jeremydschram said:
There is simply no plausible mechanism for the initial formation of the first life. I’ll round up and say 4 billion years for the first life on earth. Now I don’t disagree that at some point hydrophobic lipids could of made a ring and a speck of dust could of got in there blah,blah,blah, I know you know the rest.
It takes a remarkable amount of conceat to summarize the entire field studying abiogenesis as "blah, blah, blah". This is roughly the equivalent of summarizing black holes as "those dark things that eat stuff up in the sky".
If we kill that cell evolution states that given enough time that cell will eventually evolve alive again because all the pieces have already come together, no primordial soup needed.
I've studied evolution a long time and never heard anything even remotely close to this.
Obviously an event of this kind had to of taken place to bring the non-living alive. There has to be a repeatable testable mechanism for this occurrence. This could never be tested, of course, so we have to take it on faith, which is not science.
First, define "alive". That's non-trivial, and has yet to be done. There's a very fine gradation, it turns out (which is why the previous quote is completely bunk--if the first true cell died out, the protocells it was competing with would have still been around). Second, there are several repeatable, testable mechanisms by which this could have occurred--abiogenesis is more or less trying to figure out which happened. There's no faith here, only an unanswered question and far too many possible answers.
In a self-contained, sterile but life supporting medium, place a freshly killed cell and wait 4 billion years. Unfortunately that is nothing but a thought experiment. To convert this thought experiment to an actual one we have to convert the 4 billion years to 4 billion instances so that we would only have to wait a year. So if we did this experiment with 4 billion cells and waited 1 year do you honestly think one of those cells would come to life?
This has absolutely nothing to do with abiogenesis. Look into Hadean geochemistry sometime. Life didn't evolve on the Earth we know and love today--Earth today would have been poisonous to early life. And before you say "Well, use what it was back then!", the reason I said you should look into Hadean geochem is that we DON'T KNOW, not entirely anyway, what conditions life arose in. There are too many options, for one thing (hydrothermal vents, sea foam, calcite/clay mineral faces, etc). We have a sense of the bulk chemistry for these conditions, but the devil is in the details here.
I have no vested interest and simply do not care what mechanism exists whether it be just browning motion, a Frankenstein force, a higgs life on particle, whatever, but it is a fact that there is nothing in science to explain how this could have ever happen yet day after day in science book after science book they pretend that it does and this is simply wrong.
Nope. You're simply ignorant of the research being done.
Evolution is real undeniable force but it can only happen after life has started.
Nope. Evolution can occur in any system with heritable variation. And as I said, there's no hard and fast line between "alive" and "not alive". It's gradational.
Evolution does not explain how life started because evolution requires natural/sexual selection which can only happen after there is a self-replicating cycle.
Actually, it doesn't apply because it's A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PROCESS.
I understand the need to shut up the creationists and the intelligent design folks, but to just say evolution does what it simply can't just plain wrong and I really want someone with an intelligent skeptical mind to acknowledge this.
If I may, I suggest you stop getting your science data from the popular press and start getting it from real scientists. The press distorts things, and very few scientists that I've met make the error you're complaining about.
Who thinks life will "just happen" given enough time/instances?
This is every bit as bad as saying that abiogenesis is the same as evolution. NO ONE is saying, or has ever said, that life will "just happen" given enough time/instances. The actual theory is that life arose in specific conditions, which either no longer exist on Earth or are extremely rare on Earth. This is no different than any other chemistry equation--salts precipitate from solutions under the correct conditions, not merely if there's enough time/instances, for example.
Please learn the actual work being done on the questions you've raised. They're facinating questions, and the work is....well, to be honest it's extremely boring to read, but the implications are amazing. I suggest starting with Peter Ward's "Life As We Do Not Know It". It's easilly accessible (for an adult, anyway), and spends the first part of the book addressing these exact issues.
