Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Origin of life, pop media, and the (almost) Big Fix

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File:Monosiga Brevicollis Phase.jpg
choanoflagellate, closest cousin to multicellulars/Fairclough, Creative Commons

From Financial Express:

Evolution is a touchy subject. Unveil a new discovery pointing towards what triggered life on Earth and a whole contingent of evolutionists, the proponents of Intelligent design (ID) and SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), spiritualists and those who believe in one “Supreme Being” will rush to reinforce that what they say is true.

Yes, and hundreds of them will die, trampled by naturalists, converging on a single straw that supports them…

But one thing becomes clear if examined from a purely scientific point of view: we are close yet still far from knowing when a single-cell organism stopped behaving like a single-cell entity and decided to explode into a multi-cellular being and – millions and millions of years later – became a well-mannered, living, breathing and thinking human beings.

A person who thinks that one can be “close and yet still far” has a vocation as a mystic.

The article goes on to tout the recent claim that a single mutation 600 million years ago made all the difference, then acknowledges

Spindle orientation is one important aspect of multi-cellular life and there are many others such as cell adhesion, cell-cell communication and cell-extracellular matrix (cell exterior) communication and all these feed into spindle orientation. More.

Then trails off into religious shmush.

It’s Sunday, so can someone please explain the origin of religious shmush? Not just Templeton grants?

See also: Maybe if we throw enough models at the origin of life… some of them will stick?

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Comments
Junk reporting at it's finest. I think the caption on the picture of the choanoflagellate is wrong. They are supposed to be the closest sister group to the animals, not necessarily to all multi-cellular life. Multicellularity evolved multiple times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular_organismMung
January 17, 2016
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