"Those who think scientists understand the issues of prebiotic chemistry are wholly misinformed. Nobody understands them. Maybe one day we will. But that day is far from today. It would be far more helpful (and hopeful) to expose students to the massive gaps in our understanding. They may find a firmer—and possibly a radically different—scientific theory.
The basis upon which we as scientists are relying is so shaky that we must openly state the situation for what it is: it is a mystery."
Self-Sustained Replication of an RNA Enzyme Tracey A. Lincoln, Gerald F. Joyce
They actually started with 3 carefully selected RNA strings and used one to join the other two small pieces into one piece (ligation), in a carefully controlled multi-step process. It's pretty much unlike anything likely to happen in nature.
Who was it here that said we know how life started? Anyone?
Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien. I am Mancunian. I am Brum. I am London.
"Life, don't talk to me about life" - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed. Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved." - Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.
It would be more useful if they could unearth an eminent, atheistic biologist to quote from.
Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien. I am Mancunian. I am Brum. I am London.
"Life, don't talk to me about life" - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed. Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved." - Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.
How new species emerge in nature is still incompletely understood and difficult to study directly. Self-replicating molecules provide a simple model that allows us to capture the fundamental processes that occur in species formation. We have been able to monitor in real time and at a molecular level the diversification of self-replicating molecules into two distinct sets that compete for two different building blocks (‘food’) and so capture an important aspect of the process by which species may arise. The results show that the second replicator set is a descendant of the first and that both sets are kinetic products that oppose the thermodynamic preference of the system. The sets occupy related but complementary food niches. As diversification into sets takes place on the timescale of weeks and can be investigated at the molecular level, this work opens up new opportunities for experimentally investigating the process through which species arise both in real time and with enhanced detail.
This also begs the question of when "life" develops -- I would say when evolution begins, and that looks like these molecules qualify.
Physicist Rob Sheldon made a pithy observation regarding the University of Groningen’s latest press release and the new paper by Sandownik, Mattia, Nowak and Otto: “If this paper were about anything but ‘peptides’, it would be called ‘crystallization’.” The origin of abiotic species: Seven epic fails
quote:Discovery Institute > Multimedia Library > Center for Science and Culture > ID the Future (podcast) > Physicist Rob Sheldon on the History of Cosmological Thought, Pt. 1
On this episode of ID the Future, physicist Rob Sheldon talks with Casey Luskin about how there has been a paradigm shift in cosmological thought. Though cosmologists used to believe that the universe existed eternally in a static state, they now see a finite universe that had a beginning. Dr. Sheldon also explores the implications of this shift for theism, materialism, and intelligent design.
and
quote:Reasonable Faith, Honolulu Chapter Home > 2016 > 11 > Physicist Rob Sheldon: What ID is really about | Uncommon Descent
“Einstein spent the last 40 years of his life trying to combine QM and Gravity and failed. Stephen Hawking also reported that he failed to find a theory of QM gravity. But the 21st century is discovering that the solution lies in ID, in design, in information. We haven’t got a QM theory of gravity yet, but we have a series of “standard models” with gobs and gobs of “fine tuning”, of design, of functional information. From the Higgs to the failure of SUSY, to the failure of dark matter WIMPS, to the failure of inflation, of BBN (Li-7 problem) and on up the chain to OOL, we have so much unaccounted-for information it’s embarrassing.”
Just asking ...
... made a pithy observation ...
"Pithy" because you like it and the implications of denigrating the fact that it is peptides?
... “If this paper were about anything but ‘peptides’, it would be called ‘crystallization’.” ...
Which becomes a meaningless statement because we are talking about peptides ... this is known as a "red herring" fallacy.
So the questions remain:
do we have self-replicating molecules? Yes No ...
did they "evolve" and diversify into two different types of self-replicating molecules? Yes No
does this "evolution" show the possibility of life's beginning? Yes No
do we have self-replicating molecules? No did they "evolve" and diversify into two different types of self-replicating molecules? No does this "evolution" show the possibility of life's beginning? No
do we have self-replicating molecules? No did they "evolve" and diversify into two different types of self-replicating molecules? No does this "evolution" show the possibility of life's beginning? No
Inquiring minds want to know ... Which ones?
Ones not in denial of the evidence, of course. People with open-minded skepticism and no preconceptions.
Yes, that's the Catch-22 that creationists keep setting up to trap us in a lose-lose situation: abiogenesis cannot be proven to work until we've created life in the lab -- by creating life in the lab you've proven that it takes intelligence to create life and that it could not happen in nature.
Wrong!
A PhD Chemistry friend told me that it is impossible for us to cause a chemical reaction that cannot happen in nature. All we can do is to create the conditions for that reaction to happen, but if the reaction cannot happen in nature then we cannot force it to happen.
Therefore, if in the laboratory we can get the reactions going for life to start, then that would mean that those reactions would have also happened in nature under the right conditions. Your Catch-22 is bullshit.
So why don't we see new life springing up all the time in nature? Sidney Fox' experience with proteinoid microspheres offers the answer. Previous batches appeared to be unstable, degenerating after a few days. Then he created a new batch under sterile conditions which remained stable for years until they destroyed it because the research was completed. The reason why we do not see new life springing up all the time in nature is because of its name: food! The life that's already here just eats that stuff up!
Edited by dwise1, : Added "to trap us in a lose-lose situation"
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