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Stop asking. No one here who supports a non-supernatural origin of life believes that bacteria arose spontaneously.
Yes. And please understand that I say this with rhetorical standing at least equal to yours.
Unless they do something stupid like die.
But it is a perfect point to quible. We do not duplicate ourselves. Why not? Could it be that there are evolutionary advantages to combining DNA to create new DNA as opposed to simple replication?
Did you not read the points brought up in prior posts? Energy efficiency means nothing. It doesn't matter how energy efficient you are when you are slowing dissolving in a predator's stomach.
Which would give ample food for their predators. Or they would drown on their own waste and a different organism would eat said waste.
Wrong. You are hung up on energy efficiency. You may have a point in energy deprived areas. But we are not in one. Energy is abundant. We get a good shot of it for around 12 hours a day depending on the season and the latitude.
Huh? Explain this onw better. Components of individuals immune systems fail on a daily basis and yet the species is stronger than ever.
Your entire idea predicates on a limited food supply. And in energy poor ares, we can see what you are talking about. But most life seems to come from an energy rich environment.
Correct. And the first organisms most likely did not depend on large amounts of free oxygen. That came much later.
It does matter. One organism's waste is another's food.
Not at all. Go outside during the day. How much energy is transmitted to the earth from that big ball of fire hanging there in the sky?
If by magic, you mean thermal vents, the sun, maybe a volcano, then yes, magic it is. Otherwise, you are the one talking magic here.
And above you mention how fast microbes reproduce. Months is all that it would take for mutations and selective pressures to start changing the ecosystems at those scales.
You are talking about organisms that reproduce rapidly. Mutations occur rapidly with those types of organisms. There is a reason many geneticists use fruit flies. The life cycle is fast enough to get several generations in a small amount of time.
But it is a step in the direction of a multicellular organism.
I would. Without a magic man to do it, either.
Nah. We have a long ways to go.
Eventually. Or we evolve.
Nah. We've been around a wee bit longer than 6000 years and we are only getter better.
Except once the carrots stat getting scarce, the rabbits will start to each the feces or other rabbits. And the once that can process the feces or other rabbits more efficiently get an advantage over those that cannot, so they have a few more babies that have those helpful traits. After a few thousand generations of this, you may have a proto-tigr or proto-cockroac (not that you can get a whole lot more proto than a cockroach...)
There is no "vast gulf." There is instead a number of stages that are similar to those that existed in the past. All bacteria exist in colonies to begin with. Some form colonies with specialized cells (volvox). Then you have simple mulicellular organisms with a limited number of cell types that constitute tissues (coral, jelly fish). Where is the "vast gulf" you speak of?
Would a person rationally expect the world as we see it today to have sprung from a magic garden where there was no death or decay, and therefore no ecosystem to speak of?
Absurd. Show us where is says this in scripture.
Modern microbes are vastly, vastly more efficient than ancient ones. They've had some 3.5-3.8 billion years to get better at it, after all. Now they have all sorts of mechanisms to preserve themselves from coping errors, to swap genetic material with other organisms, to move around and ingest material, and so on and so forth. Organisms today are, in short, many orders of magnitude better at survival than the earliest organisms were. Thus, not only would your multiplication rates have been lower in the ancient past, but the death rates would have been much, much higher.
Sure. And we have some understanding of how the human immune system evolved. Many fish, for example, have only a small fraction of our own immune system, and they survive just fine. The first multicellular organisms didn't need anything like an advanced immune system, not any more than single-celled organisms, anyway, as they weren't significantly different to parasites than single-celled organisms. As they gradually changed to organisms that were larger and replicated more slowly, the immune system gradually changed along with it.
Unbelievable. How do you explain kangaroos, then? Where did they come from? Why were they (and many other animals) only found in Australia?
I don't think you're getting it. It'll take a long, long time in the early Earth for any such buildup to occur. Firstly, it'd be quite a while before the first life forms would be able to live in other environments than volcanic vents or breakwaters, or wherever they started. So the waste products would just diffuse out. Secondly, it's a big earth out there. It would take on the order of thousands of years, if not much longer, to change the overall concentration of these molecules over the entire Earth. When you're talking about life forms that have life cycles on the order of hours, changes that take that long are no problem at all: they would evolve the new metabolic pathways required in a comparative heartbeat.
Wow... now that was unexpected...
