Is Life being formed all the time?

[Richard of Chelmsford]

There's been some heated debate here, especially from Cougar (who lives up to his name!) about the truth or otherwise of evolution and other scientific tenets.

But they are as nothing as compared to what you'll see on religious sites shouted against evolution, including by people who say they're scientists.

It's been so vociferous on the Premier Radio site in the UK

http://www.premier.org.uk

that the moderators have had to shut down the forum.

It just shows you really that, as someone said, 130 years after Darwin had everyone's OK on the subject sceptics are still coming out of the woodwork.

Simply because some people believe what they want to believe.

[Richard of Chelmsford]

Another notion which might be worth mentioning, if we're talking about other life forms is one I read recently..though I hasten to add it was probably by some science fiction writer!

Having made the observation that human thought is probably the exchange of signals between neurons in the brian, or something, he noted that there was probably a lot of electrical activity moving back and forth in the sun and other stars.

Therefore, the suggestion was made, that perhaps the sun 'thinks' in some strange, alien sort of way.

Can you imagine such a thing. What do you think is going on in old Sol's mind? the possibility of finding a mate, perhaps??

The notion was also put that perhaps too the Universe thinks because of all the exchanges in radiation, etc, and that that's what God is..

OK, I've heard dafter theories!

[JohnOwens]

I think I made my position clear in the other thread, but I did think I would ask this question.

Why is it almost always assumed in Evolutionary circles that all life came from ONE intial cell?

Surely if one protocell could have formed, many others could have as well and so it should be entirely possible that Plants, Baterium, Fugus, Fish, Mammals and Birds are not actually related, but that that they instead come from 6 different protocells that developed independantly of each other and have gone on to form each group. Surely this is just as likely as everything coming from only one Protocell, in fact I would have thought more likely.

I'm not sure if this is a part of your question, a spin-off from your question, or the answer to your question, but here goes: At some point in the past, I wondered (or maybe heard/read) whether mitochondria might have formed separately from the cells that would later give rise to us, and then invaded/been absorbed by (depending on your point of view) those cells. You'd have to posit some other means of energy production by those cells prior to the introduction of the mitochondria, of course, and also that they use the same sort of DNA (as far as I know) as the rest of us would weigh against it. I suppose an alternative would be that the mitochondria were a separate branch from those cells, invaded, and were put to work; that would be more comfortable in not requiring the same DNA structure to have sprung up twice.
Anyway, is this generally regarded as a possible current hypothesis, or something no one even bothers considering because it's patently ridiculous, or has it been pretty well settled one way or the other?

[Richard of Chelmsford]

Well, before cells formed, there were macromolecules, weren't there? And surely, they could have formed in a number of different places?

Perhaps?

[Betenoire]

If it's any other sort of life, we wouldn't even be able to see it.

Granted, I have not taken organic chemistry, but why wouldn't we be able to see it?

Orgo isn't necessary for what I'm talking about here.
I guess "see it" was the wrong choice of words. "Recognize it" might be better. As I said, it's my firm belief that chemical life would closely resemble what we have today (carbon polymer information encoding and distributing units). It might not use DNA, RNA, and amino acids like we do.
So non-chemical life would be... I dunno. Self-replicating and evolving light patterns? Or self-replicating and evolving crystal structures (but crystals don't particularly evolve, and tend not to have generations within a closed environment)? Computer programs might be considered "life", but their evolution is strictly limited, if it occurs at all.
I'm just not sure we'd recognize non-chemical life to be "life".
But I could be wrong.

As to the discussion of the creationist crapadoo about "life from non-life":
Rip off my arm and it is not life. Yet it is part of me. Tear down all of my cell structures to their base chemicals and they are not life, yet they are part of me and they make me alive.
I AM LIFE FROM NON-LIFE!
BOOYAH!

[Betenoire]

Well, before cells formed, there were macromolecules, weren't there? And surely, they could have formed in a number of different places?

Perhaps?

They could have, yes.
But let's assume that life formed in two places around the world:
One set of life, Life1, could form the way we work: Watson/Crick DNA, RNA, and our 21 amino-acid-based proteins.
There's no guarantee that Life2 would do the same. There are many other bases that could have been used in DNA, or DNA might not even be necessary. And there's a ridiculous amount of other amino acids that could be used in protein, again, if aminoacids are even necessary for the structure of a cell. The tRNAs that we use are probably not an unavoidable structure for life. At the very least, the anti-codon pattern of tRNAs would be nothing at all like what we see in Life1. Therefore, if life had this "bigenesis", we'd see Life1 with Watson/Crick DNA, tRNA as we see it, and 21aa proteins, and Life2 without DNA, RNA, or proteins. Yet, we only see Life1.

And, again, phylogenetic analysis points to a single progenetor.

[Taibak]

I'm not sure if this is a part of your question, a spin-off from your question, or the answer to your question, but here goes: At some point in the past, I wondered (or maybe heard/read) whether mitochondria might have formed separately from the cells that would later give rise to us, and then invaded/been absorbed by (depending on your point of view) those cells. You'd have to posit some other means of energy production by those cells prior to the introduction of the mitochondria, of course, and also that they use the same sort of DNA (as far as I know) as the rest of us would weigh against it. I suppose an alternative would be that the mitochondria were a separate branch from those cells, invaded, and were put to work; that would be more comfortable in not requiring the same DNA structure to have sprung up twice.
Anyway, is this generally regarded as a possible current hypothesis, or something no one even bothers considering because it's patently ridiculous, or has it been pretty well settled one way or the other?

It's the standard paradigm, actually. Little mitochondria moved into bigger organisms for some reason. Trading their highly efficient energy producing ability for protection, or something like that.

[informant]

We have the same evidense, just different interpretations of it.

What is your interpretation?

(a website that anyone can, and is encouraged to, edit by the way)

It agrees with what I remember learning in biology classes.
Another page at the same site contrasts “abiogenesis” with “spontaneous generation” quite well. The difference between the two is, of course, somewhat semantic, as some of the authors of the entry insist themselves, but, regardless of what you call them, there is a meaningful difference between discussing what happened many millions of years ago, in a strikingly different Earth, over long periods of time, and discussing what happens today in a few days or weeks.

Compare your link […] with:

"The difficulties become clear when we look to see what building
blocks were actually formed in the course of the simulation experiments
of Miller and others. Robert Shapiro, professor of
chemistry at New York University, pointed out in his 1988 book,
Origins, that, contrary to what is sometimes stated, there was no
synthesis of nucleotides and, indeed, only two of the component
bases (adenine and guanine) were produced to any significant extent.
Also, only two of the required 20 amino acids were formed
in appreciable amounts, which was reduced to one when the experiment
was repeated later with a less reducing atmosphere, reflecting
changed views about the primeval Earth" (Palmer, 1999, "Controversy – Catastrophism & Evolution" p. 266).

What Yannox is saying, if I understand him correctly, is that the evidence for abiogenesis is not as good as originally thought. That still doesn’t mean that abiogenesis has been refuted.

I stand by what I said before, edited to be more general: Louis Pasteur debunked this myth originally, it a specific case, and others have subsequently confirmed his finding in the more general case.

What “more general case” are you referring to?

Life does not come from non-life.

Not fully formed, complex organisms, after a couple of days; Pasteur's experiments showed that. However, it's still conceivable that very simple cell-like organisms could coalesce gradually from "non-life".

Do you know anyone who does not have parents? Maybe some that were adopted, or orphaned etc., but they were still concieved of a man and woman and were born approximately 9 months later.

That depends on how you define "parents", I'm sure. Who are the parents of a virus?

I don't know a single person who can claim that a garbage heap, or green soup, and any non-living rock etc., was struck by lightning and out they came.

Neither do I, especially a biologist. That is a straw man.

[beskeptical]

Most mutations are 'silent':* you cannot see evidence in the organism's form or function that a mutation has occurred, and thus it cannot be chosen for or against (it is not subject to natural selection).

And then along came genetic research...Eureka! The door opened, and the answers are flooding in. And flooding in, and flooding in. The biggest breakthrough came when the lab techniques improved so that DNA could more easily and cheaply be studied.

Of those mutations which are not silent, but are expressed, the incredibly vast majority are harmful or lethal to the individual carrying them. Of the few which can be termed non-harmful, only a remnant of these can be considered beneficial, and even then they are beneficial only in particular circumstances and environments, and not in the wild population as a whole. This is what the data itself shows. It requires massive 'interpretation' and presumption on the part of the evolutionist, in spite of this data and not because of it, to claim that beneficial mutations have so built and changed organisms through time that a one-celled organism in some primordial beginning was the ancient grandparent of all life on earth today

Sigh.....I'm sorry so many people are being left behind from the wonderful discoveries that are taking place today.


Here's an interesting example of a single mutation with a huge impact, just FYI:

Several hundred years ago, a person was born with one amino acid change on one allele of one gene. The change affected the protein on the surface of white blood cells but it did not render the white blood cells ineffective. It did change the protien configuration on the surface of person's white cells. (This is very similar to different blood types, only it involves white cells rather than red cells.)

This person passed on the 'mutation' and after a few more generations, there were enough descendents to make the defect a permanent part of the gene pool.

There is some speculation that the persons who inherited this mutation were better able to survive the plague and that might have led to a greater number of folks with the defect, but this doesn't matter for my example.

Today, about 10% of the Northern European population and smaller numbers of other populations carry the defect.

Well, it turns out the HIV virus uses a particular protein configuration on the surface of our white blood cells to gain entry into the cell. And, it turns out that with this particular mutation called a CCR5 deletion, the HIV virus has a harder time infecting a person. If you inherit one CCR5 deletion from one parent, you are less likely to be infected when exposed to HIV. If you inherit two CCR5 deletions, one from each parent, you are almost immune to HIV.


There are thousands of other examples, try a google search of genetic research.

Don't be left behind. Don't let your kids get left behind. Find a way to reconcile your belief in the Bible with the fact that the world isn't flat, there was no wordwide flood, and human beings evolved over 3.5 billion or so years from organic molecules that once were not living organisms. Genetic research has answered all the gray areas of evolutionary theory.

[mike alexander]

Jotham wrote:

Life still seems to explode in the Cambrian! There is no evidence of ancestral forms to what is found there. About a billion years was needed for the first cell to become a more complex life form i.e. multicellular. If it took this long for this basic step, then even with another 2 1/2 billion years to work with, evolution just ran out of time. It needs a WHOLE lot more time than 3 1/2 billion years for what it is saying happened.

But in the last 20 years or so a lot more has turned up. There is the whole Ediacaran assemblage, a diverse group of organisms (fossils now found world-wide) that was in full gear 600MYA. Some of the body plans seem unique and may represent extinct phyla, but others can be argued to continue to and through the Cambrian. Thus complex multicellular life is pushed back considerably farther, with precursors into the 800-1000MYA range.

As the lookback time increases it will inevitably become more difficult to determine things more exactly, since less and less rock survives and that which does is more likely to be severely altered.

[Betenoire]

Even sans the Ediacaran argument: a few Eukaryotes aside, sexual reproduction was not a wildly popular thing among early cells. Multicellular life, though, was more or less equipped for makin' wit' da love (er... sexual reproduction) and therefore could make use of the increased rate of chromosomal recombination that permits.
Trying to apply the rate-of-change of the early, unicellular life forms to multicellular life forms is like trying to apply plant anatomy to neurosurgery.
I'm a bit woozy this morning, so if none of this makes sense, I'll try to clarify later.

[captain swoop]

can I suggest www.talkorigins.org and the talk.origins newsgroup?

[ExpErdMann]

I find this thread a little chaotic. It seems to have devolved to a discussion of whether evolution even happened. As usual, some posters have been able to identify some of the weaker points in biology's 'standard model', such as the problem of how life arose in the first place (supposedly by random interactions in an organic soup) and the notion that random mutations governed subsequent evolution.

These are true weaknesses, but it should be pointed out that theories are coming out now which place less emphasis on random interactions and mutations. From the origins side the main new thrust is that life evolved in metabolic complexes on the surfaces of metal sulfides, most notably pyrite. Here are some recent articles on this topic:

http://www.astrobio.net/news/print.php?sid=357
http://www.astrobio.net/news/article876.html

For evolutionary mechanisms, the direction is less clear. But a number of authors are pointing to a direct role for environmental change in shaping evolution. This is not just a question of 'fitter' organisms surviving more often, but rather a direct role for the environment in changing genotypes and phenotypes. A recent book by MIT Press covers some of this, Environment Development and Evolution.

The best way to silence the creationists is to solve these evolutionary riddles. Hopefully this will happen before the creationists take over too many school boards in the U.S. (maybe that's why Cougar was a little testy).

There were a few points regarding this post:

1st molecules to whole organisms

After the last big blast of asteroids that resurfaced the Earth, (~3.9 billion years ago), fossil evidence shows that life was well established only 50 million years later. After another 350 million years sophisticated microbes were alive. "Molecular fossils from Greenland tell us that some kind of life was on Earth ... by 3.85 billion years ago. Scientists can't say exactly what sort of life was leaving its mark in Greenland, but it was already altering the chemistry of the oceans and the atmosphere on a global scale" (Zimmer, see references below)

The fossil and geologic evidence supports a beginning soup of amino acids turning into a soup of RNA strands turning into a soup of loose gene like structures turning into a soup of redundant and ever mixing genes until whole organisms appeared. The evidence supports RNA as the first organic structure from which DNA and later complete organisms evolved.

Gerald Joyce at the Scripps Research Institute, along with other scientists, started with RNA molecules in the late 80s and replicated it into 10 trillion variations. He mixed those with DNA molecules. He took the few RNA molecules that interacted with the DNA and made 10 trillion more variations. After 2 years he had close to the same RNA-DNA interactions that occur in cells today.

There is no fossil evidence that life evolved 3.9 billion years ago. And the formerly 'hard' evidence of William Schopf for microfossils 3.5 billion years ago was recently found in error by Brasier et al. The Greenland evidence too is highly suspect. Consequently, the date for earliest evidence of life has been pushed well forward, to maybe 3-2.5 billion years ago.

Also, such fossil evidence, if it existed, would in no way imply that a 'soup' of organic compounds ever existed. That is just a model, and a fading one in my opinion. Gerald Joyce does not get at the problem of how RNA arose in the first place.

[countrywideoptionone]

...It seems to have devolved to a discussion of whether evolution even happened...

Do I understand your position correctly? - from the original question: "Is Life being formed all the time?" Evolution requires that life came from non-life, but to assume life coming from non-life is true is not necessary and sufficient to imply evolution? You may have a valid argument in that sense. But many people would argue that life coming from non-life implies evolution, and since evolution can be argue against, the same argument can be used to answer the original post.

The best way to silence the creationists is to solve these evolutionary riddles. Hopefully this will happen before the creationists take over too many school boards in the U.S. (maybe that's why Cougar was a little testy).

To "silence" the creationists, you are right; the "riddles" of evolution would have to be solved, but if you ask any creationist, evolution has many more "riddles" than creation. By the way, you should use “creation” and “evolution”, or “creationism” and “evolutionism.” As I said before, many people see more holes and "riddles" in evolution than in creation. If people would like to believe in evolutionism, than that is their prerogative.

Creationists are not taking over school boards either. If you are referring to Ohio changing the science curriculum to "support" creationism, than you are misinformed. The change only adds that the current theory of evolution has many faults, and therefore should not be used as dogmatic truth.

I do agree that this tread is chaotic, but I’m also wondering why it’s on this forum at all…

[ExpErdMann]

...It seems to have devolved to a discussion of whether evolution even happened...

Do I understand your position correctly? - from the original question: "Is Life being formed all the time?" Evolution requires that life came from non-life, but to assume life coming from non-life is true is not necessary and sufficient to imply evolution? You may have a valid argument in that sense. But many people would argue that life coming from non-life implies evolution, and since evolution can be argue against, the same argument can be used to answer the original post.

I just meant that the initial post was a scientific question (is life being formed all the time?), but that that the discussion had moved around to did life evolve or was it created. (Incidentally, regarding the first question, Gunter Wachtershauser has supposed that life according to his mechanism could be evolving anew in lower layers of the oceanic crust away from extant organisms. Finding such primitive 'life' could provide evidence for his theory).

The best way to silence the creationists is to solve these evolutionary riddles. Hopefully this will happen before the creationists take over too many school boards in the U.S. (maybe that's why Cougar was a little testy).

To "silence" the creationists, you are right; the "riddles" of evolution would have to be solved, but if you ask any creationist, evolution has many more "riddles" than creation.

I didn't know creationism had any riddles!

By the way, you should use “creation” and “evolution”, or “creationism” and “evolutionism.” As I said before, many people see more holes and "riddles" in evolution than in creation. If people would like to believe in evolutionism, than that is their prerogative.

To put "ism" on the end of "evolution" implies that it is just one of any number of belief systems that we could possibly subscribe to. That is misleading. Evolution is not something we need to "believe in", like the tooth fairy. It is the process of how life changes according to scientific evidence. It is something we are discovering about.

Creationists are not taking over school boards either. If you are referring to Ohio changing the science curriculum to "support" creationism, than you are misinformed. The change only adds that the current theory of evolution has many faults, and therefore should not be used as dogmatic truth.

They did try to do it in Kansas a few years ago. The idea that the fact that there are gaps in evolutionary theory implies that it should take equal footing with creationism or other "isms" is wrong, and a waste of taxpayers' money.

I do agree that this tread is chaotic, but I’m also wondering why it’s on this forum at all…

Maybe the BA should have a separate forum where creationism and "philosophy of science" topics could be discussed. I would like to see this forum restricted to scientific "against the mainstream" ideas. It has been getting sort of touchy-feely of late.

[countrywideoptionone]

I just meant that the initial post was a scientific question (is life being formed all the time?), but that that the discussion had moved around to did life evolve or was it created. (Incidentally, regarding the first question, Gunter Wachtershauser has supposed that life according to his mechanism could be evolving anew in lower layers of the oceanic crust away from extant organisms. Finding such primitive 'life' could provide evidence for his theory).

It is easy to suppose, but harder to prove.

I didn't know creationism had any riddles!

Oh sure; Isaac Newton declared that we have been created "to think God's thoughts after Him." As humans are finite and God is infinite, there will always be riddles that we don't understand.

To put "ism" on the end of "evolution" implies that it is just one of any number of belief systems that we could possibly subscribe to. That is misleading. Evolution is not something we need to "believe in", like the tooth fairy. It is the process of how life changes according to scientific evidence. It is something we are discovering about.

The way it is taught is schools and proclaimed on certain internet sites portrays it as an "alternative to God." As such, it encourages a change in one's beliefs and supplies something else to "believe in."

They did try to do it in Kansas a few years ago. The idea that the fact that there are gaps in evolutionary theory implies that it should take equal footing with creationism or other "isms" is wrong, and a waste of taxpayers' money.

There's a difference between creationism and creation science. As as mentioned above, "to think God's thoughts after Him" implies proposing theories and testing the results they predict, which does not require "believing" in them. Teaching a faulting theory (evolution) also wastes taxpayers' money.

[Cougar]

....if you ask any creationist, evolution has many more "riddles" than creation.

Exactly. And why is that? Well, it's because evolutionary theory has to conform to reality and the observational evidence. But Creationism is essentially a magical worldview, so it really need not follow any rules. The answer for everything: God did it. What could be simpler? Unfortunately, if one just bails out there for all the tough questions, one is left with a rather.... shallow existence.

[beskeptical]

1st molecules to whole organisms

After the last big blast of asteroids that resurfaced the Earth, (~3.9 billion years ago), fossil evidence shows that life was well established only 50 million years later. After another 350 million years sophisticated microbes were alive. "Molecular fossils from Greenland tell us that some kind of life was on Earth ... by 3.85 billion years ago. Scientists can't say exactly what sort of life was leaving its mark in Greenland, but it was already altering the chemistry of the oceans and the atmosphere on a global scale" (Zimmer, see references below)

The fossil and geologic evidence supports a beginning soup of amino acids turning into a soup of RNA strands turning into a soup of loose gene like structures turning into a soup of redundant and ever mixing genes until whole organisms appeared. The evidence supports RNA as the first organic structure from which DNA and later complete organisms evolved.

Gerald Joyce at the Scripps Research Institute, along with other scientists, started with RNA molecules in the late 80s and replicated it into 10 trillion variations. He mixed those with DNA molecules. He took the few RNA molecules that interacted with the DNA and made 10 trillion more variations. After 2 years he had close to the same RNA-DNA interactions that occur in cells today.

There is no fossil evidence that life evolved 3.9 billion years ago. And the formerly 'hard' evidence of William Schopf for microfossils 3.5 billion years ago was recently found in error by Brasier et al. The Greenland evidence too is highly suspect. Consequently, the date for earliest evidence of life has been pushed well forward, to maybe 3-2.5 billion years ago.

Also, such fossil evidence, if it existed, would in no way imply that a 'soup' of organic compounds ever existed. That is just a model, and a fading one in my opinion. Gerald Joyce does not get at the problem of how RNA arose in the first place.

Excellent point. It isn't fossil evidence when you get beyond the organisms that were able to leave a fossil. I will have to look at my source for the earliest dated fossil evidence for an organism. I don't believe it was microfossils so I'll have to get back to you on that.

As far as Joyce, the point of the research was to show a piece of the process, not the entire process. I believe RNA molecules exist in some form in nature today.

I am on a slower computer so let me get back to these issues tomorrow. I don't mind if I am correct or not, I always learn a little more by pursuing these challenges.

[informant]

I do agree that this tread is chaotic, but I’m also wondering why it’s on this forum at all…

Maybe the BA should have a separate forum where creationism and "philosophy of science" topics could be discussed.

The original post had nothing to do with creationism, but some posters decided to lead the conversation that way.

[Richard of Chelmsford]

I do agree that this tread is chaotic, but I’m also wondering why it’s on this forum at all…

Maybe the BA should have a separate forum where creationism and "philosophy of science" topics could be discussed.

The original post had nothing to do with creationism, but some posters decided to lead the conversation that way.

I am the original poster of this thread and I can confirm that I am in no way a creationist. I just find it strange to imagine that all life could come from a small number of initial cells formed billions of years ago so I came up with the notion, which has been well commented on, that perhaps life starts in a similar way all the time, but we don't notice it because we confuse it with life that's already here.

As a non-scientist, I am, of course, totally out of my depth when it comes to making good, pertinant response to all you knowledgeable blokes and Icould kick myself for not working harder at school. as soon as I can find the time (8 year old child to bring up) I will be enrolling on the Open University to try to drag my knowledge up a bit..hope you blokes will still be around to chat when that happens.

[captain swoop]

there already is a place to discuss origins. it's a Usenet group that gets mentioned here quite a bit.

[Betenoire]

The way it is taught is schools and proclaimed on certain internet sites portrays it as an "alternative to God." As such, it encourages a change in one's beliefs and supplies something else to "believe in."

Just because it is taught in schools and your particular brand of Christianity is not does not mean that it is taught as an alternative to God. At no point did my biology teacher say, "And this is one of the many reasons why God does not exist."
It's a description of the evidence, fossil, genetic, and observational, as we see it.
And "seven days" simply does not fit all of that evidence, so it fails as a scientific theory.

Excellent point. It isn't fossil evidence when you get beyond the organisms that were able to leave a fossil. I will have to look at my source for the earliest dated fossil evidence for an organism. I don't believe it was microfossils so I'll have to get back to you on that.

Just because there aren't fossils doesn't mean there isn't evidence for life. Certain chemical processes, recorded in very early rock, are closely associated with life.
My microbio/phylogeny prof's favorite was a 3.9 myo banded iron formation in a rock he brought to class almost daily. The vertical oxidation/reduction reactions between Fe(II) and Fe(III) and back are a product of little organisms doing their thing (I'm not a geologist, so I'm not certain that there aren't other explanations, but life does make these sorts of BIFs). It's secondary evidence, certainly, but animal tracks are secondary evidence that an animal has been there, and we don't doubt that conclusion.

[ExpErdMann]

Just because there aren't fossils doesn't mean there isn't evidence for life. Certain chemical processes, recorded in very early rock, are closely associated with life.
My microbio/phylogeny prof's favorite was a 3.9 myo banded iron formation in a rock he brought to class almost daily. The vertical oxidation/reduction reactions between Fe(II) and Fe(III) and back are a product of little organisms doing their thing

That is true, but you need to take a lot more care in drawing conclusions from that sort of data, partly because we still don't know all that much about the early Earth. Here is a news story in which some Danish scientists claim to have found chemical evidence for photosynthesis in 3.7-billion-year-old rocks in Greenland.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3321819.stm

In the story Roger Buick throws some cold water on their interpretation.

[mike alexander]

I recall (and have to check) that relative isotope abundances have been used (carbon12/carbon13 ratios) since living processes can skew the ratio from inorganic carbon.

[ExpErdMann]

I am the original poster of this thread and I can confirm that I am in no way a creationist. I just find it strange to imagine that all life could come from a small number of initial cells formed billions of years ago so I came up with the notion, which has been well commented on, that perhaps life starts in a similar way all the time, but we don't notice it because we confuse it with life that's already here.

Sorry, I never meant to imply that you were a creationist. Your question is a good one. I mentioned what Wachtershauser's view is on this. One other thing to keep in mind though is that some scientists are moving towards the idea that the first organisms were closer in form to present-day eukaryotes (eg, plants, animals, protists) than to prokaryotes (Bacteria, Archaea). http://www.actionbioscience.org/newf...res_poole.html

I think this approach is very promising. We could possibly see prokaryotes as either being reduced forms of eukaryotic ancestors or as some sort of construct of these ancestors. It takes away the problem of how the ultra-complex eukaryotic cell could have evolved from the highly simplified prokaryotic one: it's comparable to a Boeing 747 having 'evolved' from a glider!

edit: I forgot to say that if this is true then I don't think new life could be evolving today. Any newly derived protocells would be immediately consumed by other organisms.

as soon as I can find the time (8 year old child to bring up) I will be enrolling on the Open University to try to drag my knowledge up a bit..hope you blokes will still be around to chat when that happens.

If the BABB is still here then many of us will be I'm sure. But you could know more than us by then.

[countrywideoptionone]

....if you ask any creationist, evolution has many more "riddles" than creation.

Exactly. And why is that? Well, it's because evolutionary theory has to conform to reality and the observational evidence. But Creationism is essentially a magical worldview, so it really need not follow any rules. The answer for everything: God did it. What could be simpler? Unfortunately, if one just bails out there for all the tough questions, one is left with a rather.... shallow existence.

There will always be tough questions. It is not possible for one human, or even every human to know everything. But we can hypothesize and test and try to fill in the holes of what we don't know, the various "riddles" if you will. Creation theory is no more magical then the belief of evolutionism that says, "Particles begat ... (snip) ... begat people (including you and me)." What is more shallow, that we exist for no reason, but are here because of an unrelated series of random events - "just because" and when we die we cease to exist, or that we were created for a purpose by a powerful, omnipotent, omnipresent, Being who is greater than we are and who loves even you? We have a much different view of what it is to live a shallow existence it would seem.

[Yannox]

As Sir Hoyle (who was very far from being a Creationist) said, Evolution is a religion with its own high priests, dogmas, catechisms, sacrificial offerings and Inquisition, that it requires vastly more faith than any other religion. Indeed that the numbers against it "are big enough to bury Darwin & the whole theory forever!". Other non-Creationists have said likewise.

[ExpErdMann]

As Sir Hoyle (who was very far from being a Creationist) said, Evolution is a religion with its own high priests, dogmas, catechisms, sacrificial offerings and Inquisition, that it requires vastly more faith than any other religion. Indeed that the numbers against it "are big enough to bury Darwin & the whole theory forever!". Other non-Creationists have said likewise.

Hoyle advocated that Earth's life arrived here from space, which is a sort of cop-out on the origins problem. Hoyle has a lot of credits, but this really isn't one of them. He was probably motivated by the general argument that the origin and subsequent evolution of life is impossible if it occurred primarily through random interaction (origin) and random mutations (evolution). I would tend to agree with him there. But there are alternatives to randomness, as I've pointed out above, which Hoyle never got into.

[Betenoire]

As Sir Hoyle (who was very far from being a Creationist) said, Evolution is a religion with its own high priests, dogmas, catechisms, sacrificial offerings and Inquisition, that it requires vastly more faith than any other religion. Indeed that the numbers against it "are big enough to bury Darwin & the whole theory forever!". Other non-Creationists have said likewise.

"A witty saying proves nothing." --Voltaire.

Science is not conducted by vote or by anecdote. It's conducted by evidence and by logical inference.
If you say evolution is more of a religion than Christianity, I say show me the evidence, show me the logical inference.

[informant]

Yannox's argument sounds a lot like a fallacious appeal to authority, since I don't think Sir Hoyle was a biologist.
Not to mention that it's off-topic.