This is one of the most fundamental mysteries of evolution and the origins of multicellular life often called endosymbiosis, which is supposed to explain the origin of eukaryotic cell.
It doesn’t! Here is why…
What I found perplexing, or even disturbing, is that although it is presented as scientific fact of evolution, as evolution itself often is, there is absolutely not one fact to support that endosybiosis happened or could have happened…
And this the fact…
How could that be?
First of all, the difference between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cell is so staggering that even proposing such quantum leap in evolutionary change goes beyond macroevolutionary claim…
Here are some facts:
Prokaryotic cell above vs Eukaryotic cell below
Dr. Gauger at evolutionnews.org wrote a really good article on the miraculous appearance of the many structures in eukaryotic cells not found in prokaryotic cells that had to have evolved if endosymbiosis were true, such nucleus, mitochondria, etc…
“…There is no single proposed mechanism for the evolution of the nucleus or the other structures…” – wrote Dr. Gauger
However disturbing the theory of endosymbios already is, which makes one wonder how far and how deep preconceived ideology can reach, and the acceptance of evolution, common descent, the tree of life…right or wrong…
However…there is even more to it…
In his paper “Uprooting the Tree of Life” W. F. Doolitle destroys the preconceived and fundamental dogma of evolutionary theory – the so called Darwin’s Tree of Life (which is worth another OP). His ammunition is mainly the horizontal gene transfer…but there is another thing that is very profound…
You can read about it here:
http://labs.icb.ufmg.br/lbem/aulas/grad/evol/treeoflife-complexcells.pdf
On page marked 94 of the paper I linked above, Doolitle writes about the origin of eukaryotic genes:
“…Many eukaryotic genes turn out to be unlike those of
any known archaea or bacteria; they seem to have come from nowhere.”
So, if eukaryotic cell evolved from prokaryotic cells, via the process of endosymbiosis, as evolutionists claim, not only there is not a single evolutionary mechanism to explain rather miraculous appearance of the many structures not found in prokaryotes, that exist in eukaryotes, like nucleus, mitochondria etc. they don’t have many genes to account for in the supposed evolution of eukaryotes…
This is not a joke! It’s real...
Will these very facts overturn the evolutionary thinking and bring down the theory of evolution? One would hope… but of course not…
If it were to happen, it would have happened in 2000 when Doolitle published the world acclaimed findings about the horizontal gene transfer and the mysterious genes nowhere to be found if endosymbiosis is true…
Why?
As someone once said:
“…No amount of evidence disproving evolution will convince it’s faithful followers that the theory is wrong…”
If you don’t believe these words, just watch the comments below on how the faithful will post excuses to make them feel good and secure in their preconceived set of beliefs…
Let Darwin of the gaps begin…
God help us!
BTW: I’m willing to bet all my money that nobody can experimentally prove that endosymbiosis of prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic is possible… How could it be possible if many of the genes aren’t accounted for? Maybe gene-spermia happened? 😉
I’m pretty sure that Darwin’s faithful are willing to believe any nonsense… as long as they can pretend that the-long-dead theory of evolution is alive and kept on the respirator…for as long as possible…lol
Allan Miller,
If you consider TSZ a creationist website you are right 🙂
Mung,
I think you have completely misunderstood. I was talking about Bill Cole and his U of Berkeley quote, not you at all. I was sarcastically commenting on Bill’s apparent inability to Google basic stuff. But when faced with a requirement to find some support for the idea that “eukaryogenesis = endosymbiosis”, Google is suddenly his friend.
colewd,
So you get most of your biology from TSZ?
a) I doubt that
b) If true, your education really is in poor shape. There are accurate and inaccurate representations here; you would be a fool to go to a blog as a principal resource, you really would.
But keiths posts here. Why should we look elsewhere?
Me: Endosymbiosis /= eukaryogenesis
Mung:
a) No-one would say endosymbiosis = eukaryogenesis
or
b) He got it off an evolutionist
Colewd: Endosymbiosis = eukaryogenesis. Goititoffawebsite
Mung: See!
Me: ???
Mung,
Bitter much?
Not Susan Mazur, she’s a crackpot.
What a coincidence…
Glen Davidson
Allan Miller,
Answer A is correct.:-)
If you want to make people pucker up, it’s good to be bitter. And just look at how they pucker up around here. 🙂
If you don’t like the message, shoot the messenger. That makes sense in some sort of atheistic skeptical irrational way, I suppose.
colewd,
So ….
Talking of crackpots, Lynn Margulis. She was bang on about endosymbiosis, and for that matter sex-viewed-as-symbiosis, but aboot much else …
Not expecting a reply, I wonder how this poster justifies the claim that skeptical atheists are “irrational.”
(Seems like that kind of ad hominem slur violates the spirit of this site.)
See the comment below
I haven’t been following this thread closely. Have any of our friendly ID-Creationists Moe, Larry, or Curly provide the IDC explanation for endosymbiosis or any of the other phenomena under discussion?
No?
What a surprise.
I don’t care who Mazur is…She could be a kook for what I care…
She’s interviewed two evolutionary biologists Charles Kurland and Ajith Harish (they are not creationists) who question the evolutionary tree of life as well as the current view of the origin of eukaryotes. They claim that endosymbios is a hoax and they present their view of evolution that includes HGT…They also published papers on the theme…
“The Phylogenomics of Protein Structures: The Backstory
CG Kurland et al. Biochimie 119, 284-302. 2015 Jul 31.
Abstract
In this introductory retrospective, evolution as viewed through gene trees is inspected through a lens compounded from its founding operational assumptions. The four assumptions of the gene tree culture that are singularly important to evolutionary interpretations are: a. that protein-coding sequences are molecular fossils; b. that gene trees are equivalent to species trees; c. that the tree of life is assumed to be rooted in a simple akaryote cell implying that akaryotes are primitive, and d. that the notion that all or most incongruities between alignment-based gene trees are due to horizontal gene transfer (HGT), which includes the endosymbiotic models postulated for the origins of eukaryotes. What has been unusual about these particular assumptions is that though each was taken on board explicitly, they are defended in the face of factual challenge by a stolid disregard for the conflicting observations. The factual challenges to the mainstream gene tree-inspired evolutionary view are numerous and most convincingly summarized as: Genome trees tell a very different story. Phylogeny inferred from genomic assortments of homologous protein structural-domains does not support any one of the four principle evolutionary interpretations of gene trees: a. 3D protein domain structures are the molecular fossils of evolution, while coding sequences are transients; b. Species trees are very different from gene trees; c. The ToL is rooted in a surprisingly complex universal common ancestor (UCA) that is distinct from any specific modern descendant and d. HGT including endosymbiosis is a negligible player in genome evolution from UCA to the present.”
Therefore, I refer to their views the third way of evolution… or should it be the forth??? I lost count… 😉
Part of the interview I’d mentioned:
“Charles Kurland and Ajith Harish and a discussion of their central position on deep evolution, which is that the most recent universal common ancestor (MRUCA) is complex not a simple bacteria and “is the root of eukaryote and akaryote lineages” containing “more than a thousand Superfamilies.” Kurland and Harish think MRUCA represents complex survivors from a now extinct biosphere.
Suzan Mazur: Your Tree of Life analysis challenges not only the work of Carl Woese and Lynn Margulis but John Maynard Smith, Ford Doolittle and Eugene Koonin, among others. You see endosymbiosis as wrong, and rampant horizontal gene transfer as a reflection of the “HGT Industry.” You think HGT was a negligible factor in evolution. Charles, would you address these two points, endosymbiosis and HGT?”
For those who want to read the entire interview click here:
part 2: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/part-2-kurland-harish-rethink-deep-evolution_us_58b35ea3e4b0658fc20f9738
part 1: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kurland-harish-rethink-deep-evolution-part-1_us_58b0ff3ee4b02f3f81e447b0
OMG!agian?
Hello??? Anybody home??? Think OMagain! think!
Can someone point out to OMgain what the OP is all about??
Well, I wouldn’t mind doing the experiment if certain conditions were met:
1 If I believed it to be true; that endosymbiosis actually happened. I don’t.
2. Even if I believed it to be true, where would I get all the genes from necessary for the experiment?
Here is why:
Some times the messenger is responsible for the proliferation of the message. The fact that she has apparently made it her mission in life to be a platform for any kook or fringe opinion in biology is of her own making, and for that reason it is entirely fair to criticize her.
The problem is it misleads people like J-mac et al who think because she has decided to write on some topic it must mean there’s really something there. It gives a false picture of the state of research in the field. Given how consistently that is the case with her articles, there can be little doubt that she’s doing it deliberately.
No they don’t. A hoax is a deliberately perpetrated fraud. What they’re saying is that they think the inference of endosymbiosis is an artifact of the kind of data that was available to phylogeneticists in Lynn Margulis time, and that today (they claim) that inference is contradicted as new data has changed the picture.
Here’s the problem as I see it: They use some new, non-standard methods of phylogenetic inference, based on protein domain-family presence. Whether that is an accurate, valid, and consistent method of historical inference from comparative genetic data is beyond, I’m going to venture a guess, almost everyone in this thread. Most definitely including you and me.
Here’s the funny thing though: phylogenetic methods are roundly poo-pooed unless they appear to support Creationism (even if only in the mind of the Creationist). They feel entitled to the results of a methodology they don’t even think is valid.
Heh, yes, the funny thing is that the tree implied by Charles Kurland’s methods just has a much deeper branch for eukaryote origins. It’s all still just universal common descent with mutation, genetic drift and natural selection, but without endosymbiosis. How this is supposed to constitute support for creationism is anyone’s guess.
Here’s another funny thing: Kurland says explicitly that mitochondria originated as alpha-proteobacteria (or he did in 2000)
That’s quite the hoax he’s exposed there, ‘outing’ himself as a prime perpetrator.
To be fair he does seem to have changed his mind since then, which is entirely fair if the data bears out the conclusion.
Rumraket,
Even though:
(2015 paper quoted above)
You can’t get ‘negligible’ endosymbiosis – it’s like being ‘a bit pregnant’. Either it happened or it didn’t, regardless of its impact on genome evolution. I don’t see him as quite saying it didn’t, though in casual talk with Mazur he does say that. Not sure what he does about the evidence from circular DNA, bacterium-like transcription/translation, or cardiolipin and N-formyl methionine. Where in heck did they come from?
He’s also a fan of Woese’s ‘progenote’ idea, which I find very dubious.
I don’t disagree with anything you say, I find it all very strange. I think I’ll read their paper (Harish & Kurland) Mitochondria are not captive bacteria, today. I’m back at work and have institutional access.
Actually cancel that, today is Game of Thrones and Twin Peaks day, I’ll read it some time this coming week then. 🙂
“Suzan Mazur: You also see endosymbiosis as wrong. Would you touch on that a little?
I guess it’s not a hoax or as Rumraket put it “A hoax is a deliberately perpetrated fraud”– when it is cloaked in science?
I guess some tend to believe that it is not a lie or fraud if it is intended for so-called higher cause…
Charles Kurland: Ajith and I are just writing up a paper devoted to that issue. The thing is once you see the phylogeny of the sort that we have, that Ernst Mayr predicted, where the akaryotes are separated in their descent from the eukaryotes, the obvious possibilities for akaryotes to make eukaryotes are just not there. But that’s the essence of the symbiosis hypothesis — the bacteria gets together with an archaea and it makes a eukaryote, the bacteria becomes the mitochondria and the archaea becomes the nucleus cytoplasmic host. That’s the theory. It’s very, very clearly specified that way.
It’s interesting because it was Lynn’s [Margulis] attempt to explain why DNA was found in the cytoplasm of eukaryotes, and it turned out to be DNA located in mitochondria. It turned out to be DNA located in chloroplasts. Her idea was that: Ah, the mitochondria, the chloroplast, certain kinds of flagella, were actually originally bacteria. Her idea was that if you look at mitochondria, the DNA that was there was the whole genome of that bacteria.”
Dangit Bill you let out the secret that TSZ has become one of the best creationist websites on the internet! 🙂 It’s now a better beacon of Intelligent Design than Uncommon Descent. 🙂
As the founding mother of TSZ said it herself:
“…those of us who oppose the ideas of Intelligent Design proponents do not dispute that it is possible, in principle, to make a reasonable inference of design? That rather our opposition is based on the evidence and argument advanced, not on some principled (or unprincipled!) objection to the entire project?”
Who can argue with that?
“…our opposition is based on the evidence and argument advanced…”
So my and others mission is just to present the evidence and arguments against your supposed evidence and supposed arguments…
That’s what I’m doing and will be doing with my many, many upcoming OPs …;-)
Can’t wait for the next one!
And the posts by Adapa, Glen and OMagain that respond to it, lol.
Wynken, Blynken and Nod.
How many more do you have in store, J-Mac?
Not nearly enough, bu still enough to make you choke.
The ones that I can actually see make me often lough to tears… while they often boggle my mind at the same time… 😉
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdghRwWfaOQ
The Mysteries of Evolution I could possibly stretch to 20-30, if I really wanted to but I have 1 or 2 that could possibly drive the nail into the coffin…
However, I have quite a few on ID inference, the creation of the universe, as well as some on the dogmas of Christianity… just to be fair… 😉
J-Mac,
To repeat, Kurland himself has been perpetuating this so-called ‘lie or fraud’, at least as recently as 2000. It’s hilarious how Creationists adopt a pet expert when they think he supports their cause. Suddenly, Kurland is the only ‘correct biologist’ in the entirety of science – and then only ‘later Kurland’. Yet his ideas on ‘progenotes’ would bring them out in a rash.
Mung,
So you think this is good stuff? Ha ha ha. The most uncritical bunch I have ever encountered.
Can we expect any ‘mysteries of evolution’ that are – you know, new? Not scraped from some other website, in an endless circle of misunderstanding.
If only you had a hammer
Whales! Flagella! Comb jellies! Spliceosomes! The Avian Lung!
And a clue.
Glen Davidson
Anyone notice how a Creationist can post the most ridiculous drivel, and his fellows still gather round clapping him on the back – witness this thread. Yet an ‘evolutionist’ gets something wrong, fellow evolutionists are on them like a ton of bricks (quite rightly).
Well, if all you have is drivel…
Glen Davidson
stcordova,
At least you have dropped the pretense that ID is anything but Creationism.
Actually that should be ” to present supposed evidence and supposed arguments against your supposed evidence and supposed arguments…”
I guess you claim Kurland is not an evolutionist? How about Ajith? Does your claim make him a fraud too just by association?
Grow up Allan!
GlenDavidson,
There are degrees of drivel, though. Some can at least be well-written and marshal a coherent argument, even if wrong. J-Mac … just splatters round … a few half-grasped facts … with lots of ellipsis for adding an air of … unspoken Truths … which you can’t handle … I imagine it in a Shatner-as-Kirk voice.
My favourite so far is the use of phylogenetic methods to disprove the reality of endosymbiosis. Phylogenetic methods suddenly work when they have a conclusion to support. Erik tried to do the same with homoplasy of mouse SINEs, and others have tried to puff the Caetano-Anolles work that in their imagination ‘proves’ that protein is older than nucleic acid. It doesn’t, but even if it did, their methodology was phylogenetic, and so would only work if phylogenetics worked.
They’re fighting the good fight, intellectual honesty is superfluous
J-Mac,
No. How do you work that out?
I’m not the one calling endosymbiosis a fraud. I am ironically pointing out that, if a fraud, Kurland himself – the person you think is debunking the ‘fraud’ – has in the past published papers in support of it.
Learn to read, J-Mac.
OP’s coming up on some of those themes… and more…
How about you give me an idea how to experimentally falsify evolution?
You know how land walking mammal can evolve to the aquatic one. Let’s say I would like to evolve some aquatic functions…How long would it take me to see some evolutionary changes if I spend most of the day in the water? Can you make a prediction as evolutionists often do ?
Or how to re-evolve a function of an existing appendage that is no longer in full use to fully function again?
You are not afraid of proving your own beliefs right…?