Rob writes:
For example, can any living organism live without relying upon either fermentation, photosynthesis, or respiration to get it's supply of ATP?
None are fueled directly by any form of energy other than ATP.
Yes, but they've all grown up. Cells became dependant on nucleotide triphosphates because it makes things so easy. Just every business now depends on computers to function. It doesn't mean you can't have a functioning business without what now seems like a key element, but just that if you do, it won't be as big or productive as with computers. Which is why the little businesses without computers are either adopting it or dying. And that means we won't see business with abacuses and pen and paper. It's much the same with energy storage molecules - the evidence has been lost to natural selection.
Rob writes:
And how many thousnads of individual parts does just a simple prokaryotic cell membrane contain in it's 3 dimensional glory.
While I will concede that for anything to be called an organism, it must be separated from the environment by a membrane, the actual membrane is pretty simple. Phospholipids, like all surfactants, form layers, even bilayers, at certain concentrations in solution. They self-assemble. Likewise, a protein with many hydrophobic amino acids like glycine or leucine on one end will attach to the membrane. That sort of stuff is easy to stumble upon by accident, and what we see in living things today is just the evolved version of those accidents.
Rob writes:
No unwhole parts will do... just as my truck won't self assemble if I put all of the thousands of parts in the garage and wait. I need a mechanic. And my truck is crude and primitive technology compared to these systems
This analogy falls over, because macroscopic systems don't compare with microscopic ones. Your truck parts won't be floating around your garage, bumping into one another, but biological molecules will. If the truck parts that are fit together bump into one another, they won't usually stick without a bolt or rivet to stick them, but biological molecules fit together because of their intrinsic properties. No truck part has electrostatics and van der Waal forces to worry about, as those are tiny forces, but very real on the scale of biological molecules. In most ways, the truck is much harder to build than a biological system. In part, this is why I get so fed up with the IDists calling flagella 'outboard motors' and so forth, because an outboard motor is way harder to see self-assemble.
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