On 10/01/2011 05:03 PM, Warp wrote:

>    The theory of evolution != the theory of life's origins.
>
>    The theory of evolution says nothing about how life first came into
> existence on Earth. That would be abiogenesis.

Quite. And while the theory of evolution is universally accepted, 
abiogenesis is essentially still at the stage of "well, we've got some 
ideas, but basically nobody /really/ knows".

>    Basically the only thing that the theory of evolution postulates is that
> the genes of large populations change over time (something even the most
> hardcore young-earth creationists don't deny) and that some changes get
> preserved while others disappear due to natural selection (again, something
> the creationists don't deny). That's about it.

Evolution asserts that species are not fixed; they /change/. And so the 
species we see today were not always there. And, in particular, not so 
much evolution itself, but molecular evidence says that all life on 
Earth has a single common ancestor.

That's about as much as evolution itself actually says about the origin 
of life; that life didn't originate as twenty billion species, but as 
just one. (Actually, it was probably a handful of species; it's just 
that only one of them left descendants. As far as we know.)

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