LETS DO AN EXPERIMENT, a thought experiment to test the claim that those unresolvable, assumed to be fossilized blue-green algal mats that are estimated to be from a half a billion years after the first theorized organism formed and began reproducing, setting off the evolution of all current life on Earth, can tell us anything about that original organism. Lets assume something wildly in favor of your claim but which I think may be absurdly optimistic, that such an organism divided an average of once a modern day of 24 hours, with about 365.25 of those comprising "a year." That is, by the way, already built into the conventional assertions of the speculative estimates of conventional claims about the timing of all of this even though it's most improbable that the speeds of the early Earth's rotation and its travel around the sun were hardly exactly as now.
I think its probably a wild underestimate but under this scheme if you multiply 500,000,000 by 365.25 you would get 182,500,000,000 generations of life from the theorized first organism till the era of those algal mats, which, by the way, cannot be resolved as to reveal much of anything about their physiology never mind their actual lives in and over time.
To give you something to help you imagine how much evolution can happen in that period of time, half a billion (500,000,000) years ago would get you into the Cambrian explosion when there was a "sudden" effusion of diverse and complex multicellular organisms flourished in the ancient oceans. From Berkeley Ed's website
Around 530 million years ago, a wide variety of animals burst onto the evolutionary scene in an event known as the Cambrian explosion. In perhaps as few as 10 million years, marine animals evolved most of the basic body forms that we observe in modern groups. Among the organisms preserved in fossils from this time are relatives of crustaceans and starfish, sponges, mollusks, worms, chordates, and algae, exemplified by these taxa from the Burgess Shale.
I can tell you that after I'd read Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life about life in the Cambrian as found in the Burgess Shale, there was a lot of inter-profession sniping as to whether or not he had drawn a lot of the creatures right because the very detailed fossils could be interpreted many different ways. You can't see much if any detail of the organisms in the period we're talking about here. The issue of the visual resolution of fossils and their complete absence is one of the main issues in this argument and the fact that the oldest evidence of life is not resolvable is entirely relevant.
That inability to really say anything in any detail about, not the theorized first organism that, unlike every subsequent organism, had the unique life history of arising not from a living organism but from non-living matter, . . . not addressing the insurmountable problem of that but the theorized last common universal ancestor (LUCA) of all subsequent living lines of life before those diverged into the kingdoms that survive, is too briefly touched on in this article from Astrobiology at NASA.
It must be noted that LUCA is not the origin of life. [N.B. IS NOT THE ORIGIN OF LIFE!] The earliest evidence of life dates to 3.7 billion years ago in the form of stromatolites, which are layers of sediment laid down by microbes. Presumably, life may have existed even before that. Yet, LUCA’s arrival and its evolution into archaea and bacteria could have occurred at any point between 2 to 4 billion years ago.
Phylogenetics help narrow this down, but Martin Embley isn’t sure our analytical tools are yet capable of such a feat. “The problem with phylogenetics is that the tools commonly used to do phylogenetic analysis are not really sophisticated enough to deal with the complexities of molecular evolution over such vast spans of evolutionary time,” he says.
I'll repeat the relevant passage, phylogenetic analysis are not really sophisticated enough to deal with the complexities of molecular evolution over such vast spans of evolutionary time, and, in case you didn't notice I'll point out again, "LUCA is not the origin of life," it is a theorized descendant of the earliest theorized unique organism mentioned above after who knows how many millions and billions and maybe trillions of intervening individuals were evolving. And note how this article, which doesn't deal with that first of all organisms, starts out:
If we trace the tree of life far enough back in time, we come to find that we’re all related to LUCA. If the war cry for our exploration of Mars is ‘follow the water’, then in the search for LUCA it’s ‘follow the genes’. The study of the genetic tree of life, which reveals the genetic relationships and evolutionary history of organisms, is called phylogenetics. Over the last 20 years our technological ability to fully sequence genomes and build up vast genetic libraries has enabled phylogenetics to truly come of age and has taught us some profound lessons about life’s early history.
I've argued, over and over again and at length that the idea that that original organism [NOT LUCA] had genes as science identifies those today makes its conceived organization by random chance in the conditions of no genes available for it to randomly organize from and pass on to its immediate descendants then that makes a miraculous assembly of it through intelligent design one of the most rational of hypotheses about it. Intelligence can do what random chance cannot be known to do do in far less time.
I would deny that even if it is the most persuasive, the most rational, the explanation with the most explanatory power that the hypothesis of intelligent design can be science but that would also render the far less convincing always ideological or professionally ambitious attempts at purely material, chance-random explanations, if anything, even less persuasive as science.
Abiogenesis is not science, it started out as ideological questing by blatantly materialist-atheist ideological scientists such as Alexander Oparin and J.B.S. Haldane to "explain the origin of life without God" and later generations starting out with those in Harold Urey's generation but it has also become, as it became, an academic specialization, that most powerful of all things, something riddled with professional motives, politics, and seeking professional and so economic advancement. Along with that was the certain knowledge that they must never, ever violate the prime objective of ideological academia, never imply an argument in favor of God.
Without that original organism's remnants being found, securely identified as being that ultimate pin in the biggest haystack ever assembled, found in resolvable detail, in enough resolvable detail to come to some accurate description of how it formed, how it did that most unprecedented and certainly enormously complex act of reproduction, successfully the first time, internally multiplying and passing on the structures - including the containing membrane that certainly must have had to contain it, split and divide itself and reseal itself, at least twice, and many other things EVERYTHING SAID ABOUT THAT ORIGINAL ORGANISM IS NOT SCIENCE BUT IDEOLOGICAL LORE. That such a thing could become a specialty of science is a sign of the decadence of academic science, the crowning glory of modern universities and academic life. And it is far from the only example of that.
Update: And here I was being so generous to you by agreeing to stipulate there was an average of a generation a day during that half a billion years. In my arguments at Laden's blog I speculated that it might have been an average of a generation every twenty minutes. Three an hour times 24 hours in a day times 365.25 a year times 500,000,000
In plugging numbers into an online calculator - assuming I didn't make any errors this early before I've had coffee - that would give you about 13,149,000,000 generations. Don't let your eyes glaze over, do the exercise of naming that number so you might get the idea of how much evolution could have happened between the theorized first, unique organism and those presumed to be fossilized algal mats. THIRTEEN TRILLION, ONE HUNDRED FORTY-NINE BILLION, generations. I haven't done the calculation or even tried to come up with something pretending to be an average of how long a "generation" in such a problem would be but I will venture the guess that is more generations back in the entire history of life on Earth than that for which we have resolvable fossils of generations of multicellular life. If I'm wrong about that, state your speculations and present the math. Even if I might quibble about the speculations, if your argument holds up I will have to admit that your argument is coherent.
Update 2:
The "RNA world" hypothesis is full of problems, and hardly a uniformly accepted creation myth. One of the biggest problems with it is contained in this paper:
RNA therefore has all the properties required of a molecule that could catalyze its own synthesis (Figure 6-92). Although self-replicating systems of RNA molecules have not been found in nature, scientists are hopeful that they can be constructed in the laboratory. While this demonstration would not prove that self-replicating RNA molecules were essential in the origin of life on Earth, it would certainly suggest that such a scenario is possible.
Here's just the first problem found in this passage buried deep in the paper.
ALTHOUGH SELF-REPLICATING SYSTEMS OF RNA MOLECULES HAVE NOT BEEN FOUND IN NATURE,
There is no, NO, evidence that there were "self-replicating systems of RNA molecules in nature. Certainly not in a world in which life has not ever been present as is imagined to be the world in question. That would be in the place where random-chance events would have had to be acting on those absent molecules in order for "RNA world" to have even existed in the first place and for massive improbability to work on them to assemble into a massively more complex entity, a living, metabolizing, replicating organism.
Which gets us to a second and insurmountable problem for any of this to support a scientistic materialist-atheist scenario of the origin of life.
SCIENTISTS ARE HOPEFUL THAT THEY CAN BE CONSTRUCTED IN THE LABORATORY.
What they can artificially do in a laboratory, WITH VERY INTELLIGENT AND HIGH DEGREES OF DESIGN, can't tell you what would have happened in nature without that intelligence or those high degrees of design.
It's exactly why the Miller-Urey experiment can tell you nothing of the sort nor can any other lab experiment done on these questions. You cannot tease out the essential components of intelligence and design from such experiments anymore than you can the molecules, the containing vessels, the heat or UV or electricity or other energy put into them.
Compared to the dishonesty, the mental elisions and gymnastics and lies necessary to pretend that this materials-atheist-ideological quest to put the last nail in the coffin of God the Creator an admittedly non-scientific belief in intelligent design is far more intellectually respectable, especially if there is acceptance of what science can reliably tell us about geology, cosmology (and never forget I specified "reliably" tell us), evolution, etc. I have pointed out before here that the scientific grand-dad (through Richard Lewontin) of the materialist-atheist attack dog Jerry Coyne, the eminent geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky said:
"I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God's, or Nature's method of creation."
Which is a lot more respectable than the junk that abiogenicists put out for all the reasons I've stated above. I think he'll probably be remembered well after Jerry Coyne is not much more than a footnote and ever rarer and more obscure citations in papers few people read.
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