Posted on 01/24/2009 10:35:28 AM PST by Salman
“Hmmmm.........Abiogenesis roughly translates to ‘without biological origin’.”
True. I don’t think God is a necessary assumption to explain the origin of life but the problem is that there’s no way to prove that He isn’t. For now I prefer to leave God out of the origin of life until we know more about it. If it becaomes necessary to add God to the equation then so be it.
Your question is anything but dumb. It is insightful and clearheaded.
We know mutations happen. Most have very little impact for a variety of reasons it would take a couple of chapters of a textbook to explain. Mutations also come in kinds and sizes.
Some changes matter right away. Say, poor development of legs. Critter probably dies young and mutation is taken out of the potpulation.
Another change, let’s say a bit of extra thickness to fur, have no immediate impact. If winters get colder, it would be beneficial, if summers get hotter, it would become a problem and, again, get taken out.
So, you can see that over time beneficial or potentially beneficial mutations tend to increase in the population. If circumstances don’t change, you have a very diverse population. If they do, the best collection of accumulated mutations gets a head start for the next generation. Rinse, repeat.
Eventually (millions of years) they don’t look much like their ancestors at all.
Hope this helps. If anything is not clear, just ask. A lot has been omitted and I may have missed some clarifying points.
They were de fenceless lizards then.
I don't see why you have to insult fire ants. They may not be the deepest critters on the planet but do they find the shallowest ant in the hill and put him in charge?
You could say the same thing about everything that went into making synthetic diamonds. It took a lot of intellectual effort to do that. What intelligence did it take the earth to compress carbon deposits under millions of tons of rock for centuries to make natural diamonds?
Emulating any natural process takes a lot of intelligence that didn't go into the original.
What's ridiculous is claiming that a poodle is more "evolved" than a wolf. Unless there are poodles flopping around on useless protowings for forelegs, that is.
I agree it's ridiculous to think Wolves and Dogs are related. Only demonic fake-scientists would claim something like that.
They’re of a Biblical kind, exist. Dogs and wolves can and do interbreed, and produce fertile offspring. I guess those offspring have regressed, to your way of thinking.
If you want to try and make a mockery, at least get that much right.
> What intelligence did it take the earth to compress
> carbon deposits under millions of tons of rock for
> centuries to make natural diamonds?
The simple compressing of carbon into crystal does not require any traps to avoid destroying the crystal by the very process that formed it, as did Miller’s experiments with a “primordial soup” stimulated by electric charges. Without the traps, the presence of oxygen and the very stimulus that formed the amino acids would have destroyed them.
A more marvellous thing than compressing carbon into crystals, is the miracle of the crystalization of water. If water did not crystalize the way it does, ice would not float, and life on this planet, due to the incredibly complex system we call symbiosis, would likely be impossible.
And certainly, you do not mean to compare the simple crushing of carbon into crystal to the unspeakably complex processes regulating the metabolism and self-replication of even the most fundamental building blocks of life.
There are no coded sequences required to compress carbon into crystal. In the forming of diamonds, there is nothing like the blueprint required to be read by mindless molecules to form other mindless molecules into an intelligent array capable of metabolizing organic compounds, forming wholly different organs that must work together in unison for the life form to grow, mature, and reproduce. This is true in every life form from micro-organisms to the largest of the behemoths, from plants to animals.
Consider the way oxygen is carried through the bloodstream and distributed to cells throughout the body to catalyze the metabolic processes at the cell level. If the oxygen were not first locked up in ferrous oxide and then released at the point of delivery, the organism would be destroyed. The processes involved are so breathtakingly complex, chemically and logistically.
These are not processes that can possibly “evolve” from lower states to higher, since, to borrow from Behe, they are irreducibly complex.
Even Darwin was stumped by the eye. There is no evolutionary process to explain it, since, unless all of it is present, working together, it is non-functional and therefore an evolutionary dead-end. From the light reflected from moving objects through the cornea, iris, lens, retina, rods and cones, optic nerve, and all the musculature, electro-chemical, and metabolic connections required to support it, to the image processing in the brain, and the conscious awareness to make meaning of the images, the processes are so awesomely complex and interdependent as to stun any serious student of it.
It is simply a logical fallacy to equate an experimental process with a natural one on the level of the intellectual origin of the process. It requires making the same type of assumptions of the origin of thought that evolutionists are accused of making about life.
As far as most of your rebuttal; it is aimed at arguing about evolution theory. I wasn't arguing for or against it. My very narrow point was that your argument simply holds no water logically.
Evolution ping.
p.s., There is no point arguing otherwise, this is SCIENCE!
“........They were de fenceless lizards then....”
Punny! That’s a keeper. You should send that line Jeff Foworthy.
No new species to see here, move along folks...
Numerous ice ages have come and gone. The Polar Bear is still here.
What, if anything at all, is the “evolutionary” significance of that survival?
He certainly was. And he added that however impossible and complex it may first appear, the difficulty in understanding evolution of the eye should not be considered a proof that it did not happen.
Basically, he left the question to future scientists. And those scientists have found evidence of every stage of evolutionary development of the eye in various existing species.
Just because something is complex is no reason to say it cannot be understood.
> the difficulty in understanding evolution of the eye
> should not be considered a proof that it did not happen.
Yes, lets abandondon falsifiability from the outset. How very scientific of him.
At least I will openly confess my FAITH.
And I submit there is more scientific support for my Faith than there is for Darwin’s.
My bad. As a dear friend of mine says, this is like bringing a heterosexual woman to a pillow fight.
I gotta admit it does sound funnier if I imagine him saying it. lol
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