Just Accidental?

[Deeje]

Look up stromatolites...

Thank you for the suggestion.....will Wiki do to explain, so that uneducated dummies like me can grasp the drift?......

"Stromatolites (/stroʊˈmætəlaɪts, strə-/[1][2]) or stromatoliths (from Greek στρώμα, strōma, mattress, bed, stratum, and λίθος, lithos, rock) are layered bio-chemical accretionary structures formed in shallow water by the trapping, binding and cementation of sedimentary grains by biofilms (microbial mats) of microorganisms, especially cyanobacteria.[3] Fossilized stromatolites provide ancient records of life on Earth by these remains, some of which may date from 3.7 billion years ago.

Cyanobacteria /saɪˌænoʊbækˈtɪəriə/, also known as Cyanophyta, is a phylum of bacteria that obtain their energy through photosynthesis.
Like other prokaryotes, cyanobacteria have no membrane-sheathed organelles. Photosynthesis is performed in distinctive folds in the outer membrane of the cell (unlike green plants which use organelles adapted for this specific role, called chloroplasts). Biologists commonly agree that chloroplasts found in eukaryotes have their ancestry in cyanobacteria, via a process called endosymbiosis.

Stromatolites occur widely in the fossil record of the Precambrian, but are rare today. Very few ancient stromatolites contain fossilized microbes.

In a novel experiment, the scientists projected a school logo onto a petri dish containing the organisms, which accreted beneath the lighted region, forming the logo in bacteria.[11] The authors speculate that such motility allows the cyanobacteria to seek light sources to support the colony.[11] In both light and dark conditions, the cyanobacteria form clumps that then expand outwards, with individual members remaining connected to the colony via long tendrils. This may be a protective mechanism that affords evolutionary benefit to the colony in harsh environments where mechanical forces act to tear apart the microbial mats.

Some Archean rock formations show macroscopic similarity to modern microbial structures, leading to the inference that these structures represent evidence of ancient life, namely stromatolites. However, others regard these patterns as being due to natural material deposition or some other abiogenic mechanism. Scientists have argued for a biological origin of stromatolites due to the presence of organic globule clusters within the thin layers of the stromatolites, of aragonite nanocrystals (both features of current stromatolites),[10] and because of the persistence of an inferred biological signal through changing environmental circumstances.

Stromatolites are a major constituent of the fossil record of the first forms of life on earth. The earliest fossils date to 3.7 billion years ago.[5] They peaked about 1.25 billion years ago[12] and subsequently declined in abundance and diversity,[15] so that by the start of the Cambrian they had fallen to 20% of their peak. The most widely supported explanation is that stromatolite builders fell victim to grazing creatures (the Cambrian substrate revolution); this theory implies that sufficiently complex organisms were common over 1 billion years ago.[16][17][18]"

Stromatolite - Wikipedia

So what are we talking about here?

The reddish peaks in this 3.7-billion-year-old rock may be structures made by microbes in a shallow ocean—if so, they would be the earliest known evidence of life on Earth.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/hints-oldest-fossil-life-found-greenland-rocks

This article and the image above is also full of speculation. If the terms "maybe" and "if so" are used in any other conversation, then fact is not being spoken about.


So.....I am seeing the same speculation, suggestion and implication posing as facts just like all the rest of the articles I have read.....how can scientific facts be based on 'inference' about something that "maybe" took place? How is so much credulity placed on "if so"? Does this make it easy for science to infer a lot of stuff whilst a show of hands determines what is the "most widely supported" bit of suggestion? Seriously?

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

Remaining ignorant is made most easy by merely pretending to read what's in front of you, while dismissing it internally before the words even begin to form mental images.

The same thing is true of human relationships: if you are fighting with your significant other and pretend to be listening while mentally forming your devastating response, you're never going to get anywhere. If you actually listen while he or she is talking, and try to respond to what he or she actually said, you stand a pretty good chance of rapprochement.

You are where you are, and you're never going to get further than that. I don't mind, frankly, as it is nothing to me. I like knowing things, whether I like then or not, you like believing things, whether they're true or not. All good.

 

[Valjean]

The first life form was a single cell. Not correct?

Probably not correct. It depends on how you define life; where you draw the line.

As the humanist said -- the question is simplistic. It's not black or white. There's no clear transition point between life and non-life.

Is an amino acid or a lipid molecule life? How about a self-replicating molecule?
Life as we know it developed gradually, in a long series of tiny changes. Any transition point is arbitrary.

At what point does the text turn blue?

 

[savagewind]

Does no one think it is odd that tiny life as at the beginning isn't still happening?

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

Does no one think it is odd that tiny life as at the beginning isn't still happening?

Don't know -- not sure that it isn't! Just in my lifetime, we've seen the emergence of things never seen before: AIDS, zika virus, any number of others. I suspect that creation really is just a happening thing!

 

[Valjean]

Does no one think it is odd that tiny life as at the beginning isn't still happening?

It quite likely it is still happening, but getting a foothold and flourishing is difficult when there's already an established and thriving biota for a crude prototype to compete against.

 

[Deeje]

Probably not correct. It depends on how you define life; where you draw the line.

As the humanist said -- the question is simplistic. It's not black or white. There's no clear transition point between life and non-life.

So somewhere along the evolutionary line, a "sort of" life crept into existence without telling a soul and then gradually became a dinosaur over several billion years! Here......let me give you a diagram...... just to make it simple.....

or how about

Yes I can see clearly how an amoeba morphed itself into a T-Rex and then back to a chicken.

Is an amino acid or a lipid molecule life? How about a self-replicating molecule?

Is a brick a house? Is a tile a roof? Is a blade of grass a lawn?

Life as we know it developed gradually, in a long series of tiny changes. Any transition point is arbitrary.

That is the fantasy with not a shred of actual evidence that any of it is true.

At what point does the text turn blue?

Anyone who has ever done color theory knows that red and blue are each primary colors. (colors that cannot be made using other colors) Once you blend them, no matter how much or how little, they cease being a primary color. How amazing then that the colors in nature are seldom made up of just primary colors alone....they are mostly blends of the primaries...red blue and yellow (sometimes lightened with white or darkened with black, neither of which is classified as a true color since they have no wavelength.)

The Creator is an artist who can blend colors and designs and creatures who can all replicate themselves.....but that would mean nothing without sight and a brain to process the images. Then we need a sense of appreciation, (unique to humans) without which none of these things would even be acknowledged as beautiful. Yet we all find them to touch an inner part of us....a part that evolution can never explain.

Science leaves out all the nice parts of nature and substitutes meaningless, dry, baseless assertions that turn us into nothing more than end products of a mindless process. I know that we are soooo much more than that.

 

[Deeje]

Remaining ignorant is made most easy by merely pretending to read what's in front of you, while dismissing it internally before the words even begin to form mental images.

Remaining ignorant when something that is merely assumed, can be presented as established fact (as long as you take the time to form the mental images suggested by science) and shown to be a dishonest misrepresentation of the evidence, is worse IMO.

 

[Deeje]

So I guess the images of the ducks of different hues is like to show that only a god was capable of creating them.

What is designed, requires a designer.

'Ol Noah's ark musta been the size of the USS Theodore Roosevelt!

It was actually 437 ft 6 in. × 72 ft 11 in. × 43 ft 9 in with two floors, and three decks thus providing a total of about 8,900 sq m (96,000 sq ft) of space. It was a huge floating chest.

A bit like this...

It was designed to float...not navigate.

 

[Valjean]

So somewhere along the evolutionary line, a "sort of" life crept into existence without telling a soul and then gradually became a dinosaur over several billion years! Here......let me give you a diagram...... just to make it simple.....

Yes. You can still see them today, the transitional forms didn't go anywhere.
Set up the right environment and you can watch organic compounds, self replicating molecules, polymers, semi permeable membranes and all sorts of life components form, assemble and interact. You could do it in your own kitchen (you'll need some expensive microscopy and chromatography, though ).

You must, by now, have had the basic mechanisms of evolution explained to you, and I'm sure people have sent you links to Wiki and Talk Origins articles on abiogenesis. Did you not read these, or are you just arguing from personal incredulity?

Yes I can see clearly how an amoeba morphed itself into a T-Rex and then back to a chicken.

You joke, but what's the alternative -- magic poofing?
You really should understand the mechanisms involved by now. They're perfectly clear to rational people.

Is a brick a house? Is a tile a roof? Is a blade of grass a lawn?

A brick is a component of a house. Assemble enough components and voila! -- you have a house.
Same with life, cells and multicellular organisms.

That is the fantasy with not a shred of actual evidence that any of it is true.

Now you're just being obtuse. You know perfectly well there are boatloads of solid evidence from a dozen different disciplines. It's been explained over and over in this very thread. You know that scientists and educated people have long accepted this. Are they all idiots?
If you choose to close your eyes and put your fingers in your ears there's no hope for you. No amount of evidence could get through to you if you choose not to see.

Anyone who has ever done color theory knows that red and blue are each primary colors. (colors that cannot be made using other colors) Once you blend them, no matter how much or how little, they cease being a primary color

You're quibbling. You understand what's being illustrated.

The Creator is an artist who can blend colors and designs and creatures who can all replicate themselves.....but that would mean nothing without sight and a brain to process the images. Then we need a sense of appreciation, (unique to humans) without which none of these things would even be acknowledged as beautiful. Yet we all find them to touch an inner part of us....a part that evolution can never explain.

A feeling is not evidence, no matter how pleasant or intense.

Science leaves out all the nice parts of nature and substitutes meaningless, dry, baseless assertions that turn us into nothing more than end products of a mindless process. I know that we are soooo much more than that.

What are you talking about? I'm sorry if you find the science dry or confusingly complicated. Some of us find Nature even more beautiful and elegant, for understanding it.

Give us some evidence for this creator, besides an argument from complexity or incredulity. You're positing magic as a more rational "mechanism" than actual, testable observations.

Science's assertions, as you well know, are anything but baseless. Science is a posteriori, the evidence precedes the conclusions. It's religion where the conclusion precedes the evidence. If anything's baseless, it's theism.

 

[Shad]

Sorry. I thought we were talking about evolution with help and evolution with no help.

No as selective breeding is something practiced by a number of animals. Take for example animals which have mating practices that include some form of combat like Moose. Weak males lose more often than not in mating combat thus do not breed as much as stronger males. Non-combat rituals like that of the peacock function in a similar manner so that specimens which have a lower number of acceptable traits are not successful breeders.

What is helping your brand of evolution?

Sorry but this is not a brand of evolution. It is merely a part of evolutionary mechanics you didn't know about.

 

[Valjean]

What is designed, requires a designer.

Horsefeathers!
The mechanisms by which complexity can arise from simplicity have been explained to you, and surely you learned them in high school biology.
There are none so blind....

Simple algorithm yields complex mechanism:

 

[savagewind]

No as selective breeding is something practiced by a number of animals. Take for example animals which have mating practices that include some form of combat like Moose. Weak males lose more often than not in mating combat thus do not breed as much as stronger males. Non-combat rituals like that of the peacock function in a similar manner so that specimens which have a lower number of acceptable traits are not successful breeders.

I think that would come under the category of proper conditions. The condition would be the fight.

but this is not a brand of evolution. It is merely a part of evolutionary mechanics you didn't know about.

I know that. I think plain evolutionists are missing an important factor. If ever anyone will care to look for it (I am not holding my breath) the world will be amazed!

What factor is missing? The reason why I think I know that is because there doesn't seem to be any forms of organic materials in the process of becoming anything.

What I mean is that the three factors essential for evolution to work are 1. the materials 2. a force and 3. the proper conditions.

I think that a single force is not able to aid in the making. Just look at the wind! Does the wind ever actually produce anything? Of course not!

I compared the making of a new living thing to the making of a machine. It is a machine. Correct?

Now I shall compare it to construction. The proper condition is enough land to build on and it usually should be flat. The materials are wood and steel for the most part. I don't know what the force is in evolution. but in construction it is the workers. They are following the orders of the foreperson and he or she is following the orders of the contractor. Before all that, there was a design decided upon.

Can no one really see why someone like me who believes in God can't see that anything can make
itself like they say everything gets made without a design. (or even a pupose other than make), without a direction and without any outside help except for the right conditions?

Has anyone posted yet about where the force comes from each and every time there is any progress in the making of anything?

What about the sticking together? What makes foreign materials stick together like it had to have happened? How many times has it had to have happened?

That is a real question. How many times did two, three, four or whatever number of previously foreign materials (from where those came from, who knows?) come together to stick together and become something new?

I can see pieces of substances alone and all those substances in the universe bumping into each other. I imagine most of the time they do not stick. Sometimes they do. What is the ratio of not sticking together to sticking together?
I imagine it is huge. Too huge to fit into this universe imo.

 

[Monk Of Reason]

Nature tells you plainly what a "kind" is. If they can reproduce, (even artificially) then they are a "kind".

In many of the experiments that were conducted on fruit flies and the like they are no longer able to reproduce with the old species. Doesn't that plainly make them a different kind?

 

[Monk Of Reason]

Probably. About math I do not know, but I can see it.
When someone is learning something new there is much trial and error, but human learning comes with a plan. Evolution has no plan. All the mutations are without a plan. If someone would calculate all the mutations that were likely in all the species and then added all the failed attempts the number would not fit neatly in the relatively few years that life actually began as a simple life form.

If you just claimed that you don't know the math how can you claim that? Its like someone looking at the ocean and saying "yeah we can't cross that. No way to. Its too far. I don't know the speed of the boat or the distance across but man do I feel it."

If you want to claim it then you have to back it up with math. I Just talked about the rate of mutation which provides us with a mind boggling number of mutatinos that happen every year across our planet. You multiply that by billions and I don't understand how you are coming up with that kind of conclusion.

 

[savagewind]

In many of the experiments that were conducted on fruit flies and the like they are no longer able to reproduce with the old species. Doesn't that plainly make them a different kind?

It would seem to be a different kind if it could reproduce with its own kind but not with its parent's kind.

How long did it take to produce a specimen under special conditions which can reproduce, but not with a formally existing kind?
Were two produced?

 

[Monk Of Reason]

Most people don't appreciate the fact that about 2/3 of the history of life on earth was solely devoted to unicellular evolution. So whenever someone talks about how amazingly complex a cell is, my response is.....well yeah....that's why it took 3 billion years.

Oh, and btw, the first life forms are thought to have arisen less than a billion years after the earth formed.

I mean its .8 billion so I rounded up.

 

[savagewind]

If you just claimed that you don't know the math how can you claim that? Its like someone looking at the ocean and saying "yeah we can't cross that. No way to. Its too far. I don't know the speed of the boat or the distance across but man do I feel it."

If you want to claim it then you have to back it up with math. I Just talked about the rate of mutation which provides us with a mind boggling number of mutatinos that happen every year across our planet. You multiply that by billions and I don't understand how you are coming up with that kind of conclusion.

Too many numbers in my head is similar to the brains that can't seem to see the size of the universe or infinity. I can see infinity and also can conceive the size of the universe. Are you saying that to see them I have to have a figure?

 

[savagewind]

I am assuming there is no figure for infinity.

 

[SkepticThinker]

Thank you for the suggestion.....will Wiki do to explain, so that uneducated dummies like me can grasp the drift?......

"Stromatolites (/stroʊˈmætəlaɪts, strə-/[1][2]) or stromatoliths (from Greek στρώμα, strōma, mattress, bed, stratum, and λίθος, lithos, rock) are layered bio-chemical accretionary structures formed in shallow water by the trapping, binding and cementation of sedimentary grains by biofilms (microbial mats) of microorganisms, especially cyanobacteria.[3] Fossilized stromatolites provide ancient records of life on Earth by these remains, some of which may date from 3.7 billion years ago.

Cyanobacteria /saɪˌænoʊbækˈtɪəriə/, also known as Cyanophyta, is a phylum of bacteria that obtain their energy through photosynthesis.
Like other prokaryotes, cyanobacteria have no membrane-sheathed organelles. Photosynthesis is performed in distinctive folds in the outer membrane of the cell (unlike green plants which use organelles adapted for this specific role, called chloroplasts). Biologists commonly agree that chloroplasts found in eukaryotes have their ancestry in cyanobacteria, via a process called endosymbiosis.

Stromatolites occur widely in the fossil record of the Precambrian, but are rare today. Very few ancient stromatolites contain fossilized microbes.

In a novel experiment, the scientists projected a school logo onto a petri dish containing the organisms, which accreted beneath the lighted region, forming the logo in bacteria.[11] The authors speculate that such motility allows the cyanobacteria to seek light sources to support the colony.[11] In both light and dark conditions, the cyanobacteria form clumps that then expand outwards, with individual members remaining connected to the colony via long tendrils. This may be a protective mechanism that affords evolutionary benefit to the colony in harsh environments where mechanical forces act to tear apart the microbial mats.

Some Archean rock formations show macroscopic similarity to modern microbial structures, leading to the inference that these structures represent evidence of ancient life, namely stromatolites. However, others regard these patterns as being due to natural material deposition or some other abiogenic mechanism. Scientists have argued for a biological origin of stromatolites due to the presence of organic globule clusters within the thin layers of the stromatolites, of aragonite nanocrystals (both features of current stromatolites),[10] and because of the persistence of an inferred biological signal through changing environmental circumstances.

Stromatolites are a major constituent of the fossil record of the first forms of life on earth. The earliest fossils date to 3.7 billion years ago.[5] They peaked about 1.25 billion years ago[12] and subsequently declined in abundance and diversity,[15] so that by the start of the Cambrian they had fallen to 20% of their peak. The most widely supported explanation is that stromatolite builders fell victim to grazing creatures (the Cambrian substrate revolution); this theory implies that sufficiently complex organisms were common over 1 billion years ago.[16][17][18]"

Stromatolite - Wikipedia

So what are we talking about here?

The reddish peaks in this 3.7-billion-year-old rock may be structures made by microbes in a shallow ocean—if so, they would be the earliest known evidence of life on Earth.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/hints-oldest-fossil-life-found-greenland-rocks

This article and the image above is also full of speculation. If the terms "maybe" and "if so" are used in any other conversation, then fact is not being spoken about.


So.....I am seeing the same speculation, suggestion and implication posing as facts just like all the rest of the articles I have read.....how can scientific facts be based on 'inference' about something that "maybe" took place? How is so much credulity placed on "if so"? Does this make it easy for science to infer a lot of stuff whilst a show of hands determines what is the "most widely supported" bit of suggestion? Seriously?

Science doesn't deal in absolutes. You need to understand that.

The language you see scientists using is based on probabilities and confidence. Nobody can know anything with absolute certainty. Contrary to your belief, such language is not a display of dishonesty - quite the opposite, in fact.