Re: DARWINIAN FAIRYTALES

On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 07:55:49 -1000, Alvin Toda <aet@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 25 Apr 2006 12:06:53 GMT, Rumpelstiltskin
<PleaseDoNotReplyByEmail@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 25 Apr 2006 07:04:02 -0400, Gary James <gnjames43@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

The Reactionary Utopian
April 6, 2006


THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE FOSSILS
by Joe Sobran

The lead story on the front page of the NEW YORK
TIMES on April 6, for once, wasn't political. It was
about fossils.

"All the news that's fit to print," eh? But why
fossils on the front page, overshadowing immigration,
war, and even Katie Couric? Doesn't that belong in the
Science section on Tuesday? Or is there, as we say, some
agenda at work here?

The headline tips us off: "Fossil Called Missing
Link from Sea to Land Animals." Sure enough, the fifth
paragraph explains that some scientists -- this is
Science speaking, at which every knee should bow -- say
these fossils, found in Arctic Canada, 600 miles from the
North Pole, constitute "a powerful rebuttal to religious
creationists."



Creationism is just a joke these days. It should be an
embarrassment, but its practitioners don't seem to have
understood yet that they have been embarrassed.





How so? The critters' four fins appear to be "limbs
in the making," enabling them to come out of the water
and lumber around on land. Here at last is a missing link
between fish and other beasts, such as "amphibians,
reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans."



This is not news. We've known about the fish with
incipient leg bones for a very long time, and we have
lungfish living today that can climb trees and wander
from pond to pond.

But this missing link is crucial to the theory that life originated in
the water and evolved into life on land. The fossil record seems to
show that, and your comments show the trend, but this missing link is
direct proof. Not only did we evolve from apes but apes evolved from
fish. It might be possible that some life came from meteorites or
comets, and did not evolve on Earth. But when the theory of evolution
hangs together so well, it becomes more believable.


I wasn't under the impression there was anything new about
fish limbs, which I gather is what was presented as being new
in the current posting. We've had them for a long time, and also
have known that they didn't always necessarily come with five
fingers: some have six or seven or other numbers. The Coelocanth,
for example. I didn't think there had ever for the last century or
so been any controversy that vertebrate life (or invertebrate life
either, of course) started in water and then moved onto land. I
don't keep up with what the creationists worry about, admittedly,
so I have no idea what they might be upset about at any particular
time.

If the current life on earth started from meteorites or comets,
that would be microorganisms, of course, not fish. Extraterrestrial
travel is possible, since microorganisms can survive for a long time
in suspended animation in space travel, but I don't see a huge
need to worry about whether the microorganisms came from
outside our solar system or were generated on earth yet. We
already know the essential acids for life arise on earth, so an
important point might eventually be in the probability of when a
workable chain-reaction of life came together, but the uncertainties
in the probabilities are so great at this point in our knowledge, it
doesn't seem very informative to me yet to try to guess whether by
comet or home grown.

At the end of "The Ancestor's Tale", Dawkins takes a shot at
speculating what the first replicating molecules on earth might have
been like. He notes that what we are really looking for is the origin
of "heredity", not "life". There are RNA molecules that act as their
own catalysts, creating "daughters" and then swimming off
themselves unchanged, so that's a possible start. The DNA life
that's dominant on earth nowadays is far more complex, and ISTM
would likely have consumed any less efficient predecessor, much
as the ancient Ediacaran fauna seems to have been obliterated
with hardly a trace remaining by the rise of more advanced
organisms, including perhaps the first predators, on earth.

Here's a tiny bit from Dawkins' speculations on the origin of life
on earth, after he's done tracing ancestry back as well as he can,
from page 563 of the hardbound edition, in a concluding chapter
entitled, appropriately enough, "Canterbury".

The origin of life was the origin of true
heredity; we might even say the origin of the first gene.
By first gene, I hasten to insist, I don?t mean first DNA
molecule. Nobody knows whether the first gene was made
of DNA, and I bet it wasn?t. By first gene I mean first
replicator. A replicator is an entity, for example a
will always be errors in copying, so the population will
acquire variety. The key to true heredity is that each
replicator resembles the one :from which it was copied more
than it resembles a random member of the population. The
origin of the first such replicator was not a probable
event, but it only had to happen once. Thereafter, its
consequences were automatically self-sustaining and they
eventually gave rise, by Darwinian evolution, to all of
life.



.

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