You think we're not that similar to chimps? Watch this documenatary by Jane Goodal: click
here (if the video from that link doesn't stream that fast, then use this link
here).
Above video is a production by the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada. Jane Goodall is a British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist, considered to be the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees. She is best known for her 45-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania.
Here's a snippet taken from Jane Goodall's article on
About Chimpanzees - So Like Us (click
here to read).
We tend to say there's a vast difference in intellect between humans and chimpanzees because of how far we've come as a civilization. Remember the lineage of the species
Homo Sapiens split off from the chimpanzees' lineage some millions of years ago. So, there's a lot of time for separate development and evolution of the brain and morphology. Actually, if you go all the way back to how early homo sapiens lived, you may see the differences in lifestyle and behavior narrowed down by quite a lot.
Look, scientists didn't just come up with the idea of Chemical Evolution out of nowhere or as a conspiracy against Theism. They start with observations. And what did they observe? Well, the most striking verification of our relationship with the rest of living things is in our body chemistry. Our body contains the same chemical compounds, derives its energy from the same chemical reactions, and utilizes the same chemical mechanisms as every other life-form. Now, why is that? Why would it be ridiculous to say that we probably have a chemical origin, when our whole body is indeed made up of chemicals? What's more? The rest of life is constituted with the same chemistry. One has to wonder about that common denominator. The logical question then becomes: Could it be because we share the same chemical origin?
You can think of life as arranged in a great ladder, starting with the basic chemical compounds that make up living things, progressing upward to microscopic cells, then to collections of cells that make up organs, organ systems, and finally organisms themselves. Each new organism begins with a single cell, yet within that microcosm lies all the information needed to create the whole organism in all its complexity. In every form of life, a few different atoms and molecules, in cells with the same kinds of architecture, adopt very different designs. And where do we get such complex designs from? How are they read and passed on from generation to generation? We now know, of course, that every living thing on Earth uses the same strategy: All life is based on the same genetic code.
So, we take all these facts together and start finding out the HOW QUESTIONS. The most difficult of these questions obviously has to be the origin of life. To this date, this is largely a work-in-progress project. Maybe we will have an answer in our lifetime, or maybe not.
BUt what's the Theistic alternative. GOD DID IT. He said the magic words, and lo and behold!....LIFE. As you can see, that's not a scientific hypothesis where you can test, observe, and verify.
Yes indeed. Nobody said the leap would be a short one.
In the study of Chemical Evolution, the primordial soup theory (or hypothesis if you insist) is just one of many competing attempts at a plausible explanation on how the first living cells could have arose. The primordial soup is often rejected but there is actually no overwhelming consensus on this subject. And there is no decisive evidence for any one of them either.
One of the interesting explanations is the inorganic clay crystals theory by Graham Cairns-Smith. The recently more fashionable one is the view that the conditions under which life first arose were akin to the Hadean habitat of today's thermophilous bacteria and archaea, some of which thrive and reproduce in hot springs.
Today, however, majority of biologists are moving toward the RNA World Theory. And this is probably the most persuasive theory of them all (in my opinion)...although still subject to further tests and research. We have no evidence about what the first step in making life was, but we have some plausible ideas of what the kind of steps it must have been. That's what these hypothesis are there to compete for.
The problem with the primordial soup explanation is that it's only good enough for spontaneous generation of amino acids...and eventually we can expect perhaps polymerization into proteins. This turns out to be less promising. This isn't to deny that proteins are vitally important for life, but there is one thing proteins are bad at: They are completely hopeless at replication. So that leaves the theory that life could've arisen spontaneously from a protein technically not viable. That's just my opinion though...it could be viable for all you know.
What creationists tend to do, however, is to attack the hypothesis that has either a lot of disputes in the scientific community or has little support therein. A classic strawman tactic. But that does not prove that Chemical Evolution---the broader interdisciplinary subject---has failed as a pursuit in explaining the origin of the first life. Again, like the subject on the origin of the universe, the origin of life is also one of the grey areas in science. Scientists are still working on it.
And the grey areas of science are where religious fundamentalists love to place their magic theory as the viable alternative...the God of the gaps. They would say "See, it's impossible to get life with the conditions that science have posited. I have the answer. I know that a powerful invisible magician had to be responsible for that.
Omne vivum ex vivo (All life is from life). My magician is alive, eternal, and powerful. Therefore, my all-powerful magician did it."
That quote is a copy-and-paste from creationist websites. That's not even Niles Eldredge's words. I'll tell you where that quote came from and how Eldredge got dragged into it. That quote came from Gerald L. Schroeder, in his book
Genesis and the Big Bang (1990). Here's the full quote:
The only words that belong to Eldredge is the one highlighted and underlined. The rest are from Mr. Schroeder, who is neither an authority in biology nor chemistry. The focus of most of his work is actually more on what he perceives to be an inherent relationship between science and spirituality (check his bio in Wikipedia).
Schroeder's
Genesis and the Big Bang is another one of those pieces of theology-fiction. It's written with the express purpose of trying to reconcile the Jewish Torah with accepted science.
Niles Eldredge did indeed make the highlighted remark, but he made it in order to dispute a detail of evolutionary theory, not to debunk the whole Theory of Evolution. How can we tell where Eldredge stands on the Theory of Evolution? Well, take a look at this book which he wrote:
The Triumph of Evolution...And the Failure of Creationism. You can buy the book from Amazon (click
here).
You really think Eldredge was out to debunk the whole Theory of Evolution? Ha! Nice try. I think that quote (as well as any quote people would copy-and-paste) has to be understood in its proper context. Here's why.
Most of today’s evolutionary scientists focus not on whether evolution occurred, but how it occurred. When Darwin first proposed his theory, he argued that evolution proceeds at a slow, steady rate, and that small changes gradually accumulate to produce large ones. This view is known today as
Gradualism.
Eldredge and Gould, on the other hand, proposed an alternative view in the 1970s that goes under the name of
Punctuated Equilibrium. In their view, evolution is characterized by long periods of little change, interspersed (punctuated) by short periods of rapid change.
However, the fossil record we currently have simply isn’t good enough to allow us to differentiate between these two competing theories. In some fossil sequences, changes seem to be sudden, but other deposits reveal more gradual shifts. It is likely that evolution proceeds in both gradual and punctuated under different circumstances, but scientists will need more fossil data before they can resolve the issue.
The media used that phrase "creating synthetic cell" perhaps to sensationalize the story. I thought of using that phrase as well to stress a point: That the idea of creating the first living cells from scratch is not as far-fetched as you think.
But in any case, it still qualifies as a synthetic cell. A whole genome was written and synthesized using yeast as medium and then transfered to a bacterium where it took over and replaced the host cell's DNA (kinda like how viruses commandeer our cells' DNA in order for it to replicate themselves and invade our system). The result: IT'S ALIVE!...and it's able to replicate using the genetic information from the synthetic genome.
If DNA is called the software of various cells of an organism, genome is the operating system because it's the entirety of an organism's hereditary information.
Does it qualify then as synthetic cell? Yes. Some of the credit goes to the bacterium for providing the machinery to process DNA information. But most of the credit should go to the genome, which essentially instructs how an entire cell is to be constructed. And because the genome itself is synthetic, therefore the cell that got replicated from it should be considered synthetic as well.
I can't help waxing poetic here, but I really do think this is a groundbreaking achievement despite critics who want to downplay it. I would grant that it's not creating a cell from scratch. But is it a far-fetched possibility to really create a living cell from scratch (creating and assembling the cytoplasm, mitochondria, nucleus, etc), given the implications of this breakthrough? I think Venter and co. solved one of the major pieces of this puzzle. There's a long way to go, but I think we're getting there fast.
Originally Posted by schmuck
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