Well, take joobz, for example. And I'm not doing this to put him down but I think he is representative of a lot of people when he says this:
I think there's just a miscommunication here.
When people say "science says that all life originated from a single bacterium," that conjures up an image for some people. That image is that somewhere in the primordial ocean, there was one single solitary cell, and it was the only cell in the world, and it started dividing, and eventually became a lawyer.
That view is absurd, and no scientist believes it. That's what joobz is saying.
(It's almost hard to talk about this, because we're discussing what I think joobz is saying about what DOC is saying about what scientists are saying. At some point it becomes absurd to even try and characterize it.)
Instead, a typical scientists believes that there was some pile of water with a lot of dissolved organic molecules that somehow, through a process not understood, produced a molecule capable of replication. This resulted in a pile of goo, in which some interesting chemistry happened. Somewhere, a sack of molecules came together surrouned by lipids and became something like a primitive cell This resulted in some scum on a rock, or floating in the water. As those primitive cells divided and merged, somewhere in that scum there grew up a cell that was particularly good at dividing. So good, in fact, that cells like it grew up a lot faster than those other cells. That cell was the ancestral cell. That's what scientists mean when they say that we all came from a single cell. It wasn't the only cell in existence, but it was just one cell.
Or at least, that's a good bet. It's still quite speculative. It's hard to trace ancestry through mounds of scum.
Now I don't know how old joobz is, but I have to believe there are a lot of people out there who don't take advanced science courses or any biology at all for that matter who are atheists or agnostics or don't even think about God. And I believe they too would think it is laughably absurd to think that all the blue whales and dinosaurs and giant redwood trees and butterflies and mushrooms and all their friends and relatives came from a single one celled bacterium.
What is it you think people would find absurd? I think what you are saying is the idea that all of this incredible diversity had a simple, common, origin.
I don't know any atheist who thinks that's absurd. That's the way it happened, and while the average Joe might not understand it, he figures there must be someone who does, and it doesn't reallly matter to him anyway. (He's overestimating what we know, of course. We really don't have much knowledge of the process. We just know there had to be one.)
All I want out of all this is for everyone to learn what science is saying. Magazine covers only put apes on the covers when talking about evolution. I've never seen a bacterium on the cover of a magazine when it has an article about man and evolution.
"victoria" sells more magazines than "bacteria" (see my previous post). If you look in the inside pages, you can see the pictures of the bacteria. As bokonon said so well, you'll have to read the article, not just the cover.
