Depends on what science we deny.
The recent past ‘scientific picture of the world’ (SPW) is that all life evolved from the chance mixing of chemicals in the ocean. That was certainly taught in highschools when I was a child and backed up by ‘experimental evidence’ à la Miller-Urey.
Now of course that is all discredited and scientists say differently. And part of the reason why this fallacious idea fell away is because of scientists with an ‘evangelical’ bacground pointed out the extreme unlikelihood of complex creatures evolving due to random mutations and the other limited forces that science maintained were the only requirements.
But a dominant SPW even today still posits a material world where consciousness is some sort of subtle physical process occurring in the brain!
That hasn’t been disproven? Evolution via natural selection in fact has lots of evidence for it. It’s why you and I are related to daffodils, for example.
All life today is descended from LUCA, but LUCA wasn’t the only organism alive at the time. Before LUCA there were proto-cells, archaic forms of life likely living in an RNA world. LUCA didn’t become a bacteria. Rather Bacteria and Archaea split from it. A further split from Archaea lead to us. Interestingly despite their similarities Archaea are close to us than they are to Bacteria.
Well that experiment wasn’t about Evolution but Abiogenesis. Abiogenesis is about how life began, Evolution applies after there is life. It’s not contradictory to it, they are just looking at different things. From a scientific point of view, it’s not clear when consciousness begins.
But as you can see above this is why all life is related. Even more fascinating is that we all have ancient viral DNA within us, around 8%. Overtime viruses have become integrated into our genome, having been passed on sexually. So, in fact we are all part virus today.
These findings have a beauty to them IMO. All life is connected in some way, actually even that which straddles the line between life and organic matter (viruses).
My point about the Miller-Urey experiment taught in highschools for the origination of life was that I thought that these days it is not held up as a fact of how life began.
I see your point about the topic so I will change the title to reflect that.
It’s still significant but we know today that the early atmosphere was slightly different to what was replicated in that experiment. We have also recently discovered amino acids on asteroids, so it’s possible they were deposited here during a bombardment.
You would need a good solvent, which water is so the ocean is the most likely place, based on what I know. Once you get life going, Evolution via natural selection kicks in and a few billion years later here we are, two apes having this conversation.
It is rather different in the Agganna sutta.
Why would humans be the result of this simple operation of mutations and natural selection, why not more exotic animals, why should evolution proceed in any direction at all.
I think this development of life and complex animals and humans is something that science believes occurs directly once amino acids mix together in the right environment( first amino acids, then proteins and eventually out pops a Luca, then complex cells, bacteria and then animals ?
I know it is thought to be a probability event so is there a calculation on this occurring.
Edit: a brief search came up with fairly low odds. Yet it was considered pretty much inevitable when I was at school.
When we studied cells in biology they looked extremely complex in relation to amino acids and proteins and I think scientists are saying there must be some mixing of these cells before complex animals form. Still even if you had billions of these cells knocking against each other it is hard to see how they would manifest as a multi- celled creature.
Why are devas able to arise without this evolutionary process.
It is not black and white. Christians advocate intelligent design. Athiests advocate for random chance atomatons. Neither is particularly compelling.
We did not evolve from bacteria. The aggana sutta makes it clear that humans “devolved” from Brahmas. Evolution probably explains how animals/plants came to be since the aganna sutta leaves that out, but it is not how humans came to be.
Its also a total lie that we “know” humans evolved in Africa. Scientists “know” humans evolved in Africa and scattered around the globe. Just like Scientists “knew” humans evolved 200,000 years ago (now debunked as of 2017 since we now know from new fossil discoveries that homo sapiens have been on earth for at least 300,000 years), and that scientists “knew” the Sun was made out of coal before they knew about nuclear fusion. And that scientists “knew” dinosaurs had scales until they discovered they really had feathers around 2014. The prevailing scientific theories are not facts they are educated conclusions made based on the evidence available at the time. Science is constantly changing and disproving itself.
Much like what is done by secular Buddhists and Tear-avadins who retrofit Buddhism into thier preconceived modern values/beliefs, trying to retrofit Buddhism into things like evolutionary science is like taking a bar of gold and trying to cut it up so it perfectly fits inside your sand castle. All you do is pointlessly chisel away perfectly good pieces of gold so it fits in your sand castle, then when you come back the next day it doesnt fit anymore cuz the sand castle is now a different shape due to the winds.
In the same way if you try to twist Buddhism so it fits in perfectly with 2025 scientific thought, the scientists of 2125 will say Buddhism is wrong since they’ve disproven the prevailing scientific theories of 2025, and by extension Buddhism.
Yes Ajahn Punnadhammo made the point that if we take the random event theory of genesis as fact, the chances of single celled beings randomly becoming complex creatures thru random mutations is the same as taking a bunch of airplane parts and putting it in a tornado for it to fall out and form a perfect boeing 747 (that would also have to be functional, since multicellular lifeforms are functional themselves). Even if you repeated this a trillion times, the odds of it happening even once is basically zero.
