Darwin- would he have changed his theory?

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AdminAsgara
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Ok, gotcha.......thanks.This message has been edited by SirPimpsalot, 10-23-2004 02:37 PM

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"Behold My signifigance!" said SirPimpsalot, and all was right. "I am the Lambda and the Kappa, the Second and the Runner-Up."

A thought has just occured to me........if we know the exact process by which chemicals supposedly became life.......and we know exactly which chemicals to use, why don't scientists just engineer abiogenisis, and prove it's possible?

We don't know the exact process. Who said we did? The problem here is that the chemical precursors of life don't exactly leave fossils.

Shouldn't the exact process be easy to figure out? I mean, we have our own genetic make up to let us know which amino acids to use......which way to combine them.......etc.

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"Behold My signifigance!" said SirPimpsalot, and all was right. "I am the Lambda and the Kappa, the Second and the Runner-Up."

Goodness, no. Wouldn't you think, if it was easy to figure out, we'd have done that by now? It's not for want of trying, at this point. Well, "which amino acids to use" is all of them, at least, all of the left-handed ones. But here's the problem - all living things are made of the same amino acids. Unfortunately, our genetic code doesn't have that many instructions. The genetic code is not, as is commonly believed, a "blueprint of life", in the sense that a blueprint is an abstraction of the physical shape of something. All our genetic code does is make proteins. It doesn't describe structure, or anything like that. There's not enough genes in the genome to do that.

So, what you're saying is, we haven't decoded the genetic language yet.......right?Well, doesn't this go back to my book analogy? That first life assembling itself would be like a book writing itself, because of the inherant amount of information that would have to be present in the little bugger in order for it to be life? It's not just a matter of viable amino acids and protein molecules assembling itself.......it would have to assemble itself into a kind of language in which was present the info the organism would need to find food, metabolize the food and replicate, right?

Even if an organic compound that's as complex as a cell could assemble itself naturalistically, where does all that info it needs come from?

What? No, it's been decoded for, I dunno, 50 years or more. Here it is:It's a simple as can be - three bases code for any given amino acid, or they're a stop codon that tells the process where to end. There's not actually all that much information in the genome. Just recently, scientists redacted the estimate of the number of genes in the human genome from the upper 30k down to 20k. That's 20,000 genes. That's not a lot. That's almost as few as a certain mustard plant, I understand.

What information?Snowflakes self-assemble; crystals self-assemble into very complex structures. Neither one of them requires any "information" to do so. We're just talking about chemical reactions, here - chemicals don't need "information", whatever that is, to react.

That's obviously a lot of info, as my genetics can build me and science can't build anything even approaching my level of complexity........

Ok, so why can't we build a simple single-celled life form? Has anyone ever tried?

Didn't I just tell you that it wasn't your genetics that built you? There's no "genetic blueprint" in your cells that describes the structure of your body.There's just a complicated molecule that catalyzes protein synthesis. It's just chemistry. Just because chemicals react they way they're supposed to, over and over again, doesn't mean they need "information", whatever that is, to do so.

We don't know what proteins we need, because we don't know how to predict, yet, what the function of a protein will be from it's genetic representation.It's called the "folding problem." Proteins do what they do because they take a certain shape. We have a very limited ability to predict how a protein will fold because it's a very, very complicated interaction of literally thouands of atoms. Well, right now we're working to pin down exactly what the "minimal orgamism" would be. There's currently no such thing as a "simple single-celled life form." All the single-celled life on Earth is the result, at this point, of billions of years of evolution.When we know what the minimal organism has to be, then we can start sythesizing it. At that point it shouldn't take longer than about ten years.