Most evolutionists hinge on some belief about shared ancestry. This DOES NOT prove evolution. It's backwards. There is NO evidence for a working, functional evolution. And, in fact, all of the "evidence" for common ancestry can be attributed to common Design elements. If you can't solve the problem going forward, to where it actually becomes useful, and real, then you believe in a new age fairy tale, taken all together. A false religion of so-called science that is a DILLUSION. Fate is not without a sense of irony, I suppose. The Bible has always made the same claim about what it is, and where it comes from, and still stands firm on testable, repeatable, observable scientific phenomena.
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I use evolutionary algorithms every day in software engineering. You can put a fast replicating low load organism like yeast onto a task to evolve say an ability to process a chemical like lactase. The code for it is not in the initial spawned runs - but if you break off batches and increase the amount of lactose slowly - and cross breed the best surviving lineages - eventually you will hit upon a family of them that can process the lactose.
This is just because there is constant random drift. When a selection pressure - like the existence of a food source is available in a food scarce context, a geographic barrier, a container barrier - really anything that challenges organisms in a population ---- over time the ones that remain will be the descendants of ever better survivors in the selection context.
Its not really a hard idea to understand and requires no magic or force of god. Its built into the nature of reality. If I was a god - I would use evolution too because its so simple and explores an IMMENSE problem space in a massively parallel manner.
You sound like a programmer. Yes, there is a mutation problem. It's funny, though, you mention you're a software engineer. . . So, let's look at this for a second. Let's have it your way. . . let evolution be true. Now, shouldn't we be able to create software that "reproduces" and combines, and builds, and organizes on orders faster than normal biological reproduction, following the same structural growth of biological evolution, but for software? Where is it? Haven't figured it out yet? Or is there some "magic" you suppose that's in raw matter? Bud, there's nothing there. We're dust, and this all only makes sense with God at the beginning and helm of it all. You're building a house of cards and hiding behind technical babble. Evolution does not happen. You cannot show one single proof that evolution happens in the sense you believe.
And sorry, it is perfectly legitimate to ask what an animals is "turning into." Yes, I know we have conventions to categorize everything, blah blah blah, but everything (that is, EVERYTHING) is fully function, doing just what it was designed to do in its environment.
So, you know, think about it, there's a thing called luck. In all of the billions and trillions of living things that have existed, why has there never been something that survived despite having poor form with it's environment? Or that just eeked out an existence, but would be clearly seen as not very well adapted? Oh, because you have this theory about "survival of the fittest?" Okay, how do I measure that? Just look at humans today. Plenty of us survive, despite not being the best of the best of the best. So, where are all these creatures that are just not quite so perfect in their environment? They just all died, I guess. None of their fossils were preserved, though. Only the best of the best is what we see. If evolution were true (which is most definitely not) the world would look like a huge disgusting mess (and that's allowing an actual mechanism for it to even work). And this should especially speak to you, considering how you talk of all things being singular, and in some stage of transition. It'd be a huge mess. You haven't really tried your theory out. But the world is beautiful, and we all see it, and know that God is behind it all.
I will leave you with a video. I feel like if we have no baseline then there's not much point, so if you watch it, I'll respond. Otherwise, I'll leave it at this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU7Lww-sBPg
Please, pretty please, tell me why this guy is wrong.
I watched Prof. Tour's video. His work with graphene structures is interesting but none of that has any relevance to the question about whether or not evolution happened. Some of the things he was mentioning in this section of the talk were claims I could find no evidence for. For instance the spinal cord recovery of severed rat spinal column with nanotubes. I looked for papers citing the claim and none of the literature seems to indicate the success rates he is talking about is possible - even with microsurgery. There is no full genome sequencing available for $100 on a chip. That sounds similar to the claims made by Theranos - but that turned out to be a scam.
These things are likely possible but will not be realized as products for decades. There are still some fundamental problems that have yet to be overcome with most if not all of them. So its odd that he is talking about a lot of speculative materials physics in a talk that ostensibly supposed to be about evolution and abiogenesis.
To the science ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
He shows you a modern cell with its various specialized organelles that is the result of billions of years of natural selection to muddy the waters from the very beginning of the talk. If you looked at New York today - and had a schematic view of the cities plumbing and electrical grids - you could not imagine jumping from the wooded island of New York in 1600 to the metropolis of 2021 in a single step. It would not be the rag tag assemblage of locally optimized choices (subway tunnels intersecting with water mains and power conduits in a crazy complex configuration ) if you designed this system in one go.
it would look much more organized with far fewer kluge like choices. Cells share this crazy level of complexity and kluge like choices that were sealed in place eons ago because of locally optimized short term trade offs that became the ancestors for later states of the cells.
Cells are certainly machines. None of this requires magic. But the vast majority of the history of life - all of life here was single celled machines. The machinery that runs an elephant and the machinery that run E- Coli are not dramatically different. But he is making a fundamental error in his assertion that the first replicators would have had any of this current complexity.
The first replicators would have been more like bubbles with amino acids in them. There would not be microtubules. There would not be endoplasmic reticulum or a nucleus even. He is demanding you pretend the first replicators were as complex as current life and no one but him is making this claim. Science certainly does not make this claim.
"Organisms care about life?" <-- nonsense. We are the only organism that knows its alive and what that really means. Organisms care only about making a copy --- all of life is dedicated to this. From food seeking to mate seeking - to all the behaviors all organisms have - the goal is replication. "Life" is a complex chemical reaction - that is just reality. There is barrier between chemistry and biology. But the goal of life - if there can be said to be one - is very simple - REPLICATE.
He than lies - straight up lies - about the nature of information in life. You do not have random assemblies of DNA because those would not build an organism that can replicate. A random change that did not allow a histone series to be built would cause the cell that results from a recombination to fail - so that change would never be propagated down to descendants. If that random change was one that did not alter the structure of the histone in a way that made it non-functional --- it would be very likely to be passed down to descendants because this part of the code is VERY sensitive to change.
Cytochrome C is also a highly conserved sequence. You and I likely have the same 100 base pair sequence of cytochrome C. Changes to almost any of those 100 base pairs will cause the cell to fail so that change will not be propagated. Hemoglobin is similar. All humans have the same Hemoglobin sequence. Ours differs from old world apes by only 1 base pair. But its highly conserved because any change to that part of the code would fail build a functioning replicator.
He is lying about the nature of the science in this regard as well. I say lying because its clear in his choice of words - he is being very careful - that he knows he is mischaracterizing the nature of self assembly. Hell nanotubes he was talking about earlier in the talk self assemble with no human input into their structure. Amino acids will self polymerize in random ways.
Scientists don't just throw together a bunch of chemicals and expect life to emerge. They understand that the process was one that was loops of chemical reactions happening for eons before anything like a simple replicator assembled. No one is expecting to generate a modern cell.
"Encourage a generation of science textbook writers to make colorful deceptive cartoons of raw chemicals assembling into cells, which then emerge as slithering creatures from a prehistoric pond" <-- this is hyperbolic nonsense.
Textbooks are garbage in my opinion but to assert that a textbook illustration is somehow the be all and end all of science - or that its definitive about anything - is just nonsensical.
Everyone that works on abiogenesis knows that we don't and likely will never have - the exact sequence of events that took place to make the first replicators. ALL of them know that its a hard problem with no fossil record to help fill in gaps of knowledge. But that does not mean you can inject magic and demand a magical source for the first replicators. "I don't know yet" is a sufficient answer.
He then talks about homochirality of life and pretends that is some insurmountable issue. We don't know why L amino acids and D sugars are the only configurations used by life. It might be a historic choice that was frozen in time in the first replicators. it may very well be the result of ultraviolet radiation ionizing D amino acids - leaving L amino acids as the only usable elements. We don't know yet why this is the case. But that does not mean magic. Like all parts of life these were locally optimal solutions that were passed down to descendants.
But its like going on a long trip and turning left instead of right as your first turn. Once you make that turn - the distance you have to travel to go the opposite way is longer than any distance going the same way. Once the first replicators began - the ones that used L amino acids and D sugars could not just spontaneously flip nor is there any mutation that could cause them to flip.
i can't watch the rest of this. He is lying and its annoying me. He is smart enough to know he is telling these people half truths and I can see that by the choices of statements he makes. Its really sad and dishonest.
But its a living - I suppose.
The first replicators were not what you would call life. They were much simpler. They were basically chemical cycles - like the Krebs cycle - happening in billions of places all over the planet in hydrothermal vents and tide pools for billions of years. They would have been RNA polymers in bubbles or clinging to clay matrixes that could simply make a rough copy of themselves. Over a lot of iteration those rough copies made the first cells that we might consider to undergo homeostasis and once you have some - successful replicators will propagate.
Most of the problems of keeping a cell running and alive were solved long before the first multicellular life. The existence of animals - and the way mitochondria became a part of their parent cells is an example of this. Mitochondria used to be free roaming cells that did one thing really well - they produce a lot of ATP. At some point billions of years ago a happy accident took place when one primordial cell engulfed a primordial mitochondria and instead of breaking it down for resources - farmed it for fuel.
The cell did not know what it was doing. It might have had no vacuoles available with lysosomes. The mitochondria might have been able to fend off the lysosomes. But in any case - that one cell is our ancestor -- and the ancestor of all Animalia. Without that one event that happened 1 day in 1 cell - billions of years ago - none of us would be around to have this conversation.
If God exists - it does not need to tweak the dial on any of this. It can wait. Its running a universe with quintillions of planets - all exploring possibility space. In some lucky planets - like ours with this massive moon and stable star --- complex chemistry created simple replicators that were selected by their environment for propagation - leading to all the variety of life you see.
God is an engineer. Don't insult it by underestimating the cleverness of the universe.
He was spot on, actually. Purification is a massive problem for this "question" of abiogenesis. And in my opinion, despite people (typically evolutionists) wanting to divorce abiogenesis from darwinian evolution, they go hand-in-hand towards unfeasibility. Tour's preface about his own work was simply to show that he's a real scientists, and the things he was talking about, like full genome sequencing, was projective. I stand by my own synopsis of the evolution idea, that if it were true, the world would look a whole lot different. I think you should think about what that means, especially as a programmer, because your problem is the same as every other evolutionist's problem, from top to bottom, that you assume the truth of your idea first. This blinds you. Take it for what it actually is, whatever you say this process of evolution is, and play it out starting at the bottom without anticipating anything. Like I said, there's a thing called luck in the randomness of nature, and "survival of the fittest" is not science, but tautology. Everything would be a whole lot more sloppy. It's not what we see. We see things interacting exquisitely in their given environments. Sloppy, itself, isn't necessarily a scientific term, so you have to think of it as being on a scale for a given function. So, it might entail the difference between smooth and rough operation for a set function. If evolution were true, we'd be pretty much entirely in the rough end of operation for everything we know and are. We absolutely see smoothness. And don't bail yourself out by thinking, "well, but we have smoothness, so it simply is this way, because our theory is sound." Again, this assumes the truth of your position first. Think of a metal rod fitting into a metal tube, for example. There is smooth and rough operations of this function. Judge for yourself, in a trial and error methodology, which is the more likely to be first achieved? So, where is this rough function throughout nature?