Life is often portrayed as spontaneously arising from some sort of "primordial soup". There it is ... quiet, tranquil, warm nutrients in a primitive sea, a lightning strike in the distance is imparting the energy of life ... soon life will be emerging to the shores... Hold it, not so fast here! To go from a barren lifeless planet to a one filled with living things, we would have to pass through a number of stages: EARLY ATMOSPHERE - For starters we need a favorable environment for life to evolve and be sustained. SIMPLE ORGANIC MOLECULES - We need a means of constructing the building blocks of life. LARGE MACRO-MOLECULES (proteins, DNA, RNA, etc.) - Some the simple molecules must be assembled into biologically useful large molecules. BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS - Energy conversion must be constructed. LIVING CELL - And finally, all these molecules and systems must be assembled together to form a highly complex living cell.
2007-04-23T11:23:06Z
When each of these steps are examined scientifically, we see that each has tremendous problems and requires large leaps of faith to believe that they ever happened. To explain the origin of life by non-supernatural means we must have a plausible explanation for each of these steps. An artist's conception of lighting striking a sea of organic soup and then jumping to self-replicating life is woefully inadequate. In fact, it is very misleading. Although the origin of life by mechanistic means is routinely taken for granted by the popular press, it is, in reality still a mystery to evolutionary scientists.
DATA DROID2007-04-23T11:30:26Z
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Well, some think they are. But no. There is no evidence for evolution yet. Often we are given ,as an example, a finch with a short beak and one with a long beak. It is claimed that one of the birds evolved. Well maybe so, if thats what you mean by evolution. Thats only adaption to the environment. But an example of evolution would be if one of those finch's laid an egg and it hatched into a Komodo dragon.
Other than you using the common deceit of conflating the origin of life with evolution that begins with life, your efforts to portray abiogenesis as improbable fails at every step.
"...we need a favorable environment for life to evolve and be sustained." If life emerges, it must be compatible with the atmosphere. Even then, a crisis arose as plant life produced enough oxygen to be toxic. Life had to adapt to this little snafu.
"We need a means of constructing the building blocks of life." Lightening and ultraviolet light can both trigger bond formation.
"Some the simple molecules must be assembled into biologically useful large molecules." The first "useful" large molecule would be one that catalyzes the formation of other macromolecules.
"Energy conversion must be constructed." Not true at all, since energy is introduced into the biosphere (of in this case, "prebiosphere") at a tremendous rate. Even before photosynthesis became a source of energy, the chemical energy released by volcanic vents would suffice.
"...all these molecules and systems must be assembled together to form a highly complex living cell." No. They have to form into a simple living cell. This cell has no competition, so any crude mechanisms that work have survival potential. If it replicates successfully once every thousand years, it doesn't matter. It succeeded.
Creationist's simply ignore or distort the evidence for evolution in order to force it to comply with "their" interpretation of the bible.
Radiometric dating for example is discarded because it doesn't fit "their" view.
There are 2 million microbial, plant and animal that are all the results of evolution, what unites all these diverse life forms is that all organism's carry their genetic information in the DNA molecules within the cell.
That is a FACT and that means that all organisms are related by descent. Of course this is all denied by the creationist's.
Here are a few things for the creationist's to think about: If the earth is only a few thousand years old (the young earth claim), why does light travelling at 186,000 miles per second take 100,000 years to cross our own galaxy ? Was GOD just trying to throw us off by creating the light that is on it's way to earth as we speak, that is millions of light years away ? What does that say about the earth and the solar systems actual age? That it is much older.
The decomposition of organic matter to petroleum(fossil fuels) is known to have taken millions years. The contintental plates which formed our oceans and mountains also took millions of years.
Life has been evolving for billions of years. What about the fossilized bones of our ancient ancestors? A perfect example of our own evolutionary stages is the unbroken sequences of progressively more modern features such as increased cranial capacity, smaller faces and teeth, larger body size, etc.......was GOD simply mimicking evolution or testing your "faith" ?
Yes, they are sure. Each step is actually rather small, and has been shown to happen.
We have seen amino acids and peptide chains spontaneous building in nature. That is not so wild a leap.
There are processes that create self-propagating chains. That is also quite a small step. Once you have several of those processes, they compete for resources. It is natural for the most efficient to win.
Once you have competing processes, you have a biological system. This started long before the first actual cell. Cell walls were just another small step in the process that contributed a bit of a competitive edge. We see remnants of the pre-cells in mitochondria, which have their own DNA and lived separated before cells came to be.
Sorry, but scientists have already shown how each step in the development of life was a relatively small one. Your premise is false.