Those poor, primitive creatures we call creationists have to live their lives in spite of many difficulties, and one of the most significant is language. If you have ever tried to read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as written by Geoffrey, or a speech by Sarah Palin as written by anybody, you will know that a language can look sort of like English but be completely meaningless. Words like "intelligent design," "Darwinism," "dinosaurs," "mutation," "fossils," "species," and "random" have conventional meanings to you and me, but to your average, ten-commandments-in-courthouses, Jesus-loves-AK47s, humans-rode-dinosaurs creationist, they have other meanings, and that confusion in language leads to much misunderstanding in the real world. But never fear, gentle reader. I am always available to attempt a translation for you.
Take a very common example. Whenever I or anyone else writes about evolution on Huffington Post or elsewhere, you don't need to be a psychic to know that some commenter will always say, "Huh, all very well to talk about Darwinism, but you atheists can't explain the origin of life with evolution, can you, now?" Now at this point most writers on evolution play with paper clips on their desk in an embarrassed sort of way and say something like, "Oh, dear, no, evolution has nothing to do with origins of life, quite a different department deals with all that, ahem."
I think this is a huge mistake. I have had a go at one alternative response which envisages a process of "natural selection" assisting in getting inorganic chemicals towards being organic and then self-reproducing, but back in those primitive days of my early attempts at translation I had misunderstood the question entirely, and other approaches are needed. You see, when someone talks about the "origin of life," a scientist has an image in mind of experiments aimed at reproducing possible conditions on Earth, say, four billion years ago: playing with combinations of organic molecules, different temperatures, different salinity, different substrates, with or without electric discharges, and so on. In addition, scientists think about the earliest life forms found as fossils, the age and type of rocks they are found in, the relationships between simple life forms in existence today, possible analogs for early ecosystems around submarine volcanic vents, or in deep caves, or in extreme environments, and so on. So faced with that sort of comment a scientist will say, "Yes, you are right, evolutionary biology doesn't have much if anything to do with the origins of life" -- but because it is so obvious, they leave unsaid, "But so what? That is a field of research involving geology and chemistry and cosmology and physics and paleontology."
On the other hand, our mentally fossilised creationist isn't in fact asking anything of the kind; this person knows nothing, and cares less, about the different disciplines that make up scientific research. Isn't checking on whether the evolutionary biologist has also studied abiogenesis. Has no mental image of the conditions on Earth four billion years ago, or of what early life forms might have been like. Isn't asking (and this is another misapprehension of the hapless scientist dealing, as gladly as possible, with idiots), "How do you know that God didn't get life going four billion years ago and then provided the mechanism of evolution to keep it all ticking along?" Isn't saying, "Huh, you think you are so smart studying your Darwinism, but God tricked you by creating life in the first place, and just let you think you were finding out something worthwhile. Try being an atheist now, Mr. Smartypants Scientist."
No, they are not saying these things, because those things would make no sense at all in their language. They don't think God started things off four billion years ago by "breathing life into" some simple unicellular organism that then began to speciate and evolve to produce all of the subsequent biodiversity of this planet. Of course not; what kind of a wimp do you think their god is? Does the Bible mention stromatolites? No, they think that their god created the life forms we see today. Intelligently designed all of them to fit into their own niche and serve humans. Wiped out a few, accidentally, when he somehow flooded the whole surface of the planet to more than the depth of the highest mountain, while saving others by putting them, each with the most limited genetic diversity possible, on a boat, and then, when the water somehow disappeared, putting them ashore to go forth and multiply. And all this happened not five billion years ago but 5000, give or take a king or two.
These are people who not only have less sense of time depth than a two-year-old child but who have absolutely no ability to imagine a world any different to the one they see now, looking out the back door in, say, Kansas. The vision of the past that I have -- where an ever-increasing, ever more diverse range of plants and animals evolves through time in various directions, suffering major setbacks along the way with massive extinction events, succeeded by new bursts of speciation, and all occurring against an ever-changing backdrop of different plant communities, different climatic conditions, and different arrangements of continents and varying sea depths -- would be a vision as likely to be had by a creationist as the vision of America having a decent health care system or sane gun laws.
So when you are asked whether evolution accounts for the origin of life, don't think bacteria, or stromatolites, or yeast, or amoebae, and say, "Oh, no, of course not." Think cats and dogs, birds, worms, frogs, snakes, pine trees, gum trees, petunias, and, yes, great apes and humans, and be the worm that turns -- say, "Yes, of course it does." Your average, barely-literate creationist hears the first answer as "scientist admits evolution didn't happen, accepts creationist proof of reality of God." The second answer would come as a shock, and it may be a second or two before they totally reject it, but in that time you can reiterate how evolution (combining, of course, natural selection and speciation), not creation, gives rise to those life forms. And one day, maybe, you can educate a creationist so much that they will accept the reality of evolution (and pigs may have evolved wings) and begin to explore with you the fascinating investigation into the origins of life on Earth.
Next week's translation: "How did the first male dog that evolved find a mate?"
I make monkeys of creationists every week on The Watermelon Blog.
Follow David Horton on Twitter: www.twitter.com/watermelon_man
Numbers, Ronald L.
2006 "The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism" Berkeley: University of California Press
Scott, Eugenie C.,
2005 Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction University of California Press
The origin of life has been a key element of intelligent design creationism since its genesis. "The Mystery of Life's Origin" by Thaxton, Bradley and Olsen (1984) introduced the modern version OOL creationist argument, and even introduced all of the principle ideas later exploited by intelligent design creationists such as William Dembski, and Stephen Meyer. That book was published by The Foundation for Thought and Ethics which was famously the publisher of "Of Pandas and People," the creationist High School text featured in the Dover trial. Meyer's recent book. "The Signature in the Cell" is just a lame continuation.
Similarly, "Origins of Life: Biblical and Evolutionary Models Face Off" by Fazale Rana, and Hugh Ross
(2004 Colorado Springs: NavPress) is a failed attempt to update Thaxton, Bradley and Olsen.
(My review of Rana&Ross was published by the National Center for Science Education,
http://ncseweb.org/rncse/27/3-4/review-origins-life )
So, I would suggest to Horton that he try to replace cheap insults with a bit of study -- it makes the criticism so much better.
Giovanna Costanzo, Samanta Pino, Fabiana Ciciriello and Ernesto Di Mauro
2009 “Generation of Long RNA Chains in Water” The Journal of Biological Chemistry, 284, 33206-33216, November 27
Nuevo, Michel, Stefanie Milam, Scott Sandford, Jason Dworkin, Jamie Elsila
2009 “Formation of Uracil from the Ultraviolet Photo-Irradiation of Pyrimidine in Pure Water Ices,” Astrobiology vol. 9 no. 7, Oct. 1.
S N Rodin & A S Rodin
2008 “On the origin of the genetic code: signatures of its primordial complementarity in tRNAs and aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases” Heredity aop, | doi:10.1038/sj.hdy.6801086.
Ronald Breslow, Zhan-Ling Cheng
2009 "On the origin of terrestrial homochirality for nucleosides and amino acids" PNAS June 9, 2009 vol. 106 no. 23 9144-9146
Matthew W. Powner, Béatrice Gerland & John D. Sutherland,
2009 "Synthesis of activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides in prebiotically plausible conditions" Nature 459, 239-242 (14 May 2009)
Bernd R.T. Simoneit, Ahmed I. Rushdi and David W. Deamer
2007 “Abiotic formation of acylglycerols under simulated hydrothermal conditions and self-assembly properties of such lipid products” Advances in Space Research
Volume 40, Issue 11, 2007, Pages 1649-1656
Nick Lane, John F. Allen, and William Martin
2010 “How did LUCA make a living? Chemiosmosis in the origin of life” BioEssays Wiley Periodicals, Inc (advanced online publication Feb. 1, 2010)
Oh, and you are obviously a better Chaucer scholar than I ever was.
He started with derision compounded by inanity, and had nowhere else to go. I have read Chaucer in the original. It is best appreciated by reading out loud. It is anything but, "completely meaningless."
The modern research on the origin of life is daunting to most people, even most scientists, even most biologists. It requires some degree of comfort reading both geochemistry, biochemistry and at least some familiarity with the ecology of simple organisms such as the Archea. This is perhaps why Horton does not address any of the science at all. Instead he substitutes insults. The literature is too rich to discuss here, but for interested readers, I have a short outline of current research posted here: http://stonesnbones.blogspot.com/2008/12/origin-of-life-outline.html
8:10 PM CST
...Exactly...fanatics choose not to listen to reason; their schtick operates from a whole different area of the brain; the more primitive, limbic area of the brain. They are clueless; so why give them a platform ?...
J.B.
4/11/10
4:00 PM CST
Quote :
"...These are people (the creationist) who not only have less sense of time depth than a 2 year old child, but who have absolutely no ability to imagine a world any different to the one they see now, looking out the back door, in, say, Kansas."...
Great writing David; always refreshing to hear another voice of reason successfully negating the stench of ignorance and superstition rising out of the contemporary American cesspool of functional illiteracy.
I do grow weary of the debate; at times I wish Hitchens and Dawkins would stop giving the religious fanatics a "debate" platform...This only enables the zealots and gives them voice when otherwise they would not be heard; or at least heard less .
I certainly advocate confronting ignorance, but at least a little show of indifference can also be a potent weapon.
J.B.
4/11/10
Scientists have built on evolutionary theory for 150 years. We WATCH evolution happen. We have DNA evidence that shows beyond any doubt that we share kinship with all life on Earth.
Did you know that there are markers in your DNA - remnants of retrovirus infections suffered by distant ancestors? When a retrovirus infects an adult's reproductive cells, it can leave a unique fingerprint that is passed to all offspring.
Did you know that you share many markers with other apes and primates? Did you know that you share them in EXACTLY the pattern that evolutionary theory predicts?
Did you know that the same DNA that proves you are related to your cousin proves you are related to orangutans?
If we can make life and death decisions based on DNA in criminal trials, we must accept the power of DNA to tell us about our relationship to life on Earth. Or, we must let all those criminals out of jail.
Species evolve. Humans evolved. I'm sorry that some people can't reconcile these facts with their faith. Too bad.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away". -- Philip K. Dick
http://www.tao.invisionzone.com
But be warned; 'arguments' such as those made by David Horton in this article that are nothing more than vitriolic personal attacks against those that do not believe as he does are not allowed at TAO. It is reserved for scientific CIVIL debate only, and anyone resorting to name calling and other such childish nonsense will find their posts moved to a special 'flame zone' where they will probably be ignored by the other participants, or if they are too gross for that they will be removed altogether, along with the poster.
Origins is a very serious issue, folks, and in spite of the arm-waving and shouting of some, it is absolutely NOT scientifically settled at this particular point in time.
For example, you reposted this stupidity; "As technology continues to advance, so does our understanding of human evolution. Research by UA assistant anthropology professor David Raichlen and his colleagues provide evidence suggesting that 3.6 billion years ago, hominins walked with the same upright gait that humans do today."
True, the original author was someone called Maura Shea, and you correctly realized that "billion" is not "million." But, you are stupid enough to still claim that the research by David A. Raichlen proved that "Lucy is NOT a human ancestor." By "Lucy" we assume you mean the entire species of Australopithecus afarensis. That does prove that you are either very ignorant, or willfully deceiving.
But yes - with the Joyce/Lincoln experiments with self-replicating molecules demonstrating Darwinian evolution, I think it is safe to say that evolution was certainly involved in the origin of life as well.
While the origin of life as a field of study is avoided by a lot of biologists because we lack any fossil evidence, some scientists (Manfred Eigen and Freeman Dyson among others) have been willing to speculate on the subject, and others have been willing to experiment with the generation of biologically-significant chemicals in conditions approximating Earth of 3 or 4 billion years ago. It's likely that there actually is fossil evidence in the form of structures and behaviors in the genetic makeup of modern-day organisms, left over from the original development of life.
Spend a few hours with Google and you'll have lots of answers to give to creationists who try that little trick with you, answers they won't be able to deal with at all because they have no pat rationalizations that refute them.
"Fractal time" is an invention by some guy named Gregg Braden. It's a complete fabrication - a speculation.
Sorry but you sound like one of the folks the author is describing - a person with no real appreciation of science, but in love with pseudo-science babble.
.
We are starting to realize that 'linear' time may be just a subset of 'fractal' time.
We have a scale of reference for linear time but none for fractal time.
All I know is things make much more sense for me when I perceive time as functioning fractally.
Yup, guess that's really all you know.