Originally posted by Hanslune
Howdy Byrd

I could add that if there was a separate evolution it must have died out a long time ago as none of the existing (AFAIK) lifeform have unique DNA or a non DNA life system.
...

Its an interesting idea, multiple 'creations' and it may have happened at the start our present 'type' of life won out a long time ago and dominated the type of life on earth - AFAWK

I would agree that there could have been multiple "lifes" that lived for a short time or were only marginally successful... but our sun is rather poisonously radiant. There's not a lot of room for some of the alternatives.

I would think it far more likely that another earlier species of mankind had a sudden rush of development and might have reached 'civilization' first, however all that remains speculation!

I think we'd have seen evidence of this.

Hello, Scott.

Originally posted by Scott Creighton

The first traces of life appear nearly 3.5 billion years ago, in the early Archaean.\

Yes, Scott. I'm familiar with that material. As I said, I work for paleontologists (going on a dig this weekend.) I've held stromatolites and so forth in my bare hands.

SC: And if another proto-bacteria was swept into another area (in a different part of the world) it would also change, no?

Well, no.

My cat isn't suddenly going to develop photosynthesis. His offspring might (well... not his. He's neutered.) Life forms don't go into a new area and suddenly develop new traits. Their offspring might.

SC: And the other bacteria (i.e. the one on the other side of the world) is now the mother of the second one...and the second one can spawn others..... of course, there could have been trillions of such bacteria doing this all over the world.

Right. And we still have a *single* phylogenic tree.

Byrd: Those that make it to the poles or to the other side of the Earth... offspring of that first proto-bacteria.

SC: Which could eventually evolve higher life forms (on the other side of the world) than those life forms evolving from the original parent bacteria.

Not necessarily. Different, undoubtedly. But it still goes back to that first successful life form.

The "...offspring got out of the area and into another area...they became many things..." Forgive me for thinking this but it seems you are now actually agreeing with my original premise.

Nooooooo... I'm not. I agree that offspring isolated into different areas can develop into different groups. This is the Theory of Evolution; ain't mine... goodole Darwin done it.

You accept parallel evolution can occur within existing phylae and yet you cannot accpet that it can occur at a much earlier stage in evolution of plant and animal life? That is entirely contradictory.

I disagree on multiple sourcepoints.

I think there were lots of failed "experiments"... lifeforms that survived briefly, never developing true cell walls, dissolving back into primordial soup. But only one lineage produced life forms with simple cell walls, which is why we're all nicely structured and not walking soup.

These results suggest that these genetic changes and the selective sweep predate the common ancestor (which existed about 300,000-400,000 years ago) of modern human and Neandertal populations.

So this means that predecessor (ancestor) of homo sapiens and Neanderthals had ability to speak?

And this is a little in conflict with the "out of Africa" thesis, because both modern humans and Neanderthals evolved parallel in different places, assuming that their common ancestor lived both in Africa and Europe.

Even the version before this "ancestor" had this gene.



[edit on 4-6-2009 by DangerDeath]

Originally posted by DangerDeath

These results suggest that these genetic changes and the selective sweep predate the common ancestor (which existed about 300,000-400,000 years ago) of modern human and Neandertal populations.

So this means that predecessor (ancestor) of homo sapiens and Neanderthals had ability to speak?

Absolutely!

And this is a little in conflict with the "out of Africa" thesis, because both modern humans and Neanderthals evolved parallel in different places, assuming that their common ancestor lived both in Africa and Europe.

Not really. Heck, even the most primitive of animals make SOME sort of sound. So human ancestors all the way back to quadrupeds were able to make groups of noises. I forget when the FOXP2 gene arises but it was before either Neanderthals or homo sapiens. Both could talk. The Australopithecenes had all the anatomy to enable them to talk and undoubtedly did.

Sorry if I sounded cranky, Scott, but it appears that whoever taught you evolution kind of slipped over the topic with an embarrassed mumble and never actually taught the topic and completely failed to go over the chemistry (as they did back when I was learning it, some 40 years ago.) Let me address the basics and go over your answers.

In brief: Life is a VERY difficult thing to create (otherwise we'd have commercial "create your own lifeforms" kits and moms yelling at kids not to leave their evolution experiments in their rooms with their socks.

It requires a very complex set of chemicals, created from a set of elements with a certain concentration for each element at a certain standard temperature and pressure. If one thing is off a little bit, one way or another, you get chemical soup and no possibility of life from it.

The first "forms" of life would have been similar to prions; long folded chains of amino acids capable of reproducing and probably "living" in pits on rock surfaces within the ocean (which substituted for cell walls.) With the rise of the cell wall, we get "bacteria-oids."

Originally posted by Scott Creighton
Well it’s the offspring we’re talking about, right? So let me try again – another proto-bacteria is swept into another area (of the world) its offspring could change, evolve into other species in that part of the world, no? So, theoretically we have (at least) two proto-bacteria evolving in different parts of the world, evolving independently. How is this not possible?

The "different parts of the world" begins 10 microns from the first bacteria. The presence of this organism (pumping waste into the environment and taking food sources) changes everything around it.

So I accept that we have reached a point where we have all these little pools of bacteria all over the world from an initial start point – a single cell. (I will come back to this in a moment or two). So this one cell now has evolved and spread all over the world.

No. The cell hasn't evolved. It's had "babies" in this hot, radioactive planet and these babies had a lot of genetic mutations. So the babies are continually evolving. By the time they get to what you consider "the other side of the world", billions of generations have happened and billions and billions of mutations have occurred, many of them not very successful ones.

I ask again – from this point in evolution (i.e. pre plant and animal life), why is it not possible that such parallel life forms could have been evolving independently in different parts of the world from these dispersed proto-bacteria? Surely if it can happen once, why can’t it happen twice (or more)?

Because (I hate to be tiresome) the world isn't a giant petri dish. Exactly identical conditions never occur because the world is too varied. And once you get beyond the most simple life forms and even up into things like bacterial, the directions the offspring take are determined by what's in the environment and what changes they survive.

Some really never got beyond a certain stage. Anaerobic bacteria (one of the oldest lifeforms), for instance, simply got out-competed by everything else and now only live in niches with no oxygen. Bacteria that evolved around volcanic vents kept living quite happily with no reason to change due to environmental pressures. Were they the precursors of the volcanic vent tube worms? Perhaps.

But that's plain old evolution from a single evolutionary start.

Now – to return to the issue of the single phylo tree. You will be familiar with the panspermia theory. If the very beginnings of life resulted from a comet arriving with the “seeds” of life (each “seed” with identical DNA – trillions of them) and crashes into the primordial ocean.

Recently disproved, I should add (paper is in Science or Nature (I'll look it up) within the past week, but it always was a fairly weak theory.)

These seeds then spread throughout the primordial ocean and eventually some evolve into proto-life forms that set up their own “tree of life”. Point is – the “root” is an arbitrary point. Depends how far back you wish to go. If a whole bunch of amino acids can get together in the right sequence in one part of the world then it cannot be beyond the bounds of possibility that the same could not have occurred elsewhere.

One more time... "the world isn't a giant petri dish with the identical nutrients, temperature, and pressure all over the globe." The DNA would arrive with a set of requirements for it to reproduce; certain elements or compounds AND at a certain temperature. If the temperature is too low, even by a few degrees, it takes too much energy to process the combination of elements and the chain dies (even if everything else was perfect.) Too high a temperature (often by only a few degrees) and the chain falls apart. If the pressure is wrong, the energy requirements to combine and reproduce or form new chains changes completely and the original can't reproduce. If the exact amounts of nutrients are off by even a little bit, there's not the proper combination of elements to continue the chain and the line dies out.

SC: And is this not what we see in life today and in the fossil record. Different species of “similar” life forms widely dispersed all over the world?

From a single origin, yes. Multiple different origins... apparently not.

SC: Okay so the offspring (pre-plant and animal life) develop into “different groups”. Of what?

Everything. And some things you probably haven't heard about unless you took lots of boring bacteriology courses.

SC: You accept parallel evolution can occur within existing phylae and yet you cannot accpet that it can occur at a much earlier stage in evolution of plant and animal life? That is entirely contradictory.

Uhmm... Scott, "phylae" to the scientists go back to the proto-bacteria. If it qualifies as life, it can evolve. There aren't phylae for "chains of amino acids" (which are found all over the universe) but there's no evidence of them "growing new babies" or "evolving".

I simply cannot see how you can say that all subsequent life forms developed from one lineage. You have no proof of this. There is every likelihood that if ONE proto-bacteria can evolve higher life forms then there is absolutely no reason to suppose that other proto-bacteria could not have done the very same thing elsewhere in the world.

Scott, you don't have any proof that they didn't... and your teachers apparently didn't do much more than mumble a brief definition of what evolution was and then skulk off before someone reported them to the religious authorities. They failed to mention dividing lines between life and pre-life and it appears that no one ever taught you much in-depth chemistry (including "standard heat and pressure" variations for chemical reactions.)

a) I'm not sure how you are defining "higher life forms". For a scientist, chemical groups developing a cell wall which is a trait passed along to offspring qualifies as a "higher life form."

b) all the protobacteria had a single point; it required successful changes from a baseline to make a stable lifeform. "Life" isn't easy to create and even under laboratory conditions. Getting it stable enough to spawn and then evolve into other stable forms is not something that happens easily.

c) comparison of the genetics of all lifeforms show that we have a common ancestor lifeform and that various creatures are different numbers of steps away from it. It has to do with the amount of common genetic material. So, we've got about 98% of the same genetic material as a chimp, and less in common with animals that branched off before the primates. They, however, have more in common with their immediate predecessor species and so on down the line. The genes are the basics of "what life needs to survive on this planet with this radioactive sun."

...etc.

I can look the genetics up in detail but it's been a gazillion years since my last course in the stuff, so I can't pull it out of memory.

Sorry if this sounded like a lecture. I'm trying not to make it sound stuffy. I had assumed everyone got a basic background in this, including the simple bits about the chemistry, conditions, and microenvironments. I'm beginning to get the feeling that this is a bad assumption.

I have been following this thread for some time, it has been a confusing read from time to time but what I have deciphered from Scott is that his theories would mean that the world had identical conditions over the entire surface during the time of the evolution from the single cell organism, and if these conditions are exactly the same then it is possible that there were multiple organisms developing into a humanoid in different places on the planet.
What I have deciphered from Byrd and others is that the world was totally different in different places which has been proven in the geological record and not in any way identical to conditions that allowed the evolution that lead us down the path where we are today.
Scott continues with his arguments for his theory and wants the geological record of the planet being totally different in different places ignored in order to support his theory while Byrd and others state that the evidence cannot be ignored to support the theories because facts are facts.

Do I have a firm grasp on the conversation thus far or am I oversimplifying the conversation in this thread? It is an interesting conversation, I just want to make sure I am grasping everything.

[edit on 6/4/2009 by AlienCarnage]

Originally posted by AlienCarnage
I have been following this thread for some time, it has been a confusing read from time to time but what I have deciphered from Scott is that his theories would mean that the world had identical conditions over the entire surface during the time of the evolution from the single cell organism, and if these conditions are exactly the same then it is possible that there were multiple organisms developing into a humanoid in different places on the planet.

Yes, and that these then gave rise to different types of life (such as one proto-bacteriod being responsible for the lineage that evolves into fish and another being responsible for that which evolves into plants and so on and so forth.)

What I have deciphered from Byrd and others is that the world was totally different in different places which has been proven in the geological record and not in any way identical to conditions that allowed the evolution that lead us down the path where we are today.

Precisely. I didn't get into the "and the ancient world niches were totally different than the ones today" but you've hit the mark on the head. The world is a complex structure of microenvironments. It's beautiful and fascinating.

Scott continues with his arguments for his theory and wants the geological record of the planet being totally different in different places ignored in order to support his theory while Byrd and others state that the evidence cannot be ignored to support the theories because facts are facts.

Well, that and I try to not be too haughty or didactic. I am open to being shown other theories, but they need to be very solid and have good backups. We may also differ in our interpretation of "intelligent." I am assuming Scott means "like humans and capable of building multiple complex technological devices (devices formed from many simple parts) and capable of language and culture" when he says intelligent. (this may be totally wrong, by the way... I'd meant to ask about it.)

From a strict scientific viewpoint, the definition of intelligence is hard to pin down but we could argue that any organism capable of making a decision and remembering it (always turn right when you smell salt) or changing it has SOME form of intelligence. I probably wouldn't trust them to do my calculus test, but it represents some sort of awareness and manipulation within an environment.

(she says, aware that she's also skirting on and going to dodge the issue of Artificial Intelligence because that really goes elsewhere)

Originally posted by Scott Creighton
So, your key argument against a second independently-evolved hominid-type species having evoved independently elsewhere on the Earth is purely that there would not have been two areas (at least) on the Earth with similar environments for two (or more) such simillar life forms to have developed independently? Is that a fair summary of your position?

Let me see if I can give you the definitions I'm using:

"hominid": very specific type of primate
"primate": very specific type of vertebrate
"evolved": parent species branches out into one or more "child" species.

Do we see an ancestral primate? Yes, at least as far back as the Cretaceous (if memory serves and I'm not going to go look at this moment. It was during the age of the dinosaurs and I think it was even back into the Jurassic.)

Did multiple lineages arise from this one primate? Yes. Several thousand, including many that no longer exist.

Did one hominid lineage arise from this primate line? Yes. Hominids are a very specific type of primates just like donkeys and horses and zebras are three specific types of equines. They all have different genes and different numbers of genes.

Did this base hominid line produce a number of branches? Yes. From knuckle/palm walking fuzzy critters to bipeds.

Did one branch of the hominid line produce humans? Yes.

Did the human branch of the lineage produce multiple sister species of humans? Yes. From homo Florensis to homo Neanderthalis to homo eregaster and so on and so forth. Homo sapiens out-competed them all (thanks, I think, to the ability to create more complex technologies using simpler technologies.)


Could humans have arisen any other way? No. That's like asking "could you develop car brakes using technology that involves using strawberry jelly for both solid parts and moving parts?" (okay... really lame example, but I'm trying to restate that if it didn't come up through the lineage it's not a primate and primates don't suddenly appear through the magic of ... ah... magic... or stargates or portals between Azaroth and the Outlands (playing a bit too much Warcraft, here)).



(...although, come to think of it, the various (humanoid... not hominid) races in Warcraft are a good example of things that would have had to evolve from different proto-life forms. Except for Dwarves. And Night Elves/Blood Elves, since we know where they came from. Oh... and the merfolk since they're magically genetically transformed Night Elves. And the Undead, since they're humans hit by the Plague. Likewise the Scourge. But you could make a good case for Taurens, Trolls, Orcs, Dranei, VariousElves, and Humans all coming from different origins and evolving through different precursor lifeforms and so on and so forth. But that's getting way too involved in science of a pretend world, and even Blizzard just simply shrugs and says "they did it by magic." Though it's tempting to think of proto-proto-bacteria that begin the Night Elf lineage as having long tentacles (eyebrow feelers) and really long ear-feelers.))

Originally posted by Scott Creighton
It is, I believe, the contention of 'singular evolutionary theory' that all life (and by this I am really talking here about plant/animal life - hey, we can see them) descended from the one single-celled proto-bacteria in say 'x' location on the Earth.

Everything descended from there - correct?

Sorry - but I really can't subscribe to such an idea.

No problem.

Do you really think that the offspring of one proto-bacteria when changing (i.e. evolving) in x-location, that there is absolutely nothing happening to any other proto-bacteria in a-b-c-d-e-f-g-h-i-j-k-l-m-n (you get the idea) locations on Earth?

Scott -- what you have just stated as a "Ha! Trump THIS!" point is EXACTLY what I've been trying to explain to you for the past several pages.

In other words, while things are going on in x-location, its brothers and sisters and cousins and grand-cousins and kith and kin are all undergoing change in a-b-c-d-yaddayadda locations around the globe. Yes. That's the theory of evolution. That's how we are saying that life develops on the Earth.

With the exception of extreme environmental conditions (i.e. polar regions, volcanos, deep Earth caverns etc)

They apparently existed there, too because specialized lifeforms exist there.

Different environments around the Earth will not prohibit life forming/evolving - it will merely dictate (if Darwinism is corect) the type of life form that ultimately is formed.

Yes. That's what we've been saying (except that it won't form spontaneously out of joy and reverence and organic soup. We say "ya need special conditions for that" and "there was an original template source that got modified.")

So, in essence then from what you are saying, it is entirely feasible that a slightly different form of intelligent species could have evoved in a slightly different environment?

Undoubtedly. MOST scientists believe that life has evolved multiple times on multiple planets throughout the history of the universe. There's probably a handful who believe the only place life occurs is Earth but they're in the vast minority.

And, of course, you didn't define what you thought you mean by "intelligence"... but the scenario is broad enough to cover almost all definitions.

Your argument that animal/plant life started from one single cell is - incredbly - almost bordering on the miraculous. Are you really sure you wish to continue down such a road?

Uhm... Scott... you yourself just stated that you didn't believe this at the top of the topic. Then you go on to describe "your scenario" which is the same thing I've been telling you for the past several pages concerning what scientists believe about life and evolution.

Now you tell me that this same scenario (which you previously described in correct detail and which I've confirmed is correct) is ridiculous.

This is a very unusual style of argument. I don't think it works in your favor, frankly.