Summations Only

Now please explain, in detail, how the Theory of Evolution will change if it turns out that the current thoughts about the primordial soup are wrong, and life was seeded by an alien civilization billions of years ago, or arrived in a panspermic process on the backs of asteroids.

Top ten signs you're a foolish athiest? One sign is what some athiest types are posting on this thread.

So once again we have Buzsaw posting a definition of a word while having zero working knowledge of said word nor addressing the bit he quoted. (here's a hint: do you see the word evolution in the definition? Does your response carry the requested explanatory power?)

Buz, folks are trying to get you to realize that the exact origin of life is immaterial to the subsequent evolution of life.Posters have tried in quite a few ways to explain this point, but you are unwilling to accept it.Why are you so resistant to this concept? Is there some particular dogma that makes you unwilling to accept this? Perhaps if you explained the source of your resistance it would help the discussion.

So you refuse to explain to us why you insist that evolution depends completely on "primordial soup", such that, according to you, if there was no "primordial soup" then there could be no evolution.

Yes, Buz we understand that "telling the truth instead of worshipping Creationists" is held to be foolish by you and your kind. It is, after all, a major theme of the list.However, in reality your failure to make claims without understanding the implications will often come back to bite you. As it has in this case:If abiogenesis is a prerequisite for evolutionAnd if evolution occurs, as even most creationists admit.Then it logically follows that abiogenesis is true.So who's the fool now ?

Try this Buzz.I'm building a model aeroplane from a kit of plastic parts. [in the UK they're called Airfix kits - boxes of little bits and pieces of plastic that you glue together to make an F22 Raptor or a Spitfire]. The kit is a prerequisite - without the kit of parts I can't make the plane but it doesn't matter how I got the kit.As it happens, the kit was a present for my kid's birthday from his grand dad, but it could have come from Amazon or eBay. I might have got in my car and gone to town to buy it. It could have come down the chimney with Father Christmas or I might have no idea where it came from, it's just here on my kitchen table.It doesn't matter a damn that I might not even know how I got it it because I can still build the plane without that knowledge - but of course, it's absolutely true that without the kit I can't make the plane at all.In the natural world, evolution builds the plane but something else makes the kit of parts - if you need to put your god somewhere, he's the guy who breaks into your house in the middle of the night, leaves the box on the kitchen table, then tiptoes out without waking anyone.

For a great example of this, Faith went haywire when I pointed out that she believed in macroevolution as it is defined in science. She just couldn't accept it, it had to be a trick.These people do not understand what they are talking about (quite literally in the above case) yet still can't accept that they could be wrong.

That is beyond inane.
It is almost insane in its absurd nonsensicalness.
When asked a direct question about evolution you copy/paste a long definition that doesn't refer to evolution at all.What is wrong with your brain, Buz?!?Edited by Panda, : No reason given.

If I can just kind of bridge the divide, here, I think there's a usage problem.I think you're using "primordial soup" to refer to any and all naturalist, scientific models of the origin of life; the rest of us view "primordial soup" as a reference to an older and somewhat obsolete (quaint, really) proposal about how life might have arisen.The most modern scientific view is the "RNA World", where RNA molecules - which we now know can be both self-replicating, unlike proteins, and catalytic, unlike DNA - constituted the whole of ecology, which then gave rise to the dominant "protein/nucleotide" world we live in today. This chemistry is proposed to have arisen not in a "primordial soup", where organic compounds reacted randomly in solution, but at the surface of clays or crystals where molecules might have formed using repetitive crystal structures as physical templates. Structural repetition, of course, being a critical feature of biomolecules.Further I think you're folding in the idea that evolution connotes a Godless universe - which I, unlike many, tend to agree with you about - and implicitly saying that it hardly makes sense to propose a world of Godless evolution started by a divine act of creation, and therefore evolution has to be paired with a similarly-naturalistic origin of life. But as you well know, not everybody's notion of God seems to be inconsistent with an evolutionary world, or worldview, so while I agree with you that evolution should be paired with a naturalistic view of the origin of life, I think you're wrong to say that it has to be that way for everyone. Evolution works regardless of how life arose, just as baseball is the same game regardless of whether gravity is relativistic or Newtonian.I think your interlocutors are primarily objecting to these unstated assumptions in what you've been saying - that "primordial soup" is the accepted, modern scientific view on the origin of life, and that evolution necessarily implies a naturalistic view of life's origins. I think you can adjust your terminology in a way that will address the objections you're getting without actually changing your position. For instance, instead of invoking "primordial soup", say something like "naturalistic origin of life." And it's important to at least appear to accept that evolution and the origin of life are two very different fields of science; one is biology, and the other is chemistry, and whether or not chemists are wrong has little bearing on whether biologists are.

But you have no response to any of the people that pointed out your mistakes.Keep lying Buz, keep claiming victory in the face of defeat. You do nothing but reaffirm my beliefs and feelings about fundies.You should be ashamed of yourself. But as a true "christian" you have no shame.ABE
learn to spell atheist. After all this time you still can't spell the word? Is it stupidity or stubbornness?Edited by Theodoric, : ABE
learn to spell atheist. After all this time you still can't spell the word? Is it stupidity or stubbornness?Edited by Theodoric, : typed ABE in wrong spot

Yes, i.e. analogous to the primordial soup. Tell me, Tangle, yes or no? The majority of notable biological scientists subscribe to the primordial soup environment from which life began, i.e. the prerequisite to life on earth.

This is kind of what I'm talking about - no, actually, scientists (notable and otherwise) have overwhelmingly moved beyond a "primordial soup" notion of the chemical origins of life. It's as quaint a notion as the luminiferous ether, at this point, and it persists as a phrase largely because origins of life research doesn't really trickle into popular culture.Life evolved from things that were almost life, which evolved from things that were almost almost-life, and so on. Evolution, in this sense, is actually older than life on Earth. Living things aren't the only things that can evolve by random mutation and natural selection. We see that today in the evolution of viruses and prions.

Can you point a few of these people out? Please post references to their work showing their subscription to this idea.

Yes, but no-one but 1960s news papers use that phrase - it's not science, but I suppose it conveys some of the idea. Yes or No to what Buzz?If it helps you any, i think it's a near certainty that replicating molecules arose from your alphabet soup and evolution then used them to create the life we see around us. I expect that we'll be able to replicate that ourselves in my lifetime. We'll probably never be able to prove that that's how it came about, but it will show that it's possible and therefore at least a good contender for the prize.The next question is where did the soup come from? Science has some jolly good ideas about that too but there's a god shaped hole here and there amongst all this, you can plonk him in there if you wish.