rather chilly. After this winter, I'm not a big fan.

db: "There are so many false statements in this comment that I don’t know where to start."

Judging by your previous posts on various topics, that's easily explained by two salient facts that I've noticed about you: 1) you're ignorant of the subject matter, and 2) you bullshit a lot.

db: "1) It took almost a billion years after the formation of Earth for life to appear http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of...... "

Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Evidence points to biological organisms going back as far as 3.8 billions years. That leaves about 700 million years for so-called "chemical evolution" to occur.

Too bad for you, but any number with a measley exponent of "8" is TOO LOW for a probabilistic random-walk to search through the possibilities to create an information-storage molecule like DNA. Also, it would have to be DNA first, not amino acids, because amino acids by themselves are simply like wooden Scrabble squares: the need to be SEQUENCED into the biochemical equivalent of words — that is, functional proteins — in order to do anything. The amino acids are INSTRUCTED to sequence in a certain order by means of DNA, so DNA would have to appear first . . .

. . . and unfortunately, this scenario doesn't work either! DNA has a backbone of sugar — ribose — that is VERY difficult to synthesize in the laboratory, and highly unlikely to occur by itself in nature without intelligent intervention by the lab technicians. The way ribose is actually produced in the cell is by the much more efficient means of an enzyme . . . but an enzyme is a kind of protein! And proteins require the PRIOR existence of DNA to instruct their amino acids how to sequence functionally!

So it's chicken-and-egg: DNA requires enzymes and other proteins for its creation and maintenance; but enzymes and proteins require DNA for their creation. This paradox has not been solved.

db: "2) Actually it takes amino acids very little time to form under the conditions of early Earth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%8......


I'll bet you didn't know, for example, that Miller RETRACTED his conclusions when it was pointed out to him by geochemist colleagues that the sort of gases he used in his experiment DID NOT comprise the early atmosphere of Earth. Whoops!!!


Miller **intentionally chose** gases that he already knew **in advance of actually performing the experiment** were "REDUCING", i.e., they easily part with their electrons, which can then be used to catalyze the reactions necessary for condensing a few essential amino acids out of the atmosphere (the reaction being jump-started by electric discharge).

Hey, guess what happened when Miller repeated his experiment using a combination of gases that actually *did* comprise the early atmosphere...

Nothing. Instead of amino acids, he got a tarry residue known as "sludge."


Sorry. But life on Earth did not begin (and could not have begun) by lightning discharging through a "reducing" atmosphere, which conveniently showered the land with amino acids. There WAS NO reducing atmosphere on Earth.




db: "From Scientific American http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl...... Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance."


Thank you. I've been posting that for years, and this was, in fact, proven mathematically beyond any shadow of a rational doubt in 1962 by mathematicians and computer scientists (e.g., Murray Eden of MIT, Stanislaw Ulam of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, Marcel Schutzenberger of the University of Paris, et al.) at a famous symposium held specifically on that topic — "Mathematical Challenges to the Neo­Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution" (Wistar Institute Press, 1966, No. 5) — and chaired by Nobel Laureate (in medicine) Sir Peter Medawar, who made the following opening remarks:

"[T]he immediate cause of this conference is a pretty widespread sense of dissatisfaction about what has come to be thought as the accepted evolutionary theory in the English-speaking world, the so-called neo-Darwinian Theory. ... There are objections made by fellow scientists who feel that, in the current theory, something is missing ... These objections to current neo-Darwinian theory are very widely held among biologists generally; and we must on no account, I think, make light of them. The very fact that we are having this conference is evidence that we are not making light of them."


Murray Eden (a professor electrical engineering at MIT) made this comment:


"[A]n opposite way to look at the genotype is as a generative algorithm and not as a blue-print; a sort of carefully spelled out and foolproof recipe for producing a living organism of the right kind if the environment in which it develops is a proper one. Assuming this to be so, the algorithm must be written in some abstract language. Molecular biology may well have provided us with the alphabet of this language, but it is a long step from the alphabet to understanding a language. Nevertheless a language has to have rules, and these are the strongest constraints on the set of possible messages. No currently existing formal language can tolerate random changes in the symbol sequences which express its sentences. Meaning is almost invariably destroyed. Any changes must be syntactically lawful ones. I would conjecture that what one might call "genetic grammaticality" has a deterministic explanation and does not owe its stability to selection pressure acting on random variation." (Murray Eden, "Inadequacies as a Scientific Theory," in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press, 1966, No. 5), pg. 11)


Stanislaw Ulam (a professor of mathematics at Harvard University, and later, resident at the Institute for Advanced Study) wrote:


"[I]t seems to require many thousands, perhaps millions, of successive mutations to produce even the easiest complexity we see in life now. It appears, naively at least, that no matter how large the probability of a single mutation is, should it be even as great as one-half, you would get this probability raised to a millionth power, which is so very close to zero that the chances of such a chain seem to be practically non-existent." (Stanislaw M. Ulam, "How to Formulate Mathematically Problems of Rate of Evolution," in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press, 1966, No. 5), pg. 21)


Marcel Schutzenberger (a professor of mathematics at the University of Paris) wrote:


"We do not know any general principle which would explain how to match blueprints viewed as typographic objects and the things they are supposed to control. The only example we have of such a situation (apart from the evolution of life itself) is the attempt to build self-adapting programs by workers in the field of artificial intelligence. Their experience is quite conclusive to most of the observers: without some built-in matching, nothing interesting can occur."


And regarding chance mutation plus natural selection, Schutzenberger wrote:


“...there is no chance (<10-1000) to see this mechanism appear spontaneously and, if it did, even less for it to remain.... Thus, to conclude, we believe there is a considerable gap in the Neo­Darwinian Theory of evolution, and we believe this gap to be of such a nature that it cannot be bridged within the current conception of biology."


(Marcel Schutzenberger, "Algorithms and Neo-Darwinian Theory," in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press, 1966, No. 5), pg. 75)


Additionally, eminent British biologist, L. Harrision Matthews wrote the following in his introduction to Darwin's "Origin of Species":


"In accepting evolution as a fact, how many biologists pause to reflect that science is built upon theories that have been proved by experiment to be correct, or remember that the theory of animal evolution has never been thus proved?.... The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory—is it then a science or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation—both are concepts which believers know to be true but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof."
("The Origin of Species", 1976, J.M. Dent & Sons, London, pages x, xi.)


But I see you're praying frantically for Natural Selection to make magic happen for you. It won't work. Consider the following:


1. Natural Selection is a tautology; logically true by definition, but scientifically empty. "Organism X was chosen by Natural Selection to survive because its mutations make it more fit for its environment than its competitors. How do we KNOW it was, in fact, "more fit" than its competitors? Well, because Natural Selection chose it to survive."


Organism X survived because it was "fit"; and we know it was "fit" because . . . it survived! Just plain dumb.


Psssssstttttt! In order for this kind of statement NOT to be a vacuous tautology, there must be some INDEPENDENT criterion of "fitness" OTHER THAN the obvious fact that it survived. You must be able to identify "Factor ???" in the organism and say IN ADVANCE of anything else happening, "Yes, I see that this organism has Factor ???, which **WILL** cause Natural Selection to select it for continued survival," and you have to be able to identify Factor ??? BEFORE NATURAL SELECTION HAS DONE SO." Then you can verify whether or not "Factor ??? CAUSES (or makes it likely that) natural selection will select this organism over other organisms that lack Factor ??? for continued survival. If you wait until AFTER natural selection has supposedly selected the organism for survival, then you will merely attribute the fact of the organism's survival to whatever your bias happens to be that afternoon — "It has the right kind of teeth for eating the right kinds of seeds . . .", "it has just the right kind of fins that allow it to swim a bit faster for hunting prey than its competitors," etc., etc. In fact, you have no idea of WHY the thing survived at all; you only know the end-result, which is that it has, in fact, survived. By giving a name to this fact — "Natural Selection" — you are REIFYING a given, and pretending that you have CAUSAL KNOWLEDGE of WHY it survived, when, in fact, you have NONE.


2. According to paleontologist Colin Patterson (British Museum of Natural History), natural selection has NEVER been observed to have the ability to cause things to evolve:


"No one has ever produced a species by mechanisms of natural selection. No one has ever got near it and most of the current argument in neo-Darwinism is about this question."
("Cladistics", Interview with Brian Leek, Peter Franz, March 4, 1982, BBC.)


3. According to Darwinian dogma, Natural Selection does not *initiate* change; it selects and preserves change *once mutation has provided such change*. So natural selection must wait for mutations to appear — and mutations, according to the same Darwinia Dogma, must by random: the switching-on of some latent capability already encoded within the organism's genotype is NOT an example of a Darwinian random mutation since the change was already in existence in latent form. A Darwinian RANDOM mutation is one that is not already in existence in the genotype, but occurs spontaneously because of some equally random event: a DNA copying error; a stray cosmic ray causing some small damage to the genome, etc.


Thus, since natural selection depends first on some random event (a mutation), and then must wait for the next random event (another mutation), etc., ad infinitum, all of this talk by Scientific American, or Richard Dawkins, et al., that "evolution is not *really* random; it occurs NECESSARILY because of *natural selection*" is, quite simply, bullshit, obfuscation, and denial.


Natural Selection, by the Darwinian's own definition, must first WAIT for chance to operate in order to have something to select; ergo, evolution clearly proceeds BY CHANCE.


Modern Darwinbots don't like to admit this because enough calculations have been done by enough people in different disciplines — mathematics, computer science, information theory, engineering, biochemistry, molecular biology, etc. — to prove that "chance" doesn't have a chance at producing life.


So "chance" doesn't work, and "natural selection" is a tautology (thus, vacuous from a scientific point of view) and which, in any case, must first wait for chance (which doesn't work) to occur first.

Great theory.

Why wouldn't there be enough time? Slime life doesn't sound like a terribly complex manifestation of life. It's freaking slime. It doesn't need millions of years to evolve.

Zero: "Slime life began on Earth almost as soon as the crust solidified."

True — a fact that contradicts expectations of classical Darwinism and traditional chemical evolution: i.e., that slow, incremental, trial-and-error processes, over geologically long periods of time, gave rise to self-replicating, living organisms.

Since life appeared on Earth very soon after it cooled, there would not have been a plausibly long enough time for Darwinian processes to result in anything but functionless combinations of various chemicals.

Something other than pure, dumb luck obviously jump-started the process of life, allowing it to skip over the useless combinations of chemicals and hone in on those combinations that result in biologically useful functions.