Darwin's Illusion

[John53]

Right now, since it is really cold out, there is a big, fluffy, brown bunny in the living room. You never know where we will show up.

Did it appear spontaneously?

 

[Dan From Smithville]

Did it appear spontaneously?

It appears to be pretty well-fed and rather amorous with stuffed animals. He's is more impetuous than spontaneous.

 

[Neuropteron]

Can you tell me where Darwin said "life could appear spontaneously"?

Hi,
No I cannot, I have never studied Darwin word for word.

 

[John53]

Hi,
No I cannot, I have never studied Darwin word for word.

So why claim he said it?

 

[Neuropteron]

Darwin provided a mechanism for the change in living things over time. That is not the origin of life.

Do you have a source that states that Darwin believed in the creationist idea of spontaneous generation?

Darwin's ideas about evolution and the mechanism driving evolution were based on his observations of living things, fossils, and animal and plant breeding. There is no evidence that the creationist notion of spontaneous generation had anything to do with the theory he formulated.

Nothing in science can offer uncontested proof of anything. The only thing that seems uncontested is the creationist pension for fallacious claims.

Hi,
I seems that if something can't be proven, then any claim to be scientific is unfounded.
Since life exists it has to come from somewhere, claiming that it just sprang into existence is even more ridiculous than saying that it was created by an almighty designer.

 

[Neuropteron]

So why claim he said it?

Hi,

The same way that you just missquoted me.
I never said he said it.
I said he believed it.

but it's jus my opinion

 

[John53]

Hi,

The same way that you just missquoted me.
I never said he said it.
I said he believed it.

but it's jus my opinion

You said he crafted an explanation.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Hi,
I seems that if something can't be proven, then any claim to be scientific is unfounded.
Since life exists it has to come from somewhere, claiming that it just sprang into existence is even more ridiculous than saying that it was created by an almighty designer.

Instead of jumping to flawed conclusions it would be wiser to ask questions.

 

[danieldemol]

Hi,

The same way that you just missquoted me.
I never said he said it.
I said he believed it.

but it's jus my opinion

How did you manage to mind read Darwin's unstated beliefs? Must be quite the gift.

In my opinion.

 

[firedragon]

And God said "let there be evolution by natural section" and there was evolution by natural selection.

Thats a great creedal statement for a lot of people who worship this same creed as God. Nice really. I might steal it from you.

 

[Heyo]

He lived in a time when people believed a brood of mice could suddenly appear in a basket of dirty clothes.

He also lived in a time when that hypothesis was put to rest. Pasteur's experiments on Spontaneous Generation happened in 1859, the same year On the Origin of Species was first published.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

Hi,
I seems that if something can't be proven, then any claim to be scientific is unfounded.

Hi ya.

That would be incorrect. Nothing in science is proven. Every theory is subject to falsification.

Since life exists it has to come from somewhere, claiming that it just sprang into existence is even more ridiculous than saying that it was created by an almighty designer.

It is the creationist claim that life suddenly sprang into existence, just as spontaneous generation is a creationist claim that it suddenly sprang from burlap or rotting meat. The specifics of the origin of life are irrelevant to the theory of evolution. It only matters that life exists, reproduces and is subject to genetic variation.

The difference between science and religious views is that science is founded on logic, reason and evidence that can be demonstrated. I know you will cite the Bible, but when view objectively, it is really one big claim and evidence that can only be used to show how one culture formed its religious view. A view I may hold, but not one that I can demonstrate to be a fact. You can believe it too or any doctrine you choose, but we are both in that same boat. Science is not moored in those waters, but it cannot make claims about the existence of God either. No evidence.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

He also lived in a time when that hypothesis was put to rest. Pasteur's experiments on Spontaneous Generation happened in 1859, the same year On the Origin of Species was first published.

And even before then, in the 1600's, Redi was doing work on refuting spontaneous generation.

 

[John53]

And even before then, in the 1600's, Redi was doing work on refuting spontaneous generation.

I'm trying to remember details of an experiment where they tied swallows under water to see if they hibernated in water during winter.

 

[Yazata]

Darwin believed that life can be explained by natural selection based on his expectation that organic life was exceedingly simple.

I'm not convinced that Darwin thought that life was simple on the chemical level.

He lived in a time when people believed a brood of mice could suddenly appear in a basket of dirty clothes.

You are right that spontaneous generation was a big topic of biological controversy in his time. (He was an older contemporary of Pasteur.) He talks about those controversies in his huge and abundant correspondence. (Letters were the internet of his day and he corresponded with everybody and kept all his letters.

In other words Darwin was under the illusion that life could appear spontaneously under the right conditions.

My impression is that he was skeptical about spontaneous generation and was sarcastic at times about it. Some of the things he wrote about "breathing life" into the first cells were in his own words "Pentateuchal" and will certainly drive our atheists straight up the wall. But he admitted he didn't mean those words literally and was simply trying to emphasize the difficulty of the problem of the origin of life.

Darwin's first editions of Origin of Species were criticized because he didn't include an account of life's origin. So he addressed that criticism in the 3'd edition of the book, saying "It is no valid objection that science as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life. Who can explain what is the essence of the attraction of gravity? no one now objects to following out the results consequent on this unknown element of attraction"

Based on this ignorance, he crafted an explanation for variation within a species

He produced an explanatory hypothesis for how species change over time and generate not only new species but higher taxa as well.
,

and formulated a theory explaining the process whereby life could arise from nonliving matter and mutate to the variety of living entities we see today.

I don't think that he ever did that or believed that he did.

In 1868 Darwin wrote in his book The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, "As the first origin of life on this earth, as well as the continued life of each individual, is at present quite beyond the scope of science, I do not wish to lay much stress on the greater simplicity of the view of a few forms, or of only one form, having been originally created, instead of innumerable miraculous creations having been necessary at innumerable periods; though this more simple view accords well with Maupertuis's philosophical axiom 'of least action'".

In 1871 Darwin wrote a famous letter to his friend Dalton Hooker, in which he addressed the essence of the Spontaneous Generation debate, the problem of why, if life could have arisen from natural conditions originally, it isn't continually doing so today: "It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living being are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sort of ammonia and phosphotic salts, -- light, heat, electricity present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present such matter would be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed."

In 1876 Haekel sent Darwin a copy of his latest book and Darwin replied back with a long letter that included this: "I will at the same time send a paper which has interested me; it need not be returned. It contains a singular statement bearing on so-called Spontaneous Generation. I much wish that this latter question could be settled, but I see no prospect of it. If it could be proved true this would be most important to us..."

It is postulated that this narrative has been overwhelmingly accepted in educated circles for more than a century even though the basic mechanisms of organic life remained a mystery until several decades ago- as a convenient alternative to belief in a creator.

I agree with Darwin that his hypothesis of natural selection isn't dependent on knowing the original origin of life. Or, for that matter, on the details of cellular metabolism, protein synthesis of any of the molecular cell biology about which he knew nothing.

After 1950 biochemistry has come to understand that living matters is more complex than Darwin could ever have dreamed of.

That's definitely true.

So, in view of this, what happened to Darwin allegedly elegant and simple idea ?

Evolution by natural selection is still going strong. It basically forms the conceptual framework that gives shape to most of contempory biology.

Although not a single sector of Darwinic evolution can offer uncontested proof that it is nothing more than a imaginative theory it is acclaimed by mainstream scientists as a science.

Except that science doesn't produce proofs. That's the province of mathematics and logic.

Charles Darwin knew nothing about dna or genomics. (He didn't even know about the pioneering genetic work of his contemporary Gregor Mendel.) But it's very striking (and not only to me) how well evolutionary developmental biology coheres with biological evolution by natural selection. All the gene-sequencing stuff and everything that's spun out of that. The continual discoveries of paleontology all seem to cohere.

Evolutionary developmental biology - Wikipedia

All of my Darwin quotations above are from this very interesting paper:

Charles Darwin and the Origin of Life

 

[Valjean]

Hi,
No I cannot, I have never studied Darwin word for word.

What's this obsession with Darwin, anyway?
We don't continually bring up Galen in medical debates, or Galileo in astronomy.
Why Darwin?

 

[Valjean]

Hi,
I seems that if something can't be proven, then any claim to be scientific is unfounded.

Whaaa...?
Nothing in science is proven. Not the germ theory, not the round Earth theory, nothing. What science does is gather and test evidence. A scientific fact is not proven, it's just supported by a lot of strong evidence.

Since life exists it has to come from somewhere, claiming that it just sprang into existence is even more ridiculous than saying that it was created by an almighty designer.

It's the Christians claiming life just sprang into existence, not science. Science is studying the mechanisms whereby life appeared gradually, by ordinary chemical means, through semi-life stages that included more and more lifelike features over time, selected for by known, testable mechanisms.
Goddidit is not a reasonable alternative. It's not a mechanism at all, and it explains nothing.

 

[PruePhillip]

Darwin's Illusion

Darwin believed that life can be explained by natural selection based on his expectation that organic life was exceedingly simple.
He lived in a time when people believed a brood of mice could suddenly appear in a basket of dirty clothes. In other words Darwin was under the illusion that life could appear spontaneously under the right conditions.
Based on this ignorance, he crafted an explanation for variation within a species, and formulated a theory explaining the process whereby life could arise from nonliving matter and mutate to the variety of living entities we see today.

It is postulated that this narrative has been overwhelmingly accepted in educated circles for more than a century even though the basic mechanisms of organic life remained a mystery until several decades ago- as a convenient alternative to belief in a creator.

After 1950 biochemistry has come to understand that living matters is more complex than Darwin could ever have dreamed of.

So, in view of this, what happened to Darwin allegedly elegant and simple idea ?
Although not a single sector of Darwinic evolution can offer uncontested proof that it is nothing more than a imaginative theory it is acclaimed by mainstream scientists as a science.

Lynn Margulis a distinguished University Professor of Biology puts it this way:
"History will ultimately judge neo-Darwinism as a minor twentieth-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology"
She asks any molecular biologists to name a single, unambiguous example of the formation of a new species by the accumulation of mutations. Her challenge to date is still unmet.
She says " proponents of the standard theory [of evolution] wallow in their zoological, capitalistic, competitive, cost-benefit interpretation of Darwin..."

Yes, evolution is more complex than we think. We have been studying it closely with Covid.
But that's how science works, EVERYTHING is more complex than we first thought.
We still have no idea of the Theory of Gravity actually works.

But don't worry - Genesis said that life came first from the earth (fresh water) and then the sea.
And that's how birds came out of the sea - as Genesis stated. Formed by the laws of nature.

 

[Altfish]

Although not a single sector of Darwinic evolution can offer uncontested proof that it is nothing more than a imaginative theory it is acclaimed by mainstream scientists as a science.

I think Christian Illusion would be a better title

 

[LIIA]

Darwin's theory of evolution is not a theory of abiogenesis, or even spontaneous generation. It's a theory of change.

Darwin lived in a time when spontaneous generation (formation of living organisms without descent from similar organisms) was believed to be true. In fact, Louis Pasteur disproved the theory of spontaneous generation on 1859, Same year when Darwin published “the Origin of Species”. Also at that time, cells were known to be the basic building blocks of living things but there was no knowledge or understanding of the complex structure within the cell. The tiny structures inside the cells were too small to be seen with even the strongest microscope.

Based on Darwin’s false understanding of spontaneous generation and lack of knowledge of the extreme complexity of the living cell, he assumed that the first living cell could appear under the right conditions. As he mentioned in his letter to Joseph Hooker on 1871” we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity etcetera present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes”. Yes, Darwin’s theory was not about abiogenesis but his lack of knowledge as explained has a strong influence on his overall interpretations of his observation and the crafting of his theory.

Darwin’s theory was also influenced by the “Lamarckian evolution” that the environment gives rise to changes in animals, which can be passed from parents to offspring. Darwin proposed that organic gemmule particles allow new traits to pass to offspring, which was later proven to be totally wrong. The environment doesn’t change traits, mutation does. And the assumed gemmules do not exist.

There are still those who believe in spontaneous generation and 'magic poofing'. Here in the US they're most numerous among the evangelical Christians.

Even more are those who believe that ‘magic poofing’ was the cause for the
Instantiation of our entire universe in reality from nothing.