Russell
Posts: 1082
Joined: April 2005
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| Quote | The comment of Russell's about there being no point A baffles me to to be honest. The only reason that this gap appears to be unchanged by every issue of Nature is that chemists rarely publish in Nature! Ok so that's not a serious point at all!
What I am really confused about is this "no point A" stuff. |
Nothing all that profound, really.
I'm just noting that evolution is all about getting from one form to another by "descent with modification". So it's no big deal (unless your mind is stunted by religious indoctrination) to get from Australopithecus to Homo, or even from worms to chickens. In each case the "point A" is pretty well known and understood.
But for abiogenesis, "point A" is nonliving, nonreproducing, precursors of unknown composition, in an unknown environment. And "point B", the bacteria-like creatures reflected in the earliest fossil stromatolites (I guess that's the earliest we have, but I'm not expert or even current on this stuff), (1) is not very well known or understood itself, and (2) represents a much huger leap than any other "point A - point B" pair plausibly addressed by any real science.
It's sort of like giving a Martian detailed directions to get to the Empire State Building, starting with "Go north on 1st Avenue to 34th Street...."
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Must... not... scratch... mosquito bite.
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