life started evolution not vice versa.

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life started evolution not vice versa.

That's a really impressive statement.

However, do you have an actual reason why you think this is so? I'm not sure what you're driving at.

Because it's true. Many creationists who don't believe in evolution will make the claim that scientists believe "evolution started life", when it's actually life that started evolution. Before life originated, evolution didn't exist, so it wasn't there to start life. When life came about, evolution started. No biologists will tell you that evolution started life.

Last edited by SystemDown on 28 May 2009, 8:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

Sorry, I don't doubt your certainty, but surely you must have at least SOME reason besides "because it's true"? Otherwise the whole thing seems a bit religious. An article or anything would suffice.

Its something we'll never know for sure, but the statement has a lot of truth to it. Also, the definition of 'evolution' can be vaguely interpreted here as well. Say life did begin out of the organic materials in the right conditions of heat/moisture and lightening to trigger it. That self replicating organic material is the mere happenstance of chance, a 1 in a inconceivable number chance of it happening, only then could it begin to evolve. Through pure luck does life appear, then it begins its billions of years journey to us.
But we know evolution is largely environmentally based on a microbial scale. They make perfect copies of oneself except in the times when outside forces such as radiation cause mutations, and those 1 in a 100 billion times that mutation causes a trait giving that particular copy an advantage in survival is when it would be considered to have evolved on some scale.
So cant you say the outside forces of the environmental conditions on the pre-'life' organic material that caused it to become the simple form of life it did was a part of its evolution?

There are certain circumstances where pure chance appears to be a deciding factor such as radioactive emission. But we live in a universe of laws of electromagnetism, gravity, the strong force and the weak force. These may intermingle their influences so that untangling them seems impossible but that has nothing to do with chance. If a planetary surface contains the proper mix of elements and energy then, over time something can be expected to happen. According to the laws of chance all the gas in a room could theoretically gather in a corner and everybody in the room would smother. That this could happen as one of the happenstances of chance is unavoidable but nobody has ever experienced it. On the same level life "evolved" from non-living chemicals because the correct conditions prevailed.

Correct me if i'm wrong, but what your statement is saying is that life evolved not out of chance, but because of the correct conditions? However, the chances of the 'conditions', as we can best understand them, existing seems to be pretty unlikely. Though I guess a more accurate statement would be that the conditions for life to be created are not unlikely, but the conditions for which life needs to survive long enough to become complex are unlikely and involve an arguable amount of luck. This is all circumstantial though. We are still not sure how life started, we've created complex carbon based molecules, amino acids, lots of the building blocks through experiments, to the best of our knowledge, everything inside of what we can best gather were the first life forms. We have all the lego pieces but we have not figured out how to put them together =P.

Kinda side-tracking off topic a bit.
Evolution as it applies to Darwin is a theory that requires life to exist, it did not exist until life appeared. So in that sense, life does not exist because of evolution, evolution exists because of life. So, evolution, really doesnt define where life comes from. But when you apply a more scientific definition of evolution to life, it can absolutely define the origin of life. Just the same as it can define the evolution of an atom of hydrogen in the center of a star to its place in the urine coming out of our bodies.

Has anyone else noticed that the size of each message in this thread is exponentially larger than its predecessor? Would probably make a pretty consistent curve on a graph. Well, that is, until I broke the pattern.

Wait, I think I know what the OP is trying to say know, that Evolution and Abiogenesis are seperate from each other, and that the Theory of Evolution only attempts to describe the evolution of species, not the origins of life.

ahah!, exactly what i was trying to get at in 3+ paragraphs, but done in one sentence =P.

See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 140849.htm

Evolution is biological descent with modification (Darwin's original definition). To have evolution, one must first have life.

ruveyn

Trying to argue against evolution by arguing against abiogenisis is like trying to debunk gravity by arguing plate tectonics. Oh well, not like logic has ever had an effect on creationist dogma before.

This seems more semantic than anything.

Usually I could only imagine someone saying that evolution started life in the sense of 'life as we know it today' - in that case its more a grammatical slip than the proposition that no life evolved into life. Anything before life began or which led up to the first self-replicating DNA would really be looked at best as a standard chemical reaction.

techninically, OP is right, evolution means change, so life had to exist before it could change, its semantics

I'd say it's more appropriate to say the evolution means a gradual change.