was there enough time?

was there enough time for life to begin on it's own and then become the animals/humans we have today?i'm not sure if my numbers are correct, but i think i've been told that: the earth is about 4.6 billion years old, the oldest fossils of single celled organisms are about 3.6 billion years old, and the oldest multicellular organisms are about 2 billion years old.has anyone ever checked how much time is needed for life to become the way it is by way of evolution/natural selection/something non-creationist ?i would like to know the following:how much time it takes for the earth to form for life to come about on it's own.
what it takes for life to come about on it's own.
how long it takes for what it takes to happen.for a single celled organism (or one of the earliest living things) to become an animal/human (or one of the most complex living things we have today or ever had),
how much time it takes...
how many changes/mutations/evolution steps/changes in dna needed
what the reasons are for the changes/mutations/etc to happen
how often the reasons occur for a change/etc to happen
how much time it takes for one change to occur, (i'll take the average or the minimal)
how often do the organism live on after a change.
how many of the changes/etc are dependant on other changes/etc to occur at the same time
how often that happens
why it happens
how often the reason why it happens happens
why the above happens
how often the reason above happens and repeat.for instance, if it takes some environmental change for an organism to change/mutate/etc. how often and how much time does it take for the environmental change happen? and then what causes the environmental change? how often does the cause of the environmental change happen?preanswers:
someone might say, we can't tell how much time it takes for a change to happen? to that i say, just give me an estimate. give me the shortest time it takes for the organism at it's stage. more simple organisms would probably change faster because they reproduce faster, but once they get more complex and reproduce slower i would think the time it takes for the organism to change would be longer.someone else might say, "we have life right now the way it is, so there must have been enough time." to that i say, no. because we have life right now the way it is, would mean we just have life the way it is now. it could've happened another way. if we don't have enough time for it to happen that way, then i say, it didn't happen that way, or you have your dating methods wrong, or something went wrong.

How do you think that we would find this out? How do you even think we would estimate it?I think you need to think about this question a little more. If the fossil record indicates that the changes that led to the organisms we have today took place within 3.6 billion years, then what would lead you to conclude that there may not have been enough time for them to occur?An example: I tell you that sometime between 12:00 and 12:06 I boiled an egg. Now you want to know if 6 minutes is enough time to boil an egg? It obviously must be, if I boiled an egg in that time.Any answer I could give you about how long it would have taken life to evolve to the way it is now is necessarily going to be based on a fossil record that indicates that it evolved within 3.6 billion years.

unless there is a faster way to boil the egg.please do not dismiss the questions and just say it must have been within 3.6 billion years old

well if i said, between 12:00 and 12:06, i boiled an egg, and the egg was boiled, but i find out you cant boil the egg within 6 minutes, then there is something wrong.

Sure. But it's incumbent on you to support the assertion that an egg can't be boiled in 6 minutes - just as it's incumbent on you to support the position that 3.6 billion years isn't enough time.It sounds like plenty to me, I guess.

If the egg was boiled between 12:00 and 12:06 then your theoretical objection to egg boiling times less than 6 minutes is trumped by our empirical evidence of eggs being boiled in that time.To relate this to evolution. If we developed a theoretical model of evolution that required more than 4 billion years to produce lawni then the empirical evidence that lawni has evolved in that time trumps that theoretical model and shows it to be false.

It seems to me that the whole thread is mixing up the time for life to evolve from the original living things and the time taken for life to form.We have good solid evidence for the evolution of life.We don't have much yet for the origin of life after the earth formed. No ones particular hypothosis or speculation has really rock solid (pun intended) support. All the various ideas need to support their propositions.Until then we are all in a "I dunno" position. That is where the most fun is in science.(and for the religiously inclinded -- you don't know either. You may have is a belief but that is the same as "I dunno" in the science game )

Still, are there any public studies/essays that attempts to correlate structural development over time? It strikes me as rather odd that it would take 1.6 billion years for the step from single cell to multi cell (if these numbers has any actual bearing). What equivalent numbers do we have for developments within multi celled organisms? Maybe to the first internal organ, first development of primitive eyes and ears, and other 'milestones'.

Yes, it has often struck me that way too. However, why should the step to multi cellularity be a particular advantage?Some suggest it couldn't happen until the oxygen content built up to a high enough level.The 'snowball' earth may have created conditions that made the change advantageous has been suggested.We have a bias to think that really 'cool' things like fingers and brains are "big" steps. However, that is just a bias. The step to a complex organism seems to me to be a pretty darn big one and may well need specific conditions to allow it to arise.Once we have a complex, multicellular oganism (and especially a sexually reproducing one) then you have a base which allows more rapid evolution (perhaps? ).

moolmogo,As a general overview, evolution seems to take very sudden jumps. Mutlicellularity looks to be one of those jumps, as does the Cambrian explosion. Novel functions, especially in a world with few species, almost immediately confers a great increase in fitness. Organisms that can move into a large niche that was previously unoccupied will quickly reproduce, and quickly speciate as well. If you think about this in terms of early life on Earth, moving from the seas to land would be a huge advantage, both by escaping predation and competition.Suffice it to say, what we see today is an organism for almost (and I stress almost) every niche known. Parasitism seems to be the last frontier for most organisms, but we can discuss that in another thread. Anyway, what we see today seems to be in stasis. This is due to well developed ecosystems that have most of their niches filled. When we look at newly formed islands, what we see is rapid speciation and adaption. This is similar to what early speciation on Earth may have resembled.So to answer your question: Yes, there was ample time for life to diversify into the species we see today. As an example (off the top of my head, I can search out some references if you like), there are 250 cyclid species (a type of fish) in the Lake Victoria complex of lakes in Africa. These species are thought to have originated from just one or very few original species when the lake complex came into being approx 125,000 years ago. So we have 250 new species in a span of 125,000 years. Imagine what could happen in a span 20,000 times greater than this. Also, add on multiple changes in environment that will cause mass extinctions and break the previously static ecosystems, causing them to start over once again.Just as a supplement to some of your more specific questions about mutation rates:The "tree of life", or the systematic sorting of organisms into a tree structure, is supported by the amount of mutation found in extant species. One specific example, the human lineage and the chimpanzee lineage are thought to have separated about 5-7 million years ago by paleontology. The observed mutation rate in humans, when calculated out 5-7 million years ago, agrees with the difference between human and chimp genomes found today. So yes, the mutation rates do calculate out according to the independently measured ages and constructed trees.

In a microwave, you can boil an egg in under one minute! From this follows that life may have evolved in a microwave.

a microwave hmm.. that makes me think of another question. instead of did we have enough time... did it happen too quick? what is the fastest time it would take for all that stuff to happen under the conditions of this world without supernatural intervention?if life came about quicker than evolution stuff and environmental changes could happen, the i'd say the evolution stuff is wrong.
which pretty much saying there wasn't enough time for it to happen, and stuff happened quicker than it should've. which could mean a supernatural being created life and stuff.

Even seemingly nonsensical replies can harvest interesting questions.

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if life came about quicker than evolution stuff and environmental changes could happen, the i'd say the evolution stuff is wrong.

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When I was a kid a popular trivia fact was that, aerodynamically, bumble bees could not fly. What this meant was that, flight was impossible for bumble bees according to the aerodynamic models at the time. Of course this did not mean that bumble bees did not fly; of course, they did. The models were in error. Now we have better models that do show how bumble bees fly.In physics we have a concept called the conservation of momentum which, as far as we know, is never violated. In the thirties or forties, it was discovered that in a certain radioactive decay the measured momentum did not show conservation. This did not mean the observations are wrong - in this case there was a hard-to-detect particle called the neutrino (which has now been detected); once this extra particle was taken into account, momentum was conserved after all.So, suppose that you calculate the time it would take for life to evolve from the simplest cell to modern complex organisms and found that it takes far more than 4 billion years to do it. Does that mean evolution is impossible? By no means; the evidence for evolution is unequivocal - it simply has happened. Evolution is a fact. Either, as in the two examples here, your model upon which the calculations are based are flawed in some way, or there is something that you are not taking into account.Mathematical models and calculations never ever trump real life observations. And the heirarchical classification of life, the fossil record, modern molecular biology, and so forth provide real life observations that show evolution has occurred.

-Begin off-topic rant about bumble-bees -It is not true that models showed that bumble bees couldn't fly. What happened was that a physicist (can't remember his name) wanted to know whether bumble bees flew by the same mechanism that aircraft fly by. So he calculated how much lift a bumble bee would get if it flew by the same means. This lift was not enough for a bumble bee to fly by. Thus, he concluded, bumble bees do not fly by the same means.Which is all good science. How it came to be mutated into the urban myth that science says bumble bees can't fly, I don't know.-/rant -