Evolution: The Deal Breaker

by Hadriel 150 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

• 

  bohm

  Hi Hadriel,

  it is nice to see a criticism for evolution on this forum which is not simply a copy paste or mentions "dinosaur meat" :-)

  As I read your post, you see the evolution of the most basic components of a modern cell (such as DNA) as being too large obstacles to plausibly have come around naturally.

  I would recommend you to figure out exactly what single obstacle which is truly too large. There is a literature on the evolution of DNA, see for instance: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK6360/ . What this literature assumes is that DNA evolved from RNA in several, smaller steps. Is what they say necessarily and obviously wrong? Are these steps impossible?.

  You mentioned:

  Where I have trouble is that we can't see it because it is slow and happened long ago. Well am I to believe that all the evolutionary chains all started at the same time so they are in a phase that isn't visible today? You mean none started 1 billion years ago, 100 million ago, 1 million ago

  The conditions on the early earth is known to have been very different than they are today, for instance our atmosphere contains oxygen which breaks down organic compounds. However suppose life did start again, that somewhere there is a small environment with self-replicating string of RNA. How would we know?. What evolution does is that it optimize organisms. So suppose a very small protocell managed to evolve, what happens when it comes into contact with a modern cell that has evolved for more than 3 billion years?
• 

  EndofMysteries

  Inserting an "intelligent designer" guarantees we will never find the real answer.

  Absolute hogwash. Since intelligent designer does not have to mean supernatural, then if another biological life form was the intelligent designer then that gives a good chance of the process eventually being discovered and able to replicate. If this never happens, then more than likely a supernatural designer, other dimension, or our universe is a simulation of some sort. Random or biological design will be able to be replicated at some point.
• 

  cofty

  If this never happens, then more than likely a supernatural designer, - EoM

  Science is built on the foundation of methodological naturalism. Supernatural NEVER gets to be the default answer to anything.
• 

  redvip2000

  Since intelligent designer does not have to mean supernatural, then if another biological life form was the intelligent designer then that gives a good chance of the process eventually being discovered and able to replicate.

  
  You think that potentially finding out that an alien life form was responsible for creating life here on earth will solve the question of the origin of life? Isn't it obvious that if that was the case, then the next logical question would be "who created them" and so on?
  
• 

  ttdtt

  Buy a book on it and ready it.

  Try "The greatest show on earth" by Dawkins
• 

  Anders Andersen

  Just my two cents without having read all posts in detail:

  1) As others commented, the chicken-egg 'problem' isn't solved by pushing the origin of life back in time by assuming design/creator, whether that be a divine entity, or just extraterrestrial life forms (even in it's simplest form). Somehow life started when no life existed before, or life always existed (although that seems implausible to me).

  2) The fact that we currently don't have a full understanding of how life began, doesn't invalidate what we do know further down the chain.

  When we find a dead John Doe with bullet wounds, and a gun which ballistics characterics match it to to bullets in the victim, we're quite sure what killed the guy. Even when we don't know who pulled the trigger, or why the victim is in a closed vault.

  Still, I'm very interested in abiogenesis. And I love the research that Craig Venter does re artificial DNA.
• 

  Hadriel

  @anders It does bug me that when don't know what this driver is. If proteins suddenly began to chain ultimately kickstarting life as we know it, not knowing the driver that started this reaction leaves us with a dilemma in my mind.

  That being this driver could be an intelligent creator or it could be some unknown reactionary event. Either way you slice it you cannot say definitively either way.

  We may not know in my life time, in fact I'm rather certain we wont.
• 

  Jehalapeno

  But how is that a deal breaker for evolution? You're talking about this "driver" that initiated self replicating proteins. That's abiogenesis and not evolution. How many times must people point out that the two are not one and the same?

  Evolution does not exclude a creator. It is a fact. It is real. It is observable. It is repeatable.

  Abiogenesis on the other hand is where unanswered questions remain.

  However, speciation by means of evolution and natural selection are beyond question.
• 

  Hadriel

  As I admitted earlier that there are a minimum evidences of adaptation, even evolution.

  however does evolution begin without abiogenesis? No it does not.

  As such we simply can't definitively say whether evolution was kickstarted by some random event or by an intelligent being.

  How those amino acids to proteins to protein chains were charged is important. To me it is not wanting to admit the obvious.

  In a sense creationists and evolutionists have the same damn problem. Proof of the driver that started it all.
• 

  cofty

  In a sense creationists and evolutionists have the same damn problem.

  No. Those of us who accept the fact of evolution have a testable answer that explains the last 3.8 billion years of life on earth. We have the correct answer.

  That's not a bad start considering how science only really got going in this area 150 years ago.