In article <403E35AC.32ACA8E8@worldnet.att.net>,
[Roy Jose Lorr] wrote...
mel turner wrote:
In article <4039DF73.DB9BAA63@worldnet.att.net>,
[Roy Jose Lorr] wrote...
mel turner wrote:
[snip]
Any way you slice it, evolution [must] along with everything else
have a beginning.
Sure, and biological evolution will have begun along with the first
organisms, or really with the first imperfectly self-replicating
prebiotic systems.
Where did [they] come from?
From chemistry on the early earth, most likely, but right now the
best scientific answer will be "we don't know".
But still, we don't have to have any clear handle on the beginnings of
evolution to be able to characterize how evolution works, and how it
has worked throughout the history of life on earth..
The only way to have a "clear handle" on the mechanism
is to know how it began.
No, it will continue to operate as it does no matter how the
first organisms may have got here.
That's a pretty broad statement given the scientific concept of
falsifiability.
I'm not sure I understand. I meant just that people can study the ways
that things are evolving today [and study the evidence for the history
of how living things evolved over geological time] without ever
considering how the first organisms arose. Even if it is someday shown
that they must have been Intelligently Designed and created by a
supernatural divinity, we can still describe how they would have
evolved ever since.
For evolution "species" begins in primordial
slime,
The first life, perhaps. New species continue to begin every time an
ancestral species splits. People can and do study new species formation
happening today.
You mean people imagine new species evolving from old.
I mean just what I said.
a condition for which there is no solid evidence, either of
the slime or of the species (singular or plural) ostensibly sprung
from it.
Even if it were true that we have no knowledge at all of the origins
of the first life, we still know quite a lot about how it has evolved
ever since life first arose somehow.
If speculation is knowledge, I suppose.
Could any form of knowledge ever be sufficiently free of
"speculation" [= interpretation?]?
My point.
Then that's a limitation of all science [and really, all human
knowledge], not just evolutionary biology. Anything beyond the
most trivial of observations will likely involve many points of
interpretation.
cheers
.
