Common descent? Universal common descent? What the diff?

Matter is an abstraction, so is energy. Mung

Hi Denyse -- on a related note, i've recently posted a list of "Behe responds to critics Of IC" articles that span from 1999 -2010 and was wondering if perhaps Michael (or someone else) could writeup one singular "new" paper / article that meshes all of the points into one paper so we can see what he still advocates, what has changed (ect), as well as having a convenient "one paper" reference guide? Thanks. Timothy Kershner

J: There is no good reason to infer abstract [non-concrete], therefore non-existent. This is just ideologial materialism speaking, and it needs to be directly reminded of its self-referential incoherence and sent to the dunce corner with the proper cap. KF kairosfocus

Information is an abstraction.

It can be an abstraction, but it doesn't have to be. There are those who view information as a fundamental entity, on par with matter and energy. Matter and energy require information (for their existence) just as much as they require each other. And information requires matter and energy... Joe

An interesting nuance to the quantum teleportation video I referenced at the bottom of post 13 is that they talk of having to entangle each and every one of the material particles of the human body, on a one by one basis, in order to teleport a human body successfully. But what they have failed to point out in the video is that we now know that there is already massive quantum entanglement within the human body, in every protein and DNA molecule of the human body:

Quantum Information/Entanglement In DNA - Elisabeth Rieper - short video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/5936605/ Quantum entanglement between the electron clouds of nucleic acids in DNA – Elisabeth Rieper, Janet Anders and Vlatko Vedral – February 2011 http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1006/1006.4053v2.pdf Testing quantum entanglement in protein - 2011 http://www.quantum-mind.co.uk/testing-quantum-entanglement-in-protein-c288.html Physicists Discover Quantum Law of Protein Folding – February 22, 2011 http://www.technologyreview.com/view/423087/physicists-discover-quantum-law-of-protein/

Thus, if one holds a Theistic view of reality as I do then, considering that massive quantum entanglement is now found within the entire human body, arguably for every material particle of the human body, then one could reasonably argue that the entire human body is already primed for teleportation! And verses in the Bible, such as the following ones, become a whole lot more feasible for us to believe as far as what physics is telling us about how reality is actually constructed:

1 Corinthians 15:52-53 in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. Acts 8:39 And when they were come up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip, that the eunuch saw him no more:

Music:

Kutless: Promise of a Lifetime - Live http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wgA93WQWKE

supplemental note:

Quantum Entanglement and Information Quantum entanglement is a physical resource, like energy, associated with the peculiar nonclassical correlations that are possible between separated quantum systems. Entanglement can be measured, transformed, and purified. A pair of quantum systems in an entangled state can be used as a quantum information channel to perform computational and cryptographic tasks that are impossible for classical systems. The general study of the information-processing capabilities of quantum systems is the subject of quantum information theory. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-entangle/

bornagain77

Neil:

I prefer to talk of natural origin of life, rather than random origin of life.

If biological life were natural it would not require an origin. To theists such as myself, God cannot not exist. God is therefore, the most natural being of all. Wouldn't you say? It's what I call metaphysical naturalism. :) If biological life has it's origin in God, wouldn't that qualify as a natural cause? If not why not? Mung

Independent Birth of Organisms. A New Theory that Distinct Organisms Arose Independently from the Primordial Pond, Showing that Evolutionary Theories are Fundamentally Incorrect Mung

Moreover quantum information/entanglement is found to be conserved

Quantum no-hiding theorem experimentally confirmed for first time – March 2011 Excerpt: In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed. http://phys.org/news/2011-03-quantum-no-hiding-theorem-experimentally.html Quantum no-deleting theorem Excerpt: A stronger version of the no-cloning theorem and the no-deleting theorem provide permanence to quantum information. To create a copy one must import the information from some part of the universe and to delete a state one needs to export it to another part of the universe where it will continue to exist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_no-deleting_theorem#Consequence

Additionally, encoded ‘classical’ information such as what we find encoded in computer programs, and yes, as we find encoded in DNA, is found to be a subset of conserved ‘non-local' (beyond space and time) quantum entanglement/information by the following method:

Quantum knowledge cools computers: New understanding of entropy – June 2011 Excerpt: No heat, even a cooling effect; In the case of perfect classical knowledge of a computer memory (zero entropy), deletion of the data requires in theory no energy at all. The researchers prove that “more than complete knowledge” from quantum entanglement with the memory (negative entropy) leads to deletion of the data being accompanied by removal of heat from the computer and its release as usable energy. This is the physical meaning of negative entropy. Renner emphasizes, however, “This doesn’t mean that we can develop a perpetual motion machine.” The data can only be deleted once, so there is no possibility to continue to generate energy. The process also destroys the entanglement, and it would take an input of energy to reset the system to its starting state. The equations are consistent with what’s known as the second law of thermodynamics: the idea that the entropy of the universe can never decrease. Vedral says “We’re working on the edge of the second law. If you go any further, you will break it.” http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.htm

Thus Mr. Rickert, your assertion that 'information is an abstraction' invented by humans is found to be false; Verse and music:

John 1:1-3 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. Red - Feed The Machine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zj2uZO7xnus

bornagain77

Mr Rickert, contrary to your belief that,,

'Information is an abstraction'

,,It is now found that information is a real physical entity. A real physical entity that both matter and energy reduce to: Here are my references for the claim that energy and matter both reduce to information:

Ions have been teleported successfully for the first time by two independent research groups Excerpt: In fact, copying isn’t quite the right word for it. In order to reproduce the quantum state of one atom in a second atom, the original has to be destroyed. This is unavoidable – it is enforced by the laws of quantum mechanics, which stipulate that you can’t ‘clone’ a quantum state. In principle, however, the ‘copy’ can be indistinguishable from the original (that was destroyed),,, http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2004/October/beammeup.asp Atom takes a quantum leap – 2009 Excerpt: Ytterbium ions have been ‘teleported’ over a distance of a metre.,,, “What you’re moving is information, not the actual atoms,” says Chris Monroe, from the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland in College Park and an author of the paper. But as two particles of the same type differ only in their quantum states, the transfer of quantum information is equivalent to moving the first particle to the location of the second. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2171769/posts Physicists set new record for quantum teleportation with matter qubits - Apr 16, 2013 Excerpt: "The greatest significance of our work is the dramatic increase in efficiency compared to previous realizations of matter-matter teleportation," Nölleke said. "Besides, it is the first demonstration of matter-matter teleportation between truly independent systems and constitutes the current record in distance of 21 m. The previous record was 1 m." http://phys.org/news/2013-04-physicists-quantum-teleportation-qubits.html How Teleportation Will Work - Excerpt: In 1993, the idea of teleportation moved out of the realm of science fiction and into the world of theoretical possibility. It was then that physicist Charles Bennett and a team of researchers at IBM confirmed that quantum teleportation was possible, but only if the original object being teleported was destroyed. — As predicted, the original photon no longer existed once the replica was made. http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-myths/teleportation1.htm Quantum Teleportation – IBM Research Page Excerpt: “it would destroy the original (photon) in the process,,” http://researcher.ibm.com/view_project.php?id=2862 Unconditional Quantum Teleportation – abstract Excerpt: This is the first realization of unconditional quantum teleportation where every state entering the device is actually teleported,, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/282/5389/706.abstract

In fact the entire human body is theoretically reducible to quantum information

New Breakthrough in (Quantum) Teleportation - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xqZI31udJg Quote from video: "There are 10^28 atoms in the human body.,, The amount of data contained in the whole human,, is 3.02 x 10^32 gigabytes of information. Using a high bandwidth transfer that data would take about 4.5 x 10^18 years to teleport 1 time. That is 350,000 times the age of the universe." for comparison sake: "The theoretical (information) density of DNA is you could store the total world information, which is 1.8 zetabytes, at least in 2011, in about 4 grams of DNA." (a zettabyte is one billion trillion or 10^21 bytes of digital data) Sriram Kosuri PhD. - Wyss Institute

bornagain77

Upright BiPed

Do you think it is possible to store information without using an arrangement of matter/energy?

I'm not sure that I see the point of the question. Information is an abstraction. As a consequence, what counts as information and what counts as storing information is a matter of human conventions. At a time past, information was stored as sound waves circulating in mercury delay lines. Does that count as "an arrangement of matter/energy" given that the arrangement is continually changing? Neil Rickert

OT: Natural Selection Is Empty - Michael Egnor - August 30, 2013 Excerpt: Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini's book What Darwin Got Wrong was published in 2010. Having read it now, perhaps belatedly, I can report that it is a masterpiece. Fodor is a leading philosopher, and Piatelli-Palmarini is a leading cognitive scientist. Their analysis of natural selection is meticulous and devastating. They are both atheists -- they do not come to this debate with theistic presumptions. They demonstrate that natural selection is, in their word, empty. It's a meaningless concept that should be abandoned. - http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/08/natural_selecti_2075991.html bornagain77

Moreover the fossil evidence does is not nearly as supportive of common descent as we were originally led to believe by neo-Darwinists:

Erwin and Valentine's The Cambrian Explosion Affirms Major Points in Darwin's Doubt: The Cambrian Enigma Is "Unresolved" - June 26, 2013 http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/06/erwin_valentine_cambrian_explosion073671.html A Graduate Student (Nick Matzke) Writes - David Berlinski July 9, 2013 Excerpt: Representatives of twenty-three of the roughly twenty-seven fossilized animal phyla, and the roughly thirty-six animal phyla overall, are present in the Cambrian fossil record. Twenty of these twenty-three major groups make their appearance with no discernible ancestral forms in either earlier Cambrian or Precambrian strata. Representatives of the remaining three or so animal phyla originate in the late Precambrian, but they do so as abruptly as the animals that appeared first in Cambrian. Moreover, these late Precambrian animals lack clear affinities with the representatives of the twenty or so phyla that first appear in the Cambrian. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/07/a_graduate_stud074221.html The unscientific hegemony of uniformitarianism - David Tyler - May 2011 Excerpt: The pervasive pattern of natural history: disparity precedes diversity,,,, The summary of results for phyla is as follows. The pattern reinforces earlier research that concluded the Explosion is not an artefact of sampling. Much the same finding applies to the appearance of classes. These data are presented in Figures 1 and 2 in the paper. http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/literature/2011/05/16/the_unscientific_hegemony_of_uniformitar Origin of Phyla - The Fossil Evidence - Disparity precedes Diversity - Graphs http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AYmaSrBPNEmGZGM4ejY3d3pfMzNobjlobjNncQ&hl=en

As well, the Cambrian explosion is not the only place the very un-Darwinian, disparity precedes diversity, pattern is found. The pattern is also found after the Cambrian explosion:

Scientific study turns understanding about evolution on its head - July 30, 2013 Excerpt: evolutionary biologists,,, looked at nearly one hundred fossil groups to test the notion that it takes groups of animals many millions of years to reach their maximum diversity of form. Contrary to popular belief, not all animal groups continued to evolve fundamentally new morphologies through time. The majority actually achieved their greatest diversity of form (disparity) relatively early in their histories. ,,,Dr Matthew Wills said: "This pattern, known as 'early high disparity', turns the traditional V-shaped cone model of evolution on its head. What is equally surprising in our findings is that groups of animals are likely to show early-high disparity regardless of when they originated over the last half a billion years. This isn't a phenomenon particularly associated with the first radiation of animals (in the Cambrian Explosion), or periods in the immediate wake of mass extinctions.",,, Author Martin Hughes, continued: "Our work implies that there must be constraints on the range of forms within animal groups, and that these limits are often hit relatively early on. Co-author Dr Sylvain Gerber, added: "A key question now is what prevents groups from generating fundamentally new forms later on in their evolution.,,, http://phys.org/news/2013-07-scientific-evolution.html

Moreover, contrary to the cartoon drawings depicting man evolving from apes, rigid scrutiny of the fossil record also supports the abrupt appearance of homo sapiens.

McBride Misstates My Arguments in Science and Human Origins - Casey Luskin September 5, 2012 Excerpt: At the end of the day, I leave this exchange more confident than before that the evidence supports the abrupt appearance of our genus Homo. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/09/mcbride_misstat063931.html "A number of hominid crania are known from sites in eastern and southern Africa in the 400- to 200-thousand-year range, but none of them looks like a close antecedent of the anatomically distinctive Homo sapiens… Even allowing for the poor record we have of our close extinct kin, Homo sapiens appears as distinctive and unprecedented…there is certainly no evidence to support the notion that we gradually became who we inherently are over an extended period, in either the physical or the intellectual sense." Dr. Ian Tattersall: - paleoanthropologist - emeritus curator of the American Museum of Natural History - (Masters of the Planet, 2012)

bornagain77

The genetic "evidence" for universal common descent (UCD) amounts to nothing more than "It surely does look like UCD to me." Joe

Moreover the genetic evidence for common descent is not nearly as strong as we were once led to believe by neo-Darwinists,

Widespread ORFan Genes Challenge Common Descent – Paul Nelson – video with references http://www.vimeo.com/17135166 Estimating the size of the bacterial pan-genome - Pascal Lapierre and J. Peter Gogarten - 2008 Excerpt: We have found greater than 139 000 rare (ORFan) gene families scattered throughout the bacterial genomes included in this study. The finding that the fitted exponential function approaches a plateau indicates an open pan-genome (i.e. the bacterial protein universe is of infinite size); a finding supported through extrapolation using a Kezdy-Swinbourne plot (Figure S3). This does not exclude the possibility that, with many more sampled genomes, the number of novel genes per additional genome might ultimately decline; however, our analyses and those presented in Ref. [11] do not provide any indication for such a decline and confirm earlier observations that many new protein families with few members remain to be discovered. http://www.paulyu.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Estimating-the-size-of-the-bacterial-pan-genome.pdf

At the 12:40 minute mark of the following 'The Dictionary of Life' video, Dr. Nelson describes the breaking point for Darwinian scenarios from the genetic evidence:

The Dictionary of Life | Origins with Dr. Paul A. Nelson - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=zJaetK9gvCo#t=760s The essential genome of a bacterium - 2011 Figure (C): Venn diagram of overlap between Caulobacter and E. coli ORFs (outer circles) as well as their subsets of essential ORFs (inner circles). Less than 38% of essential Caulobacter ORFs are conserved and essential in E. coli. Only essential Caulobacter ORFs present in the STING database were considered, leading to a small disparity in the total number of essential Caulobacter ORFs. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3202797/pdf/msb201158.pdf Orphan Genes (And the peer reviewed 'non-answer' from Darwinists) - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Zz6vio_LhY Proteins and Genes, Singletons and Species - Branko Kozuli? PhD. Biochemistry Excerpt: Evolutionary biologists of earlier generations have not anticipated [164, 165] the challenge that (orphan) singletons pose to contemporary biologists. By discovering millions of unique genes biologists have run into brick walls similar to those hit by physicists with the discovery of quantum phenomena. The predominant viewpoint in biology has become untenable: we are witnessing a scientific revolution of unprecedented proportions. http://vixra.org/pdf/1105.0025v1.pdf Darwin’s Tree of Life is a Tangled Bramble Bush - May 15, 2013 Excerpt: ,,, One whole subsection in the paper is titled, “All gene trees differ from species phylogeny.” Another is titled, “Standard practices do not reduce incongruence.” A third, “Standard practices can mislead.” One of their major findings was “extensive conflict in certain internodes.” The authors not only advised throwing out some standard practices of tree-building, but (amazingly) proposed evolutionists throw out the “uninformative” conflicting data and only use data that seems to support the Darwinian tree: “the subset of genes with strong phylogenetic signal is more informative than the full set of genes, suggesting that phylogenomic analyses using conditional combination approaches, rather than approaches based on total evidence, may be more powerful.”,,, ,,,tossing out “uninformative” data sets and only using data that appear to support their foreordained conclusion. Were you told this in biology class? Did your textbook mention this? http://crev.info/2013/05/darwins-tree-of-life-is-a-tangled-bramble-bush/ Nature Article Finds MicroRNAs are "Tearing Apart Traditional Ideas about the Animal Family Tree" Casey Luskin June 29, 2012 Excerpt: When Peterson started his work on the placental [mammal] phylogeny, he had originally intended to validate the traditional mammal tree, not chop it down. As he was experimenting with his growing microRNA library, he applied it to mammals because their tree was so well established that they seemed an ideal test. Alas, the data didn't cooperate. If the traditional tree was correct, then an unprecedented number of microRNA genes would have to have been lost, and Peterson considers that highly unlikely. "The microRNAs are totally unambiguous," he says, "but they give a totally different tree from what everyone else wants.",,, Maybe the reason that different genes yield different evolutionary trees is because there isn't a single unified tree of life to be found. In other words, perhaps universal common ancestry is simply wrong. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/06/nature_article061471.html micro-RNA and Non-Falsifiable Phylogenetic Trees - lifepsy video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv-i4pY6_MU

bornagain77

Mark Frank:

2) different prokaryotic strains had separately evolved into wolves and frogs thus requiring two massive transformations rather than one.

It only took one massive transformation to get from prokaryotes to frogs and wolves? That's quite the jump. And I like option 3, which Mark didn't post: 3) Complex metazoans were designed and somehow made their way to this planet- How they were designed, by whom, when, where and how they made it here are questions to be answered, proving that the design inference is not a scientific dead-end (as is the "just happened", ie non-design scenario) Joe

Getting past hypotheticals and to actual empirical evidence, what can we say about the origin of life. First and foremost, we now have evidence for photosynthetic life suddenly appearing on earth, as soon as water appeared on the earth, in the oldest sedimentary rocks ever found on earth with no evidence of prebiotic chemical signatures.

The Sudden Appearance Of Photosynthetic Life On Earth - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4262918 U-rich Archaean sea-floor sediments from Greenland - indications of +3700 Ma oxygenic photosynthesis (2003) http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2004E&PSL.217..237R Dr. Hugh Ross - Origin Of Life Paradox (No prebiotic chemical signatures)- video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4012696 Iron in Primeval Seas Rusted by Bacteria - Apr. 23, 2013 Excerpt: The oldest known iron ores were deposited in the Precambrian period and are up to four billion years old (the Earth itself is estimated to be about 4.6 billion years old). ,,, This research not only provides the first clear evidence that microorganisms were directly involved in the deposition of Earth's oldest iron formations; it also indicates that large populations of oxygen-producing cyanobacteria were at work in the shallow areas of the ancient oceans, while deeper water still reached by the light (the photic zone) tended to be populated by anoxyenic or micro-aerophilic iron-oxidizing bacteria which formed the iron deposits.,,, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130423110750.htm

Moreover, the simplest photosynthetic life on earth is exceedingly complex, too complex to happen by accident even if the primeval oceans had been full of pre-biotic soup.

Scientists unlock some key secrets of photosynthesis - July 2, 2012 Excerpt: "The photosynthetic system of plants is nature's most elaborate nanoscale biological machine," said Lakshmi. "It converts light energy at unrivaled efficiency of more than 95 percent compared to 10 to 15 percent in the current man-made solar technologies.,, "Photosystem II is the engine of life," Lakshmi said. "It performs one of the most energetically demanding reactions known to mankind, splitting water, with remarkable ease and efficiency.",,, "Water is a very stable molecule and it takes four photons of light to split water," she said. "This is a challenge for chemists and physicists around the world (to imitate) as the four-photon reaction has very stringent requirements." http://phys.org/news/2012-07-scientists-key-secrets-photosynthesis.html

There is actually a molecular machine, that surpasses man made machines in engineering parameters, that is integral to the photosynthetic process:

Miniature Molecular Power Plant: ATP Synthase - January 2013 - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI8m6o0gXDY "In manufacturing terms, the ATP (Synthase) molecule is a machine with a level of organization on the order of a research microscope or a standard television (Darnell, Lodish, and Baltimore, 1996)." - Jerry Bergman, Ph.D. - ATP: The Perfect Energy Currency for the Cell ATP Synthase, an Energy-Generating Rotary Motor Engine - Jonathan M. May 15, 2013 Excerpt: ATP synthase has been described as "a splendid molecular machine," and "one of the most beautiful" of "all enzymes" .,, "bona fide rotary dynamo machine",,, If such a unique and brilliantly engineered nanomachine bears such a strong resemblance to the engineering of manmade hydroelectric generators, and yet so impressively outperforms the best human technology in terms of speed and efficiency, one is led unsurprisingly to the conclusion that such a machine itself is best explained by intelligent design. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/05/atp_synthase_an_1072101.html

If that was not bad enough for materialistic atheists, they must maintain that this photosynthetic 'miracle of naturalism' must have happened at least 6 different times:

The Elaborate Nanoscale Machine Called Photosynthesis: No Vestige of a Beginning - Cornelius Hunter - July 2012 Excerpt: "The ability to do photosynthesis is widely distributed throughout the bacterial domain in six different phyla, with no apparent pattern of evolution. Photosynthetic phyla include the cyanobacteria, proteobacteria (purple bacteria), green sulfur bacteria (GSB), firmicutes (heliobacteria), filamentous anoxygenic phototrophs (FAPs, also often called the green nonsulfur bacteria), and acidobacteria (Raymond, 2008)." http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2012/07/elaborate-nanoscale-machine-called.html?showComment=1341739083709#c1202402748048253561

Moreover, as it all of the preceding was not bad enough for the atheistic naturalist, it is now found that photosynthesis uses ‘non-local’ quantum mechanical principles to accomplish its job. At the 21:00 minute mark of the following video, Dr Suarez explains why photosynthesis needs a 'non-local', beyond space and time, cause to explain its effect:

Nonlocality of Photosynthesis - Antoine Suarez - video - 2012 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhMrrmlTXl4&feature=player_detailpage#t=1268s

Summary,,, Photosynthetic life appears on earth much sooner than atheists predicted that it would. Photosynthetic life is exceeding complex from the start directly challenging what the atheistic naturalist would presuppose for the beginning of life. Photosynthetic life is dependent on 'non-local', beyond space and time, cause in order to accomplish photosynthesis in the first place which is completely antagonistic to the atheist's starting materialistic presuppositions. bornagain77

Yesterday I saw a debate involving the guy who made this following video

Divinely Planted Quantum States - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCTBygadaM4

In the debate, the guy who made the preceding video was complaining that some atheist was trying to attack him by saying he was a creationist and/or a Intelligent Design advocate and that he did not believe in evolution (apparently he does not know that ID is, because of its minimalist claim, also compatible with common descent). He said that he had no reason to doubt evolution (i.e. common descent) and that he further complained that it was sheer hubris on the atheist's part to presuppose that belief in evolution implied belief in atheism. He complained that the atheist was making a huge blunder in philosophical reasoning to presuppose that it does. Everyone involved in the discussion sided with him in his assessment that the atheist was in huge error philosophically. As a bystander, this was all quite interesting for me to watch, since I knew for a fact that he had decimated the overall atheistic position in his video by reference to experiments in quantum mechanics that show as such. And this is exactly the point that was brought up over and over again to the atheist. The universe is not atheistic in its structure it is Theistic! Thus the atheist has no right to presuppose atheism from common descent. The 'Top Down' Theistic Structure Of The Universe and Of The Human Body https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NhA4hiQnYiyCTiqG5GelcSJjy69e1DT3OHpqlx6rACs/edit bornagain77

Well seeing that we can't even get a prokaryote to evolve into something other than a prokaryote it is obvious that universal common descent is a non-starter. BTW Neil, design is natural... Joe

The key question is how limited?  I don’t think you would be laughed out of a biology conference for hypothesising that prokaryotic life began several times.  You would be heavily challenged – but you could have a serious debate – as you say, some serious scientists do believe that.  You would be suggesting something very controversial if you thought e.g. that frogs and wolves did not have a common ancestor.  Setting aside the fossil evidence – you would  be proposing that either 1) a complex multicellular life form had sprung into being overnight or 2)  different prokaryotic strains had separately evolved into wolves and frogs thus requiring two massive transformations rather than one. Mark Frank

In the “Operating Systems” class that I am teaching, I will give a simplified account of virtual storage. Simplified accounts are useful for communication, so as to not get too bogged down in details that usually don’t matter at the particular level of discussion.

Neil, Do you think it is possible to store information without using an arrangement of matter/energy? If you agree that it is not possible by any other means, then you might want to explore what must happen at the material level in order to retrieve that store from the medium and have it come to create the effect it specifies. :) Upright BiPed

If a random origin of life were true, however, early life could have arisen a number of times under favourable conditions, with the individual nascent life forms having no necessary familial connection with each other.

I prefer to talk of natural origin of life, rather than random origin of life. It is my assumption that if life arose naturally, then it probably arose multiple times. However, in a "survival of the fittest" situation, most of those early starts to life are probably gone without a trace. What we see as life today may have involved symbiotic unions of indepently arising proto-life forms. And again, there might be no trace of what was there before such symbiosis occurred. I'm not a biologist, so I don't engage in coffee room discussion with biologists on OOL topics. But I suspect that the view I expressed above would be within the range of possibilities that they consider. I don't think they are nearly as doctrinaire about this as you take them to be. Sure, they talk about a single common ancestor. In the "Operating Systems" class that I am teaching, I will give a simplified account of virtual storage. Simplified accounts are useful for communication, so as to not get too bogged down in details that usually don't matter at the particular level of discussion. Neil Rickert