Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Topic

White smokers

A contradiction in Charles Marshall’s “white smoker” origin-of-life argument?

Paul Nelson: ... unless I misunderstand (always a live possibility), we’re back to postulating a “freak environment,” meaning the OOL explanation is a one-off event after all. The chemical determinism of hundreds of thousands, or millions of alkaline chimneys operating in parallel disappears, and we’re back to one very lucky setting. Read More ›

New origin of life thesis: Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) wasn’t actually a single cell

Marshall favors horizontal gene transfer as a key method of early development because ancestor–descendant evolution is a “very slow” (42:25) evolutionary process. HGT among multiple independent lineages, by contrast, allows a “vast exchange of information,” thus sharing innovations and leading to faster development. Okay. And in the midst of all that, Dawkins’s Selfish Gene got lost in a crowd somewhere and was never heard from again. Read More ›