Again, you offered interesting philosophical opinions about what evolution means. I would like to see the scientific support for the claims from rossum and Barbarian that “evolution” does not refer to the origin of life.
Wikipedia states that it does:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_evolution
Here’s another definition of evolution that conflicts with your opinions.
iscid.org/encyclopedia/Chemical_Evolution
Chemical evolution is essentially the process by which increasingly complex elements, molecules and compounds developed from the simpler chemical elements that were created in the Big Bang. Recent astronomical observations have
discovered that chemical evolution has even led to the synthesis of complex organic molecules in space, a discovery that could have serious implications on current theories of how life developed.
library.thinkquest.org/C003763/index.php?page=origin03
A scientist:
Salk scientist Leslie Orgel, Ph.D., who dedicated much of his career to the study of how life began on Earth roughly 4 billion years ago, died on October 27 from pancreatic cancer. He was 80 years old.
Orgel, a professor and head of the
Chemical Evolution Laboratory, aimed not only to discover
the chemical reactions that led to the first life forms on the primitive Earth, but also to solve the mystery of how, during this prebiological time, a replicative molecule arose that could pass on life’s genetic blueprint to future generations.
salk.edu/news/news_press_details.php?id=185
“The detection of the two new aldehydes, which are related by a common chemical pathway called hydrogen addition, demonstrates **that evolution to more complex species occurs routinely in interstellar clouds **and that a relatively simple mechanism may build large molecules out of smaller ones. The GBT is now a key instrument in exploring chemical evolution in space,” said Jan M. Hollis of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
nrao.edu/pr/2004/GBTMolecules/
Barbarian is still looking for a scientist.
Here’s one:
Randall S. Perry a1c1 and Vera M. Kolb a2c1
a1 Department of Earth and Space Sciences, Astrobiology Center for Early Evolution, Box 351310, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-1310, USA e-mail:
rsp@u.washington.edu
a2 Department of Chemistry, University of Wisconsin – Parkside, Kenosha, WI 53141-2000, USA
On the applicability of Darwinian principles to chemical evolution that led to life
**Chemical evolution at the primitive prebiotic level **may have proceeded toward increased diversity and complexity by the adjacent possible process (originally proposed by Kauffman). Once primitive self-replicating systems evolved, they could continue evolution via Eigen’s hypercycles, and by Prigogine’s emergence of order at the far-from-the equilibrium, non-linear systems. We envisage a gradual transition from a complex pre-life system, which we call the transition zone. In this zone we find a mixture of complex chemical cycles that reproduce and secure energy.
Small incremental changes in the structure and organization of the transition zone eventually lead to life. However, the chemical systems in this zone may or may not lead to life. It is possible that the transition to life might be the result of an algorithm. But, it is uncertain whether an algorithm could be applied to the systems in which chance plays a role.
journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=227E53D2CEE79370C3C407476A354F23.tomcat1?fromPage=online&aid=240771
Here’s another scientist who believes that the term “evolution” refers to the origin of life:
Professor Robert Hazen (Carnegie Institution and George Mason University) is a respected and widely published geochemist who studies **chemical evolution **and the origin of life and has a mineral hazenite; named after him.
case.edu/darwin/events/
Another scientist that Barbarian couldn’t find on his own:
“A major question about life’s origins is
how chemicals, which have no self-interest, became ‘biological’ – driven to evolve by natural selection,” says biophysicist Ken Dill, PhD, professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California - San Francisco, “This simple model shows a plausible route to this type of complexity.”
The general idea is that
simple principles of chemical interactions allow for Darwin’s ‘natural selection’ on a micro scale. For example, enzymes can cooperate and compete with each other in simple ways, which can lead to arrangements becoming stable, or “locked in,” says Dill.
This chemical process of “search, selection, and memory” can be compared to the well-studied process of how different rates of neuron firing in the brain lead to new connections between neurons and ultimately to the mature wiring pattern of the brain. Another way of describing this phenomenon is how social ants will first search randomly, then discover food, and then build a short-term memory for the entire colony using chemical trails.
These researchers say that
chemical interactions also follow Darwin’s principles of evolution, which are random selection of traits in different organisms (or chemicals in this case), selection of the most adaptive traits, and then the inheritance of the traits best suited to the environment (and presumably the disappearance of those with less adaptive traits).
dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/06/chemistry_mimic.html
The first steps in the formation of living things on earth were chemical evolution (DesMurais and Walter, 1999). So we should look for biological evolution driving forces in thedynamics of chemical reactions instead of searching for any particular biological principles
arxiv.org/ftp/q-bio/papers/0510/0510023.pdf