A few days ago in one of my classes, the professor was explaining theories about the origin of life. At the beginning of the lecture, he made a throw-away comment about how we know that life "wasn't divinely created, it evolved."
He then went on to talk about how life might have begun. The consesus is that there is no convincing explanation of how life assembled itself on the early earth. RNA (a probably precursor to the current DNA/Protein model because it can both store information and catalyze reactions) is too complicated to have assembled itself, so the current theory is that something with a simpler backbone structure arose first, and was completely supplanted by RNA, so that there are no remnants of it. There are several candidates whose pre-biotic synthesis is less improbable than RNA, but mostly they are a handful of guesses. And that is just the backbone. The bases would have been at least as hard to synthesize on the early earth, and they are so perfectly suited for their role that here is no convincing simpler form.
The attitude among Biologists seems to be that we know life arose spontaneously, we just don't know how. But what is the evidence that life arose spontaneously? There is not currently any remotely convincing chemical evidence. More importantly, though, what would a Darwinist accept as evidence that life could not have arisen spontaneously? How improbable does the chemical evidence have to become before it counts, not as evidence that we don't know enough about prebiotic chemistry, but as evidence that life did not arise spontaneously?
For that matter, what evidence would a Darwinist allow to count against the theory that, as my professor said, "All you need is a self-replicating molecule, Natural Selection can do the rest"? It seems that there must be some theoretical limits on the power of natural selection... or at least on what natural selection can accomplish within a fixed time frame. I would absolutely love it if a Darwinist would propose some structure which either 1) could not have been produced by natural selection, or 2) could not have been produced by natural selection in (say) a few billion years. Without a framework that proposes realistic limits on natural selection, Darwinism is unfalsifiable.
Note that I am not asking for evidence of common descent (which in my experience comprises nearly all of the evidence for evolution), I am asking for evidence that the proposed mechanisms or something similar are capable of what they are being asked to do.
He then went on to talk about how life might have begun. The consesus is that there is no convincing explanation of how life assembled itself on the early earth. RNA (a probably precursor to the current DNA/Protein model because it can both store information and catalyze reactions) is too complicated to have assembled itself, so the current theory is that something with a simpler backbone structure arose first, and was completely supplanted by RNA, so that there are no remnants of it. There are several candidates whose pre-biotic synthesis is less improbable than RNA, but mostly they are a handful of guesses. And that is just the backbone. The bases would have been at least as hard to synthesize on the early earth, and they are so perfectly suited for their role that here is no convincing simpler form.
The attitude among Biologists seems to be that we know life arose spontaneously, we just don't know how. But what is the evidence that life arose spontaneously? There is not currently any remotely convincing chemical evidence. More importantly, though, what would a Darwinist accept as evidence that life could not have arisen spontaneously? How improbable does the chemical evidence have to become before it counts, not as evidence that we don't know enough about prebiotic chemistry, but as evidence that life did not arise spontaneously?
For that matter, what evidence would a Darwinist allow to count against the theory that, as my professor said, "All you need is a self-replicating molecule, Natural Selection can do the rest"? It seems that there must be some theoretical limits on the power of natural selection... or at least on what natural selection can accomplish within a fixed time frame. I would absolutely love it if a Darwinist would propose some structure which either 1) could not have been produced by natural selection, or 2) could not have been produced by natural selection in (say) a few billion years. Without a framework that proposes realistic limits on natural selection, Darwinism is unfalsifiable.
Note that I am not asking for evidence of common descent (which in my experience comprises nearly all of the evidence for evolution), I am asking for evidence that the proposed mechanisms or something similar are capable of what they are being asked to do.
Ed Darrell said... 
