[Editorial note: Landon Freeman is one of my bright young internet friends. He wrote this very compelling essay on a subject that interests me quite a bit, and gave me permission to share it here.] AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY: Landon Freeman is a native Georgian who currently studies psychology at Georgia Southwestern State University. He has been interested in the creation-evolution debate for several years now and runs the Facebook group “Evidence for Creation”, which discusses a variety of topics related to creationism and evolution. When not discussing the topic of creation online, Landon can usually be found writing, listening to music, or playing video games. When discussing the hypothesis of abiogenesis, I'm astounded to see that many atheists and evolutionists act as if it's a given that life evolved through purely naturalistic processes, and that life wouldn't have much trouble getting started. There are several issues with abiogenesis, though the one I'm going to discuss is the problem of not only functional, operating organisms arising from non-living matter, but intelligence arising as well. Indeed, even allegedly simple bacteria display intelligence and foresight. An article from NewScientist states and provides evidence that microbes can communicate with each other, make decisions, form communities, and even accelerate mutations to gain new abilities. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17390-why-microbes-are-smarter-than-you-thought/ The issue here is bacteria have been living since not long after life began. Life allegedly began around at least 3.5 … [Read more...]
Bacteria and the Origin of Life, by Landon Freeman
A brief glimpse of the Big Picture
Life cannot evolve until it exists. When I recently made that point during a series of questions I asked in another post, Dr. Benoit Leblanc responded by writing, Your fourth question is the least contentious one, because it deals with matters that lie outside of evolutionary biology. “Until life exists, how can it evolve?” The answer is, of course, “it can’t”. Evolutionary theory is not concerned with abiogenesis, although its principles do apply to the evolution of increasingly-efficient unliving replicators (such as self-replicating nucleic acids) that may, in time, acquire characteristics that we associate with living creatures. Such is the power of the natural selection concept: in a population of replicators that can accumulate mutations, the replicators that gain a replicative advantage will, by definition, replicate better. To his credit, Dr. Leblanc made the effort to respond, though he conceded my point while simultaneously suggesting he and his colleagues don't care that the spontaneous origin of life was a wildly improbable anomaly, at best With all due respect and while I’m sure Dr. Leblanc is considerably more knowledgeable about evolutionary biology than me, I cannot begin to fathom how he could possibly make the statement that evolution theorists could be completely unconcerned about the hypothesis called abiogenesis while simultaneously agreeing with Dr. Coyne's assertion that evolution theory is true, beyond any question or reproach. Quid est veritas? What is the purpose of studying science? Is it to cherry-pick from the evidence that … [Read more...]
