[Nebullis]

FYI

[cornelis]

"My love, my love, my love is chemical (it's much more than physical baby)." --Lou Reed

[anniegetyourgun]

This poor scientist/prof - his career is over now....for violating the Darwinian faith tradition.

[AndrewC]

His argument is built around evidence "from the three main cellular information processing systems" – translation, transcription and replication – and he suggests that cellular evolution progressed in that order, with translation leading the way.

Oops! Darwinians will even like that less. Replication is supposed to have the honored position. That also implies something on the order of RNA world.

[narby]

I find it really hard to reply to this without getting really nasty.

It's just amazing that some people here really don't get it.....

[VadeRetro]

The three primary divisions of life now comprise the familiar bacteria and eukaryotes, along with the Archaea. Woese argues that these three life forms evolved separately but exchanged genes, which he refers to as inventions, along the way. He rejects the widely held notion that endosymbiosis (which led to chloroplasts and mitochondria) was the driving force in the evolution of the eukaryotic cell itself or that it was a determining factor in cellular evolution, because that approach assumes a beginning with fully evolved cells.

I would have guessed that truly separately-evolved (no common descent) organisms couldn't really do lateral transfer with any hope of compatibility. I gather that the soup takes the place of the usual common ancestor in this case. Same soup, three lines of "offspring," lateral transfer works.

Woese doesn't address the point, unfortunately. Nor does he explain here what his theory does better, or even differently. What are the consequences, the tests?

[ibme]

Mathematically impossible.

[VadeRetro]

New abiogeneis theory. Or three new ones. Whatever.

[Tourist Guy]

>>>Woese argues that these three life forms evolved separately but exchanged genes, which he refers to as inventions, along the way.<<<

I exchanged jeans once, but it was in high school.

Matter of fact, we did evolve differently...
One became a business owner, another a lawyer and alas the third has passed on to her final reward.

[jlogajan]

Such a transfer previously had been recognized as having a minor role in evolution

Then in fact it is nothing new. Shhh. Don't tell the creationists -- they'll be all disappointed that science already knew about this.

[mil-vet]

Darwinism is based wholly on assumption and inference without a shred of hard scientific proof, so how can anything which scientifically refutes it in the slightest way be a surprise?!

No, I'm NOT pushing creationism (or anything else)! I'm taking this as yet another opportunity to laugh (out loud) at the folly of darwin who, just like environmentalist wackos do, based his wasted life on junk (false) "science"!!!!

[apochromat]

Maxwell's first demon had some siblings?

[Ahban]

I want in on this, but I have childcare duties. I'll be back. (I hope).

[whattajoke]

What we have here is what's called, "Science at Work." Notice, dear evolution-deniers, how scientists constantly test and re-test things. They are not afraid to ask questions and upon peer review, they present their findings. (And please don't bring up that cold fusion fraud...notice that was dismissed as quickly as it came up). I'm still waiting for the day that creationism/ID/Whatever subjects itself to such scrutiny and can admit that maybe, just maybe, it may be...how shall I say...a load of crap?

[RightWhale]

bump for later

[Quix]

by sharing their evolutionary inventions.

Their INTENTIONS?

RIGHT. . . sure is difficult to get away from the notion of a conscious design isn't it.

[Rightwing Conspiratr1]

Whoops wrong thread!
I thought this had something to do with God and cellular phones.

[Gumlegs]

New Cellular Evolution Theory Rejects Darwinian Assumptions=Primordial Woese?/You.

< /f.Christian mode >

[pyx]

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. ? Life did not begin with one primordial cell. Instead, there were initially at least three simple types of loosely constructed cellular organizations. They swam in a pool of genes, evolving in a communal way that aided one another in bootstrapping into the three distinct types of cells by sharing their evolutionary inventions.

Interesting THEORY. Of course, at one time I had a THEORY that when you died, your soul went to a garage in Buffalo.

What do these achedemics believe is the WHO or WHAT Force which caused those "simple types" to first off become organized and secondly, to become loosely constructed ? Swimming or motility requires a HIGH degree of cellular SPECIALIZATION. To what do these achedemics ascribe the cause of that specialization to in their theory ?

[dirtboy]

The driving force in evolving cellular life on Earth, says Carl Woese, a microbiologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been horizontal gene transfer, in which the acquisition of alien cellular components, including genes and proteins, work to promote the evolution of recipient cellular entities.

I have my own theory. I believe that an organism can alter its DNA within its own lifetime in response to environmental changes and then pass those changes on to its offspring. Takes the randomness out of Darwinian evolution.