Summations Only

Rahvin writes:Your metaphor here really just doesn't work. I understand you're going for a historical approach, that understanding the present is predicated on an understanding of the past, but you're missing the point a bit.Evolution is an observed fact. We know that it happens. We've directly observed it. You can observe a quickie version of evolution any time yourself by observing a population of organisms with a fast reproduction rate (the "slowness" of evolution is of course because change is small and can only increment by generations, which can be bypassed somewhat through the use of fruit flies or bacteria as examples) and artificially adding some selection pressure that may duplicate a possible environment change in nature. It's not hard - it's so easy in fact that undergraduate biology students do this every semester in universities around the world.Evolution, too, describes a great deal of the past. Your metaphor regarding family medical history actually describes evolution, not the relationship between evolution and abiogenesis. The Theory of Evolution predicts that traits are passed from parent to child with slight modification, and this means that an understanding of your family history can give a doctor an idea of what potential traits you may have inherited, and it's a lot cheaper and faster than examining your complete genome for specific risk factor genes.As I've described to Buz, evolution is inevitable given just a few prerequisites:1) life must exist
2) resources needed for life must be limited
3) life must reproduce such that traits are inherited from parent to child, but with slight modification.We've run computer simulations by the hundreds feeding in just exactly those prerequisites...and lo and behold, the simulated population of organisms change over time. The mechanism is obvious - if I take a population of birds, and I kill off the least colorful 25% before they can reproduce, then obviously the 75% remaining, who are more colorful, will pass their colorful traits on to their children, and the subsequent generation will be slightly more colorful on average. If I do this for a few dozen generations, I can wind up with a population of birds significantly more colorful than my original population.The only way the mechanism would ever not work that way is if one of the prerequisites above were taken away. If resources were completely unlimited, for example, and every individual in a population had the same ability to survive and reproduce with no fear of predators or other selective pressures, then you wouldn't tend to see a lot of change in the population of successive generations. If you remove the inheritance of traits, then "successful" traits don't get passed on. If there's no variability between generations, no mutations, then change can never happen, and the population will always be a cohesive set of clones no matter how long we breed them. And if life doesn't exist, well...what exactly would we be breeding?Abiogenesis is one possible starting point for life on Earth. It looks the most likely to me and scientists in general, but it's not the only option. To carry your family history metaphor to a more accurate description, imagine that you had a very good knowledge of your family's genealogy back to your great great great grandfather...but you don't know who his father was. His mother had multiple husbands, you see, and you aren't certain if your branch of the family is actually descended from John Jackson, or Jack Johnson. Your great great great great grandfather's birth date is too smudged on the old birth certificate to know whether it matches up to Johnson or Jackson.You don't know the origin of your family tree, but you do know the rest. And the parts you do know still fit, whether you're actually descended from a Jackson or a Johnson.Evolution has a similar relationship with abiogenesis. There are several conceivable possibilities to explain the origin of life on Earth...but the Theory of Evolution describes how life changed after that origin into the diverse biology we see today. If abiogenesis originated life, then evolution took over and the mechanism of descent with modification guided by natural selection diversified life from a single organism to all of the organisms that exist and have ever gone extinct. If YAHWEH magically Created a few original organisms out of dust, then evolution took over and the mechanism of descent with modification guided by natural selection diversified life from the original created organisms into all of the organisms that exist and have ever gone extinct. If aliens from another planet or even reality created the first Earth-bound life form, then evolution took over, etc.Abiogenesis is a hypothesis regarding the origin of life. The Theory of Evolution is the description of the mechanism that causes life to change over time.Imagine that I don't know the identity of the inventor of the internal combustion engine, but I do know the details of the development of all f the internal combustion engines in use today and over the last few decades. Does the identity of the first inventor potentially validate or invalidate my knowledge of engine history? No! Of course not. Regardless of the origin, my knowledge of the history of the combustion engine rests solely on the evidence I used to build that knowledge in the firt place. If the original inventor turns out to be different from the person I thought was most likely, Ford still made all of the engines I thought they made in the intervening time - the origin is nice to know but irrelevant, at least so far as confirmation or falsification of my existing knowledge.So too with evolution and abiogenesis. If abiogenesis is confirmed to be the absolutely certain origin of life on Earth tomorrow, the Theory of Evolution would be unaffected - it would neither be additionally confirmed, nor contradicted. If conversely abiogenesis were absolutely falsified with 100% certainty tomorrow, the Theory of Evolution would not also be falsified, nor would it be confirmed. The origin is a separate issue from the mechanism that governs life after it exists.The inventor of the internal combustion engine is a separate issue from the physics and chemistry that allow the mechanism to work once the engine is built.If we discovered that Henry Ford was a mythical figure who never really lived, that doesn't mean the Ford Model-T sitting in the automotive museum doesn't exist.I'm still pretty convinced that abiogenesis is by far the most likely origin of life on Earth, Chuck. Don't get me wrong. But the evolution-abiogenesis relationship is a logical non-sequitur. The veracity or falsehood of evolution does not follow from the veracity or falsehood of abiogenesis, and vice versa. They both depend on different evidence. The evidence supporting evolution is not the same as the evidence that supports abiogenesis.

Taq writes:Let's say that God created a simple RNA replicator 4 billion years ago on Earth

Percy writes:Abiogenesis is a non-biologic origin of life

We certainly don't know much about itt

No one's trying to pull a shell game on you. We're merely explaining the science.

Is there no position so untenable you won't argue for it?

Chuck77 writes:The reason I think people seperate them is because it isn't true. The "soup" and the TOE. I don't think you can reconcile the two because there isn't evidence for it. Soup to RNA/DNA. You can't just say "what if". And what IF God didn't create a simple RNA replicater? Then what did? That's my point. That's what people can't answer, and that's why they are seperated.

Stupid is as stupid does.

My position that a valid scientifically supportive abiogenesis, i.e. biopoesis is a needful prerequisite to the alleged ToE remains effectively unrefuted by evolutionists who have participated in this thread.