Origin of Life

[Belk]

Darwinists have many many problems of credibility; which they conveniently ignore in
their numerous books on evolution.

A fundamental truth of our living world is that life begets life.
And yet Darwinists preach faith in the organic coming from the inorganic.
from no life to organic molecules (anybody observe this?) to the complexities and
marvels of single cell life and then away we go to us.

Fairytales!
And Darwinists hypocritically accuse creationists of faith over "science."

Yes, what do those stupid scientists know anyways? <roll eyes>

 

[Steve Petersen]

It's like Satan. He tells all the things he wants you to think and leaves out the truth that he is a liar telling you "intelligent" lies.

And you know this how?

 

[DavidFirth]

And you know this how?

Sorry, I don't remember exactly what it was that I was commenting about.

 

[mindlight]

I'm sorry, I should have explained more clearly - the analogy was a comparison of levels of sophistication, I wasn't suggesting that a sled or an Audi could evolve or spontaneously assemble.

The point was that drawing conclusions about the origins of life by looking at a modern cell is analogous to drawing conclusions about the difficulty of making a sled by looking at an Audi A4.

Yes but the analogy you were trying to make with proto Audi and Audi breaks down because of the commitment to undirected natural forces.

If you want to suggest that the irreducible complexity of the cell is actually not a fact. That there were prototype stages on the way to complete cellhood. Then as with the sled and the Audi even this solution suffers from being completely unlikely in nature. Also it appears to show a lack of comprehension about the cell. Basically the cell needs all its parts and each specifically are essential are specifically arranged and perform a specific function within the whole. Such a cell can reproduce while protocells would just be freaks of nature that came and went.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Yes but the analogy you were trying to make with proto Audi and Audi breaks down because of the commitment to undirected natural forces.

The analogy has nothing to do with that. I've explained what it is about. I guess I'm going to have to be a lot more selective with analogies.

If you want to suggest that the irreducible complexity of the cell is actually not a fact. That there were prototype stages on the way to complete cellhood. Then ... even this solution suffers from being completely unlikely in nature.

Why? Evolution by natural selection is demonstrably capable of the kind of changes required.

Also it appears to show a lack of comprehension about the cell.

As a biology graduate, I can assure you I understand the fundamentals of cell biology.

Basically the cell needs all its parts and each specifically are essential are specifically arranged and perform a specific function within the whole. Such a cell can reproduce while protocells would just be freaks of nature that came and went.

You might recall that I called the earliest forms 'replicators' or 'proto-life'. Protocells are self-assembled lipid vesicles, which can grow by assimilation and divide when they become large enough to be unstable, but would have no metabolism or informational replication - i.e. they're just passive lipid chemistry. Clearly, at some point replicators and vesicles came together, encapsulating simple metabolic cycles to form fully functioning cells, but research shows considerable scope for the selective development of 'free-floating' (unencapsulated) replicators in suitable environments, e.g. porous volcanic or hydrothermal vent rock with thermal gradients to supply free energy.

 

[mindlight]

The analogy has nothing to do with that. I've explained what it is about. I guess I'm going to have to be a lot more selective with analogies.

Why? Evolution by natural selection is demonstrably capable of the kind of changes required.

As a biology graduate, I can assure you I understand the fundamentals of cell biology.

You might recall that I called the earliest forms 'replicators' or 'proto-life'. Protocells are self-assembled lipid vesicles, which can grow by assimilation and divide when they become large enough to be unstable, but would have no metabolism or informational replication - i.e. they're just passive lipid chemistry. Clearly, at some point replicators and vesicles came together, encapsulating simple metabolic cycles to form fully functioning cells, but research shows considerable scope for the selective development of 'free-floating' (unencapsulated) replicators in suitable environments, e.g. porous volcanic or hydrothermal vent rock with thermal gradients to supply free energy.

So you believe by faith in the existence of a protocell standing between raw chemicals and a fully formed cell. A concept for which their is no experimental or empirical proof. Further you believe again by faith that these protocells could combine and obtain the extra required information, specificity of function, organisation etc by purely natural undirected processes. It sounds about as plausible as assembling an Audi by undirected natural forces.

 

[mindlight]

This where I stopped reading.

Another blind believer in the empirically unproven hypothetical non living chemical concept that is the protocell? Find me an earlier example of a living organism than the cell that is able to biologically reproduce and you can walk away with a smug superior sneer on your face. Fact is you have no empirically demonstrable audit trail for the development of the cell out of chemicals and you have a theory with less explanatory power than attributing it to an Intelligent Designer.

 

[mindlight]

Nope. Irreducible complexity examples are almost always debunked rather quickly.



Nope. This is applying probability exactly backwards.



I believe it's called HYDROGEN BONDING and BOND ANGLES. That's pretty much the basis. If you have two chemicals that can coordinate then one chemical can easily "template" the other chemical or some other chemical. The passage of the information is pretty simplistic.



If you want to discuss EVOLUTION you need to remember that ORIGIN OF LIFE has nothing to do with evolution.



Chance does play a role in chemistry, but usually not as loosey-goosey as you may think. Chemicals follow a suite of rather specific rules, most of which are relatively simple. But when combined produce emergent complexity.



Again, misuse of probability and a general lack of understanding of basic chemistry does NOT provide evidence of a Creator or Intelligent Design.

"Sir Fred Hoyle calculated the probability of producing the proteins necessary to service a simple one celled organism by chance at 1 in 10 to the 40000. " Meyer - Signature in the Cell - 2009(Paperback) p.213

 

[pitabread]

and you have a theory with less explanatory power than attributing it to an Intelligent Designer.

Um, "attributing it to an Intelligent Designer" doesn't add any explanatory power because it doesn't explain anything.

 

[mindlight]

Um, "attributing it to an Intelligent Designer" doesn't actually add an explanatory power because it doesn't explain anything.

Since chemistry cannot explain how the information present in the DNA of even the simplest cell arose whether by necessity or chance the real question here is why a naturalistic methodology is being employed at all. If your answers must be phrased according to the logic of a methodology that affords no explanatory power then maybe you have to seek a less reductionist explanation for how life arose. God did it being the simplest conclusion. The analogy then to the building of DNA could be likened to the actions of a supreme programmer, supreme architect or supreme engineer. Who animated the inanimate with life giving it form, organisation, reproductive potential and tools and the information to survive and thrive.

 

[essentialsaltes]

God did it being the simplest conclusion.

No, that's just putting a label on ignorance. It doesn't explain anything. It explains as much as saying that Splunge did it. Or Gobbledygook did it.

 

[Obliquinaut]

"Sir Fred Hoyle calculated the probability of producing the proteins necessary to service a simple one celled organism by chance at 1 in 10 to the 40000. " Meyer - Signature in the Cell - 2009(Paperback) p.213

And again I can't help but point out that this is calculating the probabilities backwards.

First off: proteins are simply regular organic chemicals. There is literally NOTHING about them that violates simple chemical rules.

The complex folding and secondary structures are, indeed, complex and require a lot of calculation to characterize, but there is literally NOTHING about them that isn't driven by the most simple of chemical concepts such as those related to BOND ANGLE and HYDROGEN BONDING.

Long story short: LIFE COULD BE DIFFERENT THAN IT IS. So to work the probabilities backwards is to make the assumption that life could ONLY be this way or that and that makes the probabilities far less likely. But it is also a misapplication of probability.

Here's an interesting factoid for you: most of biochemistry on earth has the same chirality out of two possible chiralities. This is a concept that relates to how different elements are arranged around a central atom (usually a Carbon atom in organic chemistry). There are two possible configurations: L and D (Levrorotary and Dextrorotary).

Almost all life on earth has biochemistry that is L enantiomer. It could just as well be D but it is L. And the only way for much of it to work is if it has the same chirality as other molecules. This is exceptionally important in enzymes who need a sort of "lock-and-key" arrangement.

This "homochirality" is a very interesting aspect of life and there are some interesting hypotheses as to why life arose with homochirality (my favorite is the fact that some mineral surfaces which would act as early pre-biotic templates preferentially adsorb one enantiomer over another...a nice metaphor for "life from dust" if you will!)

But if I were to go in the lab and synthesize some of these chemicals I would get a "racemic mixture" of varying levels of D and L.

 

[Speedwell]

So you believe by faith in the existence of a protocell standing between raw chemicals and a fully formed cell. A concept for which their is no experimental or empirical proof. Further you believe again by faith that these protocells could combine and obtain the extra required information, specificity of function, organisation etc by purely natural undirected processes. It sounds about as plausible as assembling an Audi by undirected natural forces.

No. I would say that Frumious (and the rest of us) accepts the hypothesis of a protocell as a reasonable inference from the data now on hand but is prepared to reject it if new data leads to a different hypothesis. Not at all the same thing as "belief by faith."

 

[Obliquinaut]

Since chemistry cannot explain how the information present in the DNA

This is incorrect. The "Information" you are talking about is little more than "template". Like lego blocks. The sequence of amino acids in a protein are mimicked (through bond angle and hydrogen bonding arrangment) to the sequence in the RNA which transcribes it and the RNA is likewise mimicked by the coordinated bases in the DNA from which it gets the template.

Simple chemistry explains that information quite well.

of even the simplest cell arose whether by necessity or chance the real question

Pretty much every single part of a cell has an analogue in the non-life world. Cell wall? You make micelles everytime you do the dishes. Surfactant molecules arrange in a way in that puts hydrophobic materials inside and a hydrophilic surface outside. Cell walls are simply "bi-layers" of this.

All the chemicals in the cell are just regular organic chemicals. There is nothing inherently impossible about any of the structure of life.

God did it being the simplest conclusion.

The ONLY reason that "God did it" is simpler is because those who make the claim don't feel the need to explain "God". The usual answer is simply "God exists because He does". As Pita noted earlier that explains nothing.

When you invoke the God Hypothesis then you are on the hook to not only provide sufficient evidence for God but explain where God came from AND how He made life.

 

[Obliquinaut]

No. I would say that Frumious (and the rest of us) accepts the hypothesis of a protocell as a reasonable inference from the data now on hand but is prepared to reject it if new data leads to a different hypothesis. Not at all the same thing as "belief by faith."

If it is "faith" that leads us to infer a protocell then it is "faith" that leads me to believe that when I flip the switch in the living room that the light will come on because of it.

This is basic inferential science. We have all the building blocks which look exactly like any number of zillions of non-life organic chemicals and which all follow standard regular chemical rules and that is ALL there is in a living cell, nothing else, it is my "faith" that life arose from non-life simply because, as you say, all the data points to it.

 

[mindlight]

I shall be willing to participate in this discussion with those arguing against a natural origin of life once they have confirmed they have read, studied and understood the work of Stuart Kauffman. Of course, once they have done so they are unlikely to be arguing against a natural origin of life.

Meyer actually devoted some pages to Stuart Kauffmanns Model

For the benefit of those who do not have a clue who this guy is:

"Kaufmann attempted to leapfrog the "specificity" (or information) problem by proposing a means by which a self reproducing metabolic system might emerge directly from a set of "low specificity" catalytic peptides and RNA Molecules in a prebiotic soup, or what he called a "chemical minestrone". ...... Kauffmann suggests...that the first metabolic system might have arisen directly from a group of low specificity polypeptides. He proposes that once a sufficiently diverse set of catalytic molecules had assembled (in which the different peptides performed enough different catalytic functions, albeit inefficiently), the ensemble of individual molecules spontaneously underwent a kind of phase transition (akin to crystalisation) resulting in a self reproducing metabolic system."
In effect he thinks he has succeeded in bypassing the need to use the genetic information encoded in DNA.

Meyers critique of Kaufmann was along these lines:

1) There is no experimental evidence supporting the view that autocatalysis could occur.
2) The low complexity molecules could not create the high complexity ones nor the complex three dimensional geometries necessary for the cell to work. Kauffmann fails to explain where the extra information to create these came from.
3) Effectively Kauffmann displaces the question of where the information comes from an internal discussion to one of the perfectly aligned system meant to generate the biological information. "Kauffmann merely transfers the information problem from the molecules into the soup"
4) Missing answers to important questions. Kauffmann does not answer some highly specific questions of how proteins relate to DNA, RNA or any other molecular replicator, how information transfer occurs and there is no account of "how the sequence specificity of functional polypeptides arose (given that the bonding affinities that exist among amino acids don't correlate to actual amino acid sequences in known proteins)."

Others have also criticised Kauffmanns work. Shapiro for instance suggested he has not "identified.. "driver reaction" that can convert small molecules into products that increase or mobilize the organisation of the system as a whole." Also that he had not experimentally demonstrated any of this.

So Kauffmanns case for naturalism looks rather weak overall. This is not redeemed by later work with mathematical models abstracted from actual biological functions and tuned with biases that add the missing information, the presence of which, he has failed to explain.

 

[Speedwell]

Meyer actually devoted some pages to Stuart Kauffmanns Model

For the benefit of those who do not have a clue who this guy is:

"Kaufmann attempted to leapfrog the "specificity" (or information) problem by proposing a means by which a self reproducing metabolic system might emerge directly from a set of "low specificity" catalytic peptides and RNA Molecules in a prebiotic soup, or what he called a "chemical minestrone". ...... Kauffmann suggests...that the first metabolic system might have arisen directly from a group of low specificity polypeptides. He proposes that once a sufficiently diverse set of catalytic molecules had assembled (in which the different peptides performed enough different catalytic functions, albeit inefficiently), the ensemble of individual molecules spontaneously underwent a kind of phase transition (akin to crystalisation) resulting in a self reproducing metabolic system."
In effect he thinks he has succeeded in bypassing the need to use the genetic information encoded in DNA.

Meyers critique of Kaufmann was along these lines:

1) There is no experimental evidence supporting the view that autocatalysis could occur.
2) The low complexity molecules could not create the high complexity ones nor the complex three dimensional geometries necessary for the cell to work. Kauffmann fails to explain where the extra information to create these came from.
3) Effectively Kauffmann displaces the question of where the information comes from an internal discussion to one of the perfectly aligned system meant to generate the biological information. "Kauffmann merely transfers the information problem from the molecules into the soup"
4) Missing answers to important questions. Kauffmann does not answer some highly specific questions of how proteins relate to DNA, RNA or any other molecular replicator, how information transfer occurs and there is no account of "how the sequence specificity of functional polypeptides arose (given that the bonding affinities that exist among amino acids don't correlate to actual amino acid sequences in known proteins)."

Others have also criticised Kauffmanns work. Shapiro for instance suggested he has not "identified.. "driver reaction" that can convert small molecules into products that increase or mobilize the organisation of the system as a whole." Also that he had not experimentally demonstrated any of this.

So Kauffmanns case for naturalism looks rather weak overall. This is not redeemed by later work with mathematical models abstracted from actual biological functions and tuned with biases that add the missing information, the presence of which, he has failed to explain.

So what? Certainty for any of this is not being asserted, nor does uncertainty advance the cause of creationism.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

So you believe by faith in the existence of a protocell standing between raw chemicals and a fully formed cell. A concept for which their is no experimental or empirical proof.

I believe that is the most promising and most probable way cells formed, based on the evidence available.

Fossil and other evidence of early cell development shows progressive development of complexity and function. As already mentioned, protocell lipid vesicles demonstrably self-assemble in solution, RNA bases have been shown to form RNA sequences, and the basic metabolic cycles have been observed in suitable environments.

The latest 'teardown' of ribosomes shows that the earliest part was just a cradle that strung random amino acids (and other suitable molecules) together - additional features were added progressively and both protein and RNA folding became more apparent.

Further you believe again by faith that these protocells could combine and obtain the extra required information, specificity of function, organisation etc by purely natural undirected processes. It sounds about as plausible as assembling an Audi by undirected natural forces.

I think it's by far the most plausible explanation for the evidence.

If you have a better explanation - i.e. one that also aids our understanding, makes testable predictions, is as parsimonious, and doesn't raise more questions that it answers, I'd like to hear it. 'Goddidit' fails those criteria.

 

[DennisTate]

If it is "faith" that leads us to infer a protocell then it is "faith" that leads me to believe that when I flip the switch in the living room that the light will come on because of it.

This is basic inferential science. We have all the building blocks which look exactly like any number of zillions of non-life organic chemicals and which all follow standard regular chemical rules and that is ALL there is in a living cell, nothing else, it is my "faith" that life arose from non-life simply because, as you say, all the data points to it.

I am intrigued how you would react to my
suggestion that Dr. Chaim Henry Tejman deserves the Origin of Life prize:

I have nominated Dr. Chaim Tejman for the one million dollar origin of life prize.


The Fundamental Force

"The swirling and spinning motion creates circular formations. To finish
constructing the wave, the energetic matter must complete two semi-circular rounds. The figures are executed perpendicular to each other, and their energetic paths are in a state of superposition. The closed formation allows the energetic matter to move along closed energetic paths and maintain its energetic matter. It creates two internal swirls (vortices), which are neither identical nor symmetrical. In other words, the same type of energetic matter that moves along a common path that is shared by both swirls within a particular wave formation. Nevertheless, the swirls do not contain equal amounts of energy even in units with the same amount of space." (Dr. Chaim Tejman)

Grand Unified Theory: Wave Theory and Life

"The essential matter from which our universe is created is energetic matter. It behaves like living matter, creating every known entity, including living objects and even thought (which occurs through energetic matter&#8211;wave interaction). The essential structure of energetic matter is high-energy (concentrated energetic matter) electro-magnetic waves (picture above). This simple structure is the basis of everything: every energetic formation and the universe. In picture 2, we see that the DNA (double helix) of all living formations has the same structure as waves: two loops of the same energetic matter, behaving according to the same rules." (Dr. Chaim Tejman)

 

[xianghua]

You may remember Michael Behe using the analogy of a traditional mousetrap - remove any component and it ceases to function; nevertheless, several stepwise evolutionary sequences were suggested that showed his intuition was mistaken, for example: A Reducibly Complex Mousetrap.

actually not:

A Mousetrap Defended:Response to Critics: Behe, Michael

i also speak about a single protein and not about a multi-protein system.