More Evolution Stuff

One of the sites that I am working on (along with some other most excellent people) is Facts, not Fantasy. Each day, I go there to enter a blog about evolution, vaccines, and autism (or at least that's the format I am using now). So today I had a praticularly good entry on evolution, and thought I would repost it here.

While abiogenesis has nothing itself to do with evolution, it is considered one of those "defining gaps" that are used to bludgeon evolution with. That's why it's exciting to see this article about how RNA could be the starting point for life itself. Once you have any polymer capable of self-replication, you'll end up with more of those (and more of the ones that do it better). Since these are more abundant, they're more likely to be trapped inside vesicles that spontaneously form and divide by mechanical forces. That's basically a cell. Pretty much everything else is gravy that can be explained by natural selection. (There is also this article on the RNA chemistry.)

I guess what this really means is that yet another gap for that god fellow just shrunk. Don't you just wish that people would stop resorting to the supernatural when they aren't intelectually capable of saying that they don't know? *sigh*

There is also news of a new primate fossil that was found. This one goes back to about 47 million years ago, so is an even further precursor to the primate line. What is fascinating about this one is that basically evolution predicts that this type of fossil would exist, while ID or creationism says nothing about it. Not that I would expect IDiots and people with their brains stuck in the bronze age to actualy have the neural capacity for predictions and the scientific method.