Miller-Urey and the origin of life

dizerner

Re: Miller-Urey and the origin of life

Post by dizerner » Mon Nov 02, 2015 12:04 am

There's a lot of circumstantial evidence for evolution, I don't think anyone can deny that. But mutation and natural selection don't seem powerful enough engines, in and of themselves, to power a process from molecules to man. There may be another as yet undiscovered dynamic at play. Of course evolution wouldn't be blind/random per se, since we have 3 strong initial inputs: 1. initial starting conditions 2. all materials 3. all laws. That is, if we accept a kind of materialistic determinism (there may be something in nature which produces an output based on no previous input, that is, truly random).

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jonperry
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Re: Miller-Urey and the origin of life

Post by jonperry » Mon Nov 02, 2015 3:40 am

dizerner wrote:mutation and natural selection don't seem powerful enough engines, in and of themselves, to power a process from molecules to man.
We don't yet have a fully demonstrated natural pathway from molecules to microbes (as the Miller Urey animation makes clear), but descent with modification, acted upon by selection does seem to account for microbes-to-man evolution.

I've heard people like Michael Behe claim there is an edge to evolution but neither he (he's one of my favorite creationist/ID writers by the way), nor anyone else I know of, has ever clearly demonstrated what that proposed edge is. To the contrary, descent with modification acted upon by selection has been directly observed modifying existing traits, producing entirely new structures, producing new reproductively isolated species, and has been shown to create new genes with entirely novel functions. Artificial selection in dogs has even been shown to dramatically modify behavior and intelligence.

I ask this as a serious question: What more power would be needed that isn't already accounted for?

I can certainly relate to your suspicion of evolution being insufficient. My intuition also tells me that evolution is not powerful enough to produce what we see around us, but more careful observation tells me that my intuition here is wrong. It's very similar to my intuition telling me that the sun literally goes down at night. I have trouble shaking that idea even though I know from more careful observations that day and night are actually caused by the Earth's rotation. Intuition sometimes holds us back from understanding how the world works.

dizerner

Re: Miller-Urey and the origin of life

Post by dizerner » Mon Nov 02, 2015 5:49 am

I ask this as a serious question: What more power would be needed that isn't already accounted for?
Could it be the self-organizational properties in the laws and materials of the universe itself, such as form crystals? Here is a paper from someone seriously speculating about building a self-replicating man-made DNA to study evolutionary effects on http://www.dna.caltech.edu/Papers/dna-c ... lution.pdf (I have no idea if it's plausible).

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backwoodsman
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Re: Miller-Urey and the origin of life

Post by backwoodsman » Mon Nov 02, 2015 12:34 pm

jonperry wrote:Give me an example of a loose end or piece of evidence I've ignored and I'll address it.
To this end, I've just made a post in another thread, which you may have already seen, or will shortly.

In addition to that, I don't see that you ever responded to this post:
http://theos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=61212#p61212
If you want to send more articles from creationist sites, please fact check their claims before posting.
The staff and other writers at that particular creationist site have so far proven to be much more intellectually honest than you have, so if I get time for that sort of thing I'm much more likely to fact check you than them. (I've fact checked a lot of their stuff over the years, and always found them to be both absolutely honest, and intellectually honest.) As we've already seen, it's clear you didn't take the time to read even that one short, basic article very carefully, so it seems unlikely your very serious accusations against them have any substance.

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jonperry
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Re: Miller-Urey and the origin of life

Post by jonperry » Mon Nov 02, 2015 3:31 pm

backwoodsman wrote:Hypothetically, what evidence would you accept as proof that the theory of evolution is false?
The only proof I'd need to convince me that evolution is false is for someone to present me with a better theory--one that makes sense of all (or most) of the facts that evolution currently makes sense of, and that leads us to new discoveries faster or more efficiently than evolution does. It's that simple.

Come up with that theory and you'll change the world!

The scientific community has rejected creationist and ID theories because, compared to evolution, they are extremely poor at explaining what we actually see in biology, and because they are extremely slow to lead us to new discoveries. Evolution replaced creationism for the same reason germ theory replaced miasma theory.

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jonperry
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Re: Miller-Urey and the origin of life

Post by jonperry » Mon Nov 02, 2015 3:45 pm

dizerner wrote: Could it be the self-organizational properties in the laws and materials of the universe itself, such as form crystals?
Are you asking if self-organization and laws and materials of the universe are unaccounted for by the the theory of evolution? I don't think I understand the question.

dizerner

Re: Miller-Urey and the origin of life

Post by dizerner » Mon Nov 02, 2015 4:24 pm

jonperry wrote:
dizerner wrote: Could it be the self-organizational properties in the laws and materials of the universe itself, such as form crystals?
Are you asking if self-organization and laws and materials of the universe are unaccounted for by the the theory of evolution? I don't think I understand the question.
It's a broad speculation—that inherent within the laws and materials of the universe may be self-organizational properties that helped evolution along (properties that do not include mutation or natural selection). Sort of a "meta DNA" if you will.

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Re: Miller-Urey and the origin of life

Post by jonperry » Mon Nov 02, 2015 9:37 pm

Dizerner,

I think I understand your point now. This is certainly true. Our bodies are acted upon by every imaginable law of physics and chemistry. Evolution runs on top of those foundation laws.

Furthermore, modern life forms have evolved the ability to hedge their bets against deleterious mutations. They can protect vital sections of DNA from mutation, while simultaneously subjecting less vital sections to higher rates of random mutation. There are various mechanisms that modern cells use to make this happen, some of which we don't fully understand. Surely there are other tricks cells use to survive and shape evolution that we have not yet discovered.

dizerner

Re: Miller-Urey and the origin of life

Post by dizerner » Tue Nov 03, 2015 12:38 am

Here's an interesting page from a quick google - http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/co ... 1/879.full
It is the hope of self-organization researchers that an appreciation of the fundamental roles played by physical pattern-formation mechanisms will soon be treated in the same manner.

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