Converting raw energy into biological energy

Rob writes:All I am saying is that these theories offer no emperical proof of anything.

Furthermore, the creation of these systems by human manipulation only proves intelligent design (ironically for the case of proving inteligent design is not necessary).

Rob writes:And none of those papers suggest anything resembling the emmense metabolisms we see today. What created them? What good is one one thousanth of a solution when you have a whole factory to account for?

Behe writes:I greatly respect the work of my colleagues who study the development and behavior of organisms within an evolutionary framework, and I think that evolutionary biologists have contributed enormously to our understanding of the world.

The ones that we already knew were sent by humans. Look, it's not hard to go down to Radio Shack and look at a radio if you want to know how a human being might generate an intelligent signal that could travel through space.

The "human manipulation" is only to recreate the supposed conditions of the ancient earth. In other words, the experiments are attempts to create ATP in the same way and under the same conditions as it was created on the ancient earth. The experimenters set up the conditions and then observe what happens, making it as if they had actually been there as observers when the first ATP formed.The "human manipulation" is merely to recreate those very special early-earth conditions, and definitely does not include any manipulation of molecules to force the outcome.These experiments are essentially simulations of conditions on the early earth.

He only finds evidence for a designer in certain microbiological structures that he believes are irreducibly complex, which apparently includes ATP.But as Molbiogirl's citations of the work Behe has such respect for show, ATP is not irreducibly complex. It arises naturally under conditions we believe might have been present on the early earth.

Percy: Behe writes:

“Back in the days of Charles Darwin, relatively little was known about the complexity (the enormous complexity) of the microscopic world -the microscopic aspects of living organisms. There was a view in the latter part of the nineteenth century that a living cell was essentially a featureless bag of enzymes; all, kind of in a true solution. Not much in the way of detailed three dimensional complexity.But of course in the twentieth century, we’ve made enormous strides in understanding that that’s not the case at all. There is a very great degree of intricacy of architecture down in the cell units. So today, everybody understands about bits and bites, and so perhaps a useful illustration of the complexity of, say the DNA molecule, might be helpful.You can calculate the number of bits contained in tightly packed DNA material that would fill one cubic millimeter of space as equaling 1.9 times 10 to the 18th power, bits ( or, 1,900,000,000,000,000,000). Now that number, is by many orders of magnitude, vastly greater than the storage capacity of the best supercomputing machines. Their storage capacity is far less, than the storage capacity in the DNA Molecule.Now moreover, the DNA itself as it functions in a living cell has about one hundred different proteins involved with just its own functioning. And then you have these tens of thousands of other proteins in the living cell also involved. So we have now a picture of immense sub-microscopic complexity. And so no longer is it a reasonable proposition to think that simple chemical events could have any chance at all, to generate the kind of complexity we see in the very simplest living organisms.So, we have not the slightest chance of a chemical evolutionary origin for even the simplest of cells, with the new knowledge that’s accumulated in this century.”

Rob writes:Supposedly very special simulations...Anyone with a brain knows that I can prove anything with math if we start off by agreeing on wrong assumptions. Manipulating the environment is equal to manipulating the molecules in the environment.

Certainly you know better...

Rob writes:Behe has never said ATP is irreducibly complex.

Jerry Bergman writes:ATP is an example of a molecule that displays irreducible complexity which cannot be simplified and still function (Behe, 1996).

Actually, radio signals travel through space all the time. And none of them are human created. It's called the electromagnetic spectrum. But most of it contains no information... just random noise.

Anyway, way back in Message 6 you claimed that ATP is required to create ATP. Are you now dropping that claim?

Rob writes:For example, can any living organism live without relying upon either fermentation, photosynthesis, or respiration to get it's supply of ATP?None are fueled directly by any form of energy other than ATP.

Rob writes:And how many thousnads of individual parts does just a simple prokaryotic cell membrane contain in it's 3 dimensional glory.

Rob writes:No unwhole parts will do... just as my truck won't self assemble if I put all of the thousands of parts in the garage and wait. I need a mechanic. And my truck is crude and primitive technology compared to these systems

Setting up the initial conditions can be construed as human intervention, but the intervention is with existing conditions in order to impose the insert: construedconditions of the early earth in a laboratory. Once those conditions have been replicated insert: even though they are construed then what follows should be a reenactment of what happened on the ancient earth. There is no human manipulation during the experiment.

All roads lead to Rome, it is said, and similarly there are many ways to synthesize AMP. A book for chemists on my shelf lists eight different ways to make adenine (which is the top part of AMP without the foundation); the remainder of the molecule can be put together in a variety of ways also. Chemists who want to synthesize adenine, however, use completely different routes from that used by cells. Because they involve reactions in oily liquids at extremes of acidity, these conditions would cause the quick demise of any known organism.In the early 1960s scientists who were interested in the origin of life discovered an interesting way to synthesize adenine. They saw that the simple molecules of hydrogen cyanide and ammonia- which are thought to have been plentiful in the early days of earth- will form adenine under the right conditions. The ease of the reaction so impressed Stanley Miller that he called it "the rock of faith" for origin-of-life researchers. But there's a problem lurking in the background: Hydrogen cyanide and ammonia are not used in the biosynthesis of AMP. But even if they were on the ancient earth, and even if that had something to do with the origin of life (which is problamatic on a number of other grounds), the synthesis of adenine from simple molecules in a chemists flask gives us absolutely no information about how the route for making the molecule first developed in the cell.Stanley Miller was impressed by the ease of sythesis of adenine from simple molecules, but the cell eschews simple synthesis. In fact, if we dissolved in water (using the formal chemical names) ribose-5-phosphate, glutamine, aspartic acid, glycine, N10-formylTHF, carbon dioxide, and energy packets of ATP and GTP- all the small molecules that are used by the cell to build AMP- and let them sit for a long time (say, a thousand or a million years) we would not get any AMP. If Stanley Miller mixed those chemicals hoping for another rock of the faith, he would be quite disappointed.Shoes might be all we need to get to Rome from Milan. But we will need more that shoes to get to Rome from Sicily; we will need a boat. And to get to Rome from Mars, we need very high-tech equipment indeed. To make AMP from the ingredients that the cell uses we also need very high-tech equipment; the enzymes that catalyze the reactions of the pathway.In the absence of the enzymes, AMP is simply not made by the reactions shown in figure 7-1. The point is that even if adenine or AMP can be made by simple pathways, those pathways are no more precursors to the biological route of synthesis than shoes are precursors to rocket ships.

And before ATP/NADH/GTP/etc. existed, there was thermosynthesis, i.e. free energy gain from thermal cycling.The first organisms (what could rightfully be called life aka prokaryotic cells) obtained their energy by a first protein named pF1 that worked on a thermal variation of the binding change mechanism of today's ATP sythase enzyme.In other words, the reactions necessary to assemble prebiotic compounds (and then protocells and then prokaryotic cells) are thermodynamically favorable.And, no, this is not up for debate, Rob.

Thermodynamically favorable reactions are the reason it's easy.All you can argue, really, is that the necessary constituents for assembling "the molecules of life" were not present on prebiotic Earth.

Anyway, way back in Message 6 you claimed that ATP is required to create ATP. Are you now dropping that claim?

Anyway, it does not solve the problem. The factory (photosynthesis http://www.creationwiki.net/Chloroplast ) that converts raw energy into ATP is itself dependant upon ATP.

Rob writes: Doddy: This analogy falls over, because macroscopic systems don't compare with microscopic ones. Your truck parts won't be floating around your garage, bumping into one another, but biological molecules will. If the truck parts that are fit together bump into one another, they won't usually stick without a bolt or rivet to stick them, but biological molecules fit together because of their intrinsic properties. No truck part has electrostatics and van der Waal forces to worry about, as those are tiny forces, but very real on the scale of biological molecules. In most ways, the truck is much harder to build than a biological system. In part, this is why I get so fed up with the IDists calling flagella 'outboard motors' and so forth, because an outboard motor is way harder to see self-assemble.