I am a knowing subject. I see other human beings and assume that they too are knowing subjects - this assumption is based on their having roughly the same physical form as me (brain, nervous system, etc.)
The phenomenal world that we all perceive is the correlative of the thing-in-itself, and time and space belong to it. When I was born, there were already people alive - I am convinced that they experienced a passage of time, as did the people who were alive when they were born, etc. Extrapolating, it seems obvious to me that the phenomenal timeline can be drawn back at a rate of one second per second to the beginning of recorded history, then to the first animals, and then to the formation of the Earth itself. This is the region where the theory of evolution is applied. No paradoxes are impinged on.
Recap: there is a phenomenal, empirical period of time, lasting some four billion years, which began with a lifeless planet, and is currently where we are now.
Do the sceptics and the creationists alike have any complaints with this? I want bring to light the specific points where the disagreements spring from.
(PS. I trained as a physicist, and came to philosophy/metaphysics from that direction. The marriage of science and philosphy is one of my central interests.)
Heh… even so philosophy is the woman in a male ruled “society” Her contribuitions are nevertheless extremly important. They can get married… but science has the “upper hand” so to speak .
Answer me this:is abiogenesis officially part of evolutionary theory,or is it distinct and seperate?
I need sources.Text book stuff,i know they taught evolution in school.Now,what percent of evolutionists belive evolution encompasses how life first began,and what percent believe it does not address how life first began?
Because this my friends, seems to be the biggest problem we are facing in reconciling science with religion.
I think the transition from simple molecules to more complex ones is chemistry, but from there to the first cell probably should go under the umbrella of evolution.
I for one believe that life emerged from scratch on this planet, although I’m not hostile to the theory that Earth-life was seeded from outer space.
The simplest first cell must have been composed of thousands of complex chemical reactions. Now the fact that this appeared by a sequence of chance encounters of molecules sounds slim. We know a process that generates complex items from simpler ones and that is technological evolution. In 100 years we went from nothing to computers, in a million years an advanced civilization could create an item as complex as a cell.
But the point is the aliens could come from many different places: a parallel universe where the laws of physics are simpler and easily allow high speed evolution into thinking minds; maybe the basic elementary particles of our universe is simply a pure mind; maybe there are trillions of previous universes that created higher forms of evolved items up to the first cell etc. Maybe life evolved on a completely different planet with completely different materials, created an intelligent alien civilization 7 billion years ago and they designed us. We are a second generation evolution.
The possibilities are endless and some seem more reasonable than pure chance as evolution suggests. Evolution seems to be a long sequence of one shot events that from some carbon atoms lead to the first cell and then to a thinking mind, it cannot be reproduced, it cannot be analyzed in all the trillions of detailed events that gave rise to the first cell. This theory sounds like science fiction to me. An alien that designs us from another universe or from another civilization within ours or within his computer simulation seems more reasonable.
There may be many levels of hidden layers, the alien’s universe may have different physical laws, we are a simulation or a product of the alien’s technology. But the aliens may be the product of yet another alien universe, physics and technologies. The recursion could be many layers deep, maybe infinite ? Many hidden layers of physics may lay behind us.
Intelligent Design HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH RELIGION, THE INTELLIGENT DESIGNERS COULD BE MANY DIFFERENT THINGS!
Intelligent Design does not have to imply religion. It may be intelligence that emerges from other material systems.
The problem with evolution is simply a combinational problem. The sequence of trillions of events that lead to the first cell is a combination that we may never know. Since we can’t try out all the combinations, it will remain forever a mystery. It is like trying to guess the correct sequence of a million digits. You can try for eternity but you will never be able to try them all out, at most maybe the combinations of a 1000 digits could be tried out as it is 10 to the 1000 number of combinations.
So the quirk events create the first cells and from there it becomes a positive feedback system that self evolves etc. It is a one shot history but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. For example in the 70s many kids played around with microprocessors but if you told them a sequence of quirk decisions and events will make one of them become a billionaire, they would never believe it. Now each person has a personal history made up of so many quirk events and decisions, but one guy, Bill Gates hit the right combination of events. You would never have been able to guess it, it just kind of happened, and so is evolution. It just happened, maybe only once in the universe, and this makes it seem so odd.
Actually you may be right. It may very well be a KNOWN MYSTERY in the sense that you can’t try out all the steps and combinations that will lead to the first cell.
If for example you needed 100 steps with 10 different molecules and they had to interact in a precise sequence, it would be equivalent to trying to find out the right combination of a 100 digit number. Now if you could try out a billion combinations a second for 10 billion years and billions of combinations in parallel, it still would amount to much less than 10 to a 100 combinations. So you could never find out the right sequence. But consider that the real steps are probably thousands and the number of molecules in the hundreds, then you can easily see that there is no chance for science to ever discover the correct sequence.
So how the first cell got to be may be forever a mystery, but for a well known reason. Then there is no need to invoke magic, gods, religions, aliens or parallel universes, we simply can’t discover the steps, but the steps don’t break the laws of physics.
What would be more odd would be if the observation: “Isn’t it odd that there is no life in this universe.” arose.
That would be odd.
There is no sequence, no quirk, nor time to define such. Only universal laws expressed through matter. A drop of water in free-fall is round. As is a planet in the void. There is no accident involved, or choice. They are, will always be. The medium defines the form of the objects within it. Evolution began with the bang. Life and none-life are only arbitrary catagories of the same thing.
It will never be known, you can’t crack the code. You can know just some tiny fragments of the process which lead to the first cell, but that’s all.
The most we can imagine is that in the oceans, small cell like items with a few chemical reactions became stable. Then they interacted with other types having a few different kinds of chemical reactions. After a very long, quirky, chance and random sequence WHICH WE CAN NEVER KNOW, they finally reached the first living cell. From there it became a positive feedback loop. At least this will be the closest we will be able to understand using our chemistry and physics. Just some images we can imagine.
Only from there…? I suppose you’ll be telling me next that the laws of magnetics only came into effect after the invention of the fridge and the shopping list…?
The current favoured hypothesis for the mechanism of abiogenesis is the RNA world.
Based on the Miller-Urey experiment, we can postulate that the building blocks for nucleotides were there and if the conditions were reducing (which is required for the Miller-Urey experiment, and is a reasonable assumption), then RNA could have formed.
RNA is both very thermo-stabile and has a wide range of catalytic powers. Not quite as efficient as proteins, but it gets the job done fairly well.
So, then it is reasonable to think that a strand of RNA would develop the ability to copy itself. From that point, selective pressures begin to take form and boom, you’ve got proto-life/life (depending on your definition of life).
Could this also be a fundamental limitation to our understanding of cell biology also ? I mean there are thousands of chemical reactions occuring in parallel so maybe we will never be able to “crack this code” either, in the sense that we can’t follow the exact sequences of reactions and molecules interacting since the combinations are so large. Just a thought about how hard it is to understand even the simplest cell.
I think that after many thousands of years of research, the cell can be completely understood. At that point you may be able to invent and create any form of life having any specifications at all.
However it may be that in order for a life form to adapt to a certain specification no matter how odd or complex (admitting that it is even possible to create such a specification), it may have to evolve gradually towards it, it must follow the precise sequence of trillions of events necessary to reach it. In other words it may not be possible to simply design it in one shot like we design a machine or software, the design may be strictly depedent on that million digit number we can’t crack that represents the evolution.
This may also be a limit of drugs and genetic engineering in general where we think we can manipulate biology but in reality we are limited…
I think this will happen sooner than any of us can imagine, maybe even within our lifetime. Biological research, on the heels of technological breakthroughs in biochemistry and micrography, is having its golden age. What is discovered and new possibilities that open up are amazing.
Not necessarily. That million digit number may pop out of the research NATURALLY. The forces of nature and the presence of any level of complexity almost instantaneously forms all possible structure that is stable from an energy perspective. That’s because our timescale of seconds is an eternity at sub-microscopic scales.
Consider the soup; RNA, protiens, oils, (do prokaryotes have ATP?). Probably a few different ways to get energy from the sun.
The sun shines on the tidal pools. Concentrations increase. In comes the tide which washes it all away. Oil layers would encapsulate and transport the contents of the pool to other pools. Twice a day there would be a dissolution and encapsulation; twice a day, every day, a million pools, for a billion years, a trillion capsules from every pool.
We know it happened at least twice, 'cause of mitochondria.
I think, before the evolution of the cell, there must have been a time when a slime would help to keep the RNA in the pool while the tide was in; and prevent it from drying out when the tide was out.
Evolution will be forever debated. Aliens came from a parallel universe where the laws of physics are much simpler and easily allow the arisal of life. Or the aliens are disembodied minds and the fundamental particles and energy-mass of our universe are simply pure intelligent-intentional-conscious minds, therefore not requiring any further explanations since the origin of all is a mind hence all are minds.
There can be many other explanations some very simple some perfect like the idea that no explanation is necessary because all physical laws are PURE QUIRKS NOT HAVING ANY SENSE AT ALL. Check out the thread that talks about matter transcending itself.
The problem with evolution is that it somehow imagines that a series of improbable steps of random chance atoms and molecules come together and start evolving into cells and then into thinking minds. Now if this sequence is a one shot sequence, it has no regularity, cannot be replicated therefore it is not even a scientific theory, it is simply a quirk combination of events that created a thinking mind. Science is based on patterns, regularity, configurations which generate a predictable result, but in the case of evolution we don’t know the configuration, we can state that it doesn’t break the laws of physics, but the chances of the sequence of events seems really slim. We can’t replicate the sequence of events that given the carbon atoms will generate the mind. Granted, the scale of events is billions of years and an entire planet but then we simply will never know, we just can know some tiny fragments of the QUIRK EVENTS THAT LEAD TO A THINKING MIND.
And in fact evolution seems not to be a really scientific theory like engineering or physics, exactly because it cannot be reproduced. If all of a sudden a truck pops up in the sky from nowhere and it even remains there for an hour what could science do or say ? It would say it is a miracle or a quantum quirk or SIMPLY NOTHING AT ALL because it could not reproduce the phenomena, science only works within regularities, patterns that present themselves over and over again.
In evolution we have a similar thing happening, a series of events lead to the first cell. But we can’t reproduce the events, let alone the events leading to a thinking mind. So in this sense it is not really scientific, it only suggests some of the mechanisms that lead up to a result, but can never define exactly all the events and not even a few. We can barely make some amino acids!
Her contribuitions are nevertheless extremly important. They can get married… but science has the “upper hand” so to speak 
I suppose you’ll be telling me next that the laws of magnetics only came into effect after the invention of the fridge and the shopping list…?