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Member (Idle past 1509 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Information and Genetics | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Peter Member (Idle past 1509 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
quote: The point I was trying to make is also relate to ::
quote: Which is at the hub of the whole question of 'information' let aloneinformation in a bilogical context. The sub-routine with a bug has a functionally different outputto that intended (otherwise there wouldn't be a bug) so it contains a 'new' algorithm compared to that originally envisaged. 'Information' cannot be transmitted at all, only data can. And there IS a difference between data and information (whichdistinction, incidentally, Shannon (nor any other communications experts of the past) ever explicitly make). In my word analogy it doesn't actually matter what I intended toconvey by putting 'bat' on the page ... the fact is that any english speaking individual on reading that word will flash mental images through their mind of baseball bats, cricket bats, fruit bats, vampire bats, or what-have-you. Information is ONLY formed in the conscious mind of the individual observing the data, and is highly context and historically sensitive. So now we have the problem that I see with applying the term'information' to biology. Information is something that a 'viewer' obtains from data, whetheror not that data was intended to hold that 'information'. Saying that the change from 'cat' to 'bat' is a loss of informationpre-supposes that I originally intended to convey 'cat'. In the biological/genetic sense this is to start with the assumption that there IS a creator of genetic code, and that that data was intended to contain/convey some kind of 'information'. This is why a large part of my question here is 'Does the geneticcontent of a cell convey information ?' If so, what form does that information take ? Since information can only be derived from a subjectiveviewing of data, is it even relevent to biological systems in the context of evolution/creation hypotheses ?
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derwood Member (Idle past 1906 days) Posts: 1457 Joined: |
quote: Yes, I found this out after replying to you. I don't read SciAm. quote: Yes, it was pricey. Goota love those extra travellers checks... (bought it on the last day of vacation). quote: The Biotic Message is swell, if you like reading a non-expert pat himself on the back on every page. ReMine provides no citations whatsoever for his positive claims/implications, so basically it is a sub-par rehash of a litany of standard creationist arguments, with an emphasis on genetics. quote: I do? Well, how are we to examine the supernatural? How does one go about setting up controlled conditions to perform experiments on the same? quote: Is not 'natural' a synonym for 'physical', at least in this context? Is the supernatural physical? If so, how was this determined, and can it be examined by anyone? quote: As so often happens - an error of omission. My example, in fact, is on the very topic he was discussing, just not the same specific example. My example would not have been 'accurate' for him to use because it would not have supported his contention. quote: Do tell... quote: And thus endeth the flaw-finding mission. What is the justification for this? Why one? quote: Wrong. What is a 'correct' protein? Your reformulated analogy is already moot, as it suffers from the same fatal flaws that all such endeavors do. quote: Meyer the anti-evolutionist philosopher and DI fellow - what were those 'necessary' conditions? Necessary for what? For an after-the-fact specified event? The problem with these scenarios is that were the conditions different, were we based on, I don't know, silicon or something, the exact same arguments could be made! quote: And here you are wrong - you are SPECIFYING in advance what it is you want to see. That is the whole point - you are assuming that some extant protein X was the goal. What is the evidence for that? quote: I don't have any idea. Maybe the Titans? quote: Snip quote. Yes, I understand that any hypothesis about the OOL will be prone to fault-finding. Frankly, I expect this, as it is difficult if not impossible to know the exact conditions of the event(s). quote: I wholeheartedly agree, and I wonder then why creationists so often rely upon them... quote: I have no idea. I am not an abiogenesist(?), or a biochemist, or someone who does any sort of research or even pleasure reading on the topic. However, I find the notion of Divine Fiat to be unsatisfying. quote: See what I can do... quote: Indeed.... I was wondering about the Meyer book you cite - what, exactly, does Design 'explain'?
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Lewissian Member (Idle past 4756 days) Posts: 18 From: USA Joined: |
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Peter Member (Idle past 1509 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
quote: How do you detect design ? I thought IC was put forward as anevidence of design, but I don't find it compelling. Effectively the argument of IC is one of incredulity. That issince we cannot imagine a way that such a thing could have evolved then it can't have. quote: Two things about the above ... the unless part defines thenot explained now part so I don't see what you are driving at. As far as left-handedness is concerned check outthe 2001 Nobel prize for chemistry:: http://www.nobel.se/chemistry/laureates/2001/public.html The background to which points out that :: "In the early sixties it was not known whether catalytic asymmetric hydrogenation was feasible, i.e. would it be possible to catalyse an asymmetric reaction to produce an excess of one of the enantiomers? The breakthrough came in 1968 when William S. Knowles was working at the Monsanto Company, St Louis, USA. He discovered that it was possible to use a transition metal to produce a chiral catalyst that could transfer chirality to a non-chiral substrate and get a chiralproduct. The reaction was a hydrogenation in which the hydrogen atoms in H2 are added to the carbons in a double bond. A single catalyst molecule can produce millions of molecules of the desired enantiomer. " So the potential existence of catalysts that will produce thiseffect has been known for over thirty years ... if they can exist in a lab isn't it at least possible that they could have existed on earth billions of years ago ... after all none of us know exactly what the conditions were when life began to emerge. The possibility of a catalyst being responsible is quite telling I feel. We don't even have to mention that cosmic radiation can promoteone handedness to dominate ... oh I just did
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Lewissian Member (Idle past 4756 days) Posts: 18 From: USA Joined: |
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Lewissian Member (Idle past 4756 days) Posts: 18 From: USA Joined: |
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Peter Member (Idle past 1509 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
quote: (a):: Well, yes, but for life to form spontaneously the conditionswould have had to be 'just right' ... the possibility of a chemical precedent for the dominance of one-handedness is a first step in placing reasonable doubt on chirality as a bar to the naturalistic emergence of life. (b):: But the catalysts are much more simple than amino-acids,and could perhaps emerge naturally. (c):: I think they use this process to make menthol.
quote: My understanding of 'Transition Metal' is the bunch of chemicalelements in the middle of the periodic table ... in which case they can occur naturally. Even if they are rare now, that doesn't mean they have always been rare ... it's unknowable, but adds to the reasonable doubt (over this one issue). quote: I thought there were some Right handed proteins in somebacterial cells ... might be wrong about that as I'm dredging up memories from a debate on this issue I had about two years ago ... I've got some e-mails stored somewhere Anyhow ... that is a problem, but then a part of the anti-abiogenesisargument is that amino-acids wouldn't even survive that long. So perhaps we have localised conditions were we generate amdmaintain a left-handed dominance. The catalysts I pointed out would allow this if we can find another set of conditions that allows amino-acid survival and combination into peptides. [b] [QUOTE]
Secondly, the amino acids that they manage to get to be L-forms don't just 'get together'. All of these products have a specific amino acid sequences. The scientists have to acquire L-forms by using synthetic catalysts, and then put the amino acids in the right order to form the right substance. About half of the amino acid sites are called active sites, at which a wrong amino acid could be fatal (take sickle-cell anemia for an example). Did I mention that peptide and non-peptide bonds occur at roughly equal frequency in nautre, as well? You also have to get all of the amino acids to form peptide bonds with each other.[/b][/QUOTE] I think that's jumping ahead (unless I mis-understand) to DNAisn't it ? Your talking about 'fatality' while I'm just discussing prdocutionof proteins structurally similar to those required for life as we know it. quote: What year was Behe's book ? I read about some Japanese research in a news article two yearsago that said that they had found poly-peptides forming around deep sea thermal vents. The vents act as a kind of poly-peptide factory where some amino-acids join in the vent, come out on currents, and are fed back into the system. I'll try to dig out anything on that too.
quote: How deep into water can UV penetrate ? I seem to remember thatit's not far, but I could be wrong. [Hope you have/had a nice trip ] [This message has been edited by Peter, 07-23-2002]
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mark24 Member (Idle past 5225 days) Posts: 3857 From: UK Joined: |
Bump.......
Fred? Where'd you go? Message 25 please. Mark ------------------Occam's razor is not for shaving with.
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Lewissian Member (Idle past 4756 days) Posts: 18 From: USA Joined: |
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Edited by Lewissian, : Outdated.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1509 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
quote: I think I must have mis-understood the context in which youraised the issue. quote: The article makes four points:: 1) It questions the starting/environmental assumptions made.This seems to be pot calling kettle black to me. What were the exact conditions on Earth at the time of the emergence of the first amino-acids. Niether of us know so this objection seems contrived. 2) Raises temperature objection ... when the research itself suggestsa 'quenching' effect to combat this. And then mentions chirality. ... which is kinda what we were talking about anyhow so I'll come back to that. 3) Seems a little odd. In a limited experiment don't you expectlimited, but indicative results ? Perhaps the claims that this IS how it all started are overstated but to say that it is categorically not the way it happened based upon one small-scale experiment is equally dogmatic. My feeling is that it lends credibility to the potential fornaturalistic formation of the first amino-acids, and possibly proteins. 4) Pretty much as above. I don't claim to have the answer (I'd certainly be up fora Nobel prize if I did ) but the refutation article appears to me (as a trained researcher) to be a knee-jerk, assuming invalidity style of article. It has not critiqued the methods and conclusions from an impartial stand-point, but sought problems because the position is contrary to those held by the author. Inevitably some of the raised objections are not really relevant. quote: Transition metals are just elements, and they occur in nature(otherwise we wouldn't know about them ... i.e. they are not transuranic elements manufactured via 'atomic' processing). The catalysts are relatively simple ... and perhaps are notthe oly chiral catalysts possible. One molecule of catalysts can produce millions of molecules with a chiral imbalance. How does that complicated matters. If producing a simplemolecule can increase the yield of the right kind of more complex molecules doesn't that help ? Always wondered about this chirality issue in any case ...R- and S-Limonene are lemon and orange smells ... doesn't that mean that either the orange or the lemon has a left-handed protein that works fine ? And don't some bacteria have left-handers in their cell membranes ? We don't appear to need ALL r-handed, only a tendancy for R-handed. The possibility of catalysing such a dominance surely has a littlebearing. quote: EO - 404 Error I found the above, which, even discounting the organic carbonimpurities, suggests that UV-B (at least) is rapidly disapated in water. So if the amino-acids were at deep-sea location, that wouldnot be such a bar to production I guess. quote: No problem, I've been a bit busy myself.
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John Inactive Member |
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Peter:
[B][QUOTE]I found the above, which, even discounting the organic carbon impurities, suggests that UV-B (at least) is rapidly disapated in water. So if the amino-acids were at deep-sea location, that wouldnot be such a bar to production I guess. [/b][/quote] Lipid molecules, major players in the abiogenesis debate, would float on the surface. ------------------http://www.hells-handmaiden.com
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Peter Member (Idle past 1509 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
[QUOTE]Originally posted by John:
[B][QUOTE]Originally posted by Peter: [B][QUOTE]I found the above, which, even discounting the organic carbon impurities, suggests that UV-B (at least) is rapidly disapated in water. So if the amino-acids were at deep-sea location, that wouldnot be such a bar to production I guess. [/b][/quote] Lipid molecules, major players in the abiogenesis debate, would float on the surface.[/B][/QUOTE] Oh. What if it was all sparked off by an asteroid impact ? Sudden random thought I know, but the collection of thoughts leadingup to the wondering is:: Some scientists postulate that organic compounds could surviveon asteroids enetering earth atmosphere. Cosmic radiation can affect the distributions of enatiomers A dust cloud resulting from a large enough asteroid collision couldproduce particles in the atmosphere which would dissipate UV radiation It is considered that in the early life of the solar system such impacts were not that rare. Could provoke siesmic activity resulting in heat release frommantle (energy source). ---------> Just a thought ....
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John Inactive Member |
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Peter:
[B]A dust cloud resulting from a large enough asteroid collision could produce particles in the atmosphere which would dissipate UV radiation It is considered that in the early life of the solar system such impacts were not that rare.[/quote] [/b] I'm thinking that most of the high frequency impact period would be over by the time we could start to think about abiogenesis. So as an energy source and UV shield, I'm not betting on asteroids. As suppliers of organic molecules though, they seem likely candidates.
quote: I suspect mantle heat release to have been very important, but not as a result of impacts. Hydrogen sulfide spews out of hydrothermal vents to this day. Last I heard, hydrogen sulfide eaters are considered to be the first complex organism. Still, that doesn't mean they were the first. In fact, they are pretty far down the chain it seems to me. ------------------http://www.hells-handmaiden.com
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Peter Member (Idle past 1509 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
...but could the high presence of incoming rocks
have promoted an atmosphere much different to today which would block UV for extended periods. As I understand current thinking it is considered thatmany (varying sized) asteroid impacts happened in the early life of the earth.
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John Inactive Member |
quote: Sure. I don't see why not, but whether it happened that way or not I do not know; and don't have time to try to look it up right now.
quote: That's how I understand it as well. The first billion years or so would have been hellish for that reason. The next billion, when life got its slow start, I don't know about. I need to check. ------------------http://www.hells-handmaiden.com
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