Do you all think we can expect another "mutation" in consciousness? Where we all become super brains?
timberlandko wrote:real life wrote:Jackofalltrades wrote:On a more serious note now... Concerning the development of one cell into whatever eventually crawled on the land, I still have a problem with this... Was that first creature an herbivore or carnivore, and what did it eat? Where did the plants come from...a variation of that first cell splitting into a plant like creation? Did the plants come first or the animals, and how did that first "living thing" exist. What nourished it? How did fertile soil with nutrients in it come to be to enable plants to grow? How did it reproduce? Was it just one creature or several and did they have different sexes or if it was just one then how did it reproduce itself? I realise some of these topics may have been covered earlier in these some 600 plus pages, but rather than read through all this again...
Jack,
These are excellent questions, many of which have been studiously avoided in the past 600+ pages. If you will take a quick read thru, you will see that it's a subject that apparently many would rather not discuss.
For starters, try these on (not all from this thread, nor by any means all here or on other threads that do what rl alledges has not been done - I just got tired of hunting them down)
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=249772#249772
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=370578#370578
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=792689#792689
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=799816#799816
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=618407#618407
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1684456#1684456
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1234540#1234540
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1213441#1213441
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1243998#1243998
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1304625#1304625
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1330013#1330013
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1335449#1335449
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=370427#370427
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=618537#618537
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=619437#619437
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=620102#620102
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=666404#666404
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=788877#788877
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=827634#827634
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1213494#1213494
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1212679#1212679
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1212546#1212546
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1214227#1214227
Quote:Typical responses include 'well, the theory of evolution doesn't address the question of how life began'.
Nonsense - it doesn't care about why it began, but how it began is pretty much in there as among the current body of scientific knowledge.
Quote:While technically true, we all know that Big Bang/Abiogenesis/Evolution are sold as a unified, slick package in the public schools.
Yeah - its called "
SCIENCE"
Quote:It should be apparent to all that the idea of a living cell generating itself from raw chemicals is way out. So far out as to be considered mathematically impossible.
Only when flawed mathematical models are employed by folks who attempt to discount what science has determined.
Quote:First there are the multitude of various complex compounds which must be formed and in the proper configuration and amount (enough to allow use for the emerging organism but not enough to cause it's environment to be toxic).
Then there are the multitude of components on the sub-cellular level which must form themselves, (Proponents point to a few compounds which self replicate and expect us to believe that they can also form complex sub-cellular machinery by themselves. Gimme a break. ) then these components must begin to function before they are in an organism, and keep themselves functioning until they are aggregated into a cell of some kind.
These sub-cellular components must all somehow locate each other in the muck (perhaps they could use GPS?) and assemble the organism correctly.
This unlikely set of events must be followed by instant success, or instant death. If the new organism is unable to feed itself , dispose of waste, protect itself, maintain itself, repair itself and reproduce itself (these just for starters) then it is over and we must start from chemicals again to form components on the sub-cellular level.
Given billions of years, trillions of cubic meters of available space in or on which to form, ever-changing environmental conditions some of which would have been propitious, and the simple fact the "experiment" would be ongoing just about everywhere on the planet not molten or frozen, it is not surprising at all that such might come about, in fact the converse would be more astounding. A false dichotomy you present is that:
Quote:" ... This unlikely set of events must be followed by instant success, or instant death"
... first, the series of events hardly is unlikely, regardless your personal preference, next, the road to success would have been paved with plenty of false starts, dead ends, and near-misses, but once the process was established in a propitious ecoological niche - and there would over time have been inumerable such - things just take the natural course - complex hydrocarbons, proteins, RNA, DNA, replicating sub-cellular molecular structures, proto-biotics, biotics, more complex biotics etc etc etc.
Hi Timber,
Then why don't you just explain to us all how raw chemicals (elements, compounds, complex compounds and hydrocarbons, etc) built themselves into the various machinery of the sub-cellular world. You talk about these replicating themselves (and some do, some do not ), but first they must be built!
Cells, even very simple ones, are more than just blobs of tissue. They are filled with complex components (machinery) requiring precise amounts of hundreds of specialized compounds in exact amounts, and this machinery within the cell performs complex and interdependent functions with other machinery of the cell. Even if one of these components COULD generate itself, it is both useless without, and doomed to quick disintegration without the support of, other component machinery.
Then we would like to hear how all of these components located each other at the same time to form a functioning cell. One of two of these sub-cellular components bumping into each other would not produce an organism that would survive and thrive. It takes many. You also need at the same time, dozens if not hundreds of specialized chemicals to fuel precise processes that are being carried on by these sub-cellular components in even the simplest of cells.
The components need to be already functioning when they find each other. They must "hit the ground running" so to speak. But they cannot perform their interdependent functions without each other.
Did DNA, the information guide to building the cell and regulating its processes, appear before or after the genesis of the first living cells?
Where did the information to build these components precisely and guide their interdependent processes come from, if not from DNA?
If they didn't need information to be built or function successfully, then what advantage did it confer on the organism to compile this information later (DNA) ? Evolution would teach that there must be an advantage for it to have done so, right? If the process already worked, why and how were hundreds / thousands/ millions of extra steps put into producing an unnecessary information storage unit that would be of little use until (at least large portions of) it were complete?
So how did it all happen, Timber?
First, thanks to Rex and c.i. for the kudos - I appreciate that very much.
Now, to your question, Rex - I think "We" began to strongly differentiate from the rest of the animal kingdom a lot earlier than 6000 years ago. I thionk the real change began with Homo Habilus. It took a long, long time for the inate advantages of Habilus to really fully develop express, and result in Homo Sapiens.
Given his ancestrally conferred advantages, Sapiens learned, passed on his learning to his offspring, who learned a bit more and passed the larger body of knowledge to their offspring, who etc., etc, etc. It takes a while to get from figuring out flint knapping to smelting metals and forming empires - lotta groundwork to cover first :wink:
As Sapiens found it less and less necessary to devote his entire energies and resources to the mere struggle to survive, he found time and opportunity to start "thinking" about things abstractly, I figure, and thus come funerals - a clear symbolic recognition of and reverence for life and death as 2 different states, and a strong, all but undeniable indicator of formalized clan structure with hierarchy; some burials, through artifacts found with the bones and other indicators (google up the phrase "red ochre" in conjunction with the word "burial") evidence a class distinction among the dead which entails a class concept among the living - a social order. The whole burying the dead thing is a huge, huge step, I think, and really marks the "beginning" of "modern humankind".
As the handed-down knowledge and experience base increased - certainly slowly at first simply because essentially there was EVERYTHING apart from mere survival to learn - there became available time and resources to devote to cultural advancement. Cave paintings and talismanic sculptures clearly indicate shamanism and mystical rites - no other explanation makes sense; there's advanced culture right there on the walls of caves, and all in all, culture is a liesure activity - can't do culture if its all you can do to survive and breed.
Learning and growing in knowledge, I figure the earliest modern humans emerged from the caves with the retreat, beginning some 12 to 15 thousand years ago, with the last of the great ice sheets, which essentially were gone by the appearance of agriculture - around 10,000 years ago. With agriculture and animal husbandry came more "liesure opportunity" - yet more time and resources unneeded for mere survival, and not only enabling but driving the quest for more learning, more mastery over the habitat, more control over destiny, more liesure opportunity. Call it the raindrop effect; you start out with a raindrop, add more and more untill you get enough of 'em together in one place at one time, and you've got a puddle, keep adding raindrops and the puddle becomes a rivulet, moving on its own, gathering up more water and speed and power as it develops through the joining of other rivulets until you have a stream, keep it up and you have a river, add enough water, eventually you get a raging torrent - a poor analogy, perhaps, but I think illustrative. There was no one "event" that "made us human", we grew ourselves into it, starting with the raindrops of meat, stone and fire.
The complexity of a bird building a nest is more than most humans endure in a lifetime...
rl wrote: how did it all happen
There are myriad plausible, logically defensible, academically derived hypothesese which deal with the question of "How it all happened" - none of which involve imaginary freinds, nor even leaps of faith of any sort.
Here ya go, to get you started, some real science, peer-reviewed, accepted, published, independently replicated and confirmed studies by accreditted researchers - just over 4900 of them.
A couple which might serve well as relatively accessible, non-overly-academic entry points (Note - both are .pdf downloads):
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
Evolution of the First Metabolic Cycles
Vol 87, 200-204, Copyright © 1990 by National Academy of Sciences
Reports of the European Molecular Biology Organization:
Composing life
EMBO Reports Vol. 1 No. 3, 217-222 © 2000 European Molecular Biology Organization
What, besides inane objections, have you got?
timber, Your mention of "flint knapping" is a very interesting one, because I have seen the same design on arrowheads in California, Amman, and in Lima that were thousands of years old.
RexRed wrote:Do you all think we can expect another "mutation" in consciousness? Where we all become super brains?
A specious speculation of science fiction. The size of the human cranium is already limited by the maximum safe dialation of the birth canal. The pelvis of the woman might get larger to accomodate a larger skull, but basically, the physics of the system mitigate against it.
Besides, such an idiotic idea ignores the fact that we've removed the evolution of our intellects from the cranium and deposited it in libraries, universities and research institutes. Not the sort of place where one usually encounters the more militant members of the imaginary friend crowd.
timberlandko wrote:rl wrote: how did it all happen
There are myriad plausible, logically defensible, academically derived hypothesese which deal with the question of "How it all happened" - none of which involve imaginary freinds, nor even leaps of faith of any sort.
Here ya go, to get you started, some real science, peer-reviewed, accepted, published, independently replicated and confirmed studies by accreditted researchers - just over 4900 of them.
A couple which might serve well as relatively accessible, non-overly-academic entry points (Note - both are .pdf downloads):
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
Evolution of the First Metabolic Cycles
Vol 87, 200-204, Copyright © 1990 by National Academy of Sciences
Reports of the European Molecular Biology Organization:
Composing life
EMBO Reports Vol. 1 No. 3, 217-222 © 2000 European Molecular Biology Organization
What, besides inane objections, have you got?
Thanks, Timber, but I can Google all of these experts when I want them.
What I asked, however, is what YOU think.
Tell us how YOU think raw chemicals organized themselves into complex, functioning, interdependent sub-cellular machinery -- before there was a cell.
Tell us how YOU think these components were able to remain functioning without the support they required from one another, until they located one another and joined forces in the first cell.
Tell us how YOU think the cell formed itself without information and how later the cell, for no apparent reason, went to great lengths to encode the information in DNA. This was probably a useless exercise, wasn't it, because the process and cell replication was well established and smoothly functioning, right?
If you happen to agree with one (or more) of the experts you cited, super. Cite his/their work as supporting the reasons you reached your opinion.
But all you've told us so far is 'lots of folks have lots of different ideas how it coulda happened'.
I think we knew that.
I want to know what YOU think.
C'mon Uncle Timber. Tell us a tale.
If a person is sick would one take a certified medicine or one that is not certified?
I figure its most likely organic molecules formed increasingly complex structures, an inexorable chemical process. It didn't happen with the snap of a finger, but was the result of untold billions of possible arrangements and alignment, some more likely than others, some less so, some more propitious to the eventual development of life than others.
The better candidates were those which formed, catalyzed, and synthesized even more complex and concentrated clumps of goo, whether floating or attatched to a more solid substrate makes little difference, whether on the surface or within rock fissures, or at the interface of ocean and shore, or even along the edges of undersea volcanic vents - as long as energy, building-block materials, nutients and catalyzers, and water all was there - and, of course, it was; there wasn't much of anything else.
The clumps would have oozed bumped and clumped together, some of them merging, combining, getting more complex, chemically interacting with myriad other differing goo clumps, interacting and reacting in myriad, chemically-driven ways, and in and among these as they encountered one another, chemical reactions, aided, triggered, and/or otherwise influenced by infrared, luminent, ultraviolet, radio, xray, gamma, and beta radiation, and surface tension, would have caused interfaces resembling membranes to begin to appear - sorta like the skin on a pot of pudding - on the surfaces of clumps frequently jostling against slightly different, somewhat chemically incompatible clumps ... the beginnings of cellular structure. From there to proteins and from thence to RNA and DNA is pretty much a matter of falling-into-place assembly ... it would happen.
With RNA and DNA there would be the engine for replication, the means to establish a metabolism, and the game would be on. Within the membranes, processes would begin which would require metabolism - the intake of nutrients and the output of waste. Once established, once kindled, the proto-biotic sludge would have had no hinderance but environmental to further expansion and development, proto-cells replicating, mutating in response to environmental pressures, the more adaptable surviving and thriving, each proto-generation stronger, more adaptable, more resilient, more and more "alive", more and more diverse than its forebears. What worked went on and worked some more and evolved some more, and what didn't, simply didn't.
Some of it, and as time went on more and more and more of it, became actual single-cell organisms. If it took a billion years or so to go from organic molecules to nutrient-consuming, waste-producing, replicating cells, with billions and billions and billions of mis-steps along the way, so what? What else was going on? There was plenty of room, plenty of material, plenty of time, and its not like there were other things to do. Life "Appeared" pretty much because given the opportunity, conditions, and resources, chemically it had to.
Conjecture? Certainly - but informed, plausible, scientifically consistent conjecture, congruent with observeable phenomena. That makes a helluvalot more sense to me than some imaginary freind saying "Make it so".
timberlandko wrote:I figure its most likely organic molecules formed increasingly complex structures, an inexorable chemical process. It didn't happen with the snap of a finger, but was the result of untold billions of possible arrangements and alignment, some more likely than others, some less so, some more propitious to the eventual development of life than others.
It should also be noted that life established itself on this planet very quickly, almost as soon as the rocks had cooled enough for water to collect. Evidence of living microbial processes extend back almost 3.8 billion years. Some of the oldest rocks on the planet (in Greenland) show accumulations of carbon indicative of not just a few stray microbes, but extensive colonies of them.
And this doesn't even address the fact that replicative chemical processes must have preceeded any replicating cell forms.
By all appearances, the processes which lead to cellular life were not fragile or rare on this planet, they were robust and plentiful. And once life got established, it survived several impact events which melted the surface of the planet and evaporated the oceans (six times this happened). It is theorized (with supporting evidence) that life survived by enduring in deep crust structures which stayed temperately viable to the microbes.
Amino acids are found in meteorites and replicative molecules were probably inevitible in the primordial conditions on the young Earth.
So what do you reckon to the chances of finding microbial life on Mars Ros? Personally I would think it most strange if there was not life of some sort there. And in the oceans of Europa?!! The mind boggles.
Seems to me the biggest question is not whether there are other life forms in the solar system but whether all life in the solar system has a common root.
Steve (as 41oo) wrote:So what do you reckon to the chances of finding microbial life on Mars Ros? Personally I would think it most strange if there was not life of some sort there. And in the oceans of Europa?!! The mind boggles.
Seems to me the biggest question is not whether there are other life forms in the solar system but whether all life in the solar system has a common root.
I agree on both counts Steve. That's why it's so valuable to know whether life existed on Mars. At this point, if it *didn't* exist there (at one time in the past), even in simplistic form, it would be a bit of a surprise in comparison to the processes we see evidence for here on Earth.
Many people are starting to think that Mars was actually may have been the first incubator of life in our solar system (because it cooled sooner), and may have "seeded" Earth very early on.
wandeljw wrote:Quote:Creationists say fossils back them up
(BY JIM STRATTON, The Orlando Sentinel, January 4, 2006)
CRYSTAL RIVER, Fla. - Most paleontologists look into the mouth of an allosaurus and see a prehistoric eating machine with a jaw full of flesh-tearing teeth.
Peter DeRosa peers into that mouth and sees the hand of God.
So, after careful consideration of the evidence, Peter DeRosa has determined that.... magic happened. Good job Pete.
rosborne,
Looking at the first two sentences is unintentionally humorous. If Mr. DeRosa had seen the hand of a caveman in the jaw, it would have been better support for his theory.
Ros has brought up a point that Ive always found interesting. The Isua Rocks of Greenland give us a highly "life support based" Carbonaceous shale that dates back to about 3.8 BY (+/- 3 weeks next Thursady). That would mean that life had its roots to a time shortly after the origin of liquid water on the planet. The many theories (actually hypotheses) of how water got here have at their roots , a suggestion that perhaps life "rode in" on cometary masses.
