Dismantling Darwinism

Interesting how you can't help but anthropomorphize and talk as if life were intelligently designed.

Life producing myriads of random possibilities is talking as if life were intelligently desgined?

How does one emulate such dynamics?

How does one emulate any complex process? By emulating those parts that are understood, by trial and error, by long hours, hard work, and time. The process is gradual. If you doubt it can be done, name the process that cannot be emulated. Exactly where do you see the brick wall?

Testing different possibilities, to use your phrase, definitely implies an intelligence -- what would be doing the testing if not an intelligence.

This anthropomorphicizing is something that occurs all the time, usually unconsciously. It especially happens in talking about evolutionary biology and selection pressures.

what would be doing the testing if not an intelligence.

Ever hear anyone say X 'tested his endurance'? Does X have to be an animate, volitional quality?

Ever hear anyone say X 'tested his endurance'?

Your response doesn't really match the original sentence, "...it's likely early life was producing and testing different genomic possibilities".

marker

All nature is at war, one organism with another, or with external nature.

One supposes that Darwin could open his famous paper presented to the Linnean Society in 1858 with these words because he was convinced that all of nature accorded to a mechanistic model. That is, that organisms are discrete, isolatable objects that may be empirically studied as such (and even modeled on digital computers -- though Darwin presumably didn't know that). This describes a certain now-prevalent “pre-analytical assumption” that quantum theory seems to cast in doubt.

In the matter of the speculation of DNA as universal code (designed or evolving? is a separate question) vs. the speculation that “RNA world” was an earlier biological attempt to secure the survival of a much-less-stable information source than DNA -- which attempt nature happened to select out of biological evolution. It’s an interesting theory.

But here’s another interesting theory, from Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan (Microcosmos: Four Billion Years from Our Microbial Ancestors, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986.):

“It now appears that microbes – also called microorganisms, germs, bugs, protozoans, and bacteria, depending on the context, are not only the building blocks of life, but occupy and are indispensable to every known living structure on the Earth today. From the paramecium to the human race, all life forms are meticulously organized, sophisticated aggregates of evolving microbial life. Far from leaving microorganisms behind on the evolutionary ‘ladder,’ we are surrounded by them and composed of them.”

Kafatos/Nadeau (op. cit. supra) speculate on the role of primaeval bacteria on the organization of the planetary biosphere:

“During the first two billion years of evolution, bacteria were the sole inhabitants of the Earth, and the emergence of more complex life forms is associated with networking and symbiosis. During these two billion years, prokaryotes, or organisms composed of cells with no nucleus (namely bacteria), transformed the Earth’s surface and atmosphere. It was the interaction of these simple organisms that resulted in the complex processes of fermentation, photosynthesis, oxygen breathing, and the removal of nitrogen gas from the air. Such processes would not have evolved, however, if these organisms were atomized in the Darwinian sense, or if the force of interaction between parts existed only outside the parts.

“In the life of bacteria, bits of genetic material within organisms are routinely and rapidly transferred to other organisms. At any given time, an individual bacterium has the use of accessory genes, often from very different strains, which can perform the functions not performed by its own DNA. Some of this genetic material can be incorporated into the DNA of the bacterium and some may be passed on to other bacteria. What this picture indicates, as Margulis and Sagan put it, is that ‘all the world’s bacteria have access to a single gene pool and hence to adaptive mechanisms of the entire bacterial kingdom.’

“Since the whole of this gene pool operates in some snese within the parts, the speed of recombination is much greater than that allowed by mutation alone, or by random changes inside parts that alter interaction between parts. The existence of the whole within parts explains why bacteria can accommodate change on a worldwide scale in a few years. If the only mechanism at work were mutations inside organisms, millions of years would be required for bacteria to adapt to a global change in the conditions for survival. 'By constantly and rapidly adapting to environmental conditions…the organisms of the microcosm support the entire biota, their global exchange network ultimately affecting every living plant and animal…. Since the whole of these organisms was larger than the sum of their parts, this allowed for life functions that could not be performed by the mere collection of parts [i.e., the emergence principle]. And the existence of the whole within the parts coordinates metabolic functions and overall organization.”

Obviously, the speculations "DNA world" and "RNA world" cannot both be true; possibly neither of them is true.

Still, I gotta wonder: If the foregoing description of an ancient microbial past is a true picture, then where could “RNA world” possibly fit in? Isn’t a “stable information base” necessary to this view -- and thus for the successful biological diversity that we observe all aound us?

Just thinking out loud, Professor! Thanks so much for paying attention to this thread.

Sorry for the horrific sentence fragment in my last.... Where's a copy editor, when you really need one?

All nature is at war, one organism with another, or with external nature.

I think the concept being examined is the disconnect between a loving God and nature "red of tooth and claw."

How to reconcile the anthropomorphized Victorian God, with his benevolent, white-bearded, loveable face wreathed with smiles, and the crowds of adorable chubby putti cherubs and noble angels singing and playing their harps, with the incessant, horrific, rending, shredding, blood-dripping carnage we observe in nature?

Especially during the early era of the Industrial Revolution, where young men and women and even little children were sacrificing their youth and health in the pits of Moloch?

We really can't appreciate how horrendous the mills were at the time. Why were some children born to play in the sunshine and go to heaven? Why were some children born to labor in the mills?

We really can't appreciate how horrendous the mills were at the time. Why were some children born to play in the sunshine and go to heaven? Why were some children born to labor in the mills?

The mill workers weren't slaves, so they presumably chose to work in those ghastly mills in preference to whatever other opportunities their relatively undeveloped society offered at the time. I think we therefore can appreciate that those mills were a better option than staying in the countryside, conveniently out of sight of social critics (who delighted in sonnets about the joys of pastoral life), where those mill workers knew they'd be toiling even harder for even lower wages. It's difficult for us to grasp now, but those "satanic mills" must have been seen as a big step up for those who toiled there.

Why were some children born to labor in the mills?

It's a question addressed in the New Testament. It's not directly answered but it's addressed.

John 9:2

If there is intelligence in this world -- as seems perfectly, abundantly clear to me -- then you have to assume there is Mind at work. Maybe humans contribute to its propagation in some way.

Then maybe not! :)

But seriously, one of the things which your articles reminded me of was the question of the will to live. It seems that even the simplest bacteria have it in them. This is something which is beyond any material explanation.

Yes, I suppose that the life of the millworkers must have been marginally preferable to the alternatives, as they were not slaves so chose their occupation.

Nevertheless, it was not a good life.

Further, it always baffles me, why the working conditions and the living conditions had to be so harsh, so cruel.

The idea that all life descended from a single instance of abiogenesis not considered to be an axiom.

It certainly has always been an axiom of evolution.

It is a conclusion based on observations.

What observations? There are no observations of any creature transforming itself into a more complex creature.

In addition, science says that the three simplest forms of life, the bacteria, the archea and the single celled eukaryotes could not have descended from each other because of the many different characteristics which would need to be replaced at once to achieve such a transformation. Also, the differences between plants and animals are so great that it is also impossible for one to have descended from the other.

There's significant evidence RNA preceded DNA.

False. Evidence means observable facts, there are no observable instances of any RNA life. They are just the wishful thinking of atheists. No one has been able to explain how life could have arisen without the great complexity we find in the simplest organism - some million base pairs of DNA code. Postulating RNA does not make the task any easier because if RNA were the source of the beginning of life then a whole changeover to DNA in every creature would have had to have occurred without leaving a trace of it in modern times. That is not a reasonable or a scientifically based assumption, it is just wishful thinking.

The one thing DNA has over RNA is much higher chemical stability.

Showing an important reason why RNA life is impossible - the instability of RNA would make it a very bad medium for transmitting hard to acquire genetic information. It also would make life impossible when one's functions are just dissappearing due to the instability of RNA. Again, it is just wishful thinking on the part of atheists and it is based on no science at all.

Nevertheless, it [toiling in the satanic mills] was not a good life. Further, it always baffles me, why the working conditions and the living conditions had to be so harsh, so cruel.

Western society was just barely emerging from the Dark Ages. Extreme poverty was the general lot of mankind. Only the nobility had anything better, and by our standards today, even the nobility lived horribly. No running water, no air conditioning (not too important in England, I guess), horrible nutrition (no refrigeration), no sanitary facilities at all (chamber pots, outhouses, and the nearest tree were all they had), no medical knowledge, low life expectancy, etc.

The only thing to envy about the lifestyle of a duke was that he could afford a lot of servants. He needed them. It took teams of servants just to prepare meals, clean chamber pots, replace candles, chop firewood, weave cloth, muck out the stables, etc. They had class, and style, but you probably wouldn't want to swap lives with them.

It was the industrial revolution, which started with those satanic mills, that made possible the gradually improving economic conditions which resulted in the incomparably better lives that we enjoy today.

There is a possibility that digital emulations of living systems are a dead end

Actually the opposite is true. The likelihood is slim and none. Simulations depend on their usefullness by emulating known functionality. You cannot emulate what you do not know. Thus emulating from ignorance to knowledge is very unlikely if not impossible. Even on the slim chance that it proved correct though, one would not know if it was because there would be no way to verify its correctness.

O.K.

That's your right. We live in a free society.
However, the overwhelming number of biologists, zoologists, etc., who have studied the subject, a good many of whom are Christians, disagree with you.

Thank you so much for the heads up to your musings!

Indeed, the Rocha article linked at 253 explains that for the RNA world to "bootstrap" to a level where it can begin the process of autonomous self-organizing complexity - it must alternate its state:

The idea that life may have originated from pure RNA world has been around for a while47, 48. In this scenario the first life forms relied on RNA molecules as both symbolic carriers of genetic information, and functional, catalytic molecules. The neutralist hypothesis for the function of RNA editing assumes such a RNA world origin of life. It posits that RNA editing could offer a process by which the dual role of RNA molecules as information carriers and catalysts could more easily co-exist. The key problem for the RNA world origin of life hypothesis is precisely the separation between these two functions of RNA. On the one hand RNA molecules should be stable (non-reactive) to carry information, and on the other hand they should be reactive to perform their catalytic function. RNA editing, could be seen as means to fragment genetic information into several non-reactive molecules, that are later, through RNA editing processes, integrated into reactive molecules46. This way, the understanding of this process of mediation between the role of RNA molecules as information carriers and catalytic molecules based on RNA editing, can also offer many clues to the problem of origin of a semiotic code from s dynamic (catalytic) substrate.

I think there's more to it than you suggest. People observing the living conditions of slaves often remarked how much better off they were than so-called "free" men.

Probably not too dissimilar to the way you treat your own automobile vs. the way you treat a rental car.