Posted: Apr 13, 2010 8:10 am
Wrong, you're making a common mistake of confusing the two.
Abiogenesis and Evolution are not the same, and would not be a result of the same mechamisms.
Please present some fossil evidence of Abiogenesis.
Also wrong. Although the mechanisms for evolution and abiogenesis are not the same [as you correctly point out], there are somewhat similar.
Evolution is about mutations being selected or deselected by natural selection to change gene frequencies in a population due to the differential success of genes and gene combinations [and recombinations] in bodies where there is phenotypic expression.
Abiogenesis is thought to work by massively parallel chemical "experimentation" [subject to chemical laws] that give rise to a replicator. This replicator must have the ability to copy itself, and was probably auto-catalytic. In other words, some natural selective process [Not Natural Selection in the exact sense of evolution, as there were no genes in the beginning] ] was acting on variation in the chemical soup to produce that replicator. As I have already stated above, the chemical soup already possesses some of the nutrients and building blocks, so catabolism for example, would not have been necessary. One only needs some mistakes to happen when that replicator is copying itself to produce variation, and then we can have differential reproduction of the different forms or replicator to make improvements. Other stuff could be added later, and rudimentary cell membranes spontaneously form from lipids.
Certain metals, such as iron, zinc, copper, etc can catalyse certain reactions, and later some of these became chelated into proteins like hemoglobin and myoglobin.
Nope, at the very least abiogenesis is plausible, and although we have not dotted all the "I's" and crossed all the "T's", it is valid scientific investigation which may bear lots more intellectual fruit. Just because we may not get a total and complete answer to the "origin of life" riddle does not make the quest futile. Nor is the evidence totally lacking, as you would imagine. The point you may be trying to make is that if we can't prove abiogenesis by natural means, then we will have to default to a god-creator? If so, then that has it's own problems of evidentiary support, and I would suggest, that the lack of support for a creator-god is much more of a problem than a natural explanation for the origins of life.