The Origins Of Life Bristle With Puzzle And Paradox
I don’t think this story actually means what Excitable Chucky thinks it means
Some 3.9 billion years ago, a shift in the orbit of the Sun’s outer planets sent a surge of large comets and asteroids careening into the inner solar system. Their violent impacts gouged out the large craters still visible on the Moon’s face, heated Earth’s surface into molten rock and boiled off its oceans into an incandescent mist.
Yet rocks that formed on Earth 3.8 billion years ago, almost as soon as the bombardment had stopped, contain possible evidence of biological processes. If life can arise from inorganic matter so quickly and easily, why is it not abundant in the solar system and beyond? If biology is an inherent property of matter, why have chemists so far been unable to reconstruct life, or anything close to it, in the laboratory?
The origins of life on Earth bristle with puzzle and paradox. Which came first, the proteins of living cells or the genetic information that makes them? How could the metabolism of living things get started without an enclosing membrane to keep all the necessary chemicals together? But if life started inside a cell membrane, how did the necessary nutrients get in?
The questions may seem moot, since life did start somehow. But for the small group of researchers who insist on learning exactly how it started, frustration has abounded. Many once-promising leads have led only to years of wasted effort. Scientists as eminent as Francis Crick, the chief theorist of molecular biology, have quietly suggested that life may have formed elsewhere before seeding the planet, so hard does it seem to find a plausible explanation for its emergence on Earth.
So, what does Darwin’s theory say about this? Can it explain how life arose? Might there be more to the Universe that science can now explain? Could there be some guiding force? There is no doubt that species change over time, but, how? Where are all the mistakes? Why does everything seem linear? Why is the makeup of water so perfect? Why is gravity set at just the right degree? How did tiny little one cell life become a marvelous thinking species?
Science is about testing, retesting, changing one’s hypothesis, seeing where it takes you, until there is no doubt. Darwinism is a religion, practiced as dogmatically as Islamic fundamentalists practice their version of the word of Mohammed, in which no dissension is allowed.
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Posted by William Teach on June 18, 2009 1:00 pm
» Filed Under Agenda based science, News, Religious Humanism, Science/pseudo-science, Secular Humanism, religion
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4 Responses to “The Origins Of Life Bristle With Puzzle And Paradox”
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Syndicate Me
one of Darwin’s great mistakes was thinking that a cell was a simple blob of goo. from that perspective, it’s not hard to imagine a blob forming. but we today know a little more about the numerous complicated processes and machinery that are contained within a cell.
Darwin himself said: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case.”
Of course Darwin couldn’t find such cases with 19th century technology! But modern science has found plenty of such examples of “irreducible complexity”. I guess in this quote, Darwin was right.
I’m sorry to be a beast, but my blog is concerned with the field of Christian apologetics and I just did a 3-part series on origins.
The building blocks of life:
http://winteryknight.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/could-the-building-blocks-of-life-have-emerged-spontaneously-on-the-early-earth/
The origin of biological information:
http://winteryknight.wordpress.com/2009/06/11/could-life-have-emerged-spontaneously-on-the-early-earth/
The sudden appearance of phyla in the fossil record:
http://winteryknight.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/does-the-cambrian-explosion-disprove-darwinian-evolution/
This is a great argument for a designing intelligence – these particular effects in nature are quite beyond the reach of blind chance.
@jt
This is the basis of Michael Behe’s argument for irreducible complexity in the cell. He argues that certain machines in the cell like cilium and bacterial flagella are irreducibly complex. If you knock out any component, it stops working.
Evolution is not a theory about how life arose. Its a theory about adaptation and mutations over eons. And just because Darwin’s theory has undergone some modifications over the years, does not mean that overall it has been proven wrong. Evolution is a scientific fact, weather one likes it or not.