Engineers Created by ... Evolution?

[Ingwar]

There is no dna difference between the engineers and us aside from environmental conditioning.

DNA and environment are not everything. Culture, intelligence, knowledge, logical thinking, self-consciousness, well-developed empathy, open-mindedness, understanding of reality and so on are factors that define us as species. Humans from the distant future will share the same DNA as people from ancient times.

[whiterabbit]

There is no dna difference between the engineers and us aside from environmental conditioning.

DNA and environment are not everything. Culture, intelligence, knowledge, logical thinking, self-consciousness, well-developed empathy, open-mindedness, understanding of reality and so on are factors that define us as species. Humans from the distant future will share the same DNA as people from ancient times.

Well I wasn't thinking that deep into it to be honest.

[bb-15]

Yeah. This is how I see it. Humans share the same DNA as them so maybe Engineers weren't responsible for other species.

I think that Engineers created everything on the world, but they tampered with the ones who they deemed most likely and easiest to "morph" into their image.

The reason I say this is because literally all life on this world is related in one way or another. We even share 50% of our DNA with bananas...

Were there any plants in the intro of Prometheus? I think there were some, if there were, then that scene could be an example of an Engineer coming to "add more" to the world after the plant phase was complete. This is all speculation on my part, adding to what I said above about multiple visits to improve their little gardens and add extra diversity to them so to speak.

I think the "seeding" may happen more than once if they have a specific aim to go for.

I agree with a lot of this and I'll add some bits of my own.
* The Engineers would need to have created or altered all life on earth since there is common DNA with all species.
How to do that?
- It would not require that the Engineers come 3.5 billion years ago when life first started on earth.
Claiming that creates challenges with explaining how the Engineer culture lasted so long.
- Instead I prefer that the Engineers altered life on earth after it had begun.
The easiest time to do that would be after a mass extinction event and when life was very primitive.
- One event could be Snowball Earth (or slushball earth) about 650 million years ago.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth

At that time only the equator was free of glaciers / ice / snow limiting life to a small area and it was still single cell life.

* I also agree that the Engineers would do their DNA changes many times so they could continue to guide life in the direction they wished.

Imo at least. ;-)

[The Alien Predator]

Yeah. This is how I see it. Humans share the same DNA as them so maybe Engineers weren't responsible for other species.

I think that Engineers created everything on the world, but they tampered with the ones who they deemed most likely and easiest to "morph" into their image.

The reason I say this is because literally all life on this world is related in one way or another. We even share 50% of our DNA with bananas...

Were there any plants in the intro of Prometheus? I think there were some, if there were, then that scene could be an example of an Engineer coming to "add more" to the world after the plant phase was complete. This is all speculation on my part, adding to what I said above about multiple visits to improve their little gardens and add extra diversity to them so to speak.

I think the "seeding" may happen more than once if they have a specific aim to go for.

I agree with a lot of this and I'll add some bits of my own.
* The Engineers would need to have created or altered all life on earth since there is common DNA with all species.
How to do that?
- It would not require that the Engineers come 3.5 billion years ago when life first started on earth.
Claiming that creates challenges with explaining how the Engineer culture lasted so long.
- Instead I prefer that the Engineers altered life on earth after it had begun.
The easiest time to do that would be after a mass extinction event and when life was very primitive.
- One event could be Snowball Earth (or slushball earth) about 650 million years ago.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth

At that time only the equator was free of glaciers / ice / snow limiting life to a small area and it was still single cell life.

* I also agree that the Engineers would do their DNA changes many times so they could continue to guide life in the direction they wished.

Imo at least. ;-)

Wow, those are some really good points. I never considered the idea that they could've come and done massive changes after a mass extinction event.

Earth was filled with those, so plenty of bottlenecked populations happened.

As for why Engineer culture lasted for so long, what if they were a sort of stagnant culture?

Maybe they began doing this billions of years ago, but because evolution takes so long, they would resort to long periods of hibernation, awakening only to check up on things and add a few changes before going back into their slumbers.

The Engineer that was awakened in Prometheus slept for 2,000 years. Maybe some could be hibernating for millions of years. This sorta explains why a few have been found on seemingly derelict ships around space (in the comics too), sleeping in their pods and being awakened by humans accidentally.

Hopefully Covenant sheds more light on the Engineers. They're really interesting.

[bb-15]

Yeah. This is how I see it. Humans share the same DNA as them so maybe Engineers weren't responsible for other species.

I think that Engineers created everything on the world, but they tampered with the ones who they deemed most likely and easiest to "morph" into their image.

The reason I say this is because literally all life on this world is related in one way or another. We even share 50% of our DNA with bananas...

Were there any plants in the intro of Prometheus? I think there were some, if there were, then that scene could be an example of an Engineer coming to "add more" to the world after the plant phase was complete. This is all speculation on my part, adding to what I said above about multiple visits to improve their little gardens and add extra diversity to them so to speak.

I think the "seeding" may happen more than once if they have a specific aim to go for.

I agree with a lot of this and I'll add some bits of my own.
* The Engineers would need to have created or altered all life on earth since there is common DNA with all species.
How to do that?
- It would not require that the Engineers come 3.5 billion years ago when life first started on earth.
Claiming that creates challenges with explaining how the Engineer culture lasted so long.
- Instead I prefer that the Engineers altered life on earth after it had begun.
The easiest time to do that would be after a mass extinction event and when life was very primitive.
- One event could be Snowball Earth (or slushball earth) about 650 million years ago.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth

At that time only the equator was free of glaciers / ice / snow limiting life to a small area and it was still single cell life.

* I also agree that the Engineers would do their DNA changes many times so they could continue to guide life in the direction they wished.

Imo at least. ;-)

Wow, those are some really good points. I never considered the idea that they could've come and done massive changes after a mass extinction event.

Earth was filled with those, so plenty of bottlenecked populations happened.

As for why Engineer culture lasted for so long, what if they were a sort of stagnant culture?

Maybe they began doing this billions of years ago, but because evolution takes so long, they would resort to long periods of hibernation, awakening only to check up on things and add a few changes before going back into their slumbers.

The Engineer that was awakened in Prometheus slept for 2,000 years. Maybe some could be hibernating for millions of years. This sorta explains why a few have been found on seemingly derelict ships around space (in the comics too), sleeping in their pods and being awakened by humans accidentally.

Hopefully Covenant sheds more light on the Engineers. They're really interesting.

I'm fine with the Engineer's culture lasting a long time. And you bring up some good points about how their culture was maintained which I'll discuss below.

I was responding to some people on other sites who object to that culture being 4 billion years old for instance.
My counter argument then is that the Engineer culture could be only 1 billion years old.
For instance here's a mass extinction event on earth which happened about 500 million years ago. This would allow the Engineers to change the DNA on earth in a much shorter timeframe.

The first land plants appeared around 470 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, when life was diversifying rapidly...
About 35 million years later, ice sheets briefly covered much of the planet and a mass extinction ensued.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21417-first-land-plants-plunged-earth-into-ice-age/

Now to your specific points.
"what if they were a sort of stagnant culture?"

This makes a lot of sense considering that the Engineer in the beginning of the movie, physically, is about the same as the awoken Engineer at the end of the film.
Cloning technology and genetic manipulation could allow for the maintaining of the Engineer's physical appearance over eons.
That points to the Engineers wanting to keep things the same.
Logically this could also apply to their culture. It could be that they were rigid and were able to maintain the same culture for many millions of years.

"they would resort to long periods of hibernation,"

Certainly they could do that. If some Engineers were continually in hibernation while others were working, then the physical template of what a Engineer looked like would be visible with the hibernating Engineers and DNA comparisons could be done to find genetic variation and stop that through genetic manipulation.

Imo at least. ;-)

[ScaryMinds]

You cannot claim such a statement without a proof.

Good thing she never claimed such a statement then, eh?

She did claim such a statement by asking such question: who created them? It's obvious. Statement can be hidden in a question.

Besides as you claimed in your previous post: Given they've just found that humanity was engineered, why should she assume Engineers evolved? If she didn't assume that Engineers evolved, as you claimed, then there's only one option left: they were created. Make your mind SM. One way or another.

Do you understand how science works? It starts by people asking a question, which they then explore using empirical data, this will define the theory that evolves. Shaw was showing exactly what every Scientist does, questioning  the situation, it also went to the core of her character. In short if people don't question then we end up with Trump as President ... wait a minute ...

[oduodu]

http://magazine.biola.edu/article/10-summer/can-dna-prove-the-existence-of-an-intelligent-desi/

This is an interesting one.

Where did the original DNA and rna for the first living cells originate from?

[bb-15]

http://magazine.biola.edu/article/10-summer/can-dna-prove-the-existence-of-an-intelligent-desi/

This is an interesting one.

Where did the original DNA and rna for the first living cells originate from?

The theory which I support is that asteroids and comets provided the young earth water and organic compounds and the environment for RNA/DNA to be created.

Thanks to regular and heavy comet and meteorite bombardment of Earth's surface during its formative years 4 billion years ago, the large craters left behind not only contained water and the basic chemical building blocks for life, but also became the perfect crucible to concentrate and cook these chemicals to create the first simple organisms.

http://www.astrobio.net/meteoritescomets-and-asteroids/scientist-suggests-comet-and-meteorite-impacts-made-life-on-earth-possible/

As for intelligent design; the only compelling possibility that I find is that space aliens altered life on a planet. That is scientifically possible.
There is just no evidence that space aliens came to earth and altered evolution.
So, natural evolution still is the dominant theory.
Imo at least. ;-)

[oduodu]

Well the article doesn't argue against evolution. Only where the information came from to form DNA and rna. It it came here via comets where did the comets get it and if by aliens where did they get it or where did the DNA/rna come from for their evolution?

Somewhere that has to stop and ultimate starting point be found.

[bb-15]

Well the article doesn't argue against evolution. Only where the information came from to form DNA and rna. It it came here via comets where did the comets get it and if by aliens where did they get it or where did the DNA/rna come from for their evolution?

Somewhere that has to stop and ultimate starting point be found.

OK, I've gotten the time to get the references for non fiction science theories about where organic materials in our solar system originally come from.
(I mention a bit about the Engineers at the end of my post.)
I'll first begin with a nebula from an article titled; "Nebulae: What Are They And Where Do They Come From?".

nebulae are not only massive clouds of dust, hydrogen and helium gas, and plasma; they are also often "stellar nurseries"...

And eventually, and with enough gravitational attraction between clouds, this matter can coalesce and collapse to forms stars and planetary systems.

http://www.universetoday.com/61103/what-is-a-nebula/

- Some organic material forms on a planet like earth. But some organics are brought to a planet by comets.
So, I'll move to an article about the formation of a solar system and organics titled; "Comet Organics May Be the Original Material of an Early Solar System"

NASA scientists have discovered a new class of organics in the comet dust captured from Comet Wild 2 in 2004 by NASA's Stardust mission spacecraft.

More "primitive" than any material found in meteorites, scientists believe these organics may represent some of the original material used to build everything in our Solar System, including life on Earth...

"It looks like the organic material we produce when we expose water-rich ices to ultraviolet radiation under space-like conditions in the laboratory," explained Sandford. "It suggests the possibility that comets contain some of the original organic products churned out by dense interstellar nebulae when their particle contents were bombarded by cosmic rays and ultraviolet radiation."...

"Basically, it looks like the comet has kept these samples in cold storage for the last 4.5 billion years," said Sandford...

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stardust/news/stardust_results.html

- Scientific theories about nebulas and solar system formation are continually being tested against new data and revised.
- One idea in the NASA article is that early comet organics would be further changed by getting close to a star's heat (like our sun) during the comet's orbit and this way new organics would be formed over time.
- Some comets would crash into the early earth, and organics would be introduced onto the planet.

* I'm not going to go into much about the Engineers with this comment.
In non fiction no super intelligent space aliens have been found by humanity. 
So, I can't really know for certain where super intelligent aliens like the Engineers would get RNA/DNA and how they would use it to introduce or alter life on a planet.
I could speculate within the fiction of the Alien franchise about the Engineers but I don't want to mix that in this post with actual science theories.

- This gets back to the conclusion that many scientists in our world believe that in the early history of earth some organic material was brought to our planet by comets.

* As for the original thread topic; "Engineers Created by ... Evolution?"
In non fiction, it is possible, according to science theories, for space aliens to alter evolution including with hypothetical Engineers. 
Still, the theories from science would say that evolution on a planet, which leads to advanced intelligent life, can happen without any help from space aliens. And so far on our world there is no scientific evidence yet for interference by intelligent space aliens.

Imo at least. ;-)