Ramshutu

You’ve raised a dozen or so points so far. You’ve been wrong on every one.

1.) You have dishonestly quote mined at least two examples of scientists in the media.

2.) you have dishonestly misquoted me: by omitting a line that put my statement into context. Using that omission to - twice- claim I was saying something I obviously was not saying.

3.) You and your blog post - made a claim about what should be seen in conserved proteins that relies on evolution stopping on one branch

but not the other. And a claim that completely misunderstands the intent of CytC comparrisons.

4.) You’ve claimed earthworms and lizards and birds do not match Cytochrom C patterns. despite me linking you the ensembl

genome browser, and giving you specific examples of what I’m doing, you haven’t bothered to provide any further details.

5.) Youve made claims about chronology that misrepresent what I’ve said: specifically that I’m claiming about relative times of

divergence - and using this to claim I’m talking about absolute times.

So you have repeatedly misrepresented scientists and me, have quote mined, and stated incorrect science which I have corrected. You now seem to have dropped everything you have claimed thus far, and moved on to the next manufactured controversy.

Given that your intent here seems to be wholly dishonest, given your misrepresentation: I suspect what you’re doing is just throwing link after link after link at me: while I will demonstrate as wrong (as I have), you will forget you even made the argument, and move on to the next. This is called “throwing sh*t at the wall to see what sticks”.

This is a tactic of Creationists in general. Lie, distort, misrepresent, and bombard with bad logic and poor science to force the rational and reasonable scientists to spend pages upon pages to point out and correct faulty logic and errors: only to have the point dropped and move onto the next. 

You’ve clearly demonstrated you do not intend nor seem willing to engage here in any sort of good faith and I have no doubt that if I correct your faulty understanding with these latest arguments as I have done with all of the ones so far, you will simply produce another set of claims based on the same sort of dishonesty and bad science I have pointed out.

This is how creationists derail sensible discussion, and pretend that there is a “controversy” and prevent any intelligent discussion on the subject.

As such, unless your actually willing to acknowledge anything already said: I think you’re just trying to dishonestly derail a legitimate conversation, and I have no intent of engaging with this sort of petulant childishness. I will go back to talking with people who actually seem interested in science and reason.

So, you appear to have conceded - by virtue of the fact you have no response  - that you misrepresented my argument, that you were quote mining Lynn Margolis, that you and your biologist were in incorrect on the points raised, and that you have no data to support your claims about earthworms.


This reply again, is another fairly dishonest quote mine: both deliberately misrepresenting what I said and deliberately misrepresenting what the quote said.

You deliberate misrepresented what I said, by omitting my next line from your quote: “So the first way this was done, was by finding a common protein all eukaryotes share - one that doesn’t change in form of function”



Your second quote as so many others similar that Creationists seemed to enjoy quote mining - are about bacteria and archea - which due to lateral gene transfer do not follow the pattern of descent required to produce a tree. Animals don’t have that such is why above Eukaryotes the tree pattern is what you see. One famous New Scientist article was about this change in understanding, the failure to create a tree for bacteria. There is a minute number of ways genes can jump between animal groups: hybrids and retroviruses, and both have a very limited effect in the tree.


In addition you can’t use any old protein or gene to prove relatedness - because stuff evolves, and genes can be driven by evolution - meaning it can change a lot in one species or another, disappear in other, in a pattern not related to descent. In fact, to demand that all proteins and genes should be useable is to claim that no evolution happens - which is absurd. That you have - a couple of times now - claimed that this is what I have said, is intentionally dishonest.


Obviously, you don’t appear to care what is absurd or not, or what is said or not, but there is a difference between those type of genes and conserved genes - that do not appear to be subject to any significant evolution - but can still undergo random non-functional changes.

Conserved genes do produce the same trees, as do multiple other measures of relatedness from DNA and taxonomy: which is why it’s called a “twin nested Heirarchy”. 

For conserved protein analysis - they will often produce different results: one will say the Norwegian tree shrew is closer to regular tree shrews than African tree shrews, or vice versa: one may put bats closer to rodents than to basal primates, and they may change the inferred order of the 10 or so worm phyla.

You’d obviously expect that, when analyzing proteins that have undergone millions of years of incremental random changes. In the same way you don’t expect to turn up 50 heads and 50 tails if you toss a coin a hundred times.

When you need accuracy, you need to put all these different measures together, because in phylogenetics the precise order of tree shrews matter. 


This is a question of accuracy, not validity: because none of these methods:

• Put fish closer to humans than birds
  
• Put boney fish and cartilaginous fish closer together than boney fish and humans.
  
• Put chimps as humans further away than chimps and fish.
  

Or any other relevant example therein.

Let’s deal with the outright falsehoods first:

Firstly - you are dishonestly quote mining Lynn Margolis. Who was talking about bacterial and single cellular life - which was assumed to fit a tree until lateral gene transfer was discovered and showed the relationships cannot therefore be described by simple descent. Trying to dishonestly portray her words as applying to the wider tree with regards to eukaryotes, and multi cellular life is massively dishonest.

Secondly - you incorrectly portray me talking about the patterns found in Cytochrome C as if I’m talking about all proteins. That is a intentional misrepresentation of what I’m saying. It’s clear I’m talking exclusively about Cytochrome C, making this a straw man.

Thirdly, you and your blog post asserted that we should see progressive differences in the genes from lower to higher organism. Which would mean that when species diverge: one side of the branch would have to stop changing in order to produce your asserted pattern. As you point out, that’s ridiculous as organisms don’t stop evolving. Unfortunately - as I pointed out in my reply - that’s the error you and you’d cited argument make. As you don’t seem to have provided any defense of this claim other than this rather bizzare deflection, I will presume you don’t have any defense of what you said.

Fourthly you are confusing absolute and relative measurements - Cytochrome C is not an absolute perfect chronologically accurate clock. There are too many unknowns to use this comparative differences. but it is a good relative time indicator. It only has to be accurate enough to show that A is longer than B. The whole point of Cytochrome C is that it demonstrates that relative time - the relative divergence of species - in the same way as other methods of determining orders of diverge.

Finally, as you don’t bother providing a link for your claim that earthworms are closer to lizards than birds - I made the mistake of trying to actually find out your claim - and unfortunate - I can’t seem to find any examples of earthworms in the free gene comparison databases. 

A wider search - and I can find no news, studies or anything else that supports your claim either. The blog post you cited DOES make mention of almost exactly what you said - but uses humans instead of earthworms. So I don’t know if you misquoted or invented it. Either way, I can find no valid source to your claims, so I’m going to call shenanigans. Perhaps you got the comparison wrong, or we’re not comparing the same Cyt C gene - without your source I can’t tell.

What I will do is provide a similar example from free genome databases.

Chickens and anoile lizards diverged a few hundred millions years ago, so are close compared to fruit flies. Armadillos and Hamsters and Chickens and anoil lizards all diverged from the fruit fly at the same time - so chickens and lizards should be fairly close - and all those four animals should all have about the same differences compared to fruit flies as each other.

Which they do:


Bird - lizard
http://useast.ensembl.org/Gallus_gallus/Gene/Compara_Ortholog/Alignment?db=core;g=ENSGALG00000011020;g1=ENSACAG00000013076;hom_id=10580613;r=2:31819123-31821634

Bird - fruit fly
http://useast.ensembl.org/Gallus_gallus/Gene/Compara_Ortholog/Alignment?db=core;g=ENSGALG00000011020;g1=FBgn0086907;hom_id=11355293;r=2:31819123-31821634

Lizard - fruits fly 
http://useast.ensembl.org/Anolis_carolinensis/Gene/Compara_Ortholog/Alignment?db=core;g=ENSACAG00000013076;g1=FBgn0086907;hom_id=11352430;r=6:31328170-31339393;t=ENSACAT00000013078

Armadillo - fruit fly
http://useast.ensembl.org/Drosophila_melanogaster/Gene/Compara_Ortholog/Alignment?db=core;g=FBgn0086907;g1=ENSDNOG00000031540;hom_id=11353514;r=2L:16715891-16719635

Chinese hamster - fruit fly.
http://useast.ensembl.org/Drosophila_melanogaster/Gene/Compara_Ortholog/Alignment?db=core;g=FBgn0086907;g1=ENSCGRG00001022144;hom_id=11356589;r=2L:16715891-16719635


This pattern broadly repeats any way you measure it - in Cytochrome C and other conserved proteins - strawman aside.

It’s more than that: As the error Ethang makes shows.

its at the comparative genetic level - we only have species that are alive to compare: the leaves of the tree. The genetic comparisons are all comparing differences between the leaves to allow them to compare which branch each leaf is on with respect to all the others.

Ethang shows the common faulty thinking that somehow we are seeing archaic DNA or information from the past when peforming the analysis. It’s a big conceptual hurdle and - ironically - the whole reason I used the plagiarism example.

Cytochrome c would be like a recognizable paragraph you see in all of the papers - and comparison of errors between those two sentences is what’s being done. All of the papers have been copied thousands of times, so each of them have many errors compared to the original, but papers that diverge recently have fewer differences compared to ones that diverged in the first or second year. 

Firstly, you don’t give me much to work with: it seems your unable to do much more than vitriolic rants about how wrong I am. I’m trying to actually disentangle what those reasons actually are.

The microbiologist explicity states that there should be more change: which isn’t a valid argument against why this is invalid - as it’s really the pattern that’s most important. In addition a microbiologist makes a major error by assuming tha any of the residues aside from 18 can change in any way - which is false.

Despte you shouting at me that I am wrong, what that Microbiologist is factually inaccurate.

Now, Secondly: you claim that the pattern in Cytochrome C does not match more than a couple of species that I mention. That is also factually incorrect. The original tests - and subsequence gene sequencing shows the expected evolutionary pattern across the board. You can even look at the sequences on a free site:

The idea that Cytochrome C should see a progression from lower life form to higher is indicative of your failure to understand what is being tested and how evolution actually works.


If Yeast and anomal share a common ancestor, 800mya, at that point their cytochrome C genes diverge.

If the animal branch them diverge at 400mya into protostomes and deutorostomes their genes diverge again.

And lizards and therapsids 150mya - the genes diverge.


You, and the microbiologist are expecting that lower life forms closer to yeast should be closer in sequence. And show progression.

Erm. No.

Why?

Because yeast didn’t stop evolving the moment the branches diverged. We’re not testing the animal at the time genes diverged, but their descendants alive today.

Both the “animal” branch and the “yeast” branch has been acquiring 800mya of changes to their gene. Everything on the animal branch, and everything on the yeast branch will have about the same number of differences as a result.

Every protostome and every deutorostome will have 400mya of differences when being compared.

Every descendent of lizards and mammals will have 150mya worth of differences between each other.


The CytC pattern is not a measure of how complex, or evolved an organism is - that is a laughable lack of understanding of what CytC is trying to achieve. CytC is a measure of how log ago two species diverged.

Jellyfish and yeast, and humans and yeast all diverged at the same time (multi celled animals), so will show the same numbers of differences when compared to yeast.

However jellyfish and humans will show a little less difference when compared to yeast - but still a lot. As they diverged later - but still a long time ago.

Lizards and humans again - will be around the same number of differences when compared to both jellyfish and yeast - but fewer when compared to each other - but still more than comparing two mammals.

So no, what you and the microbiologist are claiming the pattern should be is absurd, and lacks basic understanding in how evolution works, and what top down genetic analysis is actually intended to show.


As a result - it is readily apparent that the microbiologist - who should know better - is being deliberately dishonest, and deliberately distorting and lying about the science.

The biggest problem with the next part of the set of evidence, is what it really means, and what the science is trying to show. The conceptual nature of genetics, and the evidence from it that supports evolution is both intuitive and massively compelling - once you understand the conceptual nature - but it’s this understanding that trip up most people; and what most scientists fail to explain properly.


So, what I wanted to do, is start off with a thought experiment - to explain the conceptual nature of what all scientists are talking about when it comes to genetics, evolution and common descent. This is not an exact analogy - nor intended to be: but its intended to illustrate the core concepts:


Let’s say many, many years ago there was a really tough university course for which you had to write a paper.

One day, a super smart guy writes a great paper and his class mates get hold of it. Each decide, instead of writing their own, they will take a digital copy of the paper, make a few changes and submit it as a new paper.

When they make changes they:

• Introduce the odd typo here and there.
  
• Change a few words when they feel it makes sense.
  
• Occasionally they make a mistake and copy a paragraph by accident, or remove a paragraph.
  

The next year, the paper is requested again - the next set of students ask various people they know who took the course before to share their paper from last year - and the students go about copying it again. Some of last years students get copied multiple times - others not at all.

This goes on for year - the classes get larger, and the paper shared and copied by more and more people. Each year, papers are just copied and copied - no one ever writes their own.

Many years later - a university professor analyzes hundreds of thousands of paper this years papers from across the country, to try and work or whether all the work is original - or if it is a copy of some other work: 

If we assume (again remember this is not intended to be an exact analogy), that the papers are all really, really long, and each paper today has been copied hundreds of thousands of times from the original first article:

Can the Professor tell whether they’re all copies of the same original paper? How could he do that?

Could he piece together a rough hierarchy  of papers?

What if found fragments of past paper - how could he use this to confirm or reject the assumed relationship between papers?


All these questions are part of the fields called “Bioinformatics”, which is about the analysis of biological data. As a neat piece of information - BLAST - which is a software tool used to compare genetic relatedness between species has also been used to detect plagiarism in academic papers.

its a non peer reviewed blog posts. I can post you a peer reviewed article by microbiologists that show the details of why Cytochrome C is excellent evidence. As you expect me to believe your blog posts on its own authority - that would be enough to convince you, right?

Now: I explained the detail of why the patterns in Cytochrome c are highly specific and match inferred relatedness. Your blog post doesn’t bother to challenge that at all. If your blog post doesn’t challenge the pattern, nor why the pattern was relevant, there’s not too much to say.

As I pointed out though, this microbiologist makes two fatal and scientific errors. Firstly this microbiologist seems to think that Cytochrome C can undergo lots of changes which as I pointed out (and you ignored), means there is a functional constraint.

Secondly, the microbiologist moves the goal posts by trying to misrepresent what Cytochrome C actually showed - which I already explained - and you seem to ignore.

My post on Cytochrome C actually provides the detail of what it is intended to show, why the pattern is relevant, and why it supports evolution.

This person only seems to have made these two arguments, and simply claiming the evidence is absent as a result is not scientific and illogical. Especially as I have explained in detail what the evidence Is and why it is relevant.

Perhaps you would care to offer more details, rather than simply writing posts emphatically telling everyone how wrong they are, but providing no detailed explanation or justification of why.

I’m trying to work out exactly what problem your blog post has with Cytochrome C. It’s not exactly clear.

Perhaps that it doesn’t show an evolutionary pathway from bacteria to man? That’s not what it’s intended to show, nor anything that is practical to show from a single gene. Asserting that evolution must show x without providing any reasons, is not a particularly good argument.

Maybe that it thinks there should have been more change? Firstly: it doesn’t actually matter, as the proof of Cytochrome c is based upon relative differences between organisms. Secondly your blog post seems to indicate that there is no functional constraint for Cyt C not changing - there is. If it changes in a way that alters the function of the protein - the animal dies while it’s still a single cell - so it’s noy going to be inherited.

Other than that, this blog post, and your reply seems more about telling everyone who wrong Evolution is, but providing no actual logical reasons as to why.

i have some limitations on the time I can spend - these posts take time to construct, but I’d be happy to.

how about some feedback. Did it answer some of your questions? Do you have more questions? Is the scientific basis more understandable now? Is there anything you're hazy on? Or you wanted me to talk about in more detail.

oooh yes.

This has just been a VERY short chronological summary that is currently up to 1975 or so. I have another 43 years of major evolutionary discoveries to go. I don’t think I’ve even briefly summarized 20% of the big stuff.

Of course, I would love to. 

I’ll touch upon with other fossil related tests. As I said, there are 250,000 fossil species and hundreds of examples of transitions.

We have multiple examples of transitions between general primates, and upwards. Interestingly it is at the point now where scientists could place skulls of various hominid species in a row and scientists - leave alone lay people - are not able to tell where one species starts and the next begins.

A particularly funny example I recall was back when some of the later austrolapithes were discovered: and creationists disagreed as to whether it was 100% ape or 100% human. Which is kind of the point.

We have a really interesting collection of fossils in the transition of cetaceans between land and water. And some really good transitional forms between fish and amphibians.

In my opinion in terms of systematic measurement: the fossil record and this information on its own puts evolution squarely beyond reasonable doubts. It’s so specific and so broad that the continued validation of the tree is itself knockout proof of evolution.

But there is so, so much more.

Let’s take the tip of the iceberg. Evolution and common descent were proposed before the discovery of DNA, and before the advent of genetics, while Mendel scientifically demonstrated binary inheritance (ie: you inherit traits from mom and dad) and the laws of population genetics were a statistical application of these: for evolution to be valid, it needed to have this mechanism of inheritance - and when this mechanism of inheritance was found, evolution needed to survive the new science that would come out of its discovery.

So, implicitly, Evolution predicted mechanisms of adding new features, genes, protein structures, etc would exist before DNA was even known to exist.

Those mechanisms predicted were indeed discovered in the forms of gene duplication, and various types of copy mutation - together allowing new sequences of genetic material to be produced. It’s easy to forget that DNA hasn’t been invented yet, but the underlying requirements of what DNA must do was implicitly predicted.

But let’s get into the really fun systematics of genetics.


I’m going to continue with my favourite, the analysis of Cytochrome C. This was the first genetic confirmation of the relatedness of organisms.

So, let’s assume life isn’t related, and that the tree of life is somehow a coincidence not indicative of descent.

One way of determining this, is trying to find different ways of measuring relatedness of different organisms - if the tree is indicative of descent, then any way of measuring relatedness should match the tree too.

If the tree says humans and chimps are the closest related extant species - yet another way of measuring relatedness is shoes apples and humans are closer than chimps and humans - if valid this would
Falsify evolution.

So the first way this was done, was by finding a common protein all eukaryotes share - one that doesn’t change in form of function that can be extracted. The idea being that if all organisms have it, and it doesn’t change function between organisms - then any differences between that protein in two organisms would be down to how closely related they are: the only differences will be random accumulations of minor changes if life were related.

Evolution predicts a very specific pattern: chickens and turkeys will have few differences between them:  and the changes will increase the further and further away they go. This pattern should be repeated every animal you compare. 

IE, humans and chimps would have almost no differences, nor horses and zebras, nor chickens and turkeys. Humans and chimps would have the same Amount of differences as horses and zebras do from chickens and turkeys. Etc, etc

If this wasn’t the case. It would falsify evolution.

However, that wasn’t the case, and
Cytochrome C showed the expected evolutionary patterns, and so was one of the most famous evolutionary tests conducted.

Awesome!

So, one of the ways Darwin said that you could test the theory is through transitional forms.

If all life is related via descent with modification, then new species and classes of organism must be the same as it’s ancestor, but with small changes. This means that if you have a species with multiple differences over some ancestor, you’d expect to find an example of an organism in the middle - with only some of those changes.

For example, it looked like dinosaurs were in the same group as birds - just without wings, feathers and some other specific changes. If birds were descended from dinosaurs, then we should find organisms that has lots of these dinosaur traits, and some of the bird traits - for example a bird with feathers but did not have fused wing bones. 

At the time the fossil record was really patchy and the study of dinosaurs themselves was really new and barely systematic until the time of Darwin, so such examples did not exist.


The nature of what evolution predicts will be found is very specific. An ape that stood upright with a human style pelvis would meet the criteria of having treats of both descendent and ancestral species: a lemur with a human skull - would not.

Finding a fossil crocoduck - for example - would falsify evolution - because it would represent the fusion of traits from two different branches of the tree without them being found in intermediate species.


So: following the highly specific prediction of transitional forms, and that of the bird - this was discovered in 1861 - the Archaeopteryx - a bird with multiple reptile traits including unfused wing bones.


But in addition: this isn’t a one off prediction done once either. This is part of a class of predictions from evolution on what animals can and can’t be found - allowing tests, and falsifications

1.) You will never find animals with the same structural train on disparate branches of the tree, unless common ancestors have that trait as well

2.) If two animals have the same structural trait, you will be able to find the same structural trait on an ancestral form that has none, or few of the distinctive traits of those descendants.

3.) Fossils will be chronological. You will find basic and less complex animals in the past, and as you go forward in time you will find animals higher and higher up on the tree. When you have an animal the theory says shares a common ancestor with horses, you don’t find that animal well before the ancestor appears in the fossil record: (the famous fossil bunnies in the Cambrian).


So far, If memory serves there are over 250,000 species of fossils found, and many dozens of species that match even the most stringent and restrictive definition of “transitional fossil”, and hundreds that meet the scientific term. 

One of my favourites, is Tiktaalik, which is a fish-amphibian transition. The reason it is my favourite is that it’s discovery was based in part on using where and when the ancestors were found to predict not just what this transition would look like, but where it would be found.


So from the main examples here, this is one very broad but highly specific way of providing systematic and scientific tests of the main evolutionary predictions. - but not the only ones - or even the best

Mostly right - but not entirely. The difference is actually just semantics, but is easy to get caught out on.

The Hypothesis you make has to be tested. That is, you have to predict facts and occurrences before they are known. Those predictions need to be specific to the hypothesis (so it can’t be any arbitrary definition - it needs to be something that you hypothesis can’t be true unless the answer is true and the answer has no reason to be true if the theory is false). You also need to have the ability to prove the theory wrong, by being able to point out things or scenarios that couldn’t be true if the theory was true.

That does require you to make observations, where you can be certain that what you’re seeing is what was predicted, but as long as you can validly and logically say what you’re seeing is what was predicted - that’s all that’s important. Often, scientists do that via an experiment - where a particular value or measurement in particular conditions is what is being predicted. There - controlling variables and conditions is important when you know those conditions may effect the measurement. It’s all done so as to be certain that the value being measured can be attributed to the prediction - rather than anything else.

But that type of controlled experiment with lab coats, and Petri dishes etc, isn’t the sole method of being able to perform tests. Observations also work when the observation has not yet been made, and the prediction is specific. If I had a theory that made a prediction that Jupiter - when viewed in ultra violet - showed Mickey Mouse: and that’s what you observed - you’d probably conclude that the theory has some merit.

in addition, while a lot of the time a measurement can validate a prediction, or invalidate it. Some observations by their nature can only be confirmative, some only discomfirmative. Importantly though - in most cases one or two observations are not enough to confirm such a theory. You need lots of them.

What’s semantic though is that while these sorts of observational evidence ARE experiments, just not necessarily what you would consider as experiments from popular culture.

As long as it’s a logically and scientifically sound observation that by its nature can be determined to match the prediction - it’s an experiment. It’s a point a lot of people get caught up on.

Darwin made one of the most famous predictions, observed to be true two years after OtOoS was published. If you don’t have any problem with my explanation above, I can start talking about that.

Part of what I just explained was the setup: it’s mostly the information that fed into Darwin’s initial hypothesis. (I’ve misses out a lot of stuff relating to his observations on the variability of life).

The setup, was so that I could start at the beginning and show you how the scientific method has been applied - we have to start at the initial hypothesis. I wanted to make sure you were happy with the initial hypothesis and information before I went on.

If you’re happy with it, let me know - or I can explain any details or information you think is missing with regards to the initial hypothesis.

If you’re happy with it, before I continue: one question I wanted to ask you, is that once a scientist has an initial, plausible hypothesis - what do you think the next step should be, in order to be following the scientific method? 

i think it may be worth starting at the beginning here. Most people are explaining from what we know now, rather than what was known at Darwin’s time: Evolution May make more sense if you think of it from that point. 

So Carl Linnaeus - a creationist - was the first person to go through and try and classify life. What he may have been doing was trying to do, was find the “kinds of the bible” - but I can’t remember enough.

Either way he found a pattern. The pattern was a very specific branching pattern.

At the base you had organisms that had cells with a nucleus and mitochondria and those without. You had a group of animals whose butt hole forms before their mouth and those that form the other way around. But the cells of every animal in both classes had mitochondria and nucleus’s. Then you had a group of creatures with spinal chords: and all of them had butt holes that formed before their mouth, and nucleus’s in their cells and were bilaterally symmetric. You had groups with a spinal column, and skull, and a jaw - if you had a jaw, you had a skull, spinal colum, nucleas in your cells, a butthole that formed before the mouth, are bilaterally symmetric etc. This works all the way up and down life without exception.

traits don’t cross groups if they aren’t share by the parent group too.. If you have a specific feathers - you won’t have gills, or have 5 axis of symmetry like a star fish.

that may sound obtuse: but this is a highly specific pattern. A tree.

Groups within groups within groups.

Darwin proposed an explanation for this: descent with modification. This pattern would emerge if over a period of time a group of organisms split into two distinct groups, with one acquiring a new trait, and the other acquiring a different one, repeat this pattern over and over again and you would get a tree of life.

so that was the starting point - the hypothesis. That all life was related. I’m not done: but wanted to make sure you’re on the same page thus far, and

were happy with what I’ve explained.

Darwinian evolution hasn’t been a thing for nearly 100 years - while natural selection is valid and observable, much of Darwin’s theories have been shown to be false, especially his ideas about genetics.

Many people fixated on “Darwinism”, but don’t realize that modern evolution is actually far removed, and is effectively based on the following:

Mendellian Generics - now replaced with modern Genomics.

Linnean Taxonomy - now replaced with Phylogenetic systematics.

Population genetics - laws governing transfer, drift and speciation.

Game Theory - maths governing potential win/loss changes in allele frequency.

Natural Selection as per darwin.

Even the “tree of life” mostly only holds true for Eukaryotes, as Horizontal Gene Transfer has the ability to blend the genetic make up of two disparate species.

Unfortunately, stating a falsehood vehemently and forcefully doesn’t make it any less false. Perhaps you try again, with more argument and less assertion.


I am not sure whether you are making these false claims from a position of ignorance, or deliberate dishonesty, but I am happy to defer to you as to which of the two you are more comfortable with being labelled.

So, let’s go over the things you’ve got wrong.


1.) You’re still arguing as if you thing Abiogenesis is a theory like Gravity or Evolution, or is treated as such by science. It isn’t. 

Abiogenesis is an umbrella term for a collection of disparate Hypotheses that provide conceptual avenues for how life may have originated - none of which have been “proven”, but all of which have interesting evidence to support them. None of them are treated as proven, or much more than interesting avenues.

So this whole approach of trying to make it sound like Abiogenesis is being presented as more than it is, is false.

While I’ve seen a few ignorant pro-science individuals treat abiogenesis like this, this is mostly something that is done by people like you, and religious zealots who don’t want to accept anything scientific and also resort to misrepresentation. 

Abiogenesis - that life originated from non-organic material is mostly conceptually accepted by everyone because science doesn’t normally consider magic as a viable option.

But that’s more akin to things like the multiverse - it is an opinion - one that is logically valid and scientifically consistent- but an opinion nonetheless.

So: portraying this as something that has been oversold is fundamentally misrepresenting what the science is and how it applies, and attacking the misrepresentation.

IE: - a straw man.


2.) That the experiments take place in strange and obtuse conditions that don’t appear anywhere else in the universe.

This is not true and, quite frankly, it’s not a claim you bother to support with any evidence either. Considering you could have literally posted the most common experiment that has been made - and pointed out the conditions and how impossible they were.

I suspect that you’ve just pulled this out of the air because you think it’s true, or you want it to be true: rather than it is being true. 

If you look at almost every experiment, all have a source of energy (normally in the form of heat and reducible compounds - as oxygen wasn’t present in the early atmosphere), particular biological precursor that need to be made more complex, and some additional catalyst.

Some of the more famous ones focusing on hydrothermal vents and geysers - focus on the role of iron and sulphur at higher temperatures (100 degrees), and show they fixate carbon (coming from the vent), into a mass of various organic precursors.

We know that sugars and more complicated organic chemistry - including lipids and basic RNA nucleotides can form in such conditions - and know that in those same sorts of conditions montmellerite clay (fairly common on earth btw) show that these components can be converted into RNA polymers - read: genetic chains - and nucleotide lipid bilayer vesicles - read: cell membranes.

All of them focus in mostly one of two sets of conditions: hot geysers, and deep smokers. All of which literally take the conditions directly from existing conditions on the earth - but with no molecular oxygen.

An additional class of experiments attempt to show mechanisms by which increases of complexity in organic chemistry can occur. These are such experiments that discovered ribozymes, protein transcription shortcuts and other leaps that can be made: these are intended to show mechanisms by which proto life can cross major chemical hurdles - rather than being simply about the initial creation of life in the first place, and for these the conditions are mainly focused on particular organic chemistry as we know it today - rather than any absurd or obtuse conditions.

So in that regard, no: your claim that these experiments require absurd conditions is not just unsupported, it’s without merit too.

3.) name an experiment.

If you asked people, you’d be hard pressed to find a experiment that validated gravity, or relativity, or quantum theory, or cell theory, or germ theory. You could probably come up with one big one: but often no more than one.

Given that the topic isn’t taught beyond its basics - and the one experiment - in school, it’s hardly surprising that people wouldn’t be able to name more than one experiment. As they would not be able to do for most science.

So raising what experiments people know or don’t, has little to do with the science or it’s validity: and everything to do with the fact that most big discoveries are in non-sexy journals and papers, with only the occasional major discovery making headlines and getting into what people can name.

Nonetheless some of the experiments, and processes I’ve described above are some of the big ones in the field of abiogenesis: and they don’t really have names.

As is often so true concerning individuals that are insecure in their own beliefs, not of what’s being talked is abstract rhetoric and mostly misunderstanding the science that is actually involved.

For those that claim it’s not science: I suspect this is more based on not understanding what the field involves and how it works, rather than any actual factual criticism. So let’s start.

Abiogenesis in a scientific tense, is an umbrella term for scientific attempts to explain how life began: it is pressured - given the evidence - that life was not magically created, but instead the initial speculative thought was that some set of conditions over some  period of time were able to generate enough reactions of the right type to generate some form of most rudimentary organism.

That is speculative - and science started breaking down the problem into individual sub problems and hurdles. The whole field revolves finding chemistry from experiment in plausible conditions that can produce more life like structures, molecules and behaviour from simpler and more basic components, as well as other interesting avenues: such as trying to reduce life to its basics, then see what happens when you remove even more. These are a combination of both bottom up and top down.

This starts out from the most basic experiments such as the Miller - Uray experiment, all the way to modern experiments in some of the low level biomechanics of life.

These are all repeatable experiments - and do not by any means postulate impossible conditions. As a result they fully match any reasonable criterial you have for what is considered “science”.  

Now, everyone working in the field of Abiogenesis research will tell you it is - and will likely always be - a hypothesis - the end goal is not to provide an explanation of how life came to be as much as coming up with a plausible and realistic pathway for that to be the reasonable conclusion.

To be frank, the research and experiments conducted that far exceed the burden of showing life plausibly comes from non organic origins whilst still falling short of a full explanation.