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.
I sold my soul to the Devil for Permanent Press. :-)
No. I did not. Ahban persists in claiming that because I think I can compress the data, that I am really offering to write code because, I guess, "oh, it's just all so complicated and intertwined". Don't put Ahban's words in my mouth. At no time did I volunteer that the DNA code operated like a program--it emphatically does not, as I long-windedly explained just previously.
Well, now that you've explained it, it still looks like mental chewing gum to me. Kindly submit your proof that because something appears to you, in any manner, to be designed, that natural explanations are therefore precluded. You may include, as a brief appendix to your proof, an answer to my previous query as to why you think vaccine vector enzymes inserted by our immune system into our DNA aren't "designed".
That understates my concern substantially. It took us 400 meticulous, heartbreaking years, through Brahe, Copernicus, Galilo, Bruno, and innumerable other human sacrifices, to get a divorce between science in the material and theology in the immaterial realms and to shake off the church's narrow acceptance of what constitutes human reason & veto power over human imagination. I don't want to throw that away on a whim.
To my mind, it is an analloyed good idea to keep these divorce papers active.
There could be a God who created and creates everything. I'm inclined to think so, myself. But every time anyone wants to make it science's job to pursue this question, I'm priming the cannons and looking for blood, and for damnably good reason.
Yes, well, science makes no such claims; science is a game whose rules relate, by explicit design, to material cause in the material world. This is not the same thing as the philosophy of naturalism. I know of no reputable field of science, or scientific journal, that claims "the material realm is all that there is". It is an unwarranted claim science is not equipped to make or pursue, even if it was on the agenda.
The only place this battle is being fought is in the overheated imaginations of creationists.
You even admit in your next post that the current speculations about abiogenesis may not qualify as science.
I have said this over and over on this, and many other threads. It is not a fresh admission--it is my fundamental argument against most common creationist cavils against evolutionary theory because it supposedly rests on abiogenesis--an incorrect view of both history and the current state of scientific knowledge.
Right, there IS NO valid scientific explanation for something that was not wholly done by the laws and forces of this natural world.
There is also NO valid scientific explanation for anything we have little or no valid data about. The logical inference you wish to draw from this--that if there is NO valid scientific explanation for something, it was "not wholly done by the laws and forces of this natural world", is a logical fallacy called "excluded middle".
Well, to most of the world, this is a logical fallacy. To IDers, it is an iron law of science.
I don't care if a scientific view is championed by green pond scum from Jupiter. The worldly pedigree of a theories proponents are not what we judge a scientific theory on.
Returning to a theistic worldview will not bring anarchy
I'd remind you that creationists once had the political authority to kill those who held non-theistic views. By comparison, anarchy seems pretty benign. The church banned and burned books, witches, and jews on the basis of un-scientific theistic theories. This is not a good plan you are offering up. It is a bad plan, a very bad plan. Science works just fine as it is, for all it's worts and limitations--your offer is rejected with prejudice.
There have been thousands of experiments conducted over decades with millions of dollars worth of money by legions of brilliant scientists. Your claim that we have "little valid data" only applies to supported naturalistic explanations for abiogenesis, these experiments have RULED OUT many possiblilities for abiogensis.
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.
As our knowledge of the subject increases exponentially with no NEx in sight, the greater the probablility of a supernatural explanation. It is like a sliding scale. The greater our knowledge is without discovering a naturalistic answer the more likely it is that no such answer can be found.
I am sure we would disagree as to the state of our knowledge on how hard it is for life to arise from non-life. Still, my science text still holds the Cell Theory to be true. The first tennant of that is that "All cells come from other cells". Until you find a way to disprove this long-accepted and confirmed theory I could argue that YOU are the one insisting that we put away known scientific fact.
There have been thousands of experiments conducted over decades in support of 1) transforming lead into gold. 2) the significance of astrological predictions 3) astral projection. 4) the existence of ghosts.
What you have offered is insufficient reason for considering abiogenesis a science. It is quite obviously not a science in the same sense that classical physics or paleo-astronomy are.
So, the fact that "some experiments" have ruled out abiogenesis has even less foundation than such a claim would have for a recognized science. It took Edison thousands of attempts to find a useable fillament for the electric light bulb.
Should Edison have concluded that it was an impossible task after the first few hundred failures? Science as a workaday activity is mostly failures. How do you suppose we get anything done?
The only place this battle is being fought is in the overheated imaginations of creationists.
Not so. I noticed that you left out of your claim 'famous scientists'. What I said was a direct response to the quote by Carl Sagan, "The Cosmos is all that is, or was, or ever will be." You say, correctly, that this is merely Naturalism, not science. Still, its adherents are masqurading this philosophy as scientific truth. Would that you be half as angry with THEM as you are with me, with all this talk of manning the cannons and such. You speak of creationist violence of centuries ago (more violent times), but you are the one who seems most prone to violence of the two of us.
1) Transforming lead into gold - because of the experiemnts, we can now do this. THe quantities produced are very tiny and do not equal the costs, but we can now do this. Once we appled modern scientific tools, methods, and understanding of atoms this problem was solved fairly easily. The analogy you are trying to make works against you. It supports my contention that if living cells were as easy to create as the fossil and DNA evidence indicates then we should be able to do it, even as we can make lead into gold.
2) The significance of astrological predictions- I believe these have been shown by science to be junk, even as hypothesis for abiogenesis have been shown to be junk. The Cell Theory, that all cells must come from preexsisting cells, is confirmed.
3) Astral projection and Ghosts - I doubt the resources and talent expended on these two topics equals those spent on abiogenesis. These are topics that most scientists are afraid to investigate due to their worldview.
You have no case Don. All you have is your irrational fear that Christians are going to go around executing people for having some kind of unauthorized scientific beliefs. The giants of western science were all Christians until the last 50 years or so, when Naturalism became the dominant religion/philosophy of many scientists. A lot of them are still Christians or Jews.
You are blowing the "threat", if any, absurdly out of proportion.
You are trying the old bait and switch on me here. Abiogenesis is not a science, it is an incorrect hypothesis within the sciences of Biology and Biochemsitry. In the same way Star Formation is not a science, but a topic or field within the sciences of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
So abiogenesis is a failed hypothesis. Your Edison example proves my point. The time, brainpower, energy, and funding devoted to the abiogenec hypothesis in all likelyhood FAR exceeds the meager levels Thomas Edison needed to create the light bulb. And remember, Edison was trying to do something that he had no guarantee was even possible. All kinds of evolutionists are guaranteeing that abiogenesis happened- yet it remains most elusive....
I never said they were. I was rebutting your outlandish claims about what would happen to science if we used it with a theistic, rather than naturalistic, worldview. You seem to think a theistic worldview would mean a dark age "worse than anarchy". My response was to note that the giants of western science were often Christians who had no problem with the idea that God did certain things, including create the universe and devise the natural laws they were discovering.
Their worldview did not stop them from moving mankind's knowledge forward, and it won't stop it now. What will stop it is if there actually IS an extra-dimensionality that interacts with this 3d + time universe and "scientists" are afraid to consider it because "we don't go there" (shove head in sand).
Quoting someone's pedigree is not a good final judge of someone's theories, but my point was that their theories checked out, in spite of their Theistic pedigrees. This refutes your position that a return to a theistic worldview will arrest scientific progress.
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.
151 posted on 6/26/02 12:40 PM Pacific by donh
Now you say:
No. I did not.
Yes, now that you see that with all your saying that you could do better than God at writing code (which you have been saying for dozens of posts with me and Abhan) you are trying to get out of the pit you got yourself into. It is a program only if you can say you are smarter than who wrote it (which anyways is total nonsense - you do not compress running programs which is the stupid statement you have been making showing very well you do not know beans about programming).
So I repeat my question - how do you rewrite a program at random? You cannot and that is why you are running away from all your previous statements. The DNA code is proof that organisms are intelligently designed because no program has ever been written by random means by non-intelligent methods.
The proof is that by comparing your supposed programming prowess to that shown in DNA you have admitted that it is a program, so you are being totally dishonest by asking for proof to what you yourself have already admitted to. You cannot change a program at random and that proves your stupid evolution theory to be false.
Those people were not atheists like you and Darwin, they were scientists looking for truth, not for the substantiation of their atheism through the perversion of science. Evolution is not science because instead of searching for truth, it searches for ways to justify its ideology. It is for that reason that all the major discoveries in biology: mendellian genetics, DNA, and the mapping of the human genome were not only never predicted by the pseudo-science of evolutionism, but directly contradict it. There has not been a single Nobel prize winner for their work on evolution, not one because evolution is bunk. It is science for morons.
That's right abiogenesis is not science, it is atheistic pipe dreams. However, even though no one was there, if it were true, it would be possible from things we do know about which came afterward to formulate at least a hypothesis of how it could have come about. There is not even a valid hypothesis of how it could have come about. And no, the RNA world which is the latest atheist nonsense is total garbage. Viruses are 99% of the way to being self replicating forms, yet not a single experiment, not a single of the millions of different attempts at forcing it to mutate, change or whatever, has shown it to ever transform itself into a self-replicatiing creature. So even after being taken to almost all the way necessary for true life to arise, you folk cannot get to the final tiniest step. So no, all the evidence, all the scientific evidence, not the pot filled pipe dreams of atheists says that abiogenesis is totally impossible.
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