Posted on 06/17/2002 4:40:34 PM PDT by Nebullis
If they were truly 3 unrelated origins, they would have had 3 different forms of basic triplet coding, each to a differing set of Amino acids. If, in fact, they even used the same fundamental DNA paradigm. Truly independent evolution would mean they could'nt usefully eat each other--clearly not the case.
As to being evidence for ID, even if this were as you stated, it is no more compelling evidence for ID than than for some other form of earthbased abiogensis we haven't thought of yet. Your threshold of evidence is set way too low to bust the current paradigm. If ID wants attention, ID better predict some positive event other than that evolutionary theory will fail to be perfect--being a natural science, that's a given. Pointing to unfilled knowledge holes in the current paradigm is the easy half of the battle--no evidence of the hard half being fought has yet come to my attention. Please use ID theory to predict some major positive material event that comes to pass, such as green aliens landing to harvest what they planted 4 billion years ago, then ID will get everyone's respectful attention.
I also predict that life does not necessarily have one common biological ancestor. Since it is not dependent on natural processes working through chance there is no limit on the number of 'first cells from non-cells'. If it were by natural processes the first cell seems a miracle. What are the odds of at least three miracles happening (in geologic terms) almost at once?
Are those ID-supporting predictions fair enough?
Not neccesarily. This was VR's point as well. It depends entirely on the constraints present for abiogenesis. For example, was there a physical reason for homochirality or was it a flip of the coin? If several forms of transcriptional molecular aggregates popped up several places on earth, I would be hard-pressed to call them related. Their only relationship would be a common set of conditions. This smacks of too much of Gaia for my tastes.
While disagreeing that leaving fossils has anything to do with evolution, including the Darwinian kind, I cannot provide that proof by definition. I would like to represent the Darwinians in this argument and concede that you have put the nail in Chuckie's theory, but I know the real acolytes will not allow me to do that. I was acting as a messenger in relaying that requirement.
Offhand I would reject the idea of a commune of molecules dedicated to mutual survival in an energetic environment, but the idea seems interesting. The reason I have the immediate doubt is that heat tends to destroy structure instead of building it. And yes, I know of the cells formed in heated liquids, but they disappear when the heat is removed.
One of these days I'll proofread before posting.
I suppose His proofs are everywhere for people so inclined, but you're reaching.
Its not a slam dunk, but it shows the facts are consistent with what would be expeceted if a common designer (interchangable parts) made several types of cells.
In Woese's idea, there's still a common ancestor of a sort; it just isn't a single, self-contained organism. It's the "RNA world." Search on it, read for five minues, and know as much as I do.
Curt.
So I take it you WILL NOT concede that the sudden, near simultaneous appearence of at least three types of cells from apparently different non-living to living events is a mark in favor of ID? If creating cells from non-living tissue were as easy as this, why has no one done it in the lab and clamied that Noble Prize? From everything we know now, and we know quite a bit, the appearence of even ONE cell from non-living material is a miracle we are unable to replicate. Now we have evidence that it happened at least three times. Presumably,those three filled the Earth in a hurry, given evolutionary assumptions, else we might have 33 types of cells, not three. If it is so easy, WHY HAVEN'T WE DONE IT. Evolution has no answer, ID does.
Eukaryotes appear 1.2 billion years ago. Against that, isotopic signatures of some kind of life appear about 3.8 billion years ago. "Near simultaneous?"
If it (making a cell) is so easy, WHY HAVEN'T WE DONE IT. Evolution has no answer, ID does.
By natural, unguided, parallel-experiment processes, it may take from a quarter to half a billion years. Have these conditions been met since the first experiments in 1953?
Having an answer for everything isn't science, especially if there's no reason to think the answer is right.
That is just the oldest fossil evidence we can find for them. The position of this article is that they, in some form, appeared at the same time as the other two types, and that perhaps there were even more types that did not survive until the present day. If so, the non-living to living cell transition occured somehow (either naturalistically or with the help of intelligence) at least three times in a very narrow time frame.
Against that, isotopic signatures of some kind of life appear about 3.8 billion years ago. "Near simultaneous?"
About 3.86 billion years ago, give or take a couple of hundreths places, is my information. At that time there was A LOT more debris floating around the solar system. Earth got walloped by impacts that made the tiny speck that extincted the dinos look like nothing by comparison. These impacts generated heat that raised temperatures planet-wide to the crustal melting point. I wish I had the RealPlayer file on this. Maybe I can find it. This is why the oldest Earth rocks found date to that time and no older. When is that time? 3.85 million years ago, give or take a couple of hundreths place.
You will note that the first date overlaps the second. Neglecting the error bars, the time for the first trace of life comes BEFORE the last TOTAL EXTINCTION EVENT which melted Earth's crust. With the error bars stretched to the limit those two events happen on top of each other. That is not the "quarter billion years" that you say is needed to go from soup to cell. That is a maximum of 10 million years.
If natural processes can make at least three types of cells from soup in a maximum of 10 million years then scientists should have been able to show how it was done. Indeed, we should be catching nature in the middle of doing it all the time, as we "catch" nature in the various phases of stellar evolution. Every time a nutrient rich environment is sterelized the mythical "RNA World" should start self-assembling. The fact is we don't see that. Naturalism has no rational explanation, even though we now know enough that one could reasonable expect any such explanation to be well known.
Are you willing to concede that the sudden, near simultanious appearance of more than one kind of cell is, to some degree, evidence favorable to the ID hypothesis?
Apparently not. And the real point of Woese's argument, a point donh earlier chided me for missing, is that Woese's theory does not have instantaneous abiogenesis moments. The RNA world is acting like a long-lived, slow evolving common ancestor in Woese's scenario, and there was some shadowy something-else evolving before that.
You're doing the creationist hand-wave on Woese's RNA world, while retaining Woese's idea that archea, bacteria, and eukaryotes are siblings. Then you go "Tah-dah!"
Cheap trick. Is Woese credible? You're throwing away the first half of his story, then announcing the second half appears from nowhere.
Read the first paragraph of the main article. Try not to just see what you want.
Just as Newton's version of gravitational theory only applies to the appallingly slow and small, Darwin's version of evolutionary theory only applies to the appallingly cold and energy-starved.
Hmm. Than I presume you think the best temperature environment for evolution to take place in is absolute zero. Every sustained mean temperature regime the earth passes through is going to face life, or life-like entities, with distinctly different opportunities for structuring toward optimum survival.
It's not so mind boggling as you seem to want to make it--if the "life" I am proposing is pre-cellular, than why should it give a rat's ass if cells dissolve "too easily"? Maybe that's a feature, not a problem, for pre-cellular co-operating communities of RNA. The fact that mRNA, with it's curious short lifetimes became the lynchpin of DNA reproduction might have to do with utilizing evanescent cells as temporary factory floors for building temporary RNA machinery.
There are lots of viable amino acids hanging around that we don't employ in our DNA-RNA-protein paradigm, & an effectively infinite number of long-chain molecules to be built from them to experiment with--AND, questions of efficiency or compactness have been amply demonstrated, at least to my satisfaction at this point, not to have been necessarily the selecting criteria. The chirality argument gets better press than it deserves. Other chirality-compatible sets can be constructed, and it's not obvious why nature would prefer one to another. So far, there is no dragonslayer argument that has come to my attention saying our current fundamental design was in any way compelling.
I think we neglected our duty in not mentioned to you the second restraint of an ID test, aside from prediction. ID must be a far better explanation of whatever phenomena it proports to explain than a corresponding natural phenomena that might be possible-to-likely in the evolutionary paradigm, but, like the little green men of ID, has yet to be observed in the flesh.
hmmph. It's not even as efficient as 3-redundant Hemming code. It double-books several of the triplets for the exact same amino acid, and there are only a few scattered instances of re-entering a genome chain at just one or two removes from the initial starting point to give a different, but equally useful protein. It is, to a compaction geek, a very sparse information-packing design. I could do better, and I'm a fair remove from having Godly powers.
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