origin of life (The atheist delusion)

by dhw, Sunday, January 20, 2008, 12:27 (5939 days ago) @ George Jelliss

I had just drafted this reply to your earlier criticism, then logged on to this one! I think it all covers the same ground, so I shan't change what I'd written, but I can't help noticing your use of the word "invention". It ties in very neatly with my (crude) computer image below. - An interesting and amusing website (on the evolution of the penis). Thank you. - It's difficult to respond without repeating what I've already said in the text and in my last reply. My focus is on the area that Darwin wisely and explicitly avoids dealing with ... namely, the original material on which natural selection works. In Chapter 6, under "Organs of extreme perfection and complication", taking the eye as an example, he makes this abundantly clear: "How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated." I gave the example of the penis and the vagina purely for effect, but please note the word "rudimentary". We know how organs are developed and perfected, but we do not know how or why the original forms ... no matter how primitive ... came into being and ... no matter how primitively ... were able to function. Darwin thought that "a nerve sensitive to touch may be rendered sensitive to light and...sound", but how did the sensitive nerve arise in the first place, and how did it originally "render" itself (though Darwin's use of the passive here is interesting) sensitive to new things? - In my crude way, let me draw an analogy. If you put into your car a computer which can produce gadgets to cope with every change in the nature of the terrain, the light, the weather, the traffic conditions etc., the gadgets will appear, function, survive etc. according to a process of "natural selection". My problem is not with the gadgets, it's with the computer. What Dawkins calls "the first hereditary molecule" contained the potential for all these totally new concepts, and to believe that this extraordinary mechanism just fell into place accidentally requires an act of faith that is (almost) beyond me. Perhaps that was a factor in Darwin's own agnosticism.