If I get an answer, I'll post it here.

You said "I believe in Creation.  I have a few questions for those of you who don't. If we came from monkeys, where did the monkey come from? If we originated from one-cell creatures that evolved over time, where did they come from? No matter how far back you go and say we evolved over time, there is always that question. Where did that organism come from that started everything?"

This is basically all one question, and it's what we call a question of infinite regression.  One can always ask "well where did THAT come from?"  One can even ask that question about God.  Fortunately that question falls outside the bailiwick of the Theory of Evolution.  The theory of evolution does not speculate on where the first life form came from.  The abundant evidence for evolution makes clear that evolution happened and is still happening.  But none of that precludes a deity.  If you choose to believe that the first life form was the product of the divine, that's fine, evolution makes no assertions either way to challenge or support such a belief.

Which is why it's a little misguided to argue that one must choose between creation or evolution.  There are literally billions of religious people the world over who accept the evidence for evolution and continue to believe in their deity of choice.  There's no necessary conflict between those two beliefs.

Regarding the rest of your post "I have even heard some one say that we evolved from non-living rocks. Unbelievable."

Now you are getting into a different subject, and it's not part of evolution, you are speculating on what in science is referred to as abiogenesis (life from nonliving matter).  The reason why it has that name is that there is no argument (among those familiar with the evidence) that the planet existed before life did.  At one point there was only nonliving matter here, and then there was living matter.  How?

It's an interesting question... how do you get from nonliving matter to living matter?  Abiogenesis isn't a theory, there isn't enough evidence for us to know for sure how the first life forms came into being (and honestly there probably never will be)--there are a number of competing hypotheses, and many of them have points both for and against.  But the belief in divine creation is also an example of abiogenesis... if it was a god, he must have created life out of something.  Surely it is within the power of a supreme being to take some raw chemicals and assemble a living thing.  I doubt you would claim "God couldn't do that".

The most likely conclusion is that the first life form was molecular, a simple chemical compound that could make imperfect copies of itself.  At the lowest levels it becomes impossible to distinguish between biology and chemistry--and it's quite likely the first "life" would be something we would barely recognize as alive.  You may find it unbelievable that we evolved from "rocks", and that is a mind boggling proposition.  However that a simple duplicating chemical compound might have formed in a sea of chemicals bathed in solar radiation and sitrred by tides isn't all that mind boggling at all.  Once you have anything that copies itself with errors, then natural selection kicks in and begins to result in changes to that "organism" over time.

All very interesting, but when it comes to the genesis event, whatever it was, we'll never have an eyewitness or a fossil that will allow us to know the nature of that event.  Fossil molecules, I suspect, would be rather hard to find. :-)

Therefore I don't concern myself with it, and I concern myself with what we DO have evidence for.  The notion of a supernatural being that actively affects the universe and created anything is an interesting notion... a pretty spectacular claim.  But for a person with an evidentiary worldview I can't possibly just accept such a claim without evidence.  Since the evidence is lacking, I'm not going to adopt such a belief (pending further evidence of course)--that's the reasonable assumption to make.  So there we are.

What I do note of the "God Hypothesis" is that historically it has been supplied as an explanation for the unknown for any number of questions and phenomena.  As science has advanced the answer to each of those previously divine phenomena (planetary motion, earthquakes, thunder, lightning, volcanoes, rainbows, etc, etc, etc) the divine has been found to be unnecessary, and the God Hypothesis simply moves to a new unknown, filling the gaps on the shelves of knowledge, to be perennially relocated when the books that explain those gaps are written and shelved.

The unknown is mundane.  There will always be unknowns.  And since the supernatural has been invoked to explain every single unknown in the history of humanity, the fact that it is invoked to explain the origin of life isn't very compelling to me.  The hypothesis doesn't have a very good track record, and the mere fact that something is unknown is not evidence for a supernatural agent.

So while I do not know what the original life form was, or how it got here, I'm inclined to think it was some sort of entirely natural event.  That's the more reasonable assumption based on what we know about the world.  I'm not going to make assumptions based on what we DON'T know... that would be imprudent in my opinion.

That said, I bear no ill will to those who do.  There are many great things religion has brought humanity (including, ironically, science itself).  So if you want to believe in a divine being, an afterlife, redemption--more power to you I say.  Especially if it brings you happiness or comfort in difficult times.  I don't share that belief, but I see no reason either of us should condemn the other.

Obviously I tend to get quite angry with people who ignore evidence and spread disinformation.  That's to be expected from someone who holds an evidentiary worldview.  (And of course, I am as human as the next guy.)  Which is why you could sum up my opinion on the subject at hand like so:

"To believe in the divine is a personal choice, and there is nothing wrong with it.  To ignore the evidence for evolution is to be willfully ignorant."

And that's all I have to say about that.  I hope you found this message to be a useful answer to your questions.  I'm actually not interested in debating theology (I think debating things for which there isn't any evidence is fairly pointless), but if you have any questions about evolution, I'd be happy to try and answer them if I know the answers.

Last week's ice storm really socked us here in Fitchburg.  We lost power for seven days, but fortunately had access to a generator so we could run our furnace.  Finally got my pictures from the storm uploaded.

Just saw some Juncos outside when I was looking out the washroom window. Yet another sign that colder days are upon us.

I really should get some birdseed... it's been awhile since I've just sat and watched my feathered friends.

Oh I remember now... that's the sun!  I saw that the day we left to go on our vacation here in Rainland.  How nice that it has decided to grace us with its presence... on the last day.  Well I'm not going to be cynical today (I mean, after this point).  Clark's Bridge was a bust yesterday... rain dumping down and you have to pay to get in to the tourist trap it is ensconced in... a veritable fortress of phony, brightly-painted, dreck.  So I'm not going back there.  But maybe I can get to the Flume Bridge today.  We'll see.  Either way there should be something to shoot.

Unless it starts raining.

Okay, starting from now, I mean...

Yes I know, first I'm writing about the likelihood of contacting alien civilizations, then I'm talking about immortal humans who have sex for three days straight and write books in their sleep, and then about creepy flickrites, and now I am writing about watching ants.  You don't come here for consistency.

I was leaving my office around lunchtime the other day for a brief walk.  The front of the building has a raised garden with some azaleas and a really nice looking stone wall bordering it.  As I walked out I noticed the wall was swimming in tiny black ants.  Not the big ones you see wondering solo, but hordes of teensy ones.  Usually that means that a tasty food item has been discovered and the colony is out to disassemble it and carry it back.  I could see where the ants were clumped up, but didn't notice anything there that I recognized as anything ants would want to eat.  But I figured maybe somebody had spilled a soda and they were gobbling up dried sugars right off the rockface.  I went off to my walk and didn't think any more about it.

Later that night when I left work, I glanced at the wall and noticed the big cluster of ants was still there, but it had moved a few feet to the right.  Again no food was evident.  Just ants in a big tangled mass.  So I leaned close to peer at them and noticed that ants were bunching up around other ants, and apparently biting each other.  Other ants seemed to be carrying away dead (or dying ants).  I leaned back and noticed that unlike a typical feeding situation where you see a river of ants leading from the colony to the food and back, this was the meeting place of two rivers of ants.  One from one crevice about 5 feet to the left, and another from a crevice about 4 feet to the right.

That's when I realized I wasn't watching a feeding frenzy.  I was watching a war.  It was an epic battle between two colonies of ants that had both claimed this rock wall as their territory.  Thousands upon thousands of ants continually poured from both crevices, and converged in the center to engage in a massive melee.  It was mesmerizing to watch the supply lines bringing in fresh ants as the wounded or the dead were hauled away (presumably as food).  They moved in tides and complex whorling patterns as they made war... it was so intricate it was actually mesmerizing.  I checked my camera bag but I had neglected to bring ANY macro lenses with me that day, or I would have had pictures of all-out insect warfare and abject carnage to upload to my photostream.

It made me a little sad to think of these ants fighting for hours over a few feet of turf.  After 15 minutes I suddenly realized the time and made a mental note to bring my macro lens to work today.

But when I arrived this morning, the battle was over, and the battlefield had been swept clean.  Had I not noticed it, the day before, I never would have known it had happened.  In my inner thoughts I could not help but make the connection between the affairs of the ants and the affairs of humanity.  In 100,000 years, if humans are still here, what great battles and wretched suffering of ours will have passed into the unknown?  Will we forget World War 2?  Will we forget the Holocaust?  Will we repeat it?  Big thoughts from the tragic ant war of June 25, 2008.

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Here's a funny animation I caught on Pharyngula, the excellent science blog by P.Z. Myers.  The audio is German, but there are subtitles.  I got a kick out of it, perhaps you will too?

Das Rad

I was listening to NPR Science Friday on podcast a few nights ago and caught an interesting segment detailing a recent discovery regarding bacteria found in soil.  It has been demonstrated (for example, by the discovery of the nylon bug) that bacteria in the presence of an abundance of one substance or another may evolve to be able to metabolize that substance... even if the substance is synthetic.  It's also been shown that bacteria in the constant presence of antibiotics will evolve immunity.

These newly discovered soil bacteria have done both.  That is, not are they only immune to a disturbingly long list of known antibiotics, they have evolved to the point where they can actually eat antibiotics.  The Royal Society of Chemisty has an article on this recent discovery:

[...] The soil samples were taken from many different places [in the USA] including public parks and farms, pristine forest, and land treated with wastewater.

'The increase of multiple-antibiotic resistance in human pathogens is continuingly weakening our ability to fight infectious disease, and any accessible reservoir of resistance mechanisms that could transfer to pathogens could exacerbate the problem,' say Dantas and Sommer.  

So far, the researchers haven't found any known human pathogens among their antibiotic-consuming organisms, but they say that some are closely related species. This might make it rather easy for pathogens to acquire antibiotic-resistance and antibiotic-metabolising genes from innocuous bacteria. [...]

Scary stuff!  But rather unsurprising since antibiotics get into the environment every day through their continued use.

The segment on the antibiotic-munching bacteria was followed by another segment on an alternative form of antibacterial treatment called phage therapy.  Phage therapy, instead of using chemical substances to combat bacteria, uses viruses, specifically bacteriophages--viruses that only infect bacteria.  This sort of therapy was predicted shortly after the discovery of bacteriophages in 1917.  Once antibiotics were discovered (in 1941) phage therapy wasn't pursued further in the west, but continued to be studied in Russia.

The advantage of phage therapy is that the anti-bacterial agent is also a living organism, so as bacteria evolve to become immune to it, the phage species also evolves to continue to prey on the bacteria.  Antibiotics, being chemical compounds, do not evolve, hence eventually bacterial evolution will defeat an antibiotic unless you can rapidly deplete the bacterial population to the point where your own immune system can fight off the infection successfully.  As bacteria with antibiotic resistance can be found in the environment, and people have been infected with resistant strains, there is apparently renewed interest in phage therapy.

No human phage treatments are presently approved in the USA, though the use of phages to prevent bacteria from growing in food have been approved here.  Phage therapy on humans is used in some states of the former USSR, especially Georgia.  In the NPR podcast linked above the scientists interviewed spoke of a patient with a resistant bone infection that was successfully treated using bacteriophages after being told here in the USA that amputation was his only recourse.  Interesting!