Hi Everyone,
I've only been a member for a few days and already I enjoy the discussion. As I read I'm beginning to pick up on a few nuances at word usage. This is important to me so that I might understand what each of you mean.
I'll do my best to respond to everyone. It's not my intent to be rude and to ignore postings.
@jar
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If we go back far enough, back when life first showed up here on the Earth, it was just single celled (or maybe even less complex than that). At that point the only possible direction life could go was towards more complex critters.
I call the first life form in the evolutionary process 'protobug'. (Is there an actual name?) Whatever it is, it represents the point at which the abiogenesis crowd passes the baton to the evolutionary crowd. I think protobug could actually go two ways. It could 'acquire' more genetic information so that a successive offspring could be classified as being more advanced. Or it could continue on, with 'loss' of genetic information, killing the species.
@Alfred,
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Panspermia theorists postulate a strikingly different mechanics of change from species to species, etc, if you don't know that.
I had heard of this. However, I didn't know the name, Panspermia. Just took at wikipedia to read some more. Thanks.
@PaulK
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I don't think that such experiments are expected or even intended to give a "quantifiable recipe for creating life". The original Miller-Urey experiment was a stunning breakthrough as it was.
We creationists agree with the breakthrough! It's undeniable.
Creationists wholeheartedly support science with results that are observable and repeatable. You all remember as we were learning this in our biology/chemistry/physics course there was a tendency for ourselves or our classmates to infer something that wasn't substantiated by the evidence. My wife teaches biology labs to high school students and this is still true today.
The Miller/Urey experimental results produced interesting results. However, to state that it gets us closer to creating life is an overstatement. Extrapolating scientific data toward a particular outcome is okay, it simply isn't scientific. You must admit at that time, evolutionists were excited. It gave them 'hope' that life could be created naturally without divine intervention. After 60 years, it still inspires evolutionists.
The focus of abiogenesis researchers, I believe, is to create life. Technically, I believe they only need to 'show' it is possible. Of course, anything short of actually creating life falls short of my expectations. Since life has not been created through this process, there is no scientific reason to believe this is possible.
I reject the notion that life can be created from non-life. There is no compelling evidence to even suggest this is possible. If you are a supporter of abiogenesis (it's intended goal) then you do so by 'faith'. I'm okay with faith-based science.
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So far as I can tell the main arguments to try to support creationism in regard to abiogenesis are either arguments that abiogenesis can't happen (which can only hurt the case for abiogenesis - they aren't positive evidence for creationism)
Paul I do agree with this.
In fact, I can state unequivocally that there is no evidence for divine creation of life, abiogenesis, or even Al's thought of Panspermia.
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I don't really think that there is a creationist equivalent or the Miller-Urey experiment or the RNA World hypothesis (both major advances). So I'd have to say that the evidence clearly favoured abiogenesis on Earth, with panspermia a distant second (thanks to evidence like the Murchison meteorite) and creationism - even Old Earth Creationism - coming in third.
Paul, a hypothesis is a proposal. The problem here, I think, is that you are ranking possibilities without conclusive evidence one way or the other. You are simply "conjecturing" and moving the discussion from science to philosophy. ( I don't mean to offend philosophers). Many university courses combine philosophy and religion.
I'm a Christian, and I like religion as much as the guy on the pew next to me. But regarding this forum, I would prefer to stick to science. Oh yeah! If I don't practice what I preach, please correct me. I'm very thick-skinned and imperfect, and forget what I wrote minutes earlier.
@Taq,
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That would seem to be a statement based on faith. The evidence shows us quite a different result. You and me were both born with about 50 to 100 mutations. How many genetic diseases do you suffer from? I don't suffer from any, and I doubt that you do either. If we multiple this over just the last 10 generations it results in each of us carrying between 500 and 1,000 mutations. Again, I don't have a genetic diseases that I am aware of. It would seem to me that the vast majority of mutations do not result in lethal diseases contrary to your faith based claims.
Alright, I'll retract my statement.
quote:
The problem is that creationists confuse evidence with faith based beliefs. One is not the other.
Evolutionists that reject divine creation or Panspermia have only one recourse, abiogenesis. Since that is not scientific (see my comment above), you might be invoking a philosophical viewpoint. That is faith-based.
@dwise1
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No, that is not what the ToE leans toward. What you are describing there is the "Ladder of Life", an old Lamarckian concept of evolution being a progression from lower life forms to ever higher ones culminating in the Acme of Creation, Man. That is an old, long-discarded view which lives on only in creationists' misconceptions about evolution.
First, thanks for the detailed post. I guarantee I'll take a second read on it.
I remember my science book in the 8th grade. My friends and I would point to the various transitions of man from ape and try to figure out which one we looked liked the most. During the 70s our science books indoctrinated us into the theory of evolution. I wasn't a Christian and had no other perspective. So I sucked it up. We began with something like primordial ooze, life beginning, then apes, eventually man. That's how evolution was presented in American public schools. The hard evidence consisted of various bone fragments and chips. Of course all of the evidence at that time could be placed on top of your desk. Not very scientific.
During the 80's I noticed that the presentation of evolution began evolving. The first one of course is that ToE ignores the primordial ooze bit and begins with hypothetical 1st life form. ( I refer to that as protobug above...my word). Another change that happened was the differentiation on a widescale of microevolution and macroevolution.
Its important to understand that the debate changed. I must admit a lot of the older creationists slowly adjusted to the new rules for debate. Me too!
So, abiogenesis moved outside the purview of evolution. I understand science needs to be broken into smaller buckets as knowledge increases. Now it is no longer an issue for ToE. I suspect that Charlie Darwin might roll over in his grave to know that his "Origin of Species" has nothing to do with the Theory of Evolution. But I'm not a revisionist so I'll let that small travesty stand. j/k
Evolution itself has morphed in meaning. We were taught over 30 years ago that evolution was ooze to man. Now the term evolution can be applied to random genetic variations within a species. Creationist except this aspect of evolution, changes within a type of organism, that we can observe within our lifespan.
Our problem is when we consider a single celled organism (proto bug) evolving eventually and producing a male and female of a creature, that then produces a human zygote. The information that is packed into that one cell will eventually produce a human being with an anatomical structure, and all the bits functioning together from the beginning of conception to maturity.
That sort of information development, on this grand scale, has not been shown with research. Though there are some experimental results that you can toss at me, the conclusions, when summed together, are not nearly sufficient to make this big jump that we evolved from the proto-bug.
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One of the fundamental problems is that both source code and machine code are very brittle. It takes very little to break it. But life's "source code" is not at all like computer code and is much more flexible and robust.
I do agree that an organic analog computer would be much more robust than a digital computer and its software.
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This is reaching back a couple decades, but have you ever heard of Thomas Ray's TIERRA program? Instead of trying to have actual machine code evolve, he created virtual machines to act as organisms and a flexible code for them to run.
No I haven't. However, I did read a book regarding Rodney Brook's research with small robots. It used something called subsumption architecture. I was an electronics/programming mentor for a high school robotics team and I stumbled upon his research. The students and I had an interesting time talking about that research. I'll look into the TIERRA program.
@dwise1, let me read your post more thoroughly. This old man is getting tired.
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@Everyone,
Just for the record, I was pretty active at an Artificial Intelligence site. It's one of my programming interests. There was a fellow there that seemed to ramble on anything and everything. He even had a site with original material. He was lambasted by a lot of the board members. I figured as long as the owner/moderators of the board permitted his posting, then I wouldn't give him a hard time.
I'm an optimist and am always looking for something that might take me on a journey of thought outside the norms and conventions of the day. Guys like Alfred might just say something of value. As evolutionist, I thought you might appreciate random rantings because over a long period of time they might produce something intelligible and meaningful. =)
Thanks all,
Chuck
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