168 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES!
and there, you can start with a simple pathway (which is still adaptive) and improve it until
it is as complex as the Krebs cycle. Finally, creationists invoke the fallacy of pointing to a
finished product and arguing after the fact that the odds needed to produce this structure
are astronomical. As we already discussed in chapter 2, you can never argue the probabil-
ity of something after the fact because almost every event is extremely improbable if we
start with the initial conditions and build forward—and yet these “extremely improbable”
events have happened!
If the reader still feels uncomfortable with the speculative nature of the research into
the origins of life, we can put the whole issue aside for now. Whether or not you agree that
we can explain life’s origins by naturalistic methods, the fact that life has evolved since its
origins is not subject to dispute but proven beyond a reasonable doubt by an amazing con-
vergence of evidence from the fossil record, molecules, and the embryology and anatomy of
organisms. We will focus on that evidence in the remaining chapters.
For Further Reading
Cairns-Smith, A. G. 1985. Seven Clues to the Origin of Life. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Cone, J. 1991. Fire Under the Sea: The Discovery of the Most Extraordinary Environment on Earth—Volcanic
Hot Springs on the Ocean Floor. New York: Morrow.
Costanza, G., S. Pino, F. Ciciriello, and E. Di Mauro. 2009. Generation of long RNA chains in water.
Journal of Biological Chemistry 284:33206–33216.
Fry, I. 2000. The Emergence of Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Overview. Piscataway, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press.
Hazen, R. M. 2005. Gen-e-sis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origins. Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry.
Knoll, A. H. 2003. Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Kun, A., M. Santos, and E. Szathmary, E. 2005. Real ribozymes suggest a relaxed error threshold.
Nature Genetics 37:1008–1011.
Lehmann, J., M. Cibils, and A. Libchaber. 2009. Emergence of a code in the polymerization of amino
acids along RNA templates. PLoS ONE 4:e5773.
Long, M. 2001. Evolution of novel genes. Current Opinions in Genetics and Development. 11:673–680.
Long, M., E. Betran, K. Thornton, and W. Wang. 2003. The origin of new genes: glimpses from the
young and old. Nature Review of Genetics 4:865–875.
Margulis, L. 1981. Symbiosis in Cell Evolution. San Francisco: Freeman.
Margulis, L. 1982. Early animal evolution: emerging view from comparative biology and geology.
Science 284:2129–2137.
Margulis, L. 2000. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. New York: Basic.
Miller, K. 2004. The flagellum unspun: the collapse of “irreducible complexity.” In Debating Design:
From Darwin to DNA, ed. M. Ruse and W. Dembski. New York: Cambridge University Press,
81–97.
Miller, Stanley L. 1953. A production of amino acids under possible primitive earth conditions. Science
117:528–529.
Nutman, A. P., V. C. Bennett, C. R. L. Friend, M. J. van Kranendonk, and A. R. Chivas. 2016. Rapid
emergence of life shown by 3700-million-year-old microbial structures. Nature 537:535–538.
Patthy, L. 2003. Modular assembly of genes and the evolution of new functions. Genetica 118:217–231.
Pino, S., F. Ciciriello, G. Costanzo, and E. Di Mauro, E. 2008. Nonenzymatic RNA ligation in water.
Journal of Biological Chemistry 283:36494–36503.