According to you it’s “a disembodied mind some time in the past used magic to POOF all biological life into existence” Now all you have to do is figure out a way to test it.
Be it phosphate level phosphorylation or chemiosmosis, the cellular production of ATP requires complex molecular machineries whose production requires ATP. IOW, we have here a perfect example of chicken and egg paradox!
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One enzyme is all it takes to catalyze the production of ATP from ADP and P.
There are other ways of getting ATP than through ATP synthase(and other molecules than ATP can power chemical reactions), hence there’s no reason to think ATP synthase, or ATP, could not have evolved.
Also, ATP is really just an energy currency. Chemical energy can come in many other forms than ATP. And can be stored in other molecules, and released in a a manner that can power subsequent reactions too. There’s no reason to think the energy required to perform any particular chemical reaction has to come from an ATP molecule. ATP was probably just established as the energy currency very early in evolution, and then other biochemical pathways evolved to take advantage of that already existing mechanism for energy conservation. If some other currency had evolved first(for the sake of argument say, 1,3-Biphosphoglycerate, the molecule used to power the production of ATP itself in the type of substrate-level phosphorylation Larry Moran writes about in the above linked blog post), you’d be sitting here wondering how anything could be produced without that other molecule.
Ultimately the energy that powers living organisms either comes from the sun, or physical processes in the Earth’s interior, it’s just passed through a lot of middle-men for most of us, and whatever currency evolved first, if it did not get replaced by something better before many other things had grown dependent on it, would then unavoidably be inherited by all it’s descendants.
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Giltil,
I found this study that looked into the evolutionary tree of ATP pathways in prokaryotes. Evolution of the F0F1 ATP Synthase Complex in Light of the Patchy Distribution of Different Bioenergetic Pathways across Prokaryotes
Wanting to address how this metabolic diversity evolved, we mapped the distribution of nine bioenergetic modes on a phylogenetic tree based on 16S rRNA sequences from 272 species representing the full diversity of prokaryotic lineages. This highlights the patchy distribution of many pathways across different lineages, and suggests either up to 26 independent origins or 17 horizontal gene transfer events. Next, we used comparative genomics and phylogenetic analysis of all subunits of the F0F1 ATP synthase, common to most bacterial lineages regardless of their bioenergetic mode. Our results indicate an ancient origin of this protein complex, and no clustering based on bioenergetic mode, which suggests that no special modifications are needed for the ATP synthase to work with different electron transport chains.
Not a complete answer, by far, but it is being studied and and we are learning.
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But “mind” is not a mechanism, and you have been unable to explain how it is a mechanism. In fact every time you are asked to explain this you say that your model does not need to explain the mechanism.
But you do not have an ID hypothesis. You have been asked repeatedly to present one, and you still haven’t. If you want ID to be taken seriously as science, you have to actually do science. Why don’t you do science?
If I was wrong you would be able to demonstrate how I was wrong.
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Enlighten us.
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Of course, the grand daddy of Bill’s movement, who sadly died recently without ever seeing the fulfillment of his dream of the overthrow of “scientific materialism”, admitted, in a moment of candour rare for a creationist, that no ID hypothesis exists:
I also don’t think that there is really a theory of intelligent design at the present time to propose as a comparable alternative to the Darwinian theory, which is, whatever errors it might contain, a fully worked out scheme. There is no intelligent design theory that’s comparable. Working out a positive theory is the job of the scientific people that we have affiliated with the movement. Some of them are quite convinced that it’s doable, but that’s for them to prove…No product is ready for competition in the educational world.
- Phillip E. Johnson, Berkeley Science Review (Spring 2006)
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Paul Nelson agrees. As he stated in 2004:
“Easily, the biggest challenge facing the I.D. community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don’t have such a theory right now, and that’s a real problem. Without a theory, it’s very hard to know where to direct your research focus. Right now, we’ve got a bag of powerful intuitions and a handful of notions, such as irreducible complexity, but as yet, no general theory of biological design.”
He was recently asked whether that still applies:
Alan Fox on January 26, 2018 at 3:45 pm said:
Paul A Nelson
May I call you Paul, then?
Your most quoted remark (at least attributed to you in a 2004 interview in Touchstone magazine)“Easily, the biggest challenge facing the I.D. community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don’t have such a theory right now, and that’s a real problem. Without a theory, it’s very hard to know where to direct your research focus. Right now, we’ve got a bag of powerful intuitions and a handful of notions, such as irreducible complexity, but as yet, no general theory of biological design.”
struck me as a fair assessment, then. Do you see any progress, since?
Paul responded:
Paul A Nelson on January 26, 2018 at 5:42 pm said:
Alan Fox
I’ll always answer to Paul.Yes — definitely some progress.
Still no general theory, however. Good theories are hard to find, and harder still to make mathematically tractable and analytically rigorous — so that anyone can apply them, without a proponent of the theory standing nearby to guide one’s hand.
Still no general theory of ID.
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I want to know what progress has been made. All the arguments have been the same for twenty years. Just every now and then they are repackaged with some new terminology.
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I don’t think this is a legitimate complaint with all due respect to Phil and Pauls humble admissions. All theories have weaknesses and are tentative so you have to grade on a curve. General relativity is a really cool model but just as @Jonathan_Burke motioned about Phil not seeing his lifetime goal being met either did Einstein as he died without a unified theory explaining gravity at the quantum level.
Evolutionary theory is ahead of design theory if anything certainly given the content and data. The door that it has left open is having a solid explanation for the diversity of life. It does a great job with simple adaptive mechanisms.
Mind as a mechanistic explanation needs development as all theories do. If people here really want to help, pocket the straw-man arguments and make valid posts as you have here.
Or better yet, mechanisms.
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There is no design theory. There isn’t even a testable design hypothesis. Right now all ID has is idle philosophical speculation.
“Mind produced physical constructs” isn’t a theory either Bill. It’s your silly pipe dream completely unsupported by anything in reality.
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Why aren’t they evaluating, then?
That’s a meaningless statement, as you don’t examine the available evidence. You examine words only.
Rum has pointed to evidence that contradicts your claim. That evidence is available, but you won’t look at it.
You’ve demonstrated time and again that you actively avoid being aware of the available evidence. Your failure to engage with the evidence here proves it beyond any doubt.
That is gobbledygook. Would you please write shorter sentences using well-defined nouns and verbs, please?
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All theories have track records of successful empirical predictions. There is no ID theory in existence.
It’s very easy to stay ahead of something that doesn’t even exist.
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I read the paper and liked Rum’s post. The claim that ATP synthase is required for reproduction was refuted by the paper Rum posted.
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I disagree with this assertion. It is a theory what is debatable is how mature it is. Its a theory as it mechanistically explains the origin of complexity and information.
It’s a definition.
There’s not even a scientific hypothesis, the precursor of a theory.
There’s no mechanism.
And there is no sky. This is absolute nonsense.
I didn’t say that actually. You’re thinking of someone else. But your comment is irrelevant. Einstein died without a unified theory, which is why he never claimed to have a unified theory. He didn’t claim to have one and say “But it’s in the future somewhere, I haven’t actually figured it out yet”.
In contrast, you keep referring to one as if you have it, and then when pressed admit you don’t, whilst claiming this actually doesn’t matter. However in science it does matter. It definitely matters when you keep referring to one as if you have it, when you actually don’t.
It actually needs to be made into a theory. Currently it isn’t. It needs a hypothesis. Currently it doesn’t have one. Yet instead of doing the actual science to build the theory and hypothesis, IDers spend all their time online trying to argue that evolution is an inadequate theory. Why?
No it doesn’t. Every time you’ve been asked to explain this mechanism you’ve claimed it’s a theory despite the fact that it doesn’t have a mechanism. Now you’re backflipping and claiming it’s a theory because it has a mechanism (despite the fact that you can’t describe what this mechanism is).
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I have tried to explain this to you. Many other people get it. In theory a mechanism is a cause that helps account for the for the effect observed. A mind can account for information and complex function. Yes it requires a body and a tool to record the information or material to build a complex structure but the main mechanistic explanation is a mind. This is a pretty simple concept for many people who don’t have an ideological axe to grind.