Origin of Life: LUCA (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, March 18, 2014, 14:06 (3904 days ago) @ David Turell


> > dhw: And secondly, I remain baffled by the claim that "continuing advances in evolutionary biology, bioinformatics, and computational biology will give us the tools to describe LUCA and the evolutionary transitions preceding it with unprecedented accuracy and detail. " (My bold) How can there be accuracy in tracing evolution from the origin of life to bacteria if no-one knows the origin of life?
> 
> David: Perfectly put. Faith in the probability of abiogenesis is the cornerstone of the atheist's faith-Here is a contrarian's view which fits dhw's objections:-http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2014/03/guess-evidence-for-early-evolution.html-"Strangely enough DNA replication that we see in today's cells was not present in LUCA. Instead RNA polymerases performed that job. Later in evolutionary history, today's complex and circuitous DNA replication incredibly evolved independently several times. Also the aminoacyl tRNA synthetases underwent considerable horizontal gene transfer (HGT).
 
"This is but a small sampling of the complicated evolutionary narrative of early life. And what exactly is the evidence for this Darwinian choreography leading from OOL to LUCA and finally to the three cell domains? Well actually there is, err, none.
 
"In fact, not only is there no evidence for this narrative, evolutionists have repeatedly been stymied in their attempts to demonstrate how it would work in the laboratory. In fact, they can't even demonstrate how it would work outside of the laboratory. Even when evolutionists are free to speculate and hypothesize with computer models or cartoon renditions, the problem still resists solution because it is too unlikely."