We're all winners! (Serious thread)

[Bushido216]

I had a thought recently.

Every person / plant / animal / whatever alive today is the sum of an insanely successful biological line. You can talk about a line of European kings being successful for being unbroken for so long or whatever, but as a necessity of the Theory of Evolution, it follows that everything alive today on the planet, us included, traces its ancestry back to wherever life started.

So you, reading this, are the latest in an unbroken chain of reproductions going back to the primordial ooze. If you go back far enough, your fathers didn't even walk erect. If you go back even farther than that, they probably didn't even have sexual dimorphism! The first human population claims you as their offspring!

Congratulations, sir or madam, on your success.

 

[AV1611VET]

Congratulations, sir or madam, on your success.

We'd 404 after 338 --- Luke 3:38 that is ---

 

[Washington]

I had a thought recently.

Every person / plant / animal / whatever alive today is the sum of an insanely successful biological line. You can talk about a line of European kings being successful for being unbroken for so long or whatever, but as a necessity of the Theory of Evolution, it follows that everything alive today on the planet, us included, traces its ancestry back to wherever life started.

So you, reading this, are the latest in an unbroken chain of reproductions going back to the primordial ooze. If you go back far enough, your fathers didn't even walk erect. If you go back even farther than that, they probably didn't even have sexual dimorphism! The first human population claims you as their offspring!

Congratulations, sir or madam, on your success.

Errr, thanks . . . I guess. Actually, I had nothing to do with it. It's all a matter of deterministic inevitability.

 

[Nostromo]

Thanks, when do I receive my cheque?

 

[Doveaman]

So you, reading this, are the latest in an unbroken chain of reproductions going back to the primordial ooze.

Do you have any empirical evidence for this "ooze", or is this faith based?

 

[Nostromo]

I saw it myself on Ghostbusters 2.

 

[Wedjat]

Come now Bushido, we all know that ooze stuff is outdated and often misconstrued.

But anyway thanks I guess. This reminds me of a quote that I have sitting on my computer, let me get it...

The number of individual beings which could be standing here in your place vastly outnumber all of the grains of sand, on all of the beaches, in all of the world. You're the inheritor of a genetic legacy which stretches back 3.8 billion years through the eons, and which has circled the center of our galaxy about 20 times. You're the endpoint of billions of generations of births, competitions, wars, and deaths; the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that can possibly result in you. Your forbears have survived arguably the single greatest ecological catastrophe ever to hit the planet; when the earliest plants started poisoning the atmosphere with oxygen. Yet, your ancestors learned to use this poisonous gas to produce energy in a way that had never been attempted before; an evolutionary triumph which paved the way for the first multicellular life. Your genetic line has survived floods, freezes, and meteor impacts from the skies themselves, preserving this single genetic line through the eons to lead ultimately to you. This is a legacy you share with every living thing on earth, from the largest creature ever to have lived; the blue whale; to the lowliest prion. You share this legacy with the blades of grass between your toes and the trees that give you shade. You are a thread in a huge, amazing, incredibly diverse tapestry of living things; some of whom have clawed their way out of the seas to survive on land, some of whom remained in the ocean, and a few of whom stood on land for a few million years, ultimately said "well, screw this" and marched back into the sea. Once we add cosmology into the mix, not only does this legacy stretch to everything living, but to the non-living as well. You share your origins with the stars and planets. The asteroids which hang in space, all the way down to the loneliest hydrogen atom in deep space. All the parts that make you stretch back through the eons and have borne witness to the very birth of the universe. They have seen the birth and death of stars, supernovae, black holes and pulsars. They've seen planets torn to pieces and solar systems form. They've seen galaxies coalesce and skies darken.

 

[Jnwaco]

It's outdated and misconstrued? Are you agreeing with the folks that think aliens brought us here?

 

[Split Rock]

Do you have any empirical evidence for this "ooze", or is this faith based?

Faith: The new "dirty word."

 

[MoonLancer]

Do you have any empirical evidence for this "ooze", or is this faith based?

why not start a thread about how faith is the new dirty word? lol

Faith: The new "dirty word."

you said it.

 

[Split Rock]

why not start a thread about how faith is the new dirty word? lol

you said it.

Beat you to it by one minute!

 

[Bushido216]

Errr, thanks . . . I guess. Actually, I had nothing to do with it. It's all a matter of deterministic inevitability.

You must be great at parties.

 

[AV1611VET]

Faith: The new "dirty word."

Was it ever "clean" in the eyes of an [unregenerate] scientist?

 

[Cabal]

Was it ever "clean" in the eyes of an [unregenerate] scientist?

No idea, we're not the ones attributing the word to our opponents.

 

[Split Rock]

Was it ever "clean" in the eyes of an [unregenerate] scientist?

So what.... you are agreeing with "unregenerate" scientists, now? The same ones you claim have more faith than you do?

 

[Wedjat]

It's outdated and misconstrued? Are you agreeing with the folks that think aliens brought us here?

No I'm not, but I've also studied abiogenesis in depth. The idea of a primordial soup or "ooze" originated with Darwin when he said life may have begun in a "warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights, heat, electricity, etc. present, so that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes" in The Origin of Species. It was his guess as to where life arose, and an unfounded guess was all it was. New research on the subject has opened up a slew of working hypotheses, none of which have anything to do with ooze. If you really want a consistency based name maybe "very watery soup" would be in order, something along the lines of 99% water. But that's just one of the many processes that could have contributed to the rise of living organisms.

 

[AV1611VET]

It was his guess as to where life arose...

According to a literal Genesis 1:1, Wedjat, which existed first --- life or non-life?

Abiogenesis is a joke.

 

[Meshach]

No I'm not, but I've also studied abiogenesis in depth. The idea of a primordial soup or "ooze" originated with Darwin when he said life may have begun in a "warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights, heat, electricity, etc. present, so that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes" in The Origin of Species. It was his guess as to where life arose, and an unfounded guess was all it was. New research on the subject has opened up a slew of working hypotheses, none of which have anything to do with ooze. If you really want a consistency based name maybe "very watery soup" would be in order, something along the lines of 99% water. But that's just one of the many processes that could have contributed to the rise of living organisms.

Regardless, it still takes a measure of faith no matter which way you slice it.

 

[Washington]

You must be great at parties.

I hold my own, thank you.

 

[Wedjat]

According to a literal Genesis 1:1, Wedjat, which existed first --- life or non-life?

Abiogenesis is a joke.

Well I wouldn't call God alive in the traditional sense of the word so I'm going to have to go with non-life. However I can see someone taking it from the perspective that God is life, in which case I could go the other way.

Unfortunately for you not everyone see's the entire Bible as fact, so as much as you just like to say Abiogenesis is a joke based solely off Biblical teaching, for the rest of us we need to consider it very seriously as a possible idea for how life began.