Asked by
Koena Mitra
in
Puja & Rituals
at
6:07 PM on January 27, 2009
Jai Sri Ram's Answer
Evolution obviously occurred. We have fossil stromatolites dating back more than 3 billion years old. Marine multicellular organisms date back about 700 million years. The evidence for the gradual evolution of life over the past 700 million years is clear and abundant.
The really big question at this time is, how did live originate? We know amino acids are easy to produce, and in a wide variety of environments. Amino acids have been found in deep space, where some folks claim they could not survive long due to cosmic rays and UV radiation (both claims are obviously false--the amino acids are there).
But it is a huge step from amino acids to self replicating cellular organisms. At the present time we have no really good ideas how that happened. One theory is that the DNA world we inhabit now was predated by an RNA world. The evidence for that is a bit shaky, and no one still knows how the conversion might have occurred.
We can debate until the cows come home, but until we have evidence like we do by the Urey & Miller experiments for amino acid production via natural means, we really don't know.
Answered at
6:08 PM on January 27, 2009
Read answer
