re: #698 TradeBait

RNA is one component of a living cell, there are literally thousands of others. remove any one of them, working in conjunction, and you don’t have “life,” you simply have yet another pile of inorganic material.

First, this argument holds no water; irreducible complexity arguments simply don’t stand up to scientific scrutiny.

More importantly, however, neither prokaryotic nor eukaryotic cells posses “thousands” of different components. Prokaryotes, in fact, contain little beyond a plasmid of DNA and a lipid membrane, and there is abundant fossil evidence showing that this is the very first sort of cellular life that arose on earth - and in fact dominated the earth for the bulk of it’s history. Flagella are about the only interesting structures prokaryotes produce (for those who don’t find their simple, single loop of DNA interesting) and their function, structure and evolution has already been discussed in detail here, in the articles that Charles linked and elsewhere in tremendous detail.

Eukaryotic cells are more complex, and only arose roughly within the last 2 billion years; however, they contain nowhere near “thousands” of structures - more on the order of a very few dozen, at most. And the bulk of these additional consituents - mitochondria, the nucleus, lysosomes, ribosomes, chloroplasts - bear a striking resemblance to individual bacteria. Some, notably mitochondria, still retain their own unique DNA, utterly different from that found in the nucleus. The idea that these cellular constituents arose through the symbiosis of several different prokaryotic species has been around for a very long time, and it’s major proponent, Lynn Margulis, first published advanced theories elucidating it in 1966, although she acknowledges that her work derives ultimately from speculative writings dating back to the 19th century.

Also, there is no evidence whatsoever to support a supernatural origin for life. None. Every component of living matter is…just matter. It exhibits precisely the same chemistry and physics in a cell as it does in the test tube, with nothing outside the realm of what science has teased out of studying all of nature to be found. If you want your ideas to be considered by science, then you have to play by the rules that science demands and offer a testable hypothesis and the same empirical evidence you’re demanding of science in support of your own claim.