Discovery of Methane Puts Evolution 'On the rocks'

[aa118816]

Hi Bgood,

The article makes perfect sense and the point is that these single celled microbes are very complex. What we have found is that even the simplest life forms are incredibly complex. My next door neighbor is a biologist at Harvard and we have discussed these microbes in depth. The minimal complexity for these creatures is quite high. The ranges are between 300 and 1500, though the 300 has come under sever fire recently.

Harvard just started funding and OOL program and they are finding that the genomes of these simple prokaryotes are far more organized than they imagined. This is why the main push is to consider panspermia where there would have been billions of years for these microbes to "self-organize" then get transported here. My friend is an secular Jew and he said that there is no way abiogenesis happened here; therefore life must have originated elsewhere. To say that these were not complex creatures is biochemically inaccurate.

Dan

[BGoodForGoodSake]

Hi Bgood,

The article makes perfect sense and the point is that these single celled microbes are very complex. What we have found is that even the simplest life forms are incredibly complex. My next door neighbor is a biologist at Harvard and we have discussed these microbes in depth. The minimal complexity for these creatures is quite high. The ranges are between 300 and 1500, though the 300 has come under sever fire recently.

I didn't say that archaea were not chemically complex. However compared to other forms on life they are simple.

The article does not make sence. The points you made do not have any bearing on this.

Follow me carefully.

Signs of Archaea was already discovered dating back 3.5 billion years.
The discovery of a methane producing Archaea does not change the timeline at all.

The article was implying that the current theories depended on Methanogens occurring 700 million years later. This is not the case.
Whoever wrote the article was unaware of this fact.

Now your friend at Harvard beleives that panspermia must be the best explanation. Many beleive that abiogenesis occurred here on Earth. However there is not enough evidence for either case. So one may "beleive" what they want but in the mean time there is no consensus agreement.

I personally don't favor one side over the other.

[aa118816]

"There also seems to be an assumption that methane producing bacteria would be complex lifeforms. This cannot be a valid assumption."

You did say that it is not a valid assumption that they would be complex lifeforms, so I think you should follow me carefully. The author is not only aware of this fact, but has cited other data which seems to imply that early archea might have originated 3.83bya. I do not think you understand the point that these creatures are complex when you calculate the amount of genetic material they need to function. This is basic knowledge in OOL research. Also, it is meaningless to compare archea to other lifeforms to justify that they are simple.

The point is very simple, the earliest detected lifeforms are too complex for abiogenesis to have taken place according to the vast majority of probability theorists and OOL researchers (Shapiro, Sagan, ect). It does not matter what one might believe, there has been not pathway or probability experiment which would show that life could emerge in such a short period of time.

Dan

[BGoodForGoodSake]

"There also seems to be an assumption that methane producing bacteria would be complex lifeforms. This cannot be a valid assumption."

You did say that it is not a valid assumption that they would be complex lifeforms, so I think you should follow me carefully. The author is not only aware of this fact, but has cited other data which seems to imply that early archea might have originated 3.83bya.

What citation?

I do not think you understand the point that these creatures are complex when you calculate the amount of genetic material they need to function. This is basic knowledge in OOL research. Also, it is meaningless to compare archea to other lifeforms to justify that they are simple.

Of course I understand this. Are we reading the same link? The point is that the discovery of biological methane does not suddenly change the picture. It has been know for some time that Archaea probably existed almost 3.8 billion years ago.

[BGoodForGoodSake]

Essentially then ..... what we have here is .......

ummmm ......

errrrrrr ......

Fossilized Flatulance?

Why Yes!
=)

[aa118816]

I quoted you directly Bgood. What citation are you referring too? I think you are asking me where I quoted you. If you are asking for a citation from Dr. Rana, he wrote a book about this and had a complete chapter on the discovery of archaea spanning back to about 3.83 bya. Also, if you question whether or not he understands what he is talking about, Dr. Richard Smalley, a Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry in 1997 (or 1996) called all of his research spot on. Also, Dr. Shapiro from UChicago agreed with his interpretation of the science and is trying to find another way life could have developed on Earth called a "third way'.

You are completely missing the point. Life developed in a time span that is far too short for abiogenesis to take place so Dr. Rana cited this article to support his assertions. He is 100% justified in his observations which are supported by the article.

Dan

[ray]

I odn't understand all the terms mentioned but the idea that life on earth originated on some other 'planet' difficult to understand. If it couldn't develop here, why could it develop elsewhere and somehow live through the vacuum of space for ??? million years to get here. Have you ever considered the possibility that God created life as we know it?

Ray

[sandy_mcd]

I odn't understand all the terms mentioned but the idea that life on earth originated on some other 'planet' difficult to understand. If it couldn't develop here, why could it develop elsewhere and somehow live through the vacuum of space for ??? million years to get here. Have you ever considered the possibility that God created life as we know it?Ray

OOL I assume is Origin of Life. I have no idea what a 300 measure of complexity is. The argument for panspermia (term technically perhaps sometimes misused for exogenesis):
1) Life appeared on Earth a "short" time (say, 40 million to 400 million) after conditions became suitable for life to survive.
2) This "short" period of time is not long enough for life to develop from chemicals. Perhaps 2 to 5 billion years would be a more reasonable figure.
3) Therefore, life was either created on Earth at that time or drifted onto Earth from some other planet or source which was billions of years older and thus had time for life to develop.
You are correct that all of these presuppose a belief in a 4.5 billion year old Earth and a 13.7 billion year old universe. It is an irrelevant point for someone who believes the Earth is 6000 years old.

[sandy_mcd]

Life didn't have billions of years to evolve afterall, appearing a very short time after the conditions on earth would have been suitable for life...

Again, how does methanogenesis significantly change prior knowledge?

http://www.reasons.org/resources/connec ... pid_origin These findings underscore the miraculous rapidity of life's origin. We know from the ratios of carbon isotopes that life was abundant on Earth as far back as 3.86 billion years ago.5 Therefore, life must have arisen in the tiny span of 40 million years (3.9 billion minus 3.86 billion = 40 million), probably less. Naturalism offers no explanation for such a rapid appearance of life. The Bible, on the other hand, does.

So finding early examples of methane producing microbes (Archaea not bacteria?) doesn't add anything new to this argument. Or am I missing something?

[Tim S]

I assume the "300 measure of complexity" is the number of base-pairs in the genome. I have heard the the lower limit to viability in an organism is probably around 200 base-pairs.

[aa118816]

Hi Sandy,

Thanks for the response, but it just further confirms data that has been know for less than a decade, but not necessarily widely known in the public. Sorry for not labelling my numbers, but those are genes-I have to remeber that I am talking to more than Bgood. He is a knowledgable guy-so I assumed that he knew what I was talking about.

Dan

[BGoodForGoodSake]

Life didn't have billions of years to evolve afterall, appearing a very short time after the conditions on earth would have been suitable for life...

Again, how does methanogenesis significantly change prior knowledge?

http://www.reasons.org/resources/connec ... pid_origin These findings underscore the miraculous rapidity of life's origin. We know from the ratios of carbon isotopes that life was abundant on Earth as far back as 3.86 billion years ago.5 Therefore, life must have arisen in the tiny span of 40 million years (3.9 billion minus 3.86 billion = 40 million), probably less. Naturalism offers no explanation for such a rapid appearance of life. The Bible, on the other hand, does.

So finding early examples of methane producing microbes (Archaea not bacteria?) doesn't add anything new to this argument. Or am I missing something?

My point exactly.
=)

Any current theories of abiogenesis had to have taken this into account and will not be significantly affected by this discovery.

As it stands it would appear that 200-400 million years is the amount of time pre Archaea-like lifeforms would have had to develop in a abiogenesis scenario.

[sandy_mcd]

Thanks for the response, but it just further confirms data that has been know for less than a decade, but not necessarily widely known in the public.

Hi Dan, thanks for the info on genes.
Actually when I read the first message, I Googled Ueno and

I looked up the author's name and found a paper http://homepage.mac.com/yuee/H/Uenoetal04.pdf which references other papers from 1983 referring to ~3.5 Ga microfossils. I would suspect that the "billions of years necessary for the first appearance of life" idea was discarded by mainstream scientists many years ago.

So in the scientific community this knowledge is at the least 20 years old.

[sandy_mcd]

I don't care to start a debate about evolution vs. creation.

I'm going to try to walk a fine line here and discuss what's involved in the debate without actually getting tied up in debating the relative merits. As I wrote before, I don't see how narrowing down the time before the appearance of first life is convincing evidence for (or against) either creation or evolution. So here are some questions in an attempt to elucidate what is expected for both models. The answers to these questions (preferably obtained in advance) are necessary to determine what the evidence fits.

1) An argument for creation is:

RTB states that when the Spirit moved over the Earth after it was formless and void, the Spirit seeded the planet. They see early life, just after the planet became habitable, as the seeds spread by the Spirit.

Coming at this with a blank slate, what timescales is this RTB interpretation consistent with or predict? Is there a specific reference to an early seeding or is that just what farmers do? Given the standard accepted geologic ages, once the earth is suitable for life,
a) how much time is acceptable for this early seeding, e.g., up to 100 million years?
b) what time range is it not clear for (could be either seeding or not)?
c) what time limit, if any, is too long, e.g. if life appeared 2 billion years later, this would be inconsistent with the RTB model?

2) And for evolution:

the complexities involved for simple bacteria to evolve would take some time.

For life to spontaneously "self organize" or come together through chemical evolution you need a tremendous amount of time.

Again, without considering any fossil evidence, how much time is necessary for life to appear?
a) what time limit is the minimum for life to appear naturally? (under this time we can say there must have been creation or exogenesis)?
b) what time range is it not clear for (could be either creation or not)?

[Note: these questions are much more difficult because all naturalistic modes have to be considered. For more, see the "Dr Smalley, hostile witness?" post in the planning stage.]

Given all the uncertainties involved in the above, the only concept I see early fossils as evidence against is the idea of random chance, or "winning the lottery" as Bgood wrote elsewhere.

[sandy_mcd]

It is easy to say it shows the "inevitability of life [evolving] as a chemical/biological process", it is another thing to explain why it is inevitable and how this inevitability is possible.

Very true. There is no known or postulated information which can explain such an inevitability. But not being able to explain something does not mean it is unexplainable. There needs to be some other other reason to reject this as a possibility. I suspect that the more one knows about science, the easier it is believe something which seems unbelievable at first glance. [This is pretty much the standard discussion I have with August about who gets to decide whether some phenomenon is susceptible to scientific explanation.]
Philosophically,
a) an atheist is going to only look for a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life.
b) a theistic evolutionist, who already accepts ape-like primates as physical body ancestors, is not going to have a problem with abiogenesis.
c) for some others, such as those who believe in a young earth, the idea of abiogenesis is not acceptable.

Scientists do not have a model for abiogenesis. There are many unanswered questions in science. Here is a list of 125: http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/125th/ Which of these are amenable to scientific explanation, which aren't, and how does one decide? In the past many questions and inconsistencies have been answered and cleared up. How does one decide whether abiogenesis will be in this category?
1) Geologists and evolutionary biologists thought an old earth best explained their observations. Lord Kelvin's thermal analysis conclusively ruled out such a possibility. But the along came the discovery of an additional source of heat and all was ok.
2) People long recognized the complementarity of coastlines on opposite sides of the Pacific. Was this just the way God made things? Wasn't the idea of moving continents inconceivable? Eventually a mechanism, energy source, and evidence were gathered which gave birth to plate tectonics.
3) Bohr's atomic model was defective. Did God exempt orbiting electrons from obeying some physical laws or might there be another explanation?