Abiogenesis

every wonder why geologists can tell so much information from a rock?while the compositional elements of rock can be random, rocks are made up of minerals. and minerals have definite structures that form under definite conditions.not only that, but the difference in organization of the composition of rock (sedimentary vs metamorphic) has information--such as how deep it was in the earth.we can tell a lot about rocks and minerals just by their structure. They have a lot of information. But that information is useless except to us.I honestly don't see why you're making such a big deal about this. It's pretty simple, really.

AZPaul3 wrote: Pure chance doesn't do it for me. Have you any probability models to determine what those odds were? I believe its was Hoyle and Wickramasinghe who calculated the probability of the first protein molecule to be on the order 1 in 10^120.”HM

Is there any particular reason why we should credit Hoyle and Wickramsinghe's calculation?TTFN,WK

I don’t know about those two and I’m being lazy in not looking them up, but, seems to me the first question is “What first protein?” Proteins are chains of amino acids. Reasonable speculations indicate a whole slog of aminos in a pre-biotic Earth environment. Doesn’t seem to me to be so far fetched that two such thingies glom on to each other and viola . first protein. Probably doesn’t do much except float around looking for more candidates to join with.10 to some big number seems a bit linear in thinking, doesn’t it? If we’re talking some large mega-protein like hemoglobin then I can understand the incredulity of its spontaneous generation, but, I hope this is not what is being offered here.Cannot a simple chain of, say 5 aminos, or maybe even 50 aminos, not be considered a protein? The incredulity certainly lessens at this level. And if we take the reasonable assumption of many millions of trials daily over many millions of years, does this not lessen it even more?

This thread has reached the 300 post limit and so is being closed. Thanks, everyone, for your participation.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director