Watching a well-known and respected figure like British naturalist Sir David Attenborough explaining his theory on Eden TV last night on the program "First Life" you wonder sometimes at the thin logic associated with this man's reasoning as to what's behind Life on Earth as we know it. Major British newspapers one and all sang his praises in complementing him in what he said.
This was posted afterwards:
‘Brilliant’
The Guardian Newspaper
‘A worthy inheritor of Alistair Cooke’
Daily Telegraph Newspaper
‘The nation’s favourite wildlife broadcaster’
The Times Newspaper
Where do you stand on the issue on the origin of life as we know it? What is life to begin with and what is its origin?
In the TV documentary Sir David Attenborough briefly highlights the extraordinary story of the evolution of the first life on our Earth and how it then evolved into multicellular life, the first plant, the first animal, the first predator, the first to live on land.
To him and so many likeminded individuals these are all key moments in the development of the huge diversity of life that has ever lived on planet Earth.
He showed viewers fossils unearth in Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire,middle England,50 years ago that he claims were a discovery made that transformed his understanding the mysteries of mysteries,namely the origin of life.
Attenborough said how the history of life can be thought of as a many-branched tree,with all species alive today related to common ancestors down near the base.
Is that how you see it too?
Living to me is the principle of life. Possessing life generally have the capabilities of growth, metabolism, response to external stimuli, and reproduction.
Life in its fullest sense is applied to intelligent persons. However did life on earth have to wait for chance combination of chemicals to occur under a certain exact conditions.
So far scientist like Sir David Attenborough,despite his 50 years plus broadcasting for the BBC's Natural Science Programmes,has yet to observed such an event taking place in our modern times. Maybe it only happens billions of years ago right!
Scientist,like Attenborough himself, are unable to explain successfully the discontinuity between different "kinds" of life on earth.
Which, apart from the question of origin, has been a major obstacle in Attenborough's theories. Kinds to me seems to constitute divisions of life-forms wherein each division allows for cross-fertility within its limits.
If so, then the boundary between “kinds” is to be drawn at the point where fertilization ceases to occur right? Also some people confuse the term species with the term kind.
The root meaning for the word species is "a sort, kind and variety." In biologic language, however, it can apply to any group of interfertile animals or plants mutually possessing one or more distinctive characteristics. Hence, there could be many such species or varieties within a single division of the word "kinds."
The unchangeable rule that "kinds" cannot cross is a biologic principle that has never been successfully challenged. Even with the use of modern laboratory techniques and manipulation, no new “kinds” have ever been formed. Which allows for diversity in "kinds". In other words dogs remains dogs,cats stay cats and elephants will always be elephants.
Then there is the issue of sterility as the delimiting factor of what constitutes "kind" which sets boundaries that determines various "kinds" in existence today through a test of sterility. A natural test of fertilization makes it possible to uncover the primary relationships within animal life and plant life.
For example, sterility presents an impassable gulf between man and the animals. Also breeding experiments have demonstrated that appearance is no criterion. Man and apes may look similar, have comparable types of muscles and bones,but for a man to hybridize with apes proves we are two separate entities.
Just as you can't cross a horse with a donkey even though both are part of the horse family! You do find mules tough when horses did cross breed with donkeys,but that's rare and the mules were sterile and unable to continue the variation the natural way.
Even Charles Darwin had to admit that: "The distinctness of specific forms and their not being blended together by innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty." (Origin of Species, 1902, Part 2, page 54)
Sir David Attenborough reckons that the 600million year old fossil that was discovered in Charnwood Forest,later known as Charnia,was a marine organism and part of and ancient community of living things that lived in darkness at the bottom of an ocean and that relates to modern animals.
He also said that the microscopic single cells that lived before Charnia billions of years ago,lived in hostile and lifeless land dominated by volcanoes and that chemicals that were spewing from underwater volcanic events solidified and created towers needed to produce the conditions for the first cells to form and that eventually over a long period of time advanced organisms appeared in a blink of an eye!
Do you buy all that?
Attenborough claims "there is evidence for this around the coastlines of Canada in radioactive rocks where fragments of red stones are embedded in darker rocks known as drop stones. And that we owe our existence to ice-dwelling extremophiles that survived the Snowball Earth."
However,geological research has provided clear evidence that the fossils held to be among the earliest specimens of a certain particular creature are very similar to their descendants alive today.
Cockroaches,for example, that were found among the supposed earliest fossil insects are virtually identical to the modern ones. Horses, oak trees, eagles, elephants, walnuts, ferns, you name them, all continue within the same "kinds" without evolving into other "kinds."
So how does Attenborough and co explain that?
Life in itself is impersonal, incorporeal, and merely the life principle of all things having life.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica says:" A feature is the chemical individuality everywhere manifest, for each distinct type of organism seems to have some distinctive protein of its own, and some characteristic rate or rhythm of metabolism. Thus under the general quality of persistence amid unceasing metabolism, there is a triad of facts:
(1) the building-up that compensates for the breaking-down of proteins,
(2) the occurrence of these proteins in a colloidal state and
(3) their specificity from type to type."
Reference:
1.ScienceNOW: "Why Can't Mules Breed?"by Sara Coelho
2.David Attenborough-First Life
3.A Slip Under the Microscope
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