm taking this as yet another opportunity to laugh (out loud) at the folly of darwin who, just like environmentalist wackos do, based his wasted life on junk (false) "science"!!!!
I'd like to humbly suggest that you are still hung up on a sudden miracle that probably never did occur. Never bet long odds. There was probably a smooth transition from some radically alternative form of self-replication that was neither highly accurate, nor highly centralized, into RNA world. As has been suggested before--it is the energy conserving chemical cycles that have to start the show--and these could have formulated around such non-cellular locations as enduring paint pot bubble clusters, or smooth crystaline rock faces, to give some initial locality to beginnings of the process of enduring maintainence and replication.
All natural science is based on assumption and inference. If you think otherwise, I'd like to see your deductive proof of the theory of gravity.
Credit where credit is due. You and Nebullis had a discussion maybe a year and a half ago in which some ideas similar to Woese's got bandied about. Among other things, you mentioned that viruses might be linear descendants of the soup rather than evolved from cellulars as more commonly thought.
Nothing about Woese's work refutes Darwinian evolutionary theory. The title of this thread is misleading.
Yet the evolutionists want you to believe it happened.
It's funny on how the evolutionists can't even seem to agree how life began, yet creationists all have the same (correct) answer.
I believe I can jump into the middle of that discussion right here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a8ef634710e.htm#99
Using a reference of yours I saved. Woese was, in fact, the subject of this particular part of the discussion. I believe the virus quandary was pointed out earlier in the thread, but I'm a little vague about all this now.
No, it's not. And any "calculation" that suggests it is, which fails to overwhelmingly demonstrate why I must accept it's state-space and selection criteria to do the calculation, is puffed up nonsense masquerading as science.
Besides, I don't have to prove anything; after all, how many years (and years and years and years) has it been since Darwin died, and his assumption and inference STILL can't be shown to have any basis in fact?
Who needs to prove what to whom, here?!! How many folks over all this time have worked tirelessly, and failed miserably, in trying to prove Darwin correct? All of them!
I'm not trying to make anyone angry here, merely stating the facts!
Well, that is, of course, errant nonsense. Evolutionary biology's evidence is exactly like Evolutionary astronomy's evidence. Induction on a tiny number of samples. Kindly show me all the examples of stellar evolution in action that we have observed. Kindly show me the examples of gravity in action in the vacuum between, say Milky Way and Andromeda? How do you know God doesn't specially re-create gravity over and over only in specific localities near galactic formations?
Or, possibly, you are not trying to state facts, just make anyone angry. The evidence for evolution is palpable, and can be located in any sedementary rock face, or natural history museum in the world. If you have grief with that evidence, than state it, but don't be representing a natural science as something it is not.
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