Quality Control the Gold Standard

The work I described was by Spiegelman back in the 1960s, and the original papers do not seem to be online. I was able to find this abstract to a more recent paper where Spiegleman was a co-author: RNA Replication: Required Intermediates and the Dissociation of Template, Product, and QP Replicase. It's closely related, but the work is 15 years more recent than what I described and seems to be much more narrowly focused.You can also look into the work of Eigen, here's a link to an abstract for an article that appeared in Scientific American: The origin of genetic information.Or you can look into the work of Szostak, for example Isolation of new ribozymes from a large pool of random sequences.And there are many other researchers, of course. I just mentioned a few whose name I happened to run across while reading up about it. The point is that the origins of life community is very actively engaged in research. The concern that you stated back in Message 74 was that since primitive replicators are error prone, how could they have become the more accurate replicators in today's cell machinery? This is an area of active research.--Percy

You asked about how the poor accuracy of primitive relicators could have become the highly reliable copying mechanisms in today's genetic machinery, and I referred you to some work that addressed your inquiry. Naturally this does not address the origin of RNA, because you did not ask about it, and because that is not the topic of this thread. This thread is about seven sigma, remember? If you'd like to address the origin of RNA then you should open a new thread. Likely the same thing would happen: you'll claim absolutely no progress has been made until someone contradicts you with references.Replicators were refined through a selection process that lasted potentially hundreds of millions of years in a laboratory the size of the entire globe. This is a much more powerful crucible for design than any human laboratory.--Percy

I again suggest that you learn how to quote. If you had done so when replying to Rrhain you might have noticed he was talking about who writes the textbooks, not who reviews them. It is the publishers who have the final say as to a textbook's contents, not biologists or anyone on their review board, so as Rrhain says, if they want to sell textbooks in Texas then they'll follow the requirements of Texas's state board of education. This isn't called for under any circumstances, but if you must do this you might consider picking an occasion where you didn't screw up.--Percy

The concern is about public school textbooks, not university textbooks. That's why PaulK and I talked about the necessity for publishers to be consistent with the requirements of state boards of education. Universities not only do not face this issue, but biology textbooks at the university level *are* written by biologists, which is usually not the case for public school textbooks.The controversy encroaches on public perception when creationists attempt to have their views represented in public schools by lobbying publishers and boards of education. This is what PaulK and I were talking about. Public school textbooks are not written by biologists, and the textbooks are selected by boards of education, often at the state level, and not by teachers.This is all off-topic, of course, but I just wanted to briefly point out where you were wrong.--Percy

Your topic is seven sigma. Your question was about how primitive replicators could improve in accuracy. I provided references to work studying how this can happen. This work rebuts your claim that seven sigma could not happen naturally.--Percy

The term "rna" doesn't even appear in your opening post, only DNA. Your main point seemed to be this: The experiments I cited do precisely what you claim here is impossible, improve replication accuracy through a process of inaccurate replication and selection. There are no known limits to the improvements such a process can achieve. One of the significant problems faced by origins of life research is that for the most part we don't know what the conditions on the early earth actually were. The experiment didn't include as one its goals a replication of the early earth environment. The goal was to see if an evolutionary process could improve the accuracy and speed of replicators, which answers your last question about "what constituted the measure of improvement."--Percy

Really? This is from http://www.humble.k12.tx.us/KHS_profile.htm: Caught exaggerating again, I see. And while Kingwood H.S. is rated Exemplary by the Texas Education Agency, I could found nothing about any national academic ranking.Regardless of your personal experience at a single high school in Texas, it is common knowledge that the Texas State Board of Education provides lists of conforming and non-conforming textbooks to the school districts under its jurisdiction. In the biology discipline there are probably around 5 to 10 books on the conforming list, and I expect your group chose from among these books. To go outside the conforming list would be to risk a poor assessment by the Texas Education Agency.AbE: This is all off-topic, of course. I just felt it important to correct your misstatements about textbooks.--PercyThis message has been edited by Percy, 02-14-2006 11:19 AM

Obviously neither can you. This, too, is from the website: The freshman class doesn't attend Kingwood High School at present. If the freshman class is considered part of the high school for administrative purposes, this wasn't made clear by either you or the website. But it doesn't matter, because even with the freshman class included you're still off by about a thousand students.But you're drifting off the point, which is that the set of textbooks you were selecting from were likely on the Texas State Board of Education's conforming list. And PaulK's original point was that state boards of education of large states like California and Texas have a significant influence on what publishers put in textbooks. If these large states request reduced treatments for evolution, then that is what will happen. And has happened. This isn't any secret. It makes big splashes in the news several times a year.--Percy

As I've stated several times already, it is likely the original process, whatever its nature, took hundreds of millions of years in a laboratory the size of the entire globe. It is highly unlikely to be duplicated from beginning to end in a single experiment in a lab. I would like to see this too, though it is highly unlikely that such a lengthy process of progression could be demonstrated in a single experiment. It would much more likely be a series of many experiments produced over decades and decades of work by scientists in the origins of life community.I understand that your skeptical that science will ever achieve this, but personal incredulity is a poor reason for rejecting anything. There are, for example, excellent theoretical reasons for believing that matter cannot exceed the speed of light, but you have produced nothing equivalent for believing that natural processes are insufficient for producing highly reliable replicators. Scientists have shown that it is possible in relatively short periods of time to improve replicator reliability by quite a bit. I would point out here that your claim that it was from .0001 to .0002 are figures just pulled from the air, and given your errors in other areas of math, such as your claim that 5000 is the proper approximation for 4013, they are not to be trusted.Since the laboratory evidence shows that what you claimed was impossible is actually possible, now it is only a matter of degree and extent.--Percy

Just as you have the Olympic athelete as an example of the possible, so do we have the replicators in the machinery of the modern cell as an example of the possible. Just as you shouldn't be postulating to cut the time for the world record for the 100 meter butterfly in half, no one in science is postulating eight or nine sigma replicators. We're only postulating that what we've observed taking place in the natural world arose through natural processes.There are other factors you're ignoring. Someone in this thread, I think it's Crash, is trying to get you to understand that there are more types of mutations than just single substitutions. Another factor that you may be ignoring is that the measurements of the reliability of replication in human DNA could be post-facto, i.e., after a viable embryo forms. The number of failures before this stage is not well understood, and measurements of mutation rates during sperm/egg union are probably lacking. The point is that you're probably overestimating the reliability of replication, but I can't say by how much.--Percy

The first paragraph of my post was on-topic and rebutted your point. I can do no more than that. Oh, okay. We usually request that members make their points in the posts, not by handing out reading assignments.--Percy

Hi Evopeach,Some clarification for you. Sidelined was only pointing out, in an indirect way, that you are confused. You accused him of calling Gish a hack and a fraud when it was Rrhain who did that.--Percy

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