Natures wonders: Subsea Microorganisms Long Life (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, August 20, 2018, 11:45 (2285 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: This video talks about subsea biology. Most striking to me was her commentary on the cellular life spans. Particularly when she compares their life cycle and ours saying 'a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day.'

DHW: Thank you, Tony, for this brilliant, fascinating, amazingly illuminating lecture. I was bowled over by it. You will not be surprised when I say that the most striking thing for me was the statement that “all these species had to have had a common ancestor” – and the species ranged from bacteria to humans. The cell is the basis of all life, whether it was designed by a God or not. And whether the astonishing variety of living forms extant and extinct was divinely preprogrammed, separately dabbled, or the consequence of cellular responses to different environments, is one of the questions we have been discussing for days that are like years, or years that are like days!

TONY: If you look at DNA as a programming language, the commonalities do not HAVE to represent common decent so much as common functionality. Let me give you an example […]

Tony, thank you for the example, but to my shame I must confess that your computer language is totally foreign to me! It was you who kindly selected this lecture for us, but if you are satisfied that DNA is in the sort of programming language you are familiar with, I’m not going to argue with you! I listened to the opinion of a microbiologist, and was struck by what she said. However, I notice that your objection is that “the commonalities do not HAVE to represent common descent” (which certainly modifies her statement). At least that means, though, that you believe they CAN represent common descent. My point was that the cell is the basis of all life, and I find it perfectly conceivable that its design (which believers may attribute to their God) would render cells capable of combining with other cells to create every single organism, extant and extinct, throughout the history of life. This means common descent from the first living cells. Your post clearly doesn’t exclude this possibility, which is good enough for me.

DAVID: This has got to be a different branch than Archaea. It is not a candidate for origin of life since its reproductive rate is so long, it doesn't allow for evolution at the rate we see it out in the sunlight on the surface of Earth or at ocean bottom interface with salt water.

I don’t know why you have switched the subject from common descent to origin of life. I may be wrong, but I don’t remember Karen Lloyd even mentioning the origin of life, and she gave the same explanation for why the microbes couldn’t evolve.

DAVID: Thank you Tony. Great lecture. And further thank you for interpreting DNA as a program for processing life with functional coding. Easy to imagine a primary designer for the first living cells from which these sub-sea ogranisms must have developed.

Ah! I’d be interested to know, then, if you reject Tony's conclusion and agree with Karen Lloyd that ALL organisms, from bacteria to humans, must have developed from the first living cells.