Origin of Life; pre-planning (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, October 07, 2011, 18:07 (4796 days ago) @ David Turell

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-10-universal-common-ancestor-complex-previously.html-Dhw: If early life was more complex than was hitherto imagined, it would suggest an even more higgledy-piggledy advance to the complex beings (us) which you regard as your UI's ultimate goal. Why should evolution have moved from complex to simpler forms if it was pre-planned to become increasingly complex?
-DAVID: I don't know that the article shows a back and forth evolution from simple to complex to simple again. The article simply suggests that the last common ancestor on the early bush or tree was complex. We don't even know if anything simpler preceded it.-The article is concerned with the movement from complex to simple: "The study lends support to a hypothesis that LUCA [= last universal common ancestor] may have been more complex than the simplest organisms alive today, said James Whitfield, a professor of entomology at Illinois and a co-author on the study." And bacteria "may actually be reduced versions of what was there originally." What preceded LUCA is irrelevant to the question I've asked above, which is a challenge to the theory of "pre-planning", though not to the theory of intelligent design. In my view, the more higgledy-piggledy the advance, the less evidence it provides for pre-planning. But of course by tomorrow someone may have come up with a different version of LUCA.