I have been running this through my head for a while. Now I am certainly not an expert, so I may be way off here. The language I use is certainly “layman’s”, but I think my point will be understood well enough to probably be swiftly debunked. But anyhoo…
As I understand evolution/natural selection, it takes many many generations for meaningful change in a specific species. The mutations that benefit the species have a good chance of being passed on to progeny and the mutations that are bad or neutral just fade away.
So…imagine if you will the primordial soup, sloshing around the oceans, teeming with the key components of life. All at once in a remote corner of the stew the right components come together just so, and a bolt of lightning does whatever lightning does to primordial soup and voila! LIFE! Certainly an extremely simple organism.
This noble organism is the matriarch of all following generations. Over millions of years her descendants will evolve the ability to see, hear, feel, reproduce, swim, fly, create food from sunlight… wait a minute…evolve the ability to reproduce?… think about that…
How did we get past generation one, if the ability to reproduce, like all other complex physical and chemical processes in organisms, had to evolve over millions of generations? I assert that this is evidence for a Creator.
No you didn’t need a God, but you did need a researcher from MIT. Are you suggesting someone from MIT is responsible for the origens of life?? :dubious:
Simplicity can engender complexity. That’s the essential message of the argument against the necessity of Intelligent Design.
However, I must share a chuckle with you: "There is a direct connection between reproduction and theism; for proof, simply consider that the majority of the occasions when someone says “Oh, God!” is as they approach orgasm!
And replicating molecules might have errors introduced during the replication process. If some of these errors led to a molecule that would replicate faster, they would drive out the slower ones. Replication involves getting other, smaller molecules with which to build the “child” molecule. Those get the new molecules faster would also win. Eventually proto-RNA would be stumbled upon, and off we go.
I assume that you are aware that sexual reproduction came much later, as did cells.
Reproduction is a requirement - a prerequisite, if you will - for evolution, not a result of it. Without reproduction, there can be no evolution.
Molecular replication, an early precursor, to organismal reproduction, is relatively simplistic, conceptually: one molecule forms a template for creating a duplicate. The duplicate forms as a result of assorted catalytic reactions between the template and the “soup” of assorted pieces. here, for example, is an abstract for a paper showing how such molecules can be created in the lab. The same principles, of course, will also hold outside of the laboratory.
I should note that prions, while still a bit controversial as a method for disease, are an easy to grasp example of proteins replicating themselves. Now, they of course do it in an environment already full of the right building blocks for this activity, but it is definately the same sort of thing: a VERY simple molecule (compared to DNA or RNA) basically creating copies of itself.
In fact, I suspect that there may come a day when the question “but why don’t we see life(buzz!!!), er, I mean replication with heredity arising spontaneously all the time other than during the early earth?” maybe answered by “well, but we do: prions are one example.”
(Side note: Trivia time! Anyone else here know WHY it is chemically much much less that carbon-based organics could form in our modern world (at least on the normal surface conditions)
Well, for one we lack the primordial conditions which begat life. Loose organic chains form readily in methane and ammonia, which you don’t find laying around much any more. Also, we no longer have a reducing atmosphere. With the advent of life more complex than very simple anaerobic microorganisms, bacteria started processing other organic molecules and releasing–as a waste product–oxygen. Later, more complex organisms started using oxygen as–what else–an oxidizer, because it forms covalent bonds so readily. Pretty soon, your reducing atmosphere is gone, the carbons bonded up in organisms, and the now-toxic (oxygen) atmosphere (well, 21% anyway) has killed most anaerobic life, save clostridium botulinum. Here’s a good (but of course speculative) timeline for the evolution of life on Earth.
One book I recommend is Here Be Dragons, which is about the possibility of life on other worlds and contains a wealth of easily-understood information about the origins of life on Earth. Also highly recommended is Richard Dawkins, particularly The Blind Watchmaker, which destroys the argument for the necessity of Intellegent Design, and The Selfish Gene, which is the now-classic non-technical text for explaining the actual mechanism of natural selection.
Watchmaker, in particular, addresses the questions of the OP in depth, and should really be considered required reading for anyone who really wants to understand the issue.
I’ll make this caveat about Dawkins, though: he is, in his own description, a staunch advocate of athiesm, even past the point where science can say one way or the other. (I’m athiest, but I’ll acknowledge that ultimately and by definition, the supernatural is a non-falsifiable proposition.) This can be off-putting to some, but it doesn’t diminish the strength of his arguments.
Bingo! I would have accepted simply “reducing,” but the other stuff is great too. Without some sort of protection, free oxygen is a fairly destructive player at the table when you are talking about carbon chemistry. It litterally “BURNS” carbon, even without fire.
I think the section in “The Ancestor’s Tale” outdoes, or at least greatly compliments, his discussion of abiogenesis in Watchmaker.
Another hazard to primative life that I forgot to add is relatively unfiltered ultraviolet radiation. The reducing atmosphere would have been solid clouds, converting UV into infrared and low frequency visual spectrum (e.g. red, orange) radiation. Blue skies are pure death to prokaryotes and most viruses.
I haven’t read it, though I have gone back through my library and read much of Dawkins in the past couple of years. I found A Devil’s Chaplin to be fairly disappointing.
It is certainly possible for comparatively simple self-replicating molecules to exist and the work that has been done on them in the lab does not (AFAIK) invoke them by any processes that are impossible to occur in nature. Quite possibly the reason that we don’t see abiogenesis happening all over again all around us is that there are now lots of living organisms around to mop up any interesting complex molecules the moment they arise.
The ‘Ahh, but that’s in the lab, has it ever been observed in nature’ argument (of which I’m not accusing you, but I feel it is worth mentioning) has its logical conclusion in a sort of absurd position that consists of: the only thing that will satisfy me is if you can show where x has been observed without human observation.
