Did humans descend from other primates?

[McCulloch]

Man did not descend from the primates.

Did humans descend from other primates?
Are humans primates or should there be special biological taxonomy for humanity?
Please cite evidence.

[otseng]

You tell me. Does human evolutionary theory posit that humans arose from one couple?

No. Evolution works on populations.

Then you reject these findings?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

As noted, these two were not a couple and in fact lived over a hundred thousand years apart.

It would make more sense if it was explained by a male bottleneck and they did live at the same time and was the first and only couple.

Let's take the case that they did not live at the same time and did in fact live 100,000 years apart.

From what I can gather from human evolutionary theory, mitochondrial "Eve" was not the only human female at that time. There was a population of humans (how much, nobody seems to know). But, what it means is that every single lineage of all other females went extinct. What can account for that?

The same situation would've happened for Y-chromosome "Adam" 100,000 years later. There would've been a much larger group of males at that time. Yet all other lineages from other males would've gone extinct and only one lineage would've persisted. Again, what can account for all the other male lineages to become extinct?

So, here's a prediction. The human creation model predicts that all ancient human DNA will relate to either Mitochondrial Eve or Y-chromosomal Adam. It will not be from any of the other males and females that were not in the line of "Adam" or "Eve" that became extinct.

Home sapiens is a broad term and is not consistently used. If it cannot be accurately defined, no accurate dating can be placed on it. From your same source:

"The category archaic Homo sapiens is disputed. There is no single agreed upon definition of archaic Homo sapiens."

This leaves you with a dilemma then. Either you accept a broad definition of Homo sapiens which then means we can trace modern man back over 200,000 years, in violation of the creationist model, or, if you accept a more narrow definition, we then have ample examples of fossils of whatever evolved into man, which violates your creationist model. Either way, it is bad for your argument.

There's no dilemma for me since one cannot even define what is a Home sapiens. (Yes, I'm taking this from the Ignostic playbook)

If you present a claim that cannot be supported, it must be retracted.

Well, how about that had their been a flood it would have destroyed the ice caps and with what we know about climatology the icecaps could not have regrown in the past few thousand years? Or that had their been a flood it would have greatly changed the salinity of the worlds water supply, either wiping out salt water of fresh water sea life, or both? Or how about that we still have plants even though such a flood would have destroyed land vegetation the world over? Or how about the fact there isn't that much water on Earth and that the geological events necessary to reshape the Earth to have the current amount of water cover everything would have been more destructive than the flood itself in the quakes and tsunamis that would have been created? Or how about uneven erosion the world over? Or that with only two animals of each time (or 7 of the clean ones) the carnivores would have nothing to eat (usually fatal), or if they were herbivores before they would have had to rapidly evolve new digestive systems and jaws? Or that even with only two of each animal, coupled with their supplies, you could not possibly fit that many into a space the size of the ark? Or that 40 days of rainy cloud cover would have produced a massive drop in temperature that would have been extremely dangerous to a number of animals indigenous to warm, dry climates?

We can start with these and continue if necessary.

We can always go back in an infinite regress on assumptions. As for addressing these issues, it has been done elsewhere in other threads. For the sake of concentrating on human origins and not getting too distracted, the flood is just an assumption for the human creation model.

Correct, if the two did not exist at the same time, then they could not have produced offspring. So, what is the explanation that the genetic dating of males and females differ? In the human creation model, this is explained by the male genetic bottleneck during the flood. And this confirms the prediction that there is more genetic diversity in females than males.

For human evolution, how can the discrepancy be explained?

You have not yet justified the idea there is more genetic variation in females than males. Until you provide some evidence that it in fact exists, I need not explain why it exists.

I'm not stating that currently there is more genetic diversity (though there could be). I'm saying that when the 8 people repopulated the world at the time of the flood, the females had more genetic diversity as compared to the males. This is because all the males were of Noah's line. The females were not of Noah's wife's line.

As I mentioned before, even a gradual evolution among hominids to man cannot even be established. We do not have any fossil evidence of the common ancestor between chimps and humans. And we do not have any fossil evidence of a common ancestor with any other primate. So, I have a differing opinion of which fails dramatically.

None of which is really all that relevant.

Right, because evolution is unfalsifiable. Any lack of evidence or evidence against evolution doesn't matter.

Does it not seem strange that if humans evolved, that we are not able to find any fossil evidence of the common ancestor between man and chimps or any of the other great apes? That we cannot establish any clear evidence that there is a gradual progression of hominids to humans?

Even if many of the huge number of fossils found are offshoots of the human line, they still had to come from something.

And where is that "something"?

That we see differing ages over the course of several million years with an increasing resemblance to modern humans the closer we get to present is much more informative than you seem willing to consider.

One problem is that none of those supposed resemblances can be established to be a human ancestor. And those that do truly resemble humans, they can be classified as a human.

Did you miss the tools listed as over a million years old or just not post them?

I'll post later to start exploring stone tools.

[Goat]

You tell me. Does human evolutionary theory posit that humans arose from one couple?

No. Evolution works on populations.

Then you reject these findings?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

As noted, these two were not a couple and in fact lived over a hundred thousand years apart.

It would make more sense if it was explained by a male bottleneck and they did live at the same time and was the first and only couple.

Let's take the case that they did not live at the same time and did in fact live 100,000 years apart.

From what I can gather from human evolutionary theory, mitochondrial "Eve" was not the only human female at that time. There was a population of humans (how much, nobody seems to know). But, what it means is that every single lineage of all other females went extinct. What can account for that?

The same situation would've happened for Y-chromosome "Adam" 100,000 years later. There would've been a much larger group of males at that time. Yet all other lineages from other males would've gone extinct and only one lineage would've persisted. Again, what can account for all the other male lineages to become extinct?

So, here's a prediction. The human creation model predicts that all ancient human DNA will relate to either Mitochondrial Eve or Y-chromosomal Adam. It will not be from any of the other males and females that were not in the line of "Adam" or "Eve" that became extinct.

Home sapiens is a broad term and is not consistently used. If it cannot be accurately defined, no accurate dating can be placed on it. From your same source:

"The category archaic Homo sapiens is disputed. There is no single agreed upon definition of archaic Homo sapiens."

This leaves you with a dilemma then. Either you accept a broad definition of Homo sapiens which then means we can trace modern man back over 200,000 years, in violation of the creationist model, or, if you accept a more narrow definition, we then have ample examples of fossils of whatever evolved into man, which violates your creationist model. Either way, it is bad for your argument.

There's no dilemma for me since one cannot even define what is a Home sapiens. (Yes, I'm taking this from the Ignostic playbook)

If you present a claim that cannot be supported, it must be retracted.

Well, how about that had their been a flood it would have destroyed the ice caps and with what we know about climatology the icecaps could not have regrown in the past few thousand years? Or that had their been a flood it would have greatly changed the salinity of the worlds water supply, either wiping out salt water of fresh water sea life, or both? Or how about that we still have plants even though such a flood would have destroyed land vegetation the world over? Or how about the fact there isn't that much water on Earth and that the geological events necessary to reshape the Earth to have the current amount of water cover everything would have been more destructive than the flood itself in the quakes and tsunamis that would have been created? Or how about uneven erosion the world over? Or that with only two animals of each time (or 7 of the clean ones) the carnivores would have nothing to eat (usually fatal), or if they were herbivores before they would have had to rapidly evolve new digestive systems and jaws? Or that even with only two of each animal, coupled with their supplies, you could not possibly fit that many into a space the size of the ark? Or that 40 days of rainy cloud cover would have produced a massive drop in temperature that would have been extremely dangerous to a number of animals indigenous to warm, dry climates?

We can start with these and continue if necessary.

We can always go back in an infinite regress on assumptions. As for addressing these issues, it has been done elsewhere in other threads. For the sake of concentrating on human origins and not getting too distracted, the flood is just an assumption for the human creation model.

Correct, if the two did not exist at the same time, then they could not have produced offspring. So, what is the explanation that the genetic dating of males and females differ? In the human creation model, this is explained by the male genetic bottleneck during the flood. And this confirms the prediction that there is more genetic diversity in females than males.

For human evolution, how can the discrepancy be explained?

You have not yet justified the idea there is more genetic variation in females than males. Until you provide some evidence that it in fact exists, I need not explain why it exists.

I'm not stating that currently there is more genetic diversity (though there could be). I'm saying that when the 8 people repopulated the world at the time of the flood, the females had more genetic diversity as compared to the males. This is because all the males were of Noah's line. The females were not of Noah's wife's line.

As I mentioned before, even a gradual evolution among hominids to man cannot even be established. We do not have any fossil evidence of the common ancestor between chimps and humans. And we do not have any fossil evidence of a common ancestor with any other primate. So, I have a differing opinion of which fails dramatically.

None of which is really all that relevant.

Right, because evolution is unfalsifiable. Any lack of evidence or evidence against evolution doesn't matter.

Does it not seem strange that if humans evolved, that we are not able to find any fossil evidence of the common ancestor between man and chimps or any of the other great apes? That we cannot establish any clear evidence that there is a gradual progression of hominids to humans?

Even if many of the huge number of fossils found are offshoots of the human line, they still had to come from something.

And where is that "something"?

That we see differing ages over the course of several million years with an increasing resemblance to modern humans the closer we get to present is much more informative than you seem willing to consider.

One problem is that none of those supposed resemblances can be established to be a human ancestor. And those that do truly resemble humans, they can be classified as a human.

Did you miss the tools listed as over a million years old or just not post them?

I'll post later to start exploring stone tools.

as a matter of fact, a study about the mitochondria eve just came out, confirming the 200,000 year mark with a variety of different models for population.

http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/35 ... all-humans

What you say about what evolution and bottlenecks say is not very correct. The TOE can examine every gene and every chromosome to determine the 'last common ancestor' of that particular gene/chromosome using the same methods. They will often have much different dates to them.

[McCulloch]

From what I can gather from human evolutionary theory, mitochondrial "Eve" was not the only human female at that time. There was a population of humans (how much, nobody seems to know). But, what it means is that every single lineage of all other females went extinct. What can account for that?

You misunderstand the concept of mitochondrial Eve. She is the most recent female common ancestor of all humanity. That is all. None of the other lineages from her time had to become extinct. They just all eventually interbred with at least one of her direct descendants. Modern genetics does not predict a bottleneck of just one female, ever.

[GrumpyMrGruff]

Yes, I would agree that we have observed speciation. But, it would be quite an extrapolation to show that this demonstrates evolution of (non-human) primates into humans. So, rather than placing the burden on me to disprove this, the burden is on those who claimed that this indeed has happened.

If I read you correctly, you are the one claiming that there is some sort of qualitative difference between "macroevolution" and "microevolution". I see only a quantitative difference - the amount of genetic change that has accumulated. There is no known biological mechanism which stops accumulation of genetic changes at some arbitrarily defined threshold (the species or genus or kind). We know that small changes can accumulate over a short time. We know that speciation can impose reproductive boundaries between two populations formerly of the same parent species. It follows that many small changes would then accumulate independently in each species over longer periods of time, leading to the pattern of genetic similarity we see today.

'I can't believe it happened' is often deployed as an argument from incredulity in creationist circles, but I've never seen them present the mechanism(s) for it.

If you mean a mechanism for microevolution, I have no disagreements with it. If you mean an alternative explanation for the origin of man, I've presented the human creation model.

With regard to the above - I meant what mechanisms prevent the accumulation of many small "microevolutionary" changes to from "macroevolutionary" change. Would you please briefly define these so we're on the same page?

So to answer your question: No, if a significant portion of ERVs are found to have host-beneficial behavior, I would still have no way of inferring that they were purposefully designed.

I take this as all evidence for ERVs, no matter if they are found to have function or not, would always be evidence for evolution.

On the contrary, I explained what distributions of ERVs (and genes in general) would be definitively at odds with common ancestry: While phylogeny is noisy, the sequences of many independent ERVs (and genes) independently point toward a single inferred ancestral tree. If surveyed genes or ERVs predicted a single tree no better than random data, this would be be in direct contradiction of the theory.

You suggested that analogous gene similarity might arise due to similarity of designed function. I pointed out that this might hold for only some genes (e.g., homeobox genes responsible for primate morphology). If this is considered a prediction of the creation model (that similarity of genes arises due to similar function), the model fails to account for why morphology-controlling genes of whales (for example) are more similar to primates' than they are to fishes'. Common ancestry provides an explanation here.

If I follow this line of reasoning, should I consider the following a prediction of the creation model? Organisms with similar functions (e.g., bats and avians, whales and fish) should have very similar genes related to their shared function. If not, why not? If there is no definition of the designer's methods, he provides the ultimate "just so" explanation for any observation. This would make design unfalsifiable.

You have been invoking a designer, but you have not specified any of the tools used by the designer (or the genetic artifacts left by those tools which we might observe today). I have pointed out that ERV evidence is consistent with evolutionary theory and discussed the mechanisms of molecular biology and genetics involved in ERV insertion and mutation. I further suggested that common descent is the most parsimonious explanation for the pattern of known ERVs at the same location across genomes. I've also explained what would falsify this explanation.

For model falsification, you suggest that we should look for a stepwise progression of genetic changes between species. But this is impossible because we can't genetically sample extinct intermediate forms. You also suggest that we demonstrate stepwise fossil transitions. However, you criticize the lack of a definitive phylogeny for known fossils. Due to the same inability to genetically sample these fossil species, we will probably never have a definitive phylogeny for them. Take as an example this illustration of a progression of whale fossils:

Aha! You might exclaim. Pakicetus is not an ancestor of modern whales but it merely some relative. There is no set of transitional fossils for whales! This phylogenetic tree is drawn conservatively (without any direct ancestor-descendant relationships) to reflect our ignorance. The rationale here (as in hominid fossils) is that even if a homologous fossil species is not directly ancestral to another extant species, it is similar to the common ancestor it shared with living species. This makes some sense: Since pakicetus had less time to diverge from the ancestor it shared with modern whales, the common ancestor of whales and pakicetus looked more like pakicetus than modern whales. It may be that pakicetus (or another of the fossils) is a direct ancestor of modern whales - we have no way of knowing. In whale evolution, as in hominid evolution, the best fossils can do is show us that intermediate bodyplans existed in the past. They cannot differentiate between direct ancestors of living organisms and species closely related to direct ancestors.

One last note on this subject: You suggest that these data would falsify your creation model, but it seems to me you are simply setting an impossibly high bar for the data. We can't give you the former without DNA that has long since degraded. We can't give you the latter to the certainty you desire because fossil evidence - while useful - cannot give the precision that genetic evidence does for extant species.

I gave examples of genetic data which would contradict evolution and I did so without invoking creation. Can you give falsification criteria for your model which do not invoke evolution? After all, maybe neither is correct.

If we are to only go by what has been observed, then we can also rule out macroevolution. Macroevolution would only be an extrapolation of microevolution, not something that we can observe.

Please see above. I know of no qualitative difference in the amount of genetic change - only a quantitative difference in total accumulated change with time. If there's really a difference, what is it? Until this difference is demonstrated, all I see are the same observed mechanisms - mutation and natural selection - acting over different lengths of time.

I realize that the diagrams you presented are highly simplified, but at the risk of getting too technical here, how can one distinguish between an ERV retrotransposon and a non-ERV retrotransposon?

In addition to providing enhancers and promoters for viral genes, the LTRs of known retroviruses play a vital role in their copy-paste mechanism. The LTRs of of viral retrotransposons play the same role. Other retrotransposons have a different mechanism for copy-pasting which does not involve LTRs.[1]

It would appear that deleted sequences would be common in the genome as evidenced by left-over ERVs. Would deletions be an entirely random event? What would cause it?

Genomic deletions tend to be random. Replication enzyme errors are a common cause, as are certain chemicals. The paper I cited details a process by which ERVs may be randomly cut out of a sex cell's genome during meiosis (leaving only a LTR).

I too suspect that most mutations are either harmful or neutral. But natural selection (a repeatably observed and uncontested mechanism in biology) acts as a filter. Hence we expect organisms to accumulate the relatively rare beneficial mutations over generations, while harmful mutations remain at relatively low levels in populations.

However, it would not account for neutral mutations. And also, I'm not convinced that harmful mutations are filtered out in humans.

...

One is that neutral mutations would not be affected by natural selection, so there would be no mechanism to select them out. Another is that I do not see any evidence that harmful genetic mutations in humans are actually filtered out by any natural selection process. Take for example sickle cell disease. There is no indication that it will eventually disappear by natural selection or any other genetically inherited diseases.

I think Grumpy gives a good reply. I have a few things to add: We a diploid organisms (with two copies of each gene). This means that harmful recessive alleles can persist at low levels in populations - they're not selected against unless an individual is homozygous recessive. Grumpy points out another example: One copy of the sickle-cell hemoglobin allele grants individuals a survival advantage in areas where malarial parasites. Prediction: In an (extremely unethical) experiment where a tropical population (with some nonzero sickle cell frequency) is transported to a malaria-free region and denied medical treatment for sickle cell disease, we would expect the frequency of the mutant allele to drop. In the new environment, it is no longer selected for. Note that lack of medical intervention. We intervene all the time. We treat diseases with genetic components when those diseases would otherwise shorten the lives (and correspondingly, the number of carrier offspring) of the patients.

Also bear in mind that evolution doesn't necessarily select for long life. Many diseases with genetic components (like some types of cancer) have late onset - typically near the end of human's reproductive window. These genes-of-interest are "immune" to natural selection because they don't penalize reproduction. They may cause death, but only after copies have already been passed to children. (And those copies won't affect the children until they've been passed to grandchildren...)

Finally, would you please clarify what you mean about neutral mutation? While natural selection doesn't act on neutral mutations, I'm not sure what you mean by its "failing to account" for them. What do you mean when you say, "there would be no mechanism to select them out"? Why do they need to be "selected out"? They are not errors against some Platonic template which must be corrected. They are simply new points in the fuzzy cloud of genomes we label 'human.'

[inviere1644]

Humans sort of descended from primates. We are related to other living primates, genetic tests show this. However, primates and humans began to move in different directions so time age, recent fossil finds in Africa (Ardy and Toumai) suggest the shift in different directions could have taken place as long ago as 8 million years. Over that time the Homo genus evolved and changed alot, and so did the ancestors of primates alive today. So we do share a common ape-like ancestor, but we are not descended from one another.

[Matthew712]

Well, we never split from the primate branch, we're still primates like we're still mammals.

Matthew

[otseng]

Evolution has abiogenesis as its starting point, which is untestable. Or if you believe in panspermia instead, that is also untestable.

All we need to show is it was possible, and that has been done several times over.

What has been done several times over?

Show that abiogenesis is possible.

Where has this been done?

You are right, my bad. I left that out assuming readers are familiar with the Bible. I'll amend the model to state that Noah's ark landed in the Mount Ararat region.

Im quite familiar with the bible, but where the ark landed is not a model for creation, but for the flood. For creation, we would use the garden of eden

I believe that the entire world was flooded, so the human reset button was pressed at that time.

What do you mean by "some higher, enlightened point"?

If we were indeed created in the image of god, we shouldnt start off as using sticks and stones and drawing on walls.

Let's explore the concept of cavemen and drawings on cave walls.

"Cavemen are portrayed as wearing shaggy animal hides, armed with rocks or cattle bone clubs, unintelligent, and aggressive."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caveman

However, this perception is based more on speculation, cartoons, movies, and commercials rather than any substantive evidence.

If we look at the evidence of cave drawings, the earliest they date back is to the tens of thousands of years.

"The oldest known cave is that of Chauvet, the paintings of which may be 32,000 years old according to radiocarbon dating."

"Cave paintings found at the "Apollo 11 caves" in Namibia may be among the earliest cave art. The estimated age of the images date from approximately 23,000 - 25,000 B.C."

In India, "The earliest paintings on the cave walls are believed to be of the Mesolithic period, dating to 12,000 years ago."

"The Padah-Lin Caves of Burma contain 11,000-year-old paintings and many rock tools."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_painting

[Cave or rock art] consists of engraved or painted works on open air rocks or on the floors, walls and ceilings of caves, some of them in deep and almost inaccessible crannies. They were created during the Upper Palaeolithic period (40,000 to 10,000 BC), and the best were done by what we call the Magdalenians (from the name of a site), peoples who flourished in Europe from 18,000 to 10,000 BC. Such works have a unity, and can be described as the Magdalenian art system, the first in human history. it was also the longest, lasting for more than two thirds of the total time when humans have produced art.

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/C/cave.html

Further, there is no evidence that the places found with cave paintings were places of permanent residence.

Stone Age peoples did not live in caves, except occasionally in cave mouths or natural rock shelters. All the major sites which we know of were special places, not human habitations. Magdalenian artists did produce work in the open air, six examples of which, all engravings, have survived. But the vast majority of open air work has of course disappeared. Caves were used because they were shelters and the art executed in them would be preserved.

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/C/cave.html

Paintings also were quite complex. They were not a result of some bored cavemen who decided to put up some graffiti.

We can say this with confidence, for cave art at its best was difficult and expensive to produce. ln the first place, it required lighting. Some eighty five certain and thirty one probable examples of Palaeolithic lamps have survived but less than one third of them were found inside caves. The conjecture, therefore, is that artists usually worked by torchlight. Both lamps and torches consume animal fats in large quantities. Second, while it is true that some of the best cave paintings, especially at Altamira, were painted by artists standing up or in some cases lying down or squatting, others required elaborate scaffolding, no different in principle from that used by Michelangelo when painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Some of the paintings were done on a gigantic scale or at heights many feet from the cave floor. At Labastide in the Pyrenees, an immense horse is found 14 feet above floor level. At Bernifal in the Dordogne, the mammoths are painted 20 feet up. Some of the bulls at Lascaux are over 20 feet long. The famous painting of a woolly rhinoceros at Font de Gaume, whose accuracy was first disputed but then confirmed when a wellpreserved example of this supposedly mythic creature was unearthed in 1907 in a bitumen deposit in Poland, is found high up on a huge cave wall. The sheer scale of the art is daunting. The big cave vault at Lascaux, known as the Picture Gallery, is over 100 feet long and 35 feet wide. Caves were specially chosen for their size as well as for their security. Niaux in the Pyrenees is over half a mile in length, and this is by no means unusual. The big cave in Rouffignac runs over 6 miles into the mountain, and some of its huge collection of drawing engravings are nearly 7 feet long.

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/C/cave.html

Some have also suggested that caves may have been used as concert halls for rituals.

Prehistoric peoples chose places of natural resonant sound to draw their famed cave sketches, according to new analyses of paleolithic caves in France.

In at least ten locations, drawings of horses, bison, and mammoths seem to match locations that focus, amplify, and transform the sounds of human voices and musical instruments.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... tings.html

So, cave paintings were not the result of a "primitive" man. And it is highly dubious that even "cavemen" ever existed.

[Goat]

Evolution has abiogenesis as its starting point, which is untestable. Or if you believe in panspermia instead, that is also untestable.

All we need to show is it was possible, and that has been done several times over.

What has been done several times over?

Show that abiogenesis is possible.

Where has this been done?
Just a few places.. a list of references on the wiki article for abiogensis.

1. ^ Miller-Urey Experiment: Amino Acids & The Origins of Life on Earth
2. ^ Zimmer C (August 2009). "Origins. On the origin of eukaryotes". Science 325 (5941): 666–8. doi:10.1126/science.325_666. PMID 19661396.
3. ^ a b Wilde SA, Valley JW, Peck WH, Graham CM (January 2001). "Evidence from detrital zircons for the existence of continental crust and oceans on the Earth 4.4 Gyr ago". Nature 409 (6817): 175–8. doi:10.1038/35051550. PMID 11196637.
4. ^ Schopf JW, Kudryavtsev AB, Agresti DG, Wdowiak TJ, Czaja AD (March 2002). "Laser--Raman imagery of Earth's earliest fossils". Nature 416 (6876): 73–6. doi:10.1038/416073a. PMID 11882894.
5. ^ Hayes, John M.; Waldbauer, Jacob R. (2006). "The carbon cycle and associated redox processes through time". Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 361 (1470): 931–950. doi:10.1098/rstb.2006.1840. PMID 16754608.
6. ^ Archer, Corey; Vance, Derek (2006). "Coupled Fe and S isotope evidence for Archean microbial Fe(III) and sulfate reduction". Geology 34 (3): 153–156. doi:10.1130/G22067.1.
7. ^ Cavalier-Smith, Thomas; Brasier, Martin; Embley, T. Martin (2006). "Introduction: how and when did microbes change the world?". Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 361 (1470): 845–50. doi:10.1098/rstb.2006.1847. PMID 16754602.
8. ^ Summons, Roger E.; et al. (2006). "Steroids, triterpenoids and molecular oxygen". Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 361 (1470): 951–68. doi:10.1098/rstb.2006.1837. PMID 16754609.
9. ^ Philip P. Wiener, ed (1973). "Spontaneous Generation". Dictionary of the History of Ideas. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. http://xtf.lib.virginia.edu/xtf/view?do ... .id=dv4-39. Retrieved 2009-01-24.
10. ^ Lennox, James (2001). Aristotle's Philosophy of Biology: Studies in the Origins of Life Science. New York, NY: Cambridge Press. pp. 229–258. ISBN 978-0521659765.
11. ^ Balme, D. M. (1962). "Development of Biology in Aristotle and Theophrastus: Theory of Spontaneous Generation". Phronesis: a journal for Ancient Philosophy 7 (1–2): 91–104. doi:10.1163/156852862X00052.
12. ^ Dobell, C. (1960). Antony Van Leeuwenhoek and his little animals. New York: Dover Publications. ISBN 0486605949.
13. ^ Oparin, Aleksandr I. (1953). Origin of Life. Dover Publications, New York. pp. 196. ISBN 0486602133.
14. ^ First life on Earth windmillministries.org, Retrieved on 2008-01-18
15. ^ "It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism 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 sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed." written in 1871, published in Darwin, Francis, ed. 1887. The life and letters of Charles Darwin, including an autobiographical chapter. London: John Murray. Volume 3. p. 18
16. ^ Oparin, A. I. (1924) Proiskhozhozhdenie zhizny, Moscow (Translated by Ann Synge in Bernal (1967), The Origin of Life, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, pages 199–234.
17. ^ Oparin, A. I. (1952). The Origin of Life. New York: Dover. ISBN 0486495221.
18. ^ Bernal, J.D. (1969). Origins of Life. London: Wiedenfeld and Nicholson.
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[edit] Further reading

* Arrhenius, Gustaf; et al. (1997). "Entropy and Charge in Molecular Evolution—the Case of Phosphate". Journal of Theoretical Biology 187 (4): 503–522. doi:10.1006/jtbi.1996.0385. PMID 9299295.
* Buehler, Lukas K. (2000–2005) The physico-chemical basis of life, http://www.whatislife.com/about.html accessed 27 October 2005.
* Davies, Paul (1998). The Fifth Miracle. Penguin Science, London. ISBN 0-140-28226-2.
* De Duve, Christian (January 1996). Vital Dust: The Origin and Evolution of Life on Earth. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-09045-1.
* Fernando CT, Rowe, J (2007). "Natural selection in chemical evolution". Journal of Theoretical Biology 247 (1): 152–67. doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2007.01.028. PMID 17399743.
* Hartman, Hyman (1998). "Photosynthesis and the Origin of Life". Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres 28 (4–6): 515–521. doi:10.1023/A:1006548904157.
* Harris, Henry (2002). Things come to life. Spontaneous generation revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198515383.
* Hazen, Robert M. (December 2005). Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins. Joseph Henry Press. ISBN 0-309-09432-1. http://newton.nap.edu/books/0309094321/html.
* Gribbon, John (1998). The Case of the Missing Neutrino's and other Curious Phenomena of the Universe. Penguin Science, London. ISBN 0-140-28734-5.
* Horgan, J (1991). "In the beginning". Scientific American 264: 100–109. (Cited on p. 108).
* Huber, C. and Wächterhäuser, G., (1998). "Peptides by activation of amino acids with CO on (Ni,Fe)S surfaces: implications for the origin of life". Science 281 (5377): 670–672. doi:10.1126/science.281.5377.670. PMID 9685253. (Cited on p. 108).
* Knoll, Andrew H. (2003). Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691009783.
* Luisi, Pier Luigi (2006). The Emergence of Life: From Chemical Origins to Synthetic Biology. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521821177.
* Martin, W. and Russell M.J. (2002). "On the origins of cells: a hypothesis for the evolutionary transitions from abiotic geochemistry to chemoautotrophic prokaryotes, and from prokaryotes to nucleated cells". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological sciences 358 (1429): 59–85. doi:10.1098/rstb.2002.1183. PMID 12594918.
* Maynard Smith, John; Szathmary, Eors (2000-03-16). The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language. Oxford Paperbacks. ISBN 0-19-286209-X.
* Morowitz, Harold J. (1992) "Beginnings of Cellular Life: Metabolism Recapitulates Biogenesis". Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-05483-1
* NASA Astrobiology Institute: Earth's Early Environment and Life
* NASA Specialized Center of Research and Training in Exobiology: Gustaf O. Arrhenius
* Pitsch, Stefan; Krishnamurthy, Ramanarayanan; Arrhenius, Gustaf (2000). "Concentration of Simple Aldehydes by Sulfite-Containing Double-Layer Hydroxide Minerals: Implications for Biopoesis" (abstract). Helvetica Chimica Acta 83 (9): 2398 2411. doi:10.1002/1522-2675(20000906)83:9<2398::AID-HLCA2398>3.0.CO;2-5. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi- ... 8/ABSTRACT.
* Russell MJ, Hall AJ, Cairns-Smith AG, Braterman PS (1988). "Submarine hot springs and the origin of life". Nature 336: 117. doi:10.1038/336117a0.
* Dedicated issue of Philosophical Transactions B on Major Steps in Cell Evolution freely available.
* Dedicated issue of Philosophical Transactions B on the Emergence of Life on the Early Earth freely available.

[otseng]

All humanity has in common one woman estimated to have lived around 200,000 years ago and one man who probably lived between 90,000 and 60,000 years ago.
Nuclear DNA studies indicate that the size of the ancient human population never dropped below some tens of thousands.

Would you agree that mtEve was not the only female on the planet 200,000 years ago? If there were others, then it would need to be explained how all other female lineages died out. And only the same would need to be explained for yAdam.

Human origins seem to be from East Africa not the Middle East.

I addressed this here.

Thus if the flood model was correct, all of humanity would be descended from one man (Noah) and four women (Noah's sons wives and Noah's wife who passed on her genes to Noah's three sons).

All humanity is from one pair - Adam and Eve. During the flood, only 8 people survived. So, mankind's genes would trace back to these 8 and ultimately to one couple.

[Goat]

All humanity has in common one woman estimated to have lived around 200,000 years ago and one man who probably lived between 90,000 and 60,000 years ago.
Nuclear DNA studies indicate that the size of the ancient human population never dropped below some tens of thousands.

Would you agree that mtEve was not the only female on the planet 200,000 years ago? If there were others, then it would need to be explained how all other female lineages died out. And only the same would need to be explained for yAdam.

That has been explained.. that is just the one that 'replaced' the others. The same thing with the 'y-chromosome' Adam... he is just the male that didn't get 'replaced' by any other male.

Not only that.. every allele, and every chromosome will each have their OWN 'last common ancestor'. For example, the last common ancestor for people with blue eyes was 10,000 years ago!

Human origins seem to be from East Africa not the Middle East.

I addressed this here.

Thus if the flood model was correct, all of humanity would be descended from one man (Noah) and four women (Noah's sons wives and Noah's wife who passed on her genes to Noah's three sons).

All humanity is from one pair - Adam and Eve. During the flood, only 8 people survived. So, mankind's genes would trace back to these 8 and ultimately to one couple.

Except, of course, according to the evidence, the last common ancestor for all the y-chromosome people, and the last common ancestor for the mdna women live 100,000 years apart, and the migration patterns we see via DNA testing do not match the flood model.