Yes - would you rather someone akin to John Oliver/Penn Jillette or someone akin to Bill Nye debate evolution with a creationist?
Evolution and abiogenesis
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Yes - would you rather someone akin to John Oliver/Penn Jillette or someone akin to Bill Nye debate evolution with a creationist?
Skeptic Ginger
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There is no right or wrong (except using abiogenesis to support Intelligent Design, that is an unsupportable position) on where you draw the line on the continuum. Technically one can define the two terms as different things. In that sense, they are not the same, just as fertilization of the egg is different from the egg's development.
But conceptually, it's a continuum. Did abiogenesis just randomly start? No, first you had to have amino acids, then proteins, then replicating molecules and so on. Did those stages of the process not involve evolution? Did life begin when the molecules started replicating? Did it begin when the molecules began repeatedly forming in the primordial soup? They likely didn't become replicating molecules in one single event that continued. It is more likely there were many molecules (RNA is generally the accepted first) and that some of those went on to replicate, but not a single one.
Does the continuum start when RNA began to emerge from the soup? Does it start when RNA precursors emerged?
I tend to see abiogenesis as an arbitrary line on the continuum but also analogous to the fertilization of the egg in the process of development of a life form.
But conceptually, it's a continuum. Did abiogenesis just randomly start? No, first you had to have amino acids, then proteins, then replicating molecules and so on. Did those stages of the process not involve evolution? Did life begin when the molecules started replicating? Did it begin when the molecules began repeatedly forming in the primordial soup? They likely didn't become replicating molecules in one single event that continued. It is more likely there were many molecules (RNA is generally the accepted first) and that some of those went on to replicate, but not a single one.
Does the continuum start when RNA began to emerge from the soup? Does it start when RNA precursors emerged?
I tend to see abiogenesis as an arbitrary line on the continuum but also analogous to the fertilization of the egg in the process of development of a life form.
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TubbaBlubba
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Abiogenesis involves a gradual shift from "dead" chemistry to "life". That shift would obviously involve the same principles and mechanisms that biological evolution works by - imperfect self-replication and natural selection. So clearly they are closely related. Of course, Evolution is not dependent on exactly how it occur (I favour geothermal vents underground) but abiogenesis is a part of the history of evolution on this planet.
Peregrinus
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It doesn't claim any such thing, and such a figure can only be obtained by problematic and selective manipulations of highly questionable comments in the OT. The "begat" of the OT can equally be translated as "was the father of" or "was an ancestor of" a given individual without specifying the intervening generations and actual numbers of years which are never presented in a chronological sense (nor were they originally meant to be). The date of 6004 BCE and "actually" October 13th at 9:00am Greenwich Mean Time (!) was concocted by Bishop James Ussher of Ireland in a work published in 1650.
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What Darwin originally described was 1) Evolution by Natural Selection and the presumes some form of inheritance of characteristics. 2) Evolution by sexual selection. E.g. Peacocks tails. More modern evolutionary theory suggests that natural selection often stabilises species whilst loss of selective pressures may allow speciation. So I think you need to define a bit what you mean by evolution. Change happens but I guess the most important concept in evolution is that there is some sort of directive force.
I am not sure one can apply evolution easily to abiogenesis. Thermodynamics will dictate a direction of chemical reaction that is not evolution.
I disagree.
The classic definition of life is that living organisms exhibit the following behaviours
- Nutrition
- Respiration
- Excretion
- Growth
- Reproduction
- Movement
- Response
There is absolutely no reason to suppose that there was a soup of organic compounds that exhibited none of these and then they came together to exhibit all.
It looks to me as though reproduction would come first - after all we can replicate RNA/DNA chemically already. Once that is kicked off with an electrochemical gradient in place of the internal Respiration, Nutrition, and Excretion, then these would be subject to evolution - this is little difference from a virus hijacking a cell to do the same thing, and viruses are not considered to be alive of themselves.
Some of the self-replicating molecules would be better at replicating in groups with other types of molecules, and whilst far from being alive, there would be evolution of these groups of molecules. If you then get a situation where one group of molecules makes a membrane that keeps a population of molecules together, then you are pretty much of the way to cells. You would have discrete populations of molecules in discrete packages that reproduce when there is an external electrochemical gradient, but doesn't share the other characteristics of life.
If one of these packages then develops its own way of maintaining the electrochemical gradient, you have respiration and excretion as well as nutrition. It's just a matter of time before the rest arise then.
Aepervius
Non credunt, semper verificare
No. Then it is a debate that you will ALWAYS lose. Because there is no evidence of supernatural and people believing in it did not arrive it by reason. You mostly can't use reason to convince somebody away from a conclusion which they did not come to by reason.
If this was that easy there would no creationist whatsoever. The simple fact is that they reject reason in favor of belief.
That is why the debate has to be framed into fact & evidence ("observation of evolution of form") leading to a theory ("natural selection"). Any reframing into natural vs supernatural is lost and shifting (giving) creationism a credible equivalent position. It does not have such.
This is , sorry to say it, a crap reframing.
abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
Evolution deals with what happens once life already exists. It doesn't care what the origin of that life might have been.
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The two are inextricably linked. Why do you think there are so many experiments in biology to recreate primordial conditions and get life from organic compounds? If it happens, it will be big news, because evolution theory is not complete without an explanation of how life began.
It's like that old creationist saying, "Give me one miracle, and I can explain everything else."
No, it's not. Let's imagine that life was created by magic and then left to fend for itself. It would still evolve.
Abiogenesis and evolution are entirely separate things. We just happen to know that both of them happen. For one, at one point there was no life, and now there is. How did that happen? Secondly, we know that the life that does exist changes over time in adaptation to its environment. How does that happen?
They are two completely different questions about wholly different events.
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Yes, which is why I think this is so interesting
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...tor-of-all-life-on-earth-was-only-half-alive/
Although they might have missed the relevant genes due to being conservative.
I don't think biologists who believe in the standard account of evolution would be satisfied with a magical explanation for how life originated- Let there be life!-, and the discussion is about naturalism vs creationism, and whether going after abiogensis is a fair tactic.
If a natural explanation for abiogenesis doesn't eventually emerge (if experiment after experiment can't account for it), it would be a major problem for evolution. The door to "intelligent design" would get wider and wider as the failed experiments pile up.
I think one of these days fairly soon, we'll probably have some plausible evidence-based account for how life began. If I were a creationist, though, I would attack the failure to explain abiogenesis as evidence for intelligent-guided abiogensis, and then jump from there to intelligent design.
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Skeptic Ginger
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So you don't think chemical reactions are going on at the molecular level of the replication of RNA and DNA? You don't think natural selection pressures operate at the molecular level?
Skeptic Ginger
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Again, you can define evolution to only mean, after abiogenesis, and define abiogenesis as something else, OR, you can look at the process in it's entirety and see that the steps getting to abiogenesis followed a similar process evolving amidst selection pressures that led to abiogenesis.
It's like arguing that fertilization is not part of the pregnancy.
Skeptic Ginger
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So what process preceded abiogenesis?
Electromagnetism?
I know the physics and chemistry behind abiogenesis and evolution is the same. I'm saying that they are not the same thing and that one does not truly require the other, and attacking abiogenesis does not attack evolution.
So let's say 200 years from now we still don't have a definitive account of abiogenesis, just a bunch of failed experiments and various theories without any consensus.
You don't think evolution theory would be harmed by this? I think it would catastrophic. Evolution is a theory that explains how life forms change over time. Of course it needs a plausible explanation of how life began in the first place. Otherwise, it's like what Skeptical Ginger said: You're trying to explain pregnancy without talking about fertilization.
This is true. It is an important. Many of the biological words NOW used to discuss evolution are too specific to include abiogenesis. The words that we use NOW are specific to life as it manifests TODAY.
You pointed out that evolution is not specific to biological systems. Much of the specificity that we see in biological processes hypothetically happened in stages. Therefore, the phylogenic precursors of biological processes can't properly be described by words that were coined for a processes that had already evolved to interlock in a very specific way.
Darwin never used the words 'gene', 'allele', or 'mutation' in ANY of his books. He refereed to his theory as 'modification with descent', not 'evolution'.
He used words like 'feature', 'variation' and 'spontaneous chance variation'. The words are still being used now, although they still have a very broad meaning.So a modern discussion of evolution sounds nothing like 'Origin of the Species'.
That was mostly the ignorance of the biochemistry and microbiology of living things. Scientists hadn't identified genes, alleles and specific mutations yet. The words weren't coined until Mendel's work was publicized. The word mutation didn't come about until Morgan did that work with fruit flies. The scientific words that were coined after Darwin died helped scientists avoid ambiguity.
These scientific words now have meaning far too specific to encompass the new discoveries. New research findings and modern technology has found phenomena that see to be on the edge of the so called biological phenomena.
None of the modern words used in biology can be applied to abiogenesis. Suppose that we find on a a crystal made of amino acids that grows and sometimes breaks off small crystals. Is that crystal growth or metabolism? Is that merely breaking or is it reproduction? As in all crystal growth, there are atomic scale defects that spontaneously occur randomly. Is this spontaneous formation of defects or is it mutation? Darwin may have called it spontaneous variation, but no one uses that
So Darwin's vocabulary may be useful! I read articles by scientists trying to describe transgenerational epigenetics, claiming that it may sometimes contribute to evolution. 'Transgeneration epigenetics' involves inheritance that doesn't use the formally defined genes and alleles. Yet, this type of inheritance could easily fall within the description that Darwin himself gave.
The theory of evolution is a metatheory, not a specific theory. Darwin did not know any of the microscopic and atomic scale processes in living things. He came to conclusions that were quite valid on a macroscopic level but had no support on a atomic and molecular level. The biochemistry of reproduction and metabolism as we learn it now are just plain theories. By plain theory, I mean something with a rather unambiguous mechanism on an atomic and molecular level.
The problem with modern words in biology is that their usage has become tied to the specific theories, not the metatheory. A desert locust can change from a solitaire to a swarmer due to hormones in the food it eats. Its children (juveniles) inherit its state of development. A scientist that observes this inheritance may call it a mutation. However, there is no 'gene' associated with the inheritance. There is no cite on the DNA of a chromosome that is specific to the swarming state. There are genes that are turned on and off, but they don't change sequence. Better that the scientist call it a 'spontaneous variation' until he knows more.
I am really amused at the debates that I have heard on 'gene duplication'. It is even misused by scientists in articles. Sometimes it means something very specific. I actually heard a scientist say that gene duplication is not a mutation. However, some other scientist will say that evolution is caused by the natural selection of mutations ONLY. So that means that evolution can't occur through gene duplication. Then someone will say that it must be a mutation because it contributes to evolution. Then someone else will say that gene duplication couldn't be mutation because the methods used in decoding the genome couldn't detect any gene duplications, even if they occurred.
New flash: lots of evolution came about through gene duplication.
I propose that scientists go back to Darwin's vocabulary when studying things at the edge. We should go back to referring to mutation-like phenomenon as 'spontaneous variation'. Instead of allele, we can call it 'an inherited variation'. If a scientist actually discovers the site on a chromosome that changed, we could THEN call it an allele.
You may think this is just semantics. However, misused language often slows down discovery.
The problem becomes really bad when it comes to abiogenesis. Some of our oh so early ancestors could have been rocks. The precursors to cells may have been crystal defects in the minerals.
In those days, the metabolism and the reproduction of crystal defects were not specifically interlocked. What we call a gene may have been monomer nucleic acids adsorbed to the crystal surface. Now, the defect may have reproduced inefficiently without the rest of the cell. Their success rate at making exact duplicates of themselves may have been only 1%. There would be no true metabolism, just unspecific reactions catalyzed at the surface.
I would argue that the evolution of these crystal defects very much followed the metatheory described in 'Origin of the Species'. Yes, it is evolution as Darwin would have seen it. However, referring to the nucleic acid as a gene is a bit much. Referring to the catalysis as metabolism would be much. It is not evolution the way a modern scientist would see it because the organism is too inefficient.
I recommend 'Origin of the Species' to everyone, ESPECIALLY biochemists who work with genes. A lot of biochemists learn all the theories but don't understand the metatheories.
Delvo
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The main problem with separating abiogenesis and post-abiogenesis evolution is that it's just a way of wiggling away from Creationist arguments that focus on abiogenesis instead of on subsequent evolution. I know those arguments are harder to really answer than the ones about post-abiogenesis evolution, but the harder ones need to be confronted and knocked down just as much as the easy ones do, or more, and merely trying to get away from them makes it look like they would be your downfall.
It's the same problem as with the recent attempt to redefine evolution in terms of "allele frequencies" just so there would be more examples to point to and say "that's evolution" even though you know perfectly well that it's not what people, including yourself, really mean by that word in any other context but the Creationism debate.
Inventing equivocations to act semantic-pedantic over is not a way to win a debate; it's a way to avoid it... which equals avoiding winning.
It's the same problem as with the recent attempt to redefine evolution in terms of "allele frequencies" just so there would be more examples to point to and say "that's evolution" even though you know perfectly well that it's not what people, including yourself, really mean by that word in any other context but the Creationism debate.
Inventing equivocations to act semantic-pedantic over is not a way to win a debate; it's a way to avoid it... which equals avoiding winning.