The theory of evolution is not a worldview. It is a scientific theory.
The first fossils of life appear on Earth 3.5 billion years ago. The first metazoan fossils appear about 600 million years ago. That’s about a 3 billion year gap between the appearance of life and the evolution of metazoans. Whatever my views are on how life originated it has no relevance to how metazoans evolved since those events were separated by about 3 billion years. Therefore, pointing to doubt about how life arose is completely irrelevant to how metazoans evolved. One does not affect the other.
A purely materialistic view of life IS a worldview.
I was answering your question on why I keep bringing abiogenesis up; that much is clear, am I correct?
I have never argued that ancestral states should still exist. We do, however, have to account for what does. I grant that this remains an open question.
What’s troubling is to shove aside the sheer improbability of life arising spontaneously AS evidence. Spontaneous generation has already gone the way of the dodo.
But it appears that despite your reverently repeating the false mantra that both sides are interpreting the same evidence differently, you’ve never considered checking the evidence for yourself.
@Guy, I don’t want to pile on, but there is a double standard at work here. You can ask for all the material evidence you want and say it is the basis of a worldview. Your own worldview is not based on scientific evidence at all, and it would be unfair to ask you to provide it.
A bit of my personal wisdom for you: If the answers to a question are not easy to understand, it could be that you aren’t asking the right questions.
Again trying to “damage control” the conversation by refusing to address the larger issue of a reasonable pathway for abiogenesis, which you say you’re clueless about, is hardly being resposive to my overall question. I have researched and appreciate a number of the various proposals, but none of them even attempt to claim explanatory adequacy. “I don’t know” is a perfectly reasonable answer, but “I do know that no ‘god’ was necessary” is not. I’m sure you see my point. The science has not progressed that far, and is not even likely to.
Your response is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. You are entitled to ignore the issue I’ve raised, but not to pretend you haven’t heard my objections because they’re not to your tastes, because they’re not off -topic. Look at the title for the topic, which might as well be “Climbing Mount Improbable,” to use Dawkin’s phrase.
My perspective is, in fact, at least in part, in light of the evidence that science keeps trying to elucidate, the explanation for which has so far eluded its grasp, because of the improbabilities involved.
Everyone else, can you clarify why @Guy_Coe’s angle is difficult for you, but the same challenges did not arise when I made some of the same points here: Would God's Guidance Be DNA-Detectable?
Yes, that would be helpful in an apparent impasse of logic. That’s the only thing I can offer in response to a question involving a 102 post entry topic, on a moment’s notice. Thanks for engaging, @swamidass .
Reminder that in order to calculate the probability of some entity, you must know what that entity is. Are you claiming to know what the first form of life to originate was? I would be amazed to see a calculation or the probability of the emergence of an unknown entity.
Going offline for awhile, but are you familiar with the proposals for the putatively most simple hypothetical protocell or other biological entity that can be hypothesized as possessing some kind of marginal definition of “life?” See you all in a few hours.
The base of “Mt. Improbable” is already existing life. We don’t have to elucidate the the cause of the Big Bang in order to figure out how to climb a mountain or how mountains are built. In the same way, we don’t have to know how life started in order to figure out if specific adaptations can evolve in already existing life.
Any improbability calculations for the emergence of life from non-life are entirely irrelevant to the probabilities of complex adaptations evolving in already existing populations. The title of the thread is not “Mount Everest and Abiogenesis”. The thread is talking about evolution which is a separate process.
Accepting evolution does not mean you must also accept abiogenesis. In the same way, accepting the materialistic and natural process of infectious diseases by means of microorganisms does not mean that you must also accept a materialistic and wholly natural origin of germs. They are two separate processes.
I have seen many different proposals yes. Ranging from fatty acid vesicles containing inorganic minerals that catalyze the acetyl‐CoA pathway, or the reductive TCA cycle, to things like amyloid as the origin of self-replication, or self-replicating RNA.
Are you claiming to know that any of these (or something different) is how life originated?
That said, there is in fact evidence (not unassailable proof, but evidence nonetheless) that the origin of life was a process governed by the laws of physics and chemistry, as opposed to some sort of intelligent design. The inferred amino acid frequencies in the ancestors of the oldest known proteins correlate increasingly with the distribution of amino acids produced in abiotic chemical reactions, and predicted to result from them by thermodynamics, as we go further and further back in time to infer ancestral sequences. The closer we get to life’s origin, the more the protein sequences contain the kinds of amino acids that would have been produced non-biologically in abiotic chemistry, and therefore contain fewer and fewer instances of the “modern” amino acids such as Tryptophane.
This is what one would expect if life originated by a blind, unguided physical and chemical process whereby the first proteins were synthesized by polymerization of the sorts of amino acids that existed in the prebiotic environment, instead of being somehow intelligently designed and manufactured by an intelligent chemist that had access to a greater repertoire of amino acids than mere geochemistry can produce and could cause particular chemical reactions to occur at will.
See for example:
Higgs PG, Pudritz RE. A thermodynamic basis for prebiotic amino acid synthesis and the nature of the first genetic code. Astrobiology. 2009 Jun;9(5):483-90. [DOI: 10.1089/ast.2008.0280]
Trifonov EN. Consensus temporal order of amino acids and evolution of the triplet code. Gene. 2000 Dec 30;261(1):139-51. [PMID: 11164045]
Brooks DJ, Fresco JR, Lesk AM, Singh M. Evolution of amino acid frequencies in proteins over deep time: inferred order of introduction of amino acids into the genetic code. Mol Biol Evol. 2002 Oct;19(10):1645-55. [PMID: 12270892]
This is evidence for a physics/chemistry-based origin of life, and evidence against rational intelligent design, because an intelligent designer could simply have designed a modern bacterium with the complete biochemical pathways for making all 20 extant amino acids, ensuring it’s capacity to adapt to future environmental challenges.
I haven’t been following the “God’s Guidance” thread, but I’ll scan it later.
Briefly, probability arguments against evolution or abiogenesis are almost always presented as incredulity - no calculations at all. Where there are calculations, there are generally unstated assumptions which misrepresent evolution. For abiogenesis, there is a presumption they know how such a probability can be calculated.
These probability statements are often interpreted in the exact same manner as Bayes Factors. If we attempt to rewrite them as Bayes Factors, we end up with a prior probability of 1.0 for Design or God. That’s no sort of statistical inference, it’s merely restating one’s original faith in mathematical form, then concluding the assumption.
If someone really has faith, then they should not need to justify that faith with bad math.