The first living cell
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Micaiah said:
What units are you expecting an answer in? What units should be used when quantifying a measurement of DNA?
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- Dec 25, 2003
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God created the first fully "alive" and replicatable unicellular organism out of the chemicals (dust) of the earth combined with His moist (water) breath.
Now please address the fossil and genetic evidence that evolution has occured over the last 3.5 billion of years or so including horse, whale, bird, mammal and hominid tranistional fossil series, etc. etc.
Or did I misunderstand the point of the OP which has about as much relevance to the Theory of Evoution as asking how many angels could dance on the head of a pin?
Now please address the fossil and genetic evidence that evolution has occured over the last 3.5 billion of years or so including horse, whale, bird, mammal and hominid tranistional fossil series, etc. etc.
Or did I misunderstand the point of the OP which has about as much relevance to the Theory of Evoution as asking how many angels could dance on the head of a pin?
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What do you think is appropriate? I'm assuming that you are asking the question for a reason. What units are appropriate for that reason?Micaiah said:
What units will be meaningful for you to be able to understand how much DNA is in a cell?
If you were going to express the amount of DNA in a cell, what units would you use?
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The units you use will depend I guess on how you define the nature of the DNA of the first living cell. The purpose of the thread was for this to be discussed and quantified.
I do not believe in evolution and hence do not have a belief on the nature of the first life form. I am asking evolutionsists for their views on the matter.
I do not believe in evolution and hence do not have a belief on the nature of the first life form. I am asking evolutionsists for their views on the matter.
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notto said:
I would use the number of base pairs.
But then again, I am not him.
And I also just learned in Genetics class that a single organism can make a whole variety of enzymes from a single strain of DNA.... by using different combinations of introns/exons, or even by moving the mRNA back a single base pair in the Ribosomes, so that you don't read acu-cug-aag, but a-cuc-uga-ag. Fascinating stuff. And that means that the number of base pairs isn't a good measure for the amount of information. (although I doubt that the first organisms had complicated stuff like that in them..)
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Micaiah said:
Oh and yes, as far as I know, the current hypothesis would state the number of DNA base pairs in the first living cells as exactly '0'.
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rmwilliamsll
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Micaiah said:
there are a number of competing hypothesis for abiogenesis.
the necessary elements are pretty simple:
concentration mechanism
boundary
self-replicator-simple enough to spontaneous form, and self-catalytic
dna appears to be too complex to evolve without substantial supporting elements. hence the rna bootstrap scenario.
but you know all that because you googled and studied the issue before you tried to rebuttal it.
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None, zero, nada. Although, you should define what you mean by the first living cells. The main hypothesis, which I believe, is that the first cells were simple sphere-like structures that incorporated the abiotic material in their surroundings into themeselves and were able to split. But if you think of living cells traditionally, the first genetic information was stored in RNA. It would be foolish to think that a complex two-stranded system evolved before a single strand.
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Biochemists have used comparitive genomics to sort out the order that amino acids were added into the genetic code. These data were recently summarized by Edward N. Trifonov,
2004 "The Triplet Code From First Principles" Journal of Biomolecular Structure & Dynamics, ISSN 0739-1102 Volume 22, Issue Number 1, (2004).
There is a url posted in a thread within the last few weeks for a PDF of the paper- but I have not kept it- sorry.
2004 "The Triplet Code From First Principles" Journal of Biomolecular Structure & Dynamics, ISSN 0739-1102 Volume 22, Issue Number 1, (2004).
There is a url posted in a thread within the last few weeks for a PDF of the paper- but I have not kept it- sorry.
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rmwilliamsll
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Jet Black said:
that is the problem of the double question.
you ask a question that assumes an answer to the first one.
the proper way to handle the question is to draw the questioners attention to his logical error and to point out your answer to the first question.
how much dna did the first cell contain?
the 1st question is "did the first cell contain dna?"
thanks for pointing this out, i missed it, answered properly that dna is to complex to be used, but you are right it is a double question.
have you stopped beating your wife?
the first question is do you beat your wife?
the answer is no.
it is a real common problem and tactic:
for example, the cop stops you for spending and asks "do you mind opening your truck?"
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The results from Trifonov's study suggest a two base code used for fairly short peptides using only about 10 amino acids. Such a simple "critter" might not even seem "alive" to us today, and I wonder if there are any still around that have been overlooked.
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