From: mroussel@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca (Marc Roussel)
Subject: Re: Entropy of the Universe, (was Re: Genesis - fact or fiction)
Organization: Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1992 21:08:38 GMT

In article <VSUMMERS.92Aug21155605@polaris.cv.nrao.edu> vsummers@polaris.cv.nrao.edu (Vince Summers) writes:
>If other forms of life evolved into more complex life
>forms, why aren't ANY of the simple ones still around?

     Why aren't there any dinosaurs around?  Extinctions happen,
particularly when environmental conditions change.  The Earth used to be
much hotter, and the chemical composition of the atmosphere used to be
quite different.  These facts are amply sufficient to explain the
disappearance of the earliest organisms.

>What forms of life
>have no DNA in them?

     I believe that certain single-celled organisms use RNA for their
genetic material.

>     Evolutionism is no more a science than magic.

     Hmmph!  Do you know what a science is?  Evolutionary theory, like all
other legitimate scientific theories, is backed up by a substantial
amount of evidence.  Prebiotic evolution is ill-understood, but that's
only a small part of evolutionary theory.
     Let's examine another theory which faces similar problems to
evolutionary theory: Big Bang cosmology.  Obviously, we have no way of
directly verifying that a Big Bang actually occurred.  However, assuming
that one did, one can predict what the Universe should look like; some
of the byproducts of a Big Bang are hard to explain without some violent
primordial event.  When we look about, we find that things appear to be
roughly as they should if the Universe started with a Bang.  We consider
this to be evidence that a Big Bang (or something very like it) indeed
occurred.  You can say "It's the way it is because God made it so", but
since God is potentially able to make things any way He chooses, there
is no discriminatory power to such a hypothesis.  (In slightly older
language, God is not falsifiable.)  We require that our scientific
theories make specific nontrivial predictions; that's what distinguishes
a scientific theory from a religious statement.
     Evolutionary theory does make many specific predictions which are
constantly being examined.  There is no magic or faith involved in it
than in any other properly formulated scientific theory.  Perhaps you
object to the indirect nature of the evidence.  If so, we have a
fundamental disagreement, not about whether evolutionary theory is
scientific or not, but over the "rules of evidence" in science; if you
disallow indirect evidence, we will have to give up an awful lot of
science, including a good deal of physics (ever seen a neutrino?) and geology
(how do we really know that the Earth's core has such-and-such a
composition?).
     Here are some angles from which prebiotic evolution is currently being
studied:

	  1) Some laboratories have recently gotten quite good at
	     synthesizing self-replicating molecules.  That relatively
	     simple molecules can self-replicate lends support to the
	     usual scenarios for prebiotic evolution.
          2) The search goes on for unusual organisms living in extreme
	     environments.  Since, as mentioned above, the conditions
	     on the early Earth were quite vigorous, the potential
	     exists that our early ancestors live on in such
	     environments even though they no longer exist elsewhere.
          3) Increasingly sophisticated methods are being brought to
	     bear to find and examine microfossils.

Perhaps none of these avenues in itself would produce convincing
evidence for one scenario of prebiotic evolution or another, but
collectively they may give very strong hints.  Evidence already
accumulated leads me (and most other scientists) to believe that God
did not need to be so gross as to intervene directly in the Earth's
early history to achieve the observed results; perfectly ordinary
physical and chemical phenomena suffice to explain our presence here.

				Marc R. Roussel
                                mroussel@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca