Is ID falsifiable by any kind of experiment?

As I told him before personal incredulity is no basis for a scientific argument. He needs to stick to the realm of religion.

You should remain silent, as you have nothing to contribute. No, we are talking about any UCA. Why does it need to be the last? First cells must have lived off of non-living material, don't you think? As being the first life, it had nothing else to feed on.Though I can imagine changing metabolism to feed on new sources, could cause faster reproduction. However, they would not be competing for the same resources then. Perhaps the "food" of the first life cells ran out anyway? I was clearly talking about the ratio between unaltered and mutated. Your point about absolute numbers does not really address my point. Hard to say, as we can only hypothesise what LUCA was like. Though I find it perculiar that the whole top part of the tree above fungi, insects, animals, etcetera, vanished without trace.We see many groups of species being able to survive relatively unaltered for hundreds of millions of years, around 1/10th or 1/20th of time since first life began. Crocodiles, snakes, spiders, musquitos, all existed in roughly the same form few hundred million years ago.So what happened to the whole branch leading upto the latest common ancestor of all mammals? The whole lineage of gradual changes, from cold-blooded to warm-blooded, from egg hatching to placental birth, from horizontal spine movement to vertical (and those are just the obvious changes), and side branches, all vanished without trace again? So much, that we can only guess and hypothesise about the order in which all these changes gradually happened. And why so many drastic changes happened to be all occuring in the same lineage, does not really fit the "random" mutation narrative.Same as we see how so many beneficial mutations just happen to be in the lineage of the single primate group with fused chromosomes. Not very likely, under the model that any drastic mutation could happen in any of the many primate groups.
And the first primate with fused chromosomes left no unaltered descendents or descendents with only minor alterations, still showing most resemblance to the primate group before fusion, more than to human appearance today.Common ancestry fails on every level, to match with observable data. No, for discussing how likely or how plausible common descent is, we can just look at all observations, objectively. There is no complete falsification that works for everybody. People can always tweak and adjust model assumptions and parameters, so that it somehow fit observations in their model. That's the problem with theory of common descent. It's basically a reasonable narrative, full of hypothesese of how things came to be.It may somewhat explain just the changes in adult form by random mutation, but it poorly explains the exact timing of cells, to initiate complete transformation in perfect unison, orgistrated in all the details of every transformed body part.

The “non-living material” does not have to run out. If the amount available at any given time is finite, then there will be competition and the less successful species will eventually become extinct.Faster reproduction does not require changing to a new diet, so that is still a way - and not the only one - in which competition could occur, and favour the newer organism.You have not addressed the issue of environmental hazards.Accordingly both objections stand.

And also full to overflowing with supporting evidence, from many diverse fields - the fossil record, comparative anatomy, embryology, genetics, molecular biology and phylogeny. All of these methods point to the same conclusions. They didn't have to; the answers could have been quite different, but they did. But your objection is formed from a religious belief, not scientific evidence. Not even a full history of every species' evolution over 3 billion years would change your mind.Your personal incredulity doesn't change the actual facts.​

No I will not stay silent.
You still have not made any rational scientific argument. You are still stuck at personal incredulity. To make an argument you must present more than that. For example evidence and an argument that with stands scrutiny. You have contributed nothing, but you should continue. Silencing your critics is never a rarely a good choice.

It's always nice to have a little irony in the morning. It can be UCA if you like, but you seem to be confusing it with first life, e.g.: Perhaps "There's not enough information to know the answer" might be a better response. One possibility is that life arose in an environment rich in organic molecules that would serve as food, so while the "non-living" appellation might be deserved, it isn't inorganic detritus.But you had claimed that the first life would populate the entire globe and ignored that there were constantly changing conditions and environments and hazards and competition. This is what PaulK pointed out to you in Message 493 and that you quoted here, but your response didn't address the objection. It actually does address your point, which was that the mutation rate is too slow to produce beneficial mutations. But when trillions and quadrillions and sextillions of cells are involved the number of mutated cells with potentially beneficial mutations is enormous, enabling them to outcompete the original populations. You can't pretend the covid virus mutations didn't replace previous less competitive versions of the virus in short order, mere months, because such huge numbers of viruses were involved. Something similar was true of cellular life on the ancient earth, except that the timeframes were enormous. We know LUCA was adopted to conditions present on the earth at that time, and those conditions do not resemble the current earth at all. Conditions today are unlikely in the extreme to be hospitable to very ancient life. One big difference is that the ancient earth had an atmosphere consisting of gases like methane, sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide. There was very little oxygen. Oceans were very different in composition, too. Either I don't understand you or you've got the tree of life analogy backwards. The most ancient life is down by the roots. The most modern life is out by the ends of branches. The top part of the tree is today. The roots are where UCA and LUCA are.The fate of most life is extinction, some with a trace, but most with no trace. What you're claiming to find peculiar is normal. Extremely few species or genuses have survived unchanged for hundreds of millions of years that we know of. You are right that species and genuses of creatures that looked much like modern mosquitos and spiders existed long ago, they just weren't the same ones that exist today. Snakes have only been around for about 130 million years, but I guess if you're not too picky anything that is long and tubular and slithers on the ground is just a snake. And about crocodiles, did you know that there used to be hundreds of species of crocodiles but that today there are only 24?Very, very few species have existed unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. As inevitable genetic change takes place over the generations, only ecological niches that exert the same or very similar environmental pressures can keep species molded into something very similar to what existed long ago, meaning they appear to have experienced little morphological change even though there's been a great deal of genetic change. Horseshoe crabs are one of the few exceptions, one species thought to have existed for hundreds of millions of years. But like I said, it's an exception. It doesn't have much company. Fossilization is extraordinarily rare in most environments, and some things even more rarely fossilize, such as anything small or soft. Evolutionary change is a response to environmental pressures. Species in a very stable environment will only experience genetic drift, while those in rapidly changing environments could experience either rapid evolutionary change or extinction. What we see in nature is evolution everywhere, with every species population running mutational experiments up the flagpole to see how they fly.You seem to be asking why don't we see the same types and rates of evolutionary change everywhere. That's like asking why the weather isn't the same everywhere. No one thinks any particular line is experiencing more beneficial mutations than any others, and what's beneficial is relative. Thicker fleece in the north is a real boon, but in the south not so much.What does happen is that a population that experiences a mutation that produces better adaptation, which means improved differential reproductive success, will be better able to compete and will likely produce more offspring, the ultimate determinate of success. I don't know why you're saying this. There's no indication that the human lineage experienced a different mutation rate than other related species going back to the chromosome fusion. Common ancestry is the only way life has ever been observed to come into this world, going back thousands and thousands of years with no reason to think it has ever been any different. What evidence are you looking at that indicates to you that at some time in the past life didn't descend from previous life? Well, yes, exactly. What observations call common descent into question? That's like saying "We need air to breath" is a reasonable narrative. Nothing is orchestrated in evolution. Mutations aren't ordered up as needed. They occur randomly. If they're bad, which they usually are, then they do not fare well. If they're good then they do fare well. If they're neutral then genetic drift governs what happens to them. That's all.The argument you're trying to make is clear. You're saying that the variety of tempo and pace in evolution indicates that it doesn't explain our observations, but you can't produce any observations inconsistent with it. And you're expressing doubt about common descent but cannot come up with a single example of life that isn't a result of common descent.--Percy

Hi sensei,Okay, firstly, if you are going to reply to multiple people in one post - which is fine - it would be super helpful if you could attribute each quote so we can all see who said what, like this; That's incorrect. We can reconstruct LUCA, to at least some extent, by looking at highly conserved gene sequences. You write as though we can only guess and that's simply not true, there are evidence based methods for studying LUCA. Huh? In the "Tree of Life" metaphor the "top" of the tree represents the most recent life, the extant species. The above/below axis on a tree of life or cladogram is simply time, ancient at the root, current at the top. You get that right? Because this is incredibly basic, entry level stuff and if you can't even get this straight, I don't see how you can hope to engage in meaningful discussion on this topic. For starters, not all of those go back "hundreds of millions of years, only spiders go that far back. The others go back around a hundred million years. Second, I think you are underestimating the variety within some of those groups. It may look to your untrained eyes as though they have barely changed, but it does not look that way to paleontologists. For example, Crocodilians only go back about a hundred million years, but their older relatives, Crocodilomorphs, which go back further are incredibly diverse. Take a look; Do they look "relatively unaltered" to you? If so, get your eyes checked.Most problematically though, you are comparing LUCA, a single celled organism to huge slow-breeding tetrapods like crocs. That is patently absurd. Do you mean Therapsids? They became extinct, except for mammals. You know a quick google could have told you this, just as five minutes of casual research on Wikipedia could have told you that butterflies did not evolve full metamorphosis. Just saying. That's quite the grab bag of examples. But "vanished without a trace"? WTF are you talking about? That's nonsense. There are traces. There are these things called "fossils", I don't know if you've heard of them. They are traces. Traces of extinct organisms. So nothing vanished without a trace, that's codswallop. Most of the specific species became extinct though, even if they left ancestor populations that survive to this day. I don't see how you can possibly dispute this. The fossil record is full of extinct species, entire lineages even. Extinction is the eventual fate of most species. Where's the problem? No? How so? This is another fundamental misunderstanding of what evolutionary theory is saying. We would not expect to see ancestor populations surviving "unaltered". They would evolve as well, The idea that a population could give rise to a daughter population and yet itself remain unaltered is a fantasy. No expert would predict that. Evolution has no fixed rate of change. Some groups diverge from their ancestors in big obvious ways, some barely change, remaining much closer to their basal state, but all populations undergo some degree of change. This is normal. This is how it is supposed to work and, not coincidentally, how it does work. You can objectively compare observations all you like, but if you want to topple the notion of universal common descent, there are only two ways; find an observation which falsifies the theory or find a better theory that has more explanatory power. Preferably both. Anything else is just intellectual masturbation. You got that right. There is no falsification. You have not falsified and cannot falsify universal common ancestry, the theory of evolution or anything else. That's,,, how it's supposed to work though. We adjust the theory to match the observations, because a theory that doesn't match the observations would clearly be wrong. That's how we progress in our scientific understanding. There are observations though which would be fatal for the ToE. There are potential observations which would falsify the ToE. You haven't shown us any and neither has anyone else. So the problem with the ToE is its immense reasonableness? I don't think that's quite the problem you seem to think it is. I've read through this a dozen times and I still have no idea what you're talking about. Sorry.Mutate and Survive

I'm replying again because I think my first answer to this was incomplete: ​
First, bisexual life never leaves behind "unaltered descendants." The mixing of sexual chromosomes guarantees that can't happen.Second, after the fused chromosome mutation both descendant species, the one that hadn't experienced the chromosome fusion and the one that had, continued experiencing mutations and evolving at the same rate as previously. The unmutated species did not cease experiencing mutations or experience them at a slower rate. The mutated species did not begin experiencing mutations at an increased rate. Both descendant species continued to experience mutations at roughly the same rate as previously.The chromosome-fused species that eventually became us did not much resemble us when the fusion occurred. And the species that did not experience that fusion did not much resemble whatever it eventually became, assuming it didn't become extinct.Third, of course when the chromosome fusion mutation event was in the recent past that species still greatly resembled its parent species. Other factors being equal, a mere hundred thousand years of evolution will produce far less change than millions.--Percy

Do you have any concrete evidence of environmetnal harards that happened to kill off all UCA and all closely related UCA species, globally? That is cute, but UCA is still far from logical and plausible, if one really bothers to look at data and test hypotheses, instead of sheepishly conforming to mainstream narrative. What part of the data or arguments that I posted, is religious? You are ignored, as you make false claims about me. Or you are just not capable of doing anything but repeating some of same the evolutionist handbook arguments, no matter how irrelevant. Typical evolutionist fool! You think first life was not an ancestor of todays life? Or only ancestor of some of todays life? Tell me, where is my confusion? You do know, that a virus is not even biologically considered to be alive, do you? It's not even a cell. And it's a parasite that needs hosts for survival. Trees can be drawn with either side up or down or left or right. Examples are plenty. You just refuse to accept them, and twist the data to fit into your ad hoc narratives. And then you evolutionists claim that common ancestry of life is a fact, while it's highly dubious at best.Look at all the life systems that are present in todays species, for nervous system, oxygen distribution, food digestion, reproduction system, etc, also present in species of hundreds of millions of years ago. There is no sign of gradual improvement. All systems were fully present from start, in single celled species as well as in microfauna, upto all larger animals.The huge variety of all life systems is evidence for intelligent origin. If it all came from random mutation, we would find most life systems to share some similar ancestral template, not fine tuned to the exact needs of every single species alive, from the very start.

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Do you have any concrete evidence of environmetnal harards that happened to kill off all UCA and all closely related UCA species, globally?
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The question of course is whether the LUCA should be expected to survive to the present day. There is in fact well-known evidence of an early environmental disaster that may well have caused a mass extinction. In fact it’s so well known that you really ought to know of it.Adding that issue to the problem of competition and it is quite implausible that the LUCA would survive to the present day.

I have gone through all your posts, again. There is no data, there is no argument. Please point out where you have posted an argument and have presented data.

Here's another request that when you reply to more than one message at the same time that you make clear which one you're replying to. A better question is why you think this is a reasonable question to ask. There are many species that have gone extinct in just the last 10,000 years for which we know no specific cause. We presume their circumstances changed. Why do you think we should know what caused the UCA extinction event billions of years ago? This is your opportunity to describe how you looked at the data and tested the hypotheses, and what your findings were. Intelligent design was found to be a transparently religious repackaging of creationism in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District in 2005. It is my hope to remain a participant and not have to shift back to a moderator role. If life arose only once as a single cell then UCA and the first life are the same thing, but the "one cell once" hypothesis is considered unlikely. There are other more likely possibilities, such as that life arose gradually as one or more populations of self-replicating molecules (possibly RNA) that gradually became increasingly complex. You were wondering how mutation could cause the original unmutated variants to be replaced, so I provided covid as an example of exactly that, of mutation producing improvements that allow one variant to outcompete and replace other variants. The principle for bacteria is precisely the same, for which I provided the example of tuberculosis evolving drug resistance. The important concept is branching with the flow of time being upward. If you present your examples of life that didn't come from previous life then we can assess them. In very broad terms, as we trace life back in time through the fossil record we find that warm bloodedness disappears, then air breathing disappears, then vertebrae disappear, then multicellular life disappears, the signs of life itself disappears. The early naturalists found that species were exceptionally well adapted to their environments, and the theory of evolution was developed to explain that exquisitely fine-tuned adaptation. In effect life is constantly carrying out mutational experiments in real world situations, and those mutations that improve adaptation carry forward to the next generation.--Percy