Evidence against abiogenesis/evolution

[Loudmouth]

For the first reproducing life form to survive, another organism would have to evolve at the same time that biochemically works in the opposite direction to consume the first life form's excrement.

It should be noted that humans do breath in the excrement of plants. We call it oxygen. Also, plants use our excrement as well. We call it carbon dioxide.

Run this experiment, and if successful, you'll win a Nobel Prize: create a closed culture of an organism. . .

This experiment has already been run. We call the "closed culture" Earth.

 

[AintNoMonkey]

For the first reproducing life form to survive, another organism would have to evolve at the same time that biochemically works in the opposite direction to consume the first life form's excrement.

You're making the fantastically uninformed and incorrect assumption that microbes, like humans, can only eat and digest the products of other organisms. In fact, there are dozens (hundreds?) of species of microbes that eat rocks and minerals. Now, considering that the entire earth is made of rocks and minerals, your whole 'lack of nutirents' as a limiting agent argument fails hard. This also clearly refutes your argument that one organism must produce what another organism eats, and vice versa.

 

[Split Rock]

For the first reproducing life form to survive, another organism would have to evolve at the same time that biochemically works in the opposite direction to consume the first life form's excrement. Run this experiment, and if successful, you'll win a Nobel Prize: create a closed culture of an organism that obligately performs hydrogen sulfide chemosynthesis, which excretes H2SO4. Siphon off some of the SO4 2- if you prefer. Run the culture continuously for the rest of your life, and perhaps create 100,000 separate cultures. See if in your lifetime any of the organisms mutates to eat the SO4 2- through sulfate reduction chemosynthesis to turn the SO4 2- into H2S. If the test works, you'll be the biggest evolutionary hero since Charles Darwin. In real life (ie the hypothetical promordial ooze), the bacteria would die very rapidly. But even across your entire life and 100,000 separate experimental runs, I can tell you with 100% confidence the test would fail. God created life.

Let us we assume first that life began by black smoker vents in the ocean. Here hydrogen sulfide is continually expelled from the vents, providing a renewing supply of nutrients. Waste products will be diluted in the ocean and carried off into a near unlimited supply of water which will dilute it. I do not see the problem with this scenario.

Now let us look at the evolution of new enzymes. You claim it is impossible, yet the nylonase gene evolved within your own lifetime. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria
In addition, you should recognize that early enzymes were not as sophisticated as modern forms, and were therefore more likely to evolve quicker. As you probably already know an enzyme is a catalyst that speeds up a reaction that already proceeds without its presence. It will be useful as long as it increases the speed of the reaction. For primitive organisms, such enzymes would not need to be very large or tightly regulated. Perhaps only a cleft with a certain charge would be sufficient. Do not make the common creationist mistake of assuming the earliest enzymes looked like modern ones.

 

[Naraoia]

Some of you made excellent points in using the ability to pass genes to the next generation as a metric of evolutionary fitness. Here too, microbes are unsurpassed. An imaginative mind could scarcely devise a more prolific organism than a microbe, which doubles itself every 30 minutes to 4 days, depending on the microbe. At that rate, they would fill the earth in a matter of weeks. Contrast that to people, who need 15 years or so to duplicate themselves (don’t quibble this point, please). So now evolutionists are left with two insurmountable uphill battles instead of one. The first is the extraordinary energy efficiency of microbes. The second is their unsurpassed ability to procreate, also related to energy efficiency. The overwhelming force of natural selection should be forcing multicellulars to procreate faster by becoming unicellular instead, and in forcing multicellulars to become more energy-efficient, again by becoming unicellular. The inexorable selective pressure is in the direction of unicellularity.

Holy mitochondrion, you didn't really comprehend what we wrote, did you?

Big things can eat small things and small things can't eat big things very easily. That's the gist of it. You may be able to reproduce very fast if you are left alone but you won't reproduce at all if you're eaten.

Multicellular organisms survive today (at least for a while) because they have fully functioning, highly complex, and truly marvelously designed immune systems.

I wonder what kind of an immune system Volvox or Trichoplax has.

Having an immune system requires energy and reduces efficiency.

But improves survival hugely.

As soon as a single component fails, the species dies.

Heh, really? How would a species die if a single component fails in a single individual? Mutations, as I'm sure you know, happen to individuals. Harmful mutations won't generally spread throughout a species. So I'm curious as to your logic here.

The larger and more complex the multicellular organism, the more energy-intensive and complex the immune system. In engineering, this is sometimes referred to as parasitic energy costs. Competitive economic systems eliminate ideas that involve excessive parasitic energy costs, and natural selection acts to gradually eliminate such costs as well. That’s why manufacturing plants, power plants, military bases, cities, etc. become less efficient as they reach a certain size. Same is true for biological systems.

Waitwaitwait.

Let's hammer the point: these things with immune systems don't simply outcompete the microbes. They kill them. The ability to kill your parasites is rather a selective advantage.

I don’t particularly care whether evolutionists assume the first microbe was photosynthetic or not. If I were an evolutionist though, I would be compelled to make my first bug as simple as I possibly could. That would rule out photosynthesis, which is extraordinarily complex, even in organisms with only one photosystem.

Ok, point?

Some of you are hung up on my use of the term “oxygen” in my first post. I am using Chemical oxygen demand (COD) and Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD) as engineering measures of the amount of food in the medium available for consumption. It doesn’t matter whether the food refers to CO2, O2, H2S, N2, or any other sort of food the bacteria eat.

Good you are aware. Use "resource" then when you next discuss this

Assuming a limited food supply and assuming the very first evolved cell would relies on that same supply is an extremely safe and very reasonable assumption.

We told you this already. It's a stupid assumption. Anyone who makes it has never looked at this planet.

Any other assumption requires magic.

Vol-ca-noes.

The raw amount of food available is irrelevant—bacteria will eat through any amount of food supply in an extremely rapid period of time.

No they won't if it's replaced like it is in a deep sea vent.

More important is the flux of food over time. Even volcanic activity doesn’t typically last very long (decades, sometimes, but not millions of years).

Ask the Hawaii or the Yellowstone hot spot just how long it lasts. And whenever it's gone in one place it's still there in a number of other places. You might know that microbes are great at colonising new habitats.

Volcanoes die along with everything else. One of you said that evolution is rapid, but that’s synonymous with X-Men-type evolution. I believe this is the only realistic form of evolution that could account for our ecosystem, and such evolution is the stuff of fantasy/sci fi movies, not a documentary.

I think the rapidness thing was me about multicellularity, but anyway. As I've said volcanoes die in one place and form in another. Besides, the earth pretty much started out as a fireball. That means rather more volcanism back when life originated.

Myxococcus Xanthus colonies are still unicellular organisms. There’s a vast gulf between them and multicellular life forms. The fact that M. Xanthus aggregates for survival is functionally equivalent to cyanobacteria colonies emitting toxins to allow the colony survive.

And what about Boraas's algae? That's not "simple" aggregation, it's permanent coloniality. From there it's a matter of spatial gene expression regulation (and just so you know, some form of cell differentiation even occurs in cyanobacteria, where specialised cells fix nitrogen for the rest of the colony). In any case, the vastest gulf between unicellular and multicellular life forms is, as far as I understand it, a matter of cell communication and adhesion. And seems to be bridged no problem.

Remember that I’m asking you to visualize the hypothetical world in which the first living bacteria would spring into being. Would a person rationally expect the world as we see it day to have sprung from the conditions in the hypothetical world as it may have existed billions of years ago? No.

Why not? And please be specific, I can't debate against vague rhetorical questions.

Also, I am a young earth creationist, so I believe the earth is six-ten thousand years old (measured on Earth’s time clock).

Now that's a major obstacle indeed.

In the absence of intervention by God or Christ’s return, I fully expect that accumulated genetic defects and microbial attack will eventually and inevitably render mankind extinct. Here is one enunciation of the genetic aspect of this theory: http://www.onelife.com/evolve/degen.html. Think of the human race as a single big self-replicating machine. Just as a machine eventually breaks, so will the machine of the human race. Six thousand years or so is not enough time for microbes to destroy us, but I am convinced the outcome is inevitable, assuming no intervention by God.

(1) (Without reading the link) the idea is nuts

I won't think of the human race as a single anything, it's a rather big bunch of DNA trying to self-replicate. Besides, bacteria would've died out long ago with their rates of replication if genetic defects and parasites would inevitably render lineages extinct. Bacteria also mutate faster than humans. Yet they're still here and thriving. Go figure...

(2) Who cares if mankind goes extinct? Does the extinction of an overrated mammal invalidate the theory of evolution?

 

[Wiccan_Child]

For the first reproducing life form to survive, another organism would have to evolve at the same time that biochemically works in the opposite direction to consume the first life form's excrement.

Where did you get that idea from? Why must the first organism have something to eat it's excrement?

God created life.

"You're wrong. Therefore, I'm right"

I can't believe you don't see what's wrong with this argument.

 

[variant]

Volcanic and geothermal activity exist because pressure is being released. When the pressure is equalized, the activity ceases. Volcanic activity at a region lasts from days to decades, not millions of years of even multiple millennia. I don't subscribe to uniformitarianism in geology any more than I do in biology.

Who cares what you subscribe to? You don't seem to understand that the evidence has trended against you for several hundred years of geological research now do you?

Info for people who really don't know how silly you are being.
http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/lectures/age_of_the_earth/age_of_the_earth.html

Mid ocean ridges are not transient phenomena.

What you get is decades of geothermal activity at one specific location and volcanic activity in areas that lasts for millions of years like along the oceanic ridges which are were the earths plates are formed via volcanism.

 

[True_Blue]

To put this into perspective, bacteria today frequently are capable of evolving new metabolic pathways within a matter of days, though sometimes it takes a few years (it depends upon how much of a change in the enzymes is required). The bottom of this page in the following link has a few examples of the evolution of new metabolic pathways:
http://www.gate.net/~rwms/EvoMutations.html

Here is an important quote in the article you cited: "However, if any of the organisms' existing enzymes have the slightest ability to enhance reactions with the new resource, selection will strongly favor the duplication of the gene that produces that enzyme, and future mutations will improve the ability of the newly duplicated enzyme to process the new chemical resource." This sort of evolution is unquestionably present, and is a key part of microbial survival. I've built this adaptive ability into my business model. It's important to recognize that the organism has to have the a priori capability of metabolizing the compound--over time, it gets better at the process and its growth accelerates. This is a very good point you made, however.

 

[True_Blue]

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.

I have a strong hunch that if you used a double-blind survey to show an evolutionary microbiologist pictures or descriptions of microbes he had never seen before, and ask him to state whether they were ancient microbes or modern microbes, he would be unable to.

Also, genetic richness degrades over time. Our common human ancestor had all the genes that form the basis of all the human races across the world. My children do not have both African and Norwegian genes, but my ancestor did. Therefore, the ability of my line to adopt to low-sunlight and high-sunlight environments is severely degraded. I suspect Synechocystis has much worse ability to survive as a thermophile than its ancestors.

 

[True_Blue]

Oh, for another simple and elegant refutation of YEC, I'd like to point you to Supernova 1987A:
http://chem.tufts.edu/science/astronomy/SN1987A.html

Here's the basic idea. Some time before this star went supernova, it blew off a couple of rings of matter (you can see the rings clearly in the images in the above link). When the supernova went off (detected in 1987, hence the name), some of the photons struck the rings, heating them up. So, a little while after we saw the initial supernova go off, we saw the rings brighten. The time it took was 0.658 years (almost 8 months). This means that when the supernova went off, those rings were a little more than half a light year away from it.

But what's really neat is that we can see those rings directly with the Hubble Space Telescope. A detailed observation of the size of the rings, as they appear from Earth, using the HST gives us a nice geometrical measurement of the distance to the supernova. With the HST, we observe the angle. From the time delay we measure the distance at the source. Put the two together and, assuming a constant speed of light, we get a distance of 168,000 light years.

How is this remotely possible in a universe that is only 6,000 years old? How do we see evidence of an explosion that happened so long ago? By the way, you can try to see what would happen to the above measurement if you made the speed of light faster in the past: turns out it would make the supernova even further away if light were faster.

I don't know for sure, but my favorite theory at this point is Russell Humphreys' cosmology. Assuming the universe has a center and an edge, and that the earth as somewhere near the center, gravitational time dilation and other cosmological effects allow different clocks for different points in the universe. This is a different thread, however. Chalnoth, I appreciate your thoughtfulness. Those of you who have been posting insults can learn from Chalnoth's example.

 

[variant]

I have a strong hunch that if you used a double-blind survey to show an evolutionary microbiologist pictures or descriptions of microbes he had never seen before, and ask him to state whether they were ancient microbes or modern microbes, he would be unable to.

How would you obtain the ancient microbe descriptions and pictures?

Also, genetic richness degrades over time. Our common human ancestor had all the genes that form the basis of all the human races across the world. My children do not have both African and Norwegian genes, but my ancestor did. Therefore, the ability of my line to adopt to low-sunlight and high-sunlight environments is severely degraded. I suspect Synechocystis has much worse ability to survive as a thermophile than its ancestors.

Do you have the least bit of evidence for any of those assertions?

 

[True_Blue]

Holy mitochondrion, you didn't really comprehend what we wrote, did you?

Big things can eat small things and small things can't eat big things very easily. That's the gist of it. You may be able to reproduce very fast if you are left alone but you won't reproduce at all if you're eaten.

I wonder what kind of an immune system Volvox or Trichoplax has. But improves survival hugely. Heh, really? How would a species die if a single component fails in a single individual? Mutations, as I'm sure you know, happen to individuals. Harmful mutations won't generally spread throughout a species. So I'm curious as to your logic here. Waitwaitwait.

Let's hammer the point: these things with immune systems don't simply outcompete the microbes. They kill them. The ability to kill your parasites is rather a selective advantage.

Ok, point?

Good you are aware. Use "resource" then when you next discuss this

We told you this already. It's a stupid assumption. Anyone who makes it has never looked at this planet. Vol-ca-noes. No they won't if it's replaced like it is in a deep sea vent. Ask the Hawaii or the Yellowstone hot spot just how long it lasts. And whenever it's gone in one place it's still there in a number of other places. You might know that microbes are great at colonising new habitats. I think the rapidness thing was me about multicellularity, but anyway. As I've said volcanoes die in one place and form in another. Besides, the earth pretty much started out as a fireball. That means rather more volcanism back when life originated.

And what about Boraas's algae? That's not "simple" aggregation, it's permanent coloniality. From there it's a matter of spatial gene expression regulation (and just so you know, some form of cell differentiation even occurs in cyanobacteria, where specialised cells fix nitrogen for the rest of the colony). In any case, the vastest gulf between unicellular and multicellular life forms is, as far as I understand it, a matter of cell communication and adhesion. And seems to be bridged no problem.

Why not? And please be specific, I can't debate against vague rhetorical questions.

Now that's a major obstacle indeed. (1) (Without reading the link) the idea is nuts

I won't think of the human race as a single anything, it's a rather big bunch of DNA trying to self-replicate. Besides, bacteria would've died out long ago with their rates of replication if genetic defects and parasites would inevitably render lineages extinct. Bacteria also mutate faster than humans. Yet they're still here and thriving. Go figure...

(2) Who cares if mankind goes extinct? Does the extinction of an overrated mammal invalidate the theory of evolution?

Naraoia,

1. No organism could even exist to eat another organism if there is no time for the first predatory organism to evolve.
2. Immune systems are ultimately no panacea for multicellular organisms. Anyone suffering from AIDS can attest to this. Given enough time, the microbes will kill us all.
3. The point is that sunlight as a renewable source of energy directly utilizable by microbes is not available for non-photosynthetic organisms. The first organism would need to derive its food from a point source of emissions, such as a volcano.
4. The longest volcanic eruption we know of was 50 years. http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/2000/00_02_03.html. My reasonable hunch is that no eruption would reasonably last for 500k years or more. I’m sorry, those of you who argue otherwise, but completely reversing a metabolic process could not be done with evolution, and even if it could, not as soon as 500k years.
5. We already live in a balanced aquarium, which allows the ecosystem to sustain itself. The first cell would not exist in a balanced aquarium.
6. High levels of volcanism don’t help evolution—they hurt evolution through incineration.
7. One volcano popping up elsewhere doesn’t help either. The microbe could not travel from one point source of food to another fast enough. In between would be a vast “desert”
8. I can’t access Borass’s paper, so I can’t evaluate it (not willing to pay $32). I don’t regard TalkOrigins as credible, if your information cam from there.
9. If you don’t regard humans as a “single anything,” would you care to identify a person who is only half-human, or less than 100% human? Charles Darwin and his contemporaries could. I absolutely do not think you’re a racist, by the way.
10. If you want me to take the time to read Borass’s paper, then you should read my link as well.

 

[True_Blue]

Where did you get that idea from? Why must the first organism have something to eat it's excrement?

Wiccan, almost all the ideas in this thread are my own original ideas.

Because otherwise the organism would be inhibited (poisoned) by the excrement. If you assume that some current carries off the excrement, then there is no selective pressure to impel the organism to evolve (assuming you accept other evolutionist arguments regarding mutation, etc). If you say that organisms evolve without selective pressure, then you're resorting to random chance and open the door to the full power of Creationist probability & statistics. For example, one chance in 10^4,478,296.

 

[True_Blue]

How would you obtain the ancient microbe descriptions and pictures?



Do you have the least bit of evidence for any of those assertions?

I honestly have no idea. Fossils probably won't cut it. I'm glad you made that point, because I'm not sure any evolutionist has a clue about what "ancient" bacteria look like. As best I can tell, talk about ancient bacteria and their characteristics is pure speculation.

 

[Chalnoth]

Here is an important quote in the article you cited: "However, if any of the organisms' existing enzymes have the slightest ability to enhance reactions with the new resource, selection will strongly favor the duplication of the gene that produces that enzyme, and future mutations will improve the ability of the newly duplicated enzyme to process the new chemical resource." This sort of evolution is unquestionably present, and is a key part of microbial survival. I've built this adaptive ability into my business model. It's important to recognize that the organism has to have the a priori capability of metabolizing the compound--over time, it gets better at the process and its growth accelerates. This is a very good point you made, however.

Apparently you missed the important point: that first enzyme that has the "slightest ability to enhance reactions" appears more or less at random from previous enzymes. Often it's a slight modification of an enzyme used to metabolize some other molecule.

 

[Chalnoth]

I have a strong hunch that if you used a double-blind survey to show an evolutionary microbiologist pictures or descriptions of microbes he had never seen before, and ask him to state whether they were ancient microbes or modern microbes, he would be unable to.

Given how hard it is to get good information on ancient microbes, this may well be correct much of the time. But it's irrelevant to the point: evolution adds complexity over time. We can trace the evolution of many of the complex structures in cells.

Also, genetic richness degrades over time. Our common human ancestor had all the genes that form the basis of all the human races across the world. My children do not have both African and Norwegian genes, but my ancestor did. Therefore, the ability of my line to adopt to low-sunlight and high-sunlight environments is severely degraded. I suspect Synechocystis has much worse ability to survive as a thermophile than its ancestors.

I'm sorry, but no. It's entirely the other way around. Random mutations are continually adding information to the genome, which is then winnowed down by natural selection into only those directions that are either useful or at least not deadly. Complexity increases over time, in short. And this has been observed time and time again.

 

[Chalnoth]

I don't know for sure, but my favorite theory at this point is Russell Humphreys' cosmology. Assuming the universe has a center and an edge, and that the earth as somewhere near the center, gravitational time dilation and other cosmological effects allow different clocks for different points in the universe.

Sorry, but the universe has no center, and there is no edge that we can see. But what's more, this doesn't work. The gravitational potentials aren't anywhere close to deep enough to make for gravitational time dilation on these scales. In fact, the time dilation is small enough in nearly all situations that it can be safely ignored (the exceptions being when you get very close to the event horizon of a black hole, or if you're making extremely detailed measurements).

By the way, this is my field of study, so I do enjoy discussions along these lines (cosmology, that is).

 

[Chalnoth]

Wiccan, almost all the ideas in this thread are my own original ideas.

Because otherwise the organism would be inhibited (poisoned) by the excrement. If you assume that some current carries off the excrement, then there is no selective pressure to impel the organism to evolve (assuming you accept other evolutionist arguments regarding mutation, etc). If you say that organisms evolve without selective pressure, then you're resorting to random chance and open the door to the full power of Creationist probability & statistics. For example, one chance in 10^4,478,296.

It's impossible to have zero selective pressure. No matter the situation, there are still going to be differences in reproductive efficiency. For example, one variant may multiply faster than another. One variant may be more resistant to damage than another. One variant may be more able to repair damage than another. One variant may be able to eat another. And so on and so forth.

 

[True_Blue]

It's impossible to have zero selective pressure. No matter the situation, there are still going to be differences in reproductive efficiency. For example, one variant may multiply faster than another. One variant may be more resistant to damage than another. One variant may be more able to repair damage than another. One variant may be able to eat another. And so on and so forth.

To bring the thread full circle, I propose a crude equation: for macroevolution to take place, selective pressure toward macroevolution must be greater than the pressure of reduced energy efficiency + 2nd law entropy in the other direction. Whether this is truly the case or not is ultimately a matter of religion for all of us, not science based on observation. The small measure of faith, common sense and experience that I have tells me entropy and lost energy efficiency overwhelms what little selective pressure exists for the first microbe in a steady state environment.

To address your naked assertion about Humphrey's cosmology, I suggest your read his books and articles first, then make your judgment. We'll have a much better idea about whether his theory is accurate when we collect better astronomical data, and when we figure out the precise numerical value of the cosmological constant. Until then, neither of us can say he's right or wrong.

 

[Chalnoth]

To bring the thread full circle, I propose a crude equation: for macroevolution to take place, selective pressure toward macroevolution must be greater than the pressure of reduced energy efficiency + 2nd law entropy in the other direction. Whether this is truly the case or not is ultimately a matter of religion for all of us, not science based on observation.

What? How is it not a matter of observation? I mean, wouldn't simply observing macroevolution show that it happens? See one example of macroevolution here. I mean, if we observe macroevolution happening (which we do), that would indicate that your theoretical objections are clearly flawed.

To address your naked assertion about Humphrey's cosmology, I suggest your read his books and articles first, then make your judgment. We'll have a much better idea about whether his theory is accurate when we collect better astronomical data, and when we figure out the precise numerical value of the cosmological constant. Until then, neither of us can say he's right or wrong.

Look, he proposes the existence of a white hole to explain his cosmology. A white hole is the time reversal of a black hole, and proposing that one actually exists out there is the equivalent of proposing that a bunch of shards of glass lying on the floor can spontaneously assemble themselves and hop onto a desk. It's forbidden by thermodynamics.

 

[plindboe]

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?

I think it should be a crime punishable by numerous lashings to mention Volvox without even providing a picture.

Peter