How did food evolve?

Is this guy for real? I guess some people have no idea where their food comes from except the supermarket.

There's no such thing as "raw energy" or "life energy." It's not that complex. It's just chemistry. Living things didn't evolve chemistry; they started as chemistry. Using available local energy sources for life processes is life, so the first living things started out being able to do this. As life evolved, it evolved a metabolism that could take advantage of more complicated chemical reactions and different energy sources - like the sun.If you can imagine the first simple replicator, it would be something like an enzyme made of naturally-occurring building blocks (like those developed in the Urey experiments) that could catalyze more of itself from those same blocks. Its food source and its building blocks would have been the same thing. Indistinguishable. It wouldn't have needed any other energy because the catalyst would have made the reaction entropically favorable. The need to have energy for entropically unfavorable reactions would have come much, much later.Ultimately, the source of energy for all living things on Earth is the sun. Plants store the sun's energy by using it to power a reaction that turns water and carbon dioxide into sugar and gaseous oxygen (photosynthesis), and then the plant - and anything that eats the plants - uses those sugars, combined with oxygen, to power cellular processes.So, to answer your question - before photosynthesis evolved, organisms were chemosynthetic - they took advantage of the energy that comes from certain chemical reactions. This is fairly simple if all you are is a chemical reaction, as the first proto-life surely was.

The question isn't whether it's simple or complex. Water forming intricate, unique ice crystals is the result of complex interactions between electrons in water molecules; but it just happens when it gets cold. In that sense, it's very simple. You still don't get it. Chemical reactions aren't converted into life; chemical reactions are life. What we mean when we say that something is "alive" is that a bunch of chemical reactions are all happening inside of bags (which we call "cells"). You're just a trillion little bags where chemical reactions are happening inside of water. You're not using them for life; your life is what those reactions are.Life didn't have to evolve the ability to to use energy. Life is using energy. That's what life is - chemical reactions that use available energy sources and materials to perpetuate themselves. The laws of physics and chemistry. Life is the inevitable, if rare, result of certain conditions - that just happened by random, in one planet in one galaxy in the whole universe, that we know of. (Suggesting that it's fairly rare indeed.)Just like a chemical reaction is inevitable when certain chemicals are put together, life is inevitable under the right conditions.

The laws of physics. Combustion is chemistry. When a forest burns down because a tree was struck by lightning, would you ask "where did this chemistry come from?" When iron, left out in the elements, combines with oxygen to form rust, would you ask "where did this chemistry come from?"No, of course not. Chemistry is what happens when atoms follow the laws of physics, and they all do. (That's why we call them "laws.") They don't have to be made to do so. It's just what happens. Chance creates randomness. A chance process creates random output. When you take that output and separate the good from the bad, the adapted from the maladaptive - the fittest from the weak - you have evolution. I guess you're completely unaware how many truly great inventions - vulcanized rubber, the telephone, spirits, vaccines, medicines, matches, the microwave, explosives - were invented by accident.Have you never heard of someone solving a problem by "trial and error"?

No, it is. There's no such thing as life that isn't chemicals, reacting.When you life your spoon? Chemical reaction. When you see a sunset? Chemical reactions occur in your eyes in response to light. When you think? Chemical reactions occurring in and between neurons in your brain.It's all chemistry. See "all dentists are doctors, but not all doctors are dentists" for the repudiation of this idiotic reasoning. I said life was chemistry. I didn't say all chemistry was alive. Those things are chemical reactions occurring in the body. The reason you don't know this is because you don't know anything about bodies, so life seems like magic to you. It seems like bodies are animated by some "life force", but this is a false view of living things. This is called "vitalism" and it has been discredited for centuries. There's no such thing as life force or life energy. It is. When I feel, it's because cells in my fingertips undergo reactions in response to pressure. Those reactions cause neurons to undergo reactions, and those reactions cause other reactions; a whole chain reaction that ends with neurons in my brain undergoing reactions, and since that's why my consciousness is - chemical reactions - I'm conscious of feeling something.It's all chemistry. I don't know how you could be ignorant of that. That's 100% wrong. You have to know that. If that's true, what is life if it can cause chemistry?If life isn't chemistry, what is it? How can we measure it? Where can it be seen?Nowhere, because we know that life is chemistry. All scientists accept this; it's one of the most fundamental facts. Why don't you? They never set out to create life - just amino acids - so the experiment was a complete success. And it proves that the chemistry of life is the same as the chemistry of anything else. The Miller-Urey experiment, in fact, proves the exact opposite of what you're saying. It proves that there's nothing special or different about what's going on in living things - it can be done in test tubes just as well as in cells.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Nowhere. They've always been part of the universe for as long as there's been a universe. It's not possible to have a universe that doesn't have laws of physics.It's like asking "when did circles evolve roundness." It's not evolution's problem that it doesn't address nonsensical questions. It's a stupid question, though. We don't have to ask why the laws of physics apply to wood in a forest just as they do to iron in the rain; they apply everywhere. That's why they're called "laws." It's like asking how gravity knows to pull you down into your seat. It's a nonsense question that only someone deeply immature would find profound. It's a way of fooling yourself into thinking that foolishness is wisdom. I never said that they had. Are you capable of responding to my arguments, or must I grapple with your extreme disingenuousness all night long? It does and has, in experiments and under observation. And those mutations are selected against. Mutations that are beneficial are selected for. If you have a big pile of mutations, most bad and some good, and you take away all of the bads one, surely even you can imagine what must be left?100, or even 1,000,000 to one is good odds if you know that the 999,999 others will be eliminated before they even play. The organisms dies. Are you saying that no organism has ever died, ever?

You're 100% wrong, though. Look it up. These are examples of things that were created by people who didn't know how to make them - they were made by accident, usually as they were trying to make something else.That's what I meant by "created by accident." Trial and error works. Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you spill some lead into the rubber and drop it on the stove. If you wear shoes or drive on tires, be glad that's exactly what happened to Charles Goodyear.Like I said if you think I'm lying you can look it up. Are you saying nothing was ever invented by accident? You would have to be extremely foolish to think so. True, but living things aren't machines. They're living things. They're like machines, in some ways - like in the way they work according to the laws of physics, not by magic - but very different in other ways, like the way that living things are the result of evolution. No need, someone did it for me: Sayz Me - free text-to-speech reader - make the computer talk - accessibility software - page magnifier - reading on screenYou keep saying all these things can't be done, and then I go and look and they've been done already. Why are you so relentlessly negative?

Um, "neutrons" don't fire; neurons send each other chemical signals in response to signals they receive.Why do they fire when they do? A neuron fires its axon when its recieved enough impulses in its dendrites to exceed its "excitation threshold". It's another chemical reaction. Which we know are controlled by the brain and influenced by hormones. Haven't you ever met a woman with PMS? What do you think causes all that disruption to her emotions? Her hormones.Why do you think we can treat depression with pills? Because it's chemical reactions. It should be stupendously obvious that feelings, emotions, and thinking are all chemical reactions - which is why they can be affected chemically. If thinking isn't chemistry, then why can drugs change how you think? How could you possibly get drunk or high if chemistry wasn't involved?I could go on all day. There's a million examples to show how stupendously wrong you are right now. Nonsense. Of course they're not. Psychological pharamcology wouldn't exist if they were "beyond the physical." Brain damage wouldn't change your emotions if they were "beyond the physical", but it does. There's never been one that we know of. Which is why I think it's basically impossible. Either way, though, we're both arguing from a position of ignorance. You don't know that you're right, and you don't know that I'm wrong. I don't think questions with no answers are very interesting, but I can see how you might be obsessed with pointless questions like "why is there a universe." I can't think of anything less interesting than a question where we have to just make up the answer. It's the laws of physics. Pure iron in oxygen can't not rust. At some point, you need to get over fake mysticism and get some work done - don't you think? That you can find the commonplace amazing isn't proof against evolution - it's proof that I'm talking to someone who doesn't have a rational mindset. I don't know. Probably just one, which begins to catalyze the same reaction over and over again, making more of itself.We may never know for sure how it works because the fossil evidence is long gone, and the very presence of living things on Earth prevents those initial conditions from ever happpening again. Once abiogenesis happens, it never happens again - living things gobble up all the chemicals the process needs. There's always chemicals. Everything is a chemical.But the inorganic origin of organic chemicals was what the Miller-Urey experiment was designed to study, and that's just what they got - organic chemicals from inorganic processes. It was a complete success in that regard. Nonsense; there are plenty of good mutations. Less than the bad ones, but there are less bad ones than neutral ones. Why don't you ask yourself? You have between 5 and 50 mutations of your very own - and those are just your germline mutations. If you've ever gone outside in the sunlight, there are millions of mutations in the cells of your skin and the layers just underneath.But you're still alive, aren't you? Because I've observed good ones. I've read about more. I've seen organisms evolve beneficial features through mutation. I've been involved with the research.Have you done anything except read creationist websites? I haven't ever insulted you. I've just pointed out where you've been dishonest. I haven't even called you ignorant, despite the obvious fact that you're well out of the depth of your knowledge.

Right. Something you said couldn't be done. Machines couldn't speak, you said, but there's one of a thousand different programs that will make your computer speak anything you tell it to.How many times do you have to be wrong before you understand what I'm trying to tell you? It has machine-like qualities, as I said. "Having been designed", though, is clearly a quality that it does not possess.

Oh, you're talking about machine learning? We've been doing that for two decades. The most recent result of that research has been face-recognition software - you can't program a computer to recognize a face, but you can program a computer to learn and to be taught, and then you can teach it to recognize faces.I suggest you read this article: Machine learning - WikipediaAnd then follow some of the links where they show specific machine learning systems. If you say it looks designed then you don't know anything about it. What designer would design the human retina to be inside-out? That's right - the nerves and blood vessels that connect to the light sensitive cells are on top of them, where they block a lot of the light. In one spot - the blind spot - the need for the nerve bundle to punch through the retina to go to the brain prevents light-sensitive cells from even growing. That's why you're blind there.Who would design something like that? It doesn't make any sense. Most organisms have retinas that are right-side out. That's intelligent design? More like stupid design.

Would a perfect God make even a little mistake? How does that make any sense?

This is circular reasoning. No matter what the human body is like, you'd define it as "intelligently designed."It's just a nonsense argument. The human body has the superficial appearance of design, but it evaporates as you look closer, and we have an enormous amount of evidence that proves that it's all just the result of evolution. I'm pretty sure my wife and I can. Without even hardly trying, even. In fact it's a lot harder to not make a human, doing what we do. If you build a car, but you build the headlights so that they point backwards at the engine instead of towards the road, we're entitled to wonder if maybe, just maybe, you're not as great as you're claiming to be.

What? That's not even a complete sentence.

In what way, uninformed? I've got his book on my coffee table right now and speaking as a former Christian (who was one for years and is familiar with theology at all levels) I didn't encounter a single thing I thought Dawkins was misinformed or uninformed about. You don't have to be a tailor to see that the emperor has no clothes. You don't have to have memorized every magic item in the Dungeon Master's Guide to know that Dungeons and Dragons is just a game.It's certainly true that he didn't interview literally every believer about their belief in God, but that hardly seems necessary. Is that why you're calling him ignorant? Because he didn't have a response for literally every variation of theist woo?I'll tell you what, though; for all Dawkins' book is criticized for being shoddy reasoning, I've not seen a single refutation that wasn't based entirely in disingenuity. For instance, most recently, Alistair McGrath's book. Less than a third the length of Dawkins' book, it largely accomplishes that feat of economy by grappling with strawmen. If God exists, why isn't it possible to defend that position from atheists without being disingenuous? If atheist arguments are so impotent, why is it that they're only every refuted as strawmen?

Don't we have a God Delusion thread? I thought we did.And that's not getting into the fact that I was pretty sure it was you a while back who called shenanigans on voicing contentious opinions and then demanding that they not be discussed.