evolution

[rapture101]

Evolution.....I know that some people think that we evolved from apes or what ever. But my question is how did they get here if not by God.How did the earth get here? How did everything get here? from what I see everything got here by evolving.(thats the argument that some present me) But how did the first little spec of life get here?

[McCulloch]

How did the first little spec of life get here?
We really don't know, do we? There are two ways to approach this question.

1. By Faith. It is a mystery that we do not understand, therefore, it must have been done by a supernatural being, God.
2. By Science. It is a mystery that we do not understand yet. Therefore, we must look carefully at whatever evidence we can find to try to progress towards a more full understanding of this issue.

[micatala]

Hi rapture.

How did the first little speck of life get here?

I think the short and honest answer is 'we don't know.' I think most scientists, even those that have made some hypotheses about how this might have happened by natural causes, would admit this.

However, even if we never find out, and even if we hypothesize that God did it, we still have ample evidence that the explanation provided by evolution for how life diversified over time is a good one.

One does not need to know where or how a person was born to be able to create an accurate history of his adult life.

[Rob]

How did the first little speck of life get here?

I think the short and honest answer is 'we don't know.' I think most scientists, even those that have made some hypotheses about how this might have happened by natural causes, would admit this.

I think Micatala makes a good point, and regarding the Origin of Life there is ample evidence it is a separate issue from the fact and mechanisms of evolution.

However, even if we never find out, and even if we hypothesize that God did it, we still have ample evidence that the explanation provided by evolution for how life diversified over time is a good one. One does not need to know where or how a person was born to be able to create an accurate history of his adult life.

And our understanding of the mechanisms and paths of evolution are only getting better with the passing of time, especially given the fact that we are now beginning to unravel the relationship between the core conserved processes that provided the biological foundation upon which evolutionary change is built. We are for the first time linking up the developmental genetics of evolution with the population level studies and learning the actual gentic, biochemical (molecular biology), and devepmental pathways of past transformations in morphology. While we still have a long ways to go, the fact is for the first time we have cracked the black box of development on the molecular level and it has opened the door to a whole new understanding and growth in our knowledge of the mechanisms and paths of evolutionary development.

It is a real exciting time to be in biology; we are just starting to crack the 5th-base (i.e., epigenetics) on a level that also will cause in time a leap in the level of our knowledge about how the genome relates to the environment. This is the time to tell our children not only what we know, but what we don't know but now have the tools to discover if we can only enourage bright young minds to believe they can be the next Noble Prize Winner for finding the cause of, for example, MS or some other disease plaguing humanity.

[juliod]

I wrote a really nice article for this thread earlier, and my computer crashed right before I was ready to post it.

Here's a summery:

1) I'm not happy with the answers that have been posted so far. I think saying "we don't know" is a bit unsatisfying.

2) The questions about the origin of life is complicated by the difficulty in defining life.

3) There is not difference between "life" and "non-life". This erroneous assessment come from the early days of chemistry when they observed carbon compounds in living things and other types of compounds in minerals, rocks, etc.

4) The answer to the question of where did the first lump of life come from is that it evolved from it's predecessor. If you choose to call that predecessor "non-living" that is your determination, and it is quite artificial.

5) The first "living" things were probably very different from what is alive today. Probably just a self-replicating chemical system. Once some sort of replication is achieved (and the first such systems could be very inefficiant and of low fidelity) natural selection will drive evolution forward.

6) Even though we can never know how it actually happened, we do know that the chemical processes carried out by living things today can be carried out with little difficulty by non-living chemical systems. There is no "missing link" in abiogenesis, nor is there any sort of "magic" step that we can't see how it could have happened.

DanZ

[QED]

Perhaps it's worth remembering that all "living things" are made from the same atoms as "non living things". Certain arrangements of atoms give rise to subsequent arrangements and we can witness the transfer of the property we term "life" in a continuum of activity at this level during reproduction. Whether or not we consider atoms to be "alive" it is their intrinsic properties that give rise to the possibilities resulting in structures such as stars planets and life on planets. I would argue that all these possibilities were present from the moment the universe condensed. What it was that made all this possible is a separate question from what happened thereon. Evolution is nothing more than trial and error. Even the wind can try things and nothing natural is immune to error.

[micatala]

Our local PBS station had a program on last night discussing the possibility that meteors brought organic material to earth.

See Exploring Space: The Search for Life

The noted that, starting about 400 million years ago, a steep increase in the rate of bombardment occurred, and that this coincided with an increase in evolutionary activity. This suggested the hypotheses that the organic material from the meteors, or possibly the adaptations that were required for organisms to survive in an environment changed by massive or smaller meteor impacts, fueled the evolutionary activity.


So yes, we do have reasonable or at least plausible hypotheses, just not a very high degree of confidence in any particular theory about how life arose, at this point.

[Rob]

The origin of life is a complex but active research area with many interesting avenues being investigated, though there is not yet consensus on the sequence of events that led to living things. But at some point in Earth's early history, perhaps as early as 3.8 billion years ago, life in the form of simple single-celled organisms appeared. Once life evolved, biological evolution became possible.

Although some people confuse the origin of life itself with evolution, the two are conceptually separate. Biological evolution is defined as decent of living things from ancestors from which they differ. Life had to precede evolution! Regardless of how the first replicating molecule appeared, we see in the subsequent historical record the gradual appearance of more complex living things, and many variations on the many themes of life. We know much more about evolution than about the origin of life.

-- Scott, Eugenie C. Evolution vs. Creationism: And Introdution. California: University of California Press; 2004; pp. 26-27.

Now there are a couple of important things that evolution is not, misleading claims by creationists [and scientists] notwithstanding. For example, evolution is not a theory of the origin of life, for the simple reason that evolution deals with changes in living organisms induced by a combination of random (mutation) and nonrandom (natural selection) forces. [These assumptions are now being questioned; see Rudolf A. Raff in "The Shape of Life: Genes, Development, and the Evolution of Animal Form," chapter 9 and 10] By definition, before life originated there were no mutations, and therefore there was no variation; hence, natural selection could not possibly have acted. This means that the origin of life is a (rather tough) problem for physics and chemistry to deal with, but not a proper area of inquiry for evolutionary biology. It would be like asking a geologist to explain the origin of planets: The geologist's work starts after planets come into existence, and it is the cosmologist who deals with the question of planetary origins.

(....) Evolution is also most definitely not a theory of the origin of the universe. As interesting as this question is, it is rather the realm of physics and cosmology. Mutation and natural selection, the mechanisms of evolution, do not have anything to do with stars and galaxies. It is true that some people, even astronomers, refer to the "evolution" of the universe, but this is meant in the general sense of change through time, not the technical sense of the Darwinian theory.

-- Pigliucci, Massimo (2002) Denying Evolution: Creationism, Scientism, and the Nature of Science. Sinauer Press. pp. 76-77.

Millers classic experiments -- as historically important for the field as they are -- are not the solution (or even a valuable starting point) to understanding the origin of life on Earth. An intellectually honest and well-informed science educator (they are usually the former but only more rarely the latter) should therefore point to the amount of [so-called] progress that has been in this field, describe some of the ongoing research, and stop far short of saying that the promblem has been solved.... [D]ismissal of ... [honest critical questions and/or facts and the honest recognition of the current limitations of science] is ... common. But it is wrong, both ethically and educationally.

-- Pigliucci, Massimo (2002) Denying Evolution: Creationism, Scientism, and the Nature of Science. Sinauer Press. p. 242.

Pigliucci confronts in his book Denying Evolution: Creationism, Scientism, and the Nature of Science not only the fallacies of creationism, but the equal logical fallacies of scientism. Scientism is a popular belief, and a rather pedestrian one at that, as most scientists who have reached the pinnacle of their fields are careful not to slip into such false rhetorical story telling. It may be good entertainment on discovery channel (along with UFO stories!) for the masses, but it doesn't make for good science. For it is true with regards to science (or anything in my view), that the "moment departure is made from the stage of facts, reason abdicates or else rapidly degenerates into a consort of false logic."

But scientists are human too, and indeed some do slip into espousing a form of scientism that is no more supported by "facts" than are the myths of old used to explain origins by early man. Some who engage in this form of "science fiction" have replaced one form of myth (story) with another, and by bestowing magical power upon the terms "plausible, probable, or likely" we have confused "fact" and "knowledge" with speculation and thereby avoid an honest admission of the current limits of science and human knowledge, and replace these limits with self-assuring myths (stories) in descriptions that are little more than admitted "idle speculation."

For example, to claim that because a so-called "scientific" speculation can devise a "plausible" story, such as life came to the earth from a meteorite, does not transform speculation into fact or knowledge. Such loose treatment of fact hides far more than it reveals, no matter how self-assuring it may be. The truth is as Harold notes,

... even though one can never exclude the intervention of some unlikely but crucial happenstance, one should be able to arrive at a plausible account of how it could have happened. This, however, is not how matters have turned out. The range of permissible options is to broad, the constraints so loose, that few scenarios can be firmly rejected; and when neither theory nor experiment set effective boundaries, hard science is stymied.

We simply don't know how life originated on this planet, and that is a fact that is admitted by many honest scientists, including those quoted below. And as the evolutionary scientist Pigliucci makes clear, if one is an educator, especially a science educator, "it is wrong, both ethically and educationally" to portray as "scientific fact" what is in truth purely "idle speculation." It is a fact, well recognized by the National Science Foundation and numerous scientists, that the origin of life is not included within the scope of evolutionary theory, as is made plain by the statements of scientists quoted in this post. Such fallacies as put forth by those who espouse scientism have no more place in the science classroom, except as an example of what science is not, than do the fallacies of creationism. We cannot teach our children how to think critically, how to carry out good science, but indoctrinating them with sloppy reasoning and the unfounded myths (stories) of scientism. Science prospers by facing the facts honestly, and then subjecting all speculation, hypotheses, and explanations to honest critical examination and empirical tests against the real world. And part of that process is a frank and honest admission of what science doesn't know, in other words its current limitations. And only time will answer the question of whether or not those current limitations will be overcome through new technological breakthroughs or further discoveries.

[O]f course we can weave a story out of anything we see. But if we are expected to take the story literally it must make some connection, have some unique explanatory power, otherwise it can be no more than poetry. Just reading a story and shouting "Yes! It fits!" can be no more than a shot in the dark. Anyone with patience and imagination can deliver something like this and I see no limit to the number of different accounts of the same thing -- all telling a different story.

I agree with this observation; and it cuts both ways with regards to religious myths as well as the mythical stories of scientism. Just inventing a story and then shouting "Yes! It fits!" doesn't make a story fact. And just because a story has "explanatory power" doesn't make it true either; epicycles have just as much explantory power as Newtonian mechanics, but that doesn't make the "explanation" factually true.

It seems that scientists, philosophers, and religionists alike ought to keep in mind the tenative nature of many of their claims, and the incomplete state of human knowledge given the fact we cannot have absolute truth in any one of these domains.

There is not difference between "life" and "non-life".

[This is an example of solution by definition; if the problem proves to elude solution, then simply solve it by definition. Unfortunately for those who espouse such pseudoscientific nonsense -- such pedestrian scientism -- the majority of informed scientists would laugh at this statement, noting it is hardly a problem that is solved by shifting rhetorical definitions. The simple scientific fact is, the more we learn about the molecular basis of life and the complex interactions of genome and cellular core processes, the more this type of simple minded reductionism is recognized as being the left-overs from an age of blind materialistic optimism found in a "quasi-religious" belief espoused by scientism that all reality is reducible to the lowest common denominator -- matter.]

This erroneous assessment come from the early days of chemistry when they observed carbon compounds in living things and other types of compounds in minerals, rocks, etc.

[Here we see a complete ignorance of the history of science, as exemplified below in Woese quoting Bohm, and others below. The failure of reductionism has actually lead to the recognition that the whole is greater than the simple sum of its parts. Life is not reducible to matter, and the claim that this it is, and that this claim is a scientific fact, is simply erroneous, false, and outright ignorant of the actual state of the discussion on this issue in the scientific community.]

... The answer to the question of where did the first lump of life come from is that it evolved from it's predecessor. If you choose to call that predecessor "non-living" that is your determination, and it is quite artificial.

[One of the common statements of pseudoscientists (occult, religious, and those who espouse scientism alike) is the trivialization of terminology and levels of reality. Science, true science, is very precise in its use of terms; for example, the term "evolved" is meaningless unless one uses it in relation to a specific context. Here, the simple minded and erroneous assumption is that the term "evolution" applies in the same way to physics, chemistry, biochemistry, and cellular and biological evolution. It only takes a careful examination of what scientists are now calling Emergence theory, to see that this is false. "As Christopher Southgate writes, 'An emergent property is one describing a higher level of organization of matter, where the description is not epistemologically reducible to lower-level concepts' (Southgate et al. 1999: 158)."]

.... Probably just a self-replicating chemical system. Once some sort of replication is achieved .... (and the first such systems could be very inefficiant and of low fidelity) natural selection will drive evolution forward.

[Arguements on both sides of this debate that attempt to use "probabilty" as support for one position or the other are little more than what one scientist, Fox, calls a "euphemism for ignorance."]

Even though we can never know how it actually happened, [here is an admission of ignorance] we do know that the chemical processes carried out by living things today can be carried out with little difficulty by non-living chemical systems [followed by more ignorant and erronous scientism, for it is certainly not true, as noted by scientist after scientist engaged in this field, that the "chemical processes carried out by living things today can be carried out with little difficulty by non-living chemical systems."]. There is no "missing link" in abiogenesis [more irrelevant smoke screen; it has to do with the fact acknowledged by scientists themselves, such as Pigliucci above, that "abiogeneis" is not included in the theory of evolution, and to claim that it is and that it has been solved or there is no difference bewteen it and the theory of evolution is simply pseudoscientific scientism masquarading as intelligent scientific disucssion. In other words, it is simply another blind "quasi-religious" belief unsupported by scientific fact.], nor is there any sort of "magic" step that we can't see how it could have happened.

Perhaps it's worth remembering that all "living things" are made from the same atoms as "non living things".

[A trivial observation, because it says nothing about the more important question, which is are there differences and is one level reducible to the other?]

Certain arrangements of atoms give rise to subsequent arrangements

[Another trivial and meaningless non-observation based upon fallacious reasoning and obfuscation; chemistry is not simply reducible to physics, but this fact is ignored in the pseudoscientific conflation of meaningful differences between these levels in QED’s vacuous statement.]

and we can witness the transfer of the property we term "life"

[Another example of non-explanation via obfuscation; scientists don’t even have a consensus on the definition of life.]

in a continuum of activity at this level during reproduction

[Trivial obtuse scientism; it begs the question of what the actual definition of “life” is or if biochemistry is reducible to chemistry, and many scientists claim it is not, or chemistry reducible to physics, which again is disputed by many scientists and the findings of emergent levels of reality, as exemplified in the statement of Clayton: "Dreams of a final reduction ‘downwards’ are fundamentally impossible. Recycled lower-level descriptions cannot do justice to the actual emergent complexity of the natural world as it has evolved. (Clayton 2004: 582) .... The scientific task is to correctly describe and comprehend such emergent phenomena where the whole is more than the sum of the parts. (Clayton 2004: 586-587)" and that while “living things” depend upon the "underlying physical and chemical regularities ... [they] are not reducible to them."]

Whether or not we consider atoms to be "alive"

[Another example of solution by shifting rhetorical definitions; this tactic may work in pseudoscience, pseudophilosophy, or pseudoreligion, all of which seek to twist fact to preconceived metaphysical belief systems; it begs the question regarding the fundamental distinction between animate and inanimate reality.]

it is their intrinsic properties

[Naming something an “intrinsic property” doesn’t explain it, but rather defines away what we don’t know and makes it sound like we do? Funny way of doing science, eh? Its called scientism!]

that give rise to the possibilities resulting in structures such as stars planets and life on planets. I would argue that all these possibilities were present from the moment the universe condensed.

[What a trivial and meaningless observation based upon circular reasoning; it happened so it must have been possible to happen.]

What it was that made all this possible is a separate question from what happened thereon. Evolution is nothing more than trial and error.

[Another perfect example of simplistic scientism; it begs the real question of whether or not we have really uncovered and discovered the ultimate underlying mechanism(s) of evolution, and it ignores the very real lively debate going on within the diverse fields of evolutionary studies that refute this fallacious claim that we know evolution is “nothing more than trial and error”; findings in evo-devo have long ago refuted the claim that evolution is “nothing more than trial and error,” and scientists are now addressing these issues of nonrandom morphological variation which were both unpredicted by and are left unaccounted for in standard Neo-Darwinian theory. Science provides proximate, tentative, causal explanations; theoretic mathematical models; not absolute dogmatic claims, such as "evolution is nothing more than trial and error," with "nothing more" being the dogma supplied by the unspoken metaphysical presuppositions of a mechanistic materialist belief system. Frankly, this is a very uninformed statement; for we do not have any final answers with regards to the ultimate causes of evolution that warrant such “nothing more” statements or conclusions. In truth, this is “nothing more” than a dogmatic belief statement made by a mechanistic materialist philosophy. It is little more than the inverse mirror image (scientism) of the equally fallacious claim made by some creationists that we don't know anything about the biological mechanisms of evolution.]

Even the wind can try things and nothing natural is immune to error.

[Poetry and stories don’t make it so.]

Conceptualizing Cells

We should all take seriously an assessment of biology made by the physicist David Bohm over 30 years ago (and universally ignored):

"It does seem odd ... that just when physics is ... moving away from mechanism, biology and psychology are moving closer to it. If the trend continues ... scientists will be regarding living and intelligent beings as mechanical, while they suppose that inanimate matter is to complex and subtle to fit into the limited categories of mechanism." [D. Bohm, "Some Remarks on the Notion of Order," in C. H. Waddington, ed., Towards a Theoretical Biology: 2 Sketches. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Press 1969), p. 18-40.]

The organism is not a machine! Machines are not made of parts that continually turn over and renew; the cell is. A machine is stable because its parts are strongly built and function reliably. The cell is stable for an entirely different reason: It is homeostatic. Perturbed, the cell automatically seeks to reconstitute its inherent pattern. Homeostasis and homeorhesis are basic to all living things, but not machines.

If not a machine, then what is the cell?

-- Woese, Carl R., Author. Evolving Biological Organization. In Microbial Phylogeny and Evolution: Concepts and Controversies. (Jan Sapp, ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2005: 100.

In the beginning was the Word:; so says the gospel of Saint John. Goethe's Faust, the prototypic modern man and scientist, thought otherwise: in the beginning was the Deed. Rephrased just a little, scholars still divide into those who seek the origin of life in information and those who look to energetics. Those who believe, a I do, that living organisms are autopoietic systems capable of evolution by variation and natural selection, must keep a foot in both camps and risk being scorned by both. But the definition really sharpens the issue: the question is not only how life arose on earth, but how nature generates organized material systems to which terms such as adaptation, function and purpose can be applied. Readers will have noted that this is still a free-wheeling inquiry, in which the few solid facts need not seriously impede the imagination; let me take advantage of what, sadly, become a very rare privilege. (Harold 2001: 249-250)

Granted that, as de Duve says, we are compelled by our calling to insist at all times on strictly naturalistic explanations; life must, therefore, have emerged from chemistry. Granted also that simple organic molecules were present at the beginning, in uncertain locations, diversity and abundance. Leave room for contingency, some rare chemical fluctuation that may have played a seminal role in the inception of living systems; and remember that you may be mistaken. With all that, I still cannot bring myself to believe that rudimentary organisms of any kind came about by the association of prefabricated organic molecules, born of purely chemical processes in their environment. Did life begin as a molecular collage? To my taste, that idea smacks of the reconstitution of life as we know it rather than its genesis ab initio. It overestimates what Harold Morowitz called the munificence of nature, her generosity in providing building blocks for free. It makes cellular organization an afterthought to molecular structure, and offers no foothold to autopoiesis. And it largely omits what I believe to be the ultimate wellspring of life, the thermodynamic drive of energy dissipation, creating mounting levels of structural order for natural selection to winnow. If it is true that life resides in organization rather than in substance, than what is left out of account is the heart of the mystery: the origin of biological order. (Harold 2001: 250)

Scientists formulate hypotheses, not just at the conclusion of an inquiry but from its very outset. Karl Popper and Thomus Kuhn both taught that, absent a preconception of some sort, we do not know what questions to ask or even what facts to observe. The downside is that we will cling to an outworn hypothesis, well aware of its shortcomings, until a more credible alternative comes to hand. This, I suspect, is where the study of biopoiesis now stands: the past unburied, the future not yet born. I will also venture an opinion about where we should look. The hurdle is to understand, not the origin of organic molecules, but of systems that progressively come to display the characteristics of organisms: boundaries, metabolism, energy transduction, growth, heredity and evolution. This is hardly a startling or even original proposition, but its unapologetic holism makes it a minority view. (Harold 2001: 250-251)

I hold, then that cellular organization was not a codicil to the true origin of life, but part and parcel of it. That implies compartmentation of some kind (not necessarily lipid membranes) from the beginning. Biological order is dynamic, created and sustained by a continuous stream of energy, and that also must have been true all along. Therefore, a credible biopoietic theory will be one that generates mounting levels of complexity naturally, by providing the means to convert the flux of energy into organization. But energy dissipation can only carry life over the first jump; evolution is hamstrung until the emerging "functions" within the developing system have been codified in a "text" of some kind that can be transmitted, executed, altered, and put to the test of utility again and again. Nucleic acids or their precursors must have come on stage early, if not when the curtain rose. No satisfying scheme of this kind is presently on the books, and I have none to offer, I have only the strong hunch that there is much more to this mystery than is dreamt of in molecular philosophy. (Harold 2001: 251)

It would be agreeable to conclude this book with a cheery fanfare about science closing in, slowly but surely, on the ultimate mystery; but the time for rosy rhetoric is not yet at hand. The origin of life appears to me as incomprehensible as ever, a matter for wonder but not for explication. Even the principles of biopoiesis still elude us, for reasons that are as much conceptual as technical. The physical sciences have been exceedingly successful in formulating universal laws on the basis of reproducible experiments, accurate measurements, and theories explicitly designed to be falsifiable. These commendable practices cannot be fully extrapolated to any historical subject, in which general laws constrain what is possible but do not determine the outcome. Here knowledge must be drawn from observation of what actually happened, and seldom can theory be directly confronted with reality. The origin of life is where these two ways of knowing collide. The approach from hard science starts with the supposition that physical laws exercise strong constraints on what was historically possible; therefore, even though one can never exclude the intervention of some unlikely but crucial happenstance, one should be able to arrive at a plausible account of how it could have happened. This, however, is not how matters have turned out. The range of permissible options is to broad, the constraints so loose, that few scenarios can be firmly rejected; and when neither theory nor experiment set effective boundaries, hard science is stymied. The tools of "soft," historical science unfortunately offer no recourse: the trail is too cold, the traces too faint. (Harold 2001: 251-252)

They tell a story of Max Delbrück, one of the pioneers of molecular genetics and the ironic inventor of DNA, whom I was privileged to meet during his later years at the California Institute of Technology. He had stopped reading papers on the origin of life, Max once observed; he would wait for someone to produce a recipe for the fabrication of life. So are we all waiting, not necessarily for a recipe but for new techniques of apprehending the utterly remote past. Without such a breakthrough, we can continue to reason, speculate and argue, but we cannot know. Unless we acquire novel and powerful methods of historical inquiry, science will effectively have reached a limit. (Harold 2001: 252)

[Franklin M. Harold is Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Colorado State Univeristy.]

-- Harold, Franklin M. The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms and the Order of Life. New York: Oxford University Press; 2001; pp. 249-252.

Many influential contemporary discussions of the origin of life have concentrated on the origin of information, in which information is construed simply to be nucleic acid sequences (e.g., Eigen 1992). Implicit in these discussions is the assumption that nucleic acid sequences ultimately encode all that is necessary for the genesis of living forms and, therefore, that a solution to the problem of the initial generation of these sequences will solve the problem of the origin of life. The move away from sequences [reductionism] would put these efforts in proper perspective: to explain the possible origin of persistent segments of DNA [which we can only speculate about at this time] does not suffice as an explanation of the origin of living cells. However, I do not wish to harp on this point since, quite justifiably, most molecular biologists think that such discussions of the origin of life are little other than idle speculation. (Sahotra 2005: 246)

-- Sarkar, Sahotra (2005) Molecular Models of Life. The MIT Press.

[Sahotra Sarkar is Professor of Integrative Biology and Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin.]

Not only are complex systems hierarchic, but the levels of this hierarchy represent different levels of abstraction, each built upon the other, and each understandable by itself (and each characterized by a different phenomenology). This is the phenomenon of emergent order. All parts at the same level of abstraction interact in a well-defined way (which is why they have a reality at their own level, each represented in a different language describing and characterizing the causal patterns at work at that level). (Ellis 2004: 612)

We find separate parts that act as independent agents, each of which exhibit some fairly complex behavior, and each of which contributes to many higher level functions. Only through the mutual co-operation of meaningful collections of these agents do we see the higher-level functionality of an organism. This emergent behavior -- the behavior of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and cannot even be described in terms of inter-component linkages. This fact has the effect of separating the high-frequency dynamics of the components -- involving their internal structure -- from the low-frequency dynamics -- involving interactions amongst components. (Simon 1982.)

(....) In a hierarchy, through encapsulation, objects at one level of abstraction are shielded from implementation details of lower levels of abstraction.

-- Ellis, George F. R. True complexity and its associated ontology. In Science and Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology and Complexity (John D. Barrow, Paul W. Davies, and Charles L. Harper, Jr., ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2004; p. 612.

How did the first little spec of life get here?

We really don't know, do we?

There are two ways to approach this question.

1. By Faith. It is a mystery that we do not understand, therefore, it must have been done by a supernatural being, God.
2. By Science. It is a mystery that we do not understand yet. Therefore, we must look carefully at whatever evidence we can find to try to progress towards a more full understanding of this issue.

It seems in my view from the perspective of science that it is factually correct and honest to say we really don't know. I am not sure if there are two ways to answer this question; at least I am not sure what McCulloch means by this statement, because I cannot see how religious faith can answer the "how" question which does not fall within its domain, but rather falls into the domain of science.

It seems that science, at least given the current state of science, can only proceed by honestly acknowleding it is a mystery we do not understand, and continuing to look carefully at what evidence can be found and to try and progress towards a fuller understanding. That is a very different thing than the false scientism espoused by those who attempt to mask uncertainty surrounding this mystery with pseudocertainties based upon little more than the espousal of a mechanistic materialist philosophy attempting to wrap itself in the illusion of "fact" and a false scientific authority.

[Arthur-Robin]

My whole approach to evolution is simple: I narrow my investigation to only the "links" between apes and modern man. In my opinion the extant "missing links" are all pretty weak if not completely false:

Here is my answer to a similar challenge in http://www.simaqianstudio.com/forum/ind ... entry69117

(Unfortuneately I lost 15 yrs worth of notes/resources in a crisis 2 yrs ago now so I can not provide as a detailed answer now as before when I had more detailed info, so forgive me if I have to appeal more to references which I remember more than the details.)

Firstly I admit that it is not as easy to answer as some say it should be because the question is already based on certain assumptions that radiometric and other dating methods are reliable and that we did evolve from primates with "similar structures to our own" like apes, pongids, pangids, gorillas, monkeys, chimpanzees, orangutans, baboons, gibbons, tarsiers, etc.

Oreopithecus an aberant ape. Ramapithecus was an ape if I remember correctly? Various Australopithecines esp Lucy were apes except for [Africanus?] which was closer to humans and was tall and dark. Homo erectus are a combination of ape/simian/animal bones and (indistinquishable) human/homo sapiens (post-cranial) bones a little like Piltdown, Peking man went missing, and half people think Heidelberg was an animal while the other half think it was fully human, Aust Abos have been called homo erectus. Progressive Neanderthals were more or less indistinquishable from fully modern humans. Classical Neanderthals post-cranial were more or less fully modern, the carricature/slander was based on one arthritic old man (with rickets): they walked upright, tok care of sick/buried dead, able to speak, cranial capacity equal or superior to modern, and by some measurements Europeans closer to neanderthals than to modern Africans. Cro-Magnons were more or less equal or superior to fully modern humans.

I think there was a find in America (Florida?) that was closer to modern humans and quite early. Find of homo erectus/sapiens skulls with modern/Chinese features on Han river in Yunxian 350,000 yrs old. There are some finds of more or less modern humans that are early enough to pose an over-lap problem for the usual evolutionary line of developement but I haven't recovered the list that was in AN Field's Examiner article on evolution but there are some in Funk & Wagnalls dictionary incld Kanam, Kanjera, Ipswich, (Grimaldi, Canstadt, Furfooz). Finds of homo erectus in East Africa 1.75 mya contemp with late australopithcenes. Unexplained anomaly of more advanced ER-1470 dated 2(.5)my. (Notes on Homo hablis and genus homo lost).

Traces of humans/civilisation have been found in every period of the geological time-scale see Forbidden Archaeology by Cremo & Thompson (plus Tani Jantsang, and the Genesis Flood by Whitcombe and Morris incld giant human footprints in Cretaceous strata).

Neanderthals not such a rough bunch scientists say, Michael Smith, Feb 9 1992. Fossils cast doubt on African Eve, Fri Jun 5 1982, Miami herald. Pears cyclopedia, C Cook. AN Field, Examiner. VG Childe, What Happened in history. Funk & Wagnalls new std dict of the Engl language, 1963. JT Chick. Tani Jantsang. LD Gadd.

[juliod]

In my opinion the extant "missing links" are all pretty weak if not completely false:

The problem is that your opinion is contradicted by every single professional scientist who has studied the issue.

DanZ