Darwinist and atheist P.Z. Myers thinks that origin of life is part of evolution
J. Warner Wallace tweeted this post by vjtorley from Uncommon Descent.
Excerpt:
On a deeper level, however, the skeptics’ attempt to divorce to the theory of evolution from the origin of life is fundamentally flawed. “Says who?”, you ask. Says evolutionary biologist PZ Myers, that’s who – in his 2008 post, 15 misconceptions about evolution. Myers was responding to a list of common myths about Darwin’s theory of evolution, drawn up by Listverse founder Jamie Frater. For the most part, Professor Myers thought Frater’s post was excellent, but on a couple of points, he differed sharply with Frater’s responses to these myths about evolution. Frater had argued that evolution doesn’t deal with the origin of life, but PZ Myers argued that this compartmentalization of the two issues was tantamount to “cheating”:
[Myth] #15 is also a pet peeve [of mine]: “Evolution is a theory about the origin of life” is presented as false. It is not. I know many people like to recite the mantra that “abiogenesis is not evolution,” but it’s a cop-out. Evolution is about a plurality of natural mechanisms that generate diversity. It includes molecular biases towards certain solutions and chance events that set up potential change as well as selection that refines existing variation. Abiogenesis research proposes similar principles that led to early chemical evolution. Tossing that work into a special-case ghetto that exempts you from explaining it is cheating, and ignores the fact that life is chemistry. That creationists don’t understand that either is not a reason for us to avoid it.
Well, there you have it. If you accept that “life is chemistry,” as any card-carrying materialist surely does, then you cannot honestly maintain that the evolution of life should be studied in isolation from the question of how it originated.
Myers is wrong about a lot, but this time he is right on the money.
Darwinists who are trying to avoid putting forward a naturalistic theory for the origin of life better think again. In order to affirm that naturalistic mechanisms can account for the diversity of life, you do have to explain the origin of life. If that is the place where an intelligent cause is needed to explain the information, then that’s enough to cast doubt on naturalism. There has to be a seamless chain of cause and effect for naturalism to be true. Any discontinuity, whether it be the creation event or the origin of life, is lethal to naturalism. |
