Quote:Yes, I've seen the info on the proto-life experiment - they made some amino acids. The experiment does not, however, address the improbability of DNA forming from those amino acids, not to mention the additional improbability of sustainable beneficial mutations resulting in macro-evolutionary leaps. It also ignores the little issue of specified complexity, systems that are both complex and have little tolerance for change. The simplest living organism (that we know of) contains 500,000 DNA letters Link. The next step up contains about 80,000 more and has to have over half of it's DNA in order to function and reproduce. Just the flagellum of the bacteria requires 50 proteins. Miss just one and it won't work.
Take a look at this:
click here
"In reality,
only some positions on a protein require a specific amino acid, others require any of a few different amino acids, and many will accept practically any amino acid.. "
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the fact that the same FUNCTIONAL protein can have different sequences "
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Your first mistake is in assuming, quite incorrectly, that one and only one amino acid sequence would be correct and any variation in that sequence would be non-functional. Human lysozyme, chicken lysozyme, and bullfrog lysozyme all have different amino acid sequences and yet are still the same protein, lysozyme (BTW, human and chimpanzee lysozyme are identical).
Your argument Idaho, is more towards abiogenesis than evolution.
This site has some points:
FAQ
" Firstly, the formation of biological polymers from monomers is a function of the laws of chemistry and biochemistry, and these are decidedly not random."
"Secondly, the entire premise is incorrect to start off with, because in modern abiogenesis theories
the first "living things" would be much simpler, not even a protobacteria, or a preprotobacteria (what Oparin called a protobiont [8] and Woese calls a progenote [4]), but one or more simple molecules probably not more than 30-40 subunits long. These simple molecules then slowly evolved into more cooperative self-replicating systems, then finally into simple organisms [2, 5, 10, 15, 28]. An illustration comparing a hypothetical protobiont and a modern bacteria is given below. "
"This, however, is nonsense.
The 400 protein claim seems to come from the protein coding genome of Mycobacterium genetalium, which has the smallest genome currently known of any modern organism [20]. However, inspection of the genome suggests that this could be reduced further to a minimal gene set of 256 proteins [20]. Note again that this is a modern organism. The first protobiont/progenote would have been smaller still [4], and preceded by even simpler chemical systems"
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The probability of generating this in successive random trials is (1/20)32 or 1 chance in 4.29 x 1040. This is much, much more probable than the 1 in 2.04 x 10390 of the standard creationist "generating carboxypeptidase by chance" scenario, but still seems absurdly low.
However, there is another side to these probability estimates, and it hinges on the fact that most of us don't have a feeling for statistics. When someone tells us that some event has a one in a million chance of occuring, many of us expect that one million trials must be undergone before the said event turns up, but this is wrong."
"1 chance in 4.29 x 1040 is still orgulously, gobsmackingly unlikely; it's hard to cope with this number. Even with the argument above (you could get it on your very first trial) most people would say "surely it would still take more time than the Earth existed to make this replicator by random methods". Not really; in the above examples we were examining sequential trials, as if there was only one protein/DNA/proto-replicator being assembled per trial.
In fact there would be billions of simultaneous trials as the billions of building block molecules interacted in the oceans, or on the thousands of kilometers of shorelines that could provide catalytic surfaces or templates "
I don't think I need to quote anymore... Just take a look at the website as it addresses all the things you have just typed out.
First, organisms do not evolve in a great leap from micro to macro. If you look at protists, monerans evolved into it. The endosymbiotic hypothesis noted that two individual cells became too attached to each other that they need one another to live, and because of mutations and this factor, the cells merge forming organelles. There is a protist that one can look at that provide the link for this theory.
Within Protista, there are types of protists, like animal-like, plant-like, and fungi/algae like.
Anyhow, evolution is a "theory"/model; it's falsifiable, but it's the best theory out there so far. If you have a better theory in mind tell us and show how it fits the mutations of viruses and bacterias.
This is an interesting debate btw.
