SomeoneWild
Fiesta's Angels
- Sep 10, 2006
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Aliens Exist?
- Thread starter SteveMCsteve
- Start date
Knarfi
Yaba-daba-doo!
Nope.
Sometimes not evereything comes with the science that you need to know about.
nou
Knarfi
Yaba-daba-doo!
¿¿
seriously though, i doubt you actually knew what you said, scientifically speaking
If I didn't then I wouldn't of said it.
or did you mean the: "Nope.
Sometimes not evereything comes with the science that you need to know about." bit??
or did you mean the: "Nope.
Sometimes not evereything comes with the science that you need to know about." bit??
Knarfi
Yaba-daba-doo!
Actually that didnt make much sense to me at all either, but i was refering to what you first said
oohh.
Yeah. I know what I mean ^^
but I have troubles trying to use the right words to explain what I mean.
and the 2nd bit didn't sound right either. Buuuut. yeah...
Yeah. I know what I mean ^^
but I have troubles trying to use the right words to explain what I mean.
and the 2nd bit didn't sound right either. Buuuut. yeah...
Altitudes
Stay Frosty
Nope.
Sometimes not evereything comes with the science that you need to know about.
At first I thought you were trolling people but turns out you are a 15 year old girl. You will (hopefully) learn more in school.
Knarfi
Yaba-daba-doo!
blindguard
Member
dawnghost
Borderline
Show me exactly how abiogenesis works. If you can't, you also can't simply imply "science will discover how it does sooner or later", and assume abiogenesis can happen in another part of the cosmos.
Leandro
¬¬
The beauty of that argument is that it's not concerned with the details of abiogenesis. It just assumes its probability is nonzero (and it is!) and takes an insanely huge sample to argue in favour of more than one planet holding life. Of course, it's not a solid scientific argument. It's heuristic, I'll grant you that. However, it's a means of justifying belief without resorting to faith or whatever other slippery slope fallacy one could come up with.
Then again, abiogenesis is more or less well understood. Take some chemicals, put them into an energetically active environment (such as the young earth) and voilà, nucleotides and aminoacids. The conditions for that kind of chemical reaction are somewhat strict (even more so considering conditions for evolution) but the humongous size of the sample makes the belief in extraterrestrial life a perfectly valid stance, albeit non-scientific, strictly speaking.
But even then, a scientific stance is agreeing that the probability of life existing elsewhere is high. What we cannot say for certain is regarding intelligent life, as we understand intelligence. Technically speaking, nobody has the slightest idea of what path evolution took to give humans the ability to solve problems. It could be unavoidable, it could be a longshot. But given the size of the sample, it's not too awkward to believe it possible.
And there's another point. I think it'd be arrogance to think we're the only ones (what's so special about life anyway? It's just a chemical reaction), kind like a remnant of religious belief "we're made to the shape of god" etc etc etc. I'm well aware it might be wishful thinking - or my own personal discredit of religions - but I neutrally believe it valid due to the reasons I exposed above.
dawnghost
Borderline
The beauty of that argument is also its downfall. Because, obviously, when you say it's not concerned with the "details" of abiogenesis, it is so because you assume it must have happened a priori, no scientific evidence provided, and worse, nor needed.
Of course, someone who understands statistics will know you can't actually begin with an unproven fact and then use heuristics to assume it will happen AGAIN given enough time and space. It doesn't justify belief. Heuristics, in this case, justifies nothing at all. It's simply a case of blind faith, even if you employ statistics to mask it.
And aminoacids are enough for you to justify belief in abiogenesis? You must either lack understanding of the chemical complexity necessary for even the most primitive form of life, or choose to ignore it, wishfully hoping for a magic bullet to be published in a scientific journal one of these days. It hasn't, and I challenge you to provide something even close to resembling it.
In the words of a scientist:
If there were a basic principle of matter which somehow drove organic systems toward life, its existence should easily be demonstrable in the laboratory. One could, for instance, take a swimming bath to represent the primordial soup. Fill it with any chemicals of a non-biological nature you please. Pump any gases over it, or through it, you please, and shine any kind of radiation on it that takes your fancy. Let the experiment proceed for a year and see how many of those 2,000 enzymes [proteins produced by living cells] have appeared in the bath. I will give the answer, and so save the time and trouble and expense of actually doing the experiment. You would find nothing at all, except possibly for a tarry sludge composed of amino acids and other simple organic chemicals. How can I be so confident of this statement? Well, if it were otherwise, the experiment would long since have been done and would be well-known and famous throughout the world. The cost of it would be trivial compared to the cost of landing a man on the Moon . In short there is not a shred of objective evidence to support the hypothesis that life began in an organic soup here on the Earth.
Sir Fred Hoyle, British physicist and astronomer
I don't agree it's a "valid stance, albeit non-scientific", as you say, at all. If you start with a non-scientific hypothesis, you'll end up with an unfounded conjecture, and that's all. If that's good enough for you, then great, but it shouldn't receive more credit than it is due.
I won't discuss your stance on religion or whatever, it's waste of time, as it's a matter of opinion and all. I still have a newspaper at home, since you're brazilian as well as I am, in which recently a cosmologist stated that exactly the contrary is true, and that science is pointing out that the chances of observing alien life out there are slim to none. I can look for it if you're specially curious about this subject, and may not be able to do it soon since I'm busy with my dissertation, but it was published fairly recently in the "O Globo"'s science section.
Leandro
¬¬
I think it's pretty safe to assume abiogenesis occurred sometime. Otherwise you're relying entirely in intelligent design, creationism or other possibilities for which evidence is, to use a euphemism, lacking. Panspermia isn't really an issue here, since it just pushes the boundary to where abiogenesis should have occurred a bit farther.
Not if the unproven fact is itself pretty much the only scientific possibility. As much as it's safe to assume abiogenesis occurred (otherwise, what?), it's safe to assume it leads to a universe with more than just one inhabited planet, emphasizing beings similar to bacteria, fungi, and simple life forms in general. It's hardly blind faith.
You ignored the other keyword. Nucleotides. As I'm sure you know, nucleotides compose DNA (or RNA is what we're most interested in). From wikipedia:
This experiment inspired many experiments in a similar vein. In 1961, Joan Oró found that amino acids could be made from hydrogen cyanide (HCN) and ammonia in a water solution. He also found that his experiment produced a large amount of the nucleotide base adenine. Experiments conducted later showed that the other RNA and DNA bases could be obtained through simulated prebiotic chemistry with a reducing atmosphere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experiment
Aminoacids, as I'm also sure you know, are the basis to protein. Take a bath of aminoacids and nucleotides and shake it, you'll get some nucleic acid molecule (that's one more example of the law of large numbers). Nucleic acid molecules can survive and replicate through coacervation or other simple insulation mechanisms. Natural selection takes care of the rest. It's a proposal so elegant and simple that it's the natural first candidate for a solid theory of how life began. It's well backed up as it stands, and for the lack of a better candidate most scientists assume it true and work up the details. I can't provide much better arguments since I'm no biologist, but knowledge of stochastic processes is enough to regard this is the most viable possibility.
I have two remarks about this quote. First, he's no biologist, so this is a false authority fallacy (we all know Fred Hoyle is quite partial to intelligent design). Secondly, even if the experiment has been done with nary a result as he says, that doesn't invalidate the hypothesis. It's based on large amounts of molecules, large amounts of time. Again from wikipedia:
Scientific research theorizes that abiogenesis occurred sometime between 4.4 billion years ago, when water vapor first liquefied,[2] and 2.7 billion years ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
We're talking about a period of time of 1.7 billion years. I would be surprised if all the worldwide phenomena in such a long period of time could be successfully modeled by a test tube with orange juice in the microwave for a year. Fred Hoyle's opinion is based on the assumption that there's something intrinsecally special and precious about life, and that's something for which no shred of evidence can be found.
Abiogenesis is hardly a non scientific hypothesis. That's the cross of my argument.
Thanks. It'd be entirely senseless.
I'd be interested in that article - take your time. But well, I can't say I don't agree. My argument and beliefs (in the sense of this post) regard existence of life somewhere. The odds an element of this set of "somewheres where life could exist" be anywhere within the range of human space exploration are, agreeably, slim to none. To point out fermi's paradox, where are they?
Out of curiosity, what's your major?
EDIT: Also, let me remark that the high odds of existence of life elsewhere are within the boundaries of what's currently most well-accepted. It could be, yes, that I'm wrong and you're right and that something else that nobody ever thought of is the cause of life. Who knows. Revolutions in scientific knowledge happen all the time and are well-known by the epistemologists of the I-forgot-which-author school. However, accepting this framework, it's our best shot. That's why it's an informed belief (non scientific, yes) and not just science fiction.
dawnghost
Borderline
Just because you have no "acceptable" alternative, it doesn't mean your cherished paradigm is necessarily right. Belief on a primeval soup just because no other explanation is available is clearly an example of the logical fallacy of the false alternative. And as such, it characterizes blind faith.
Let's get to the meaty part.
Alright, there's much to be said about this. I am glad you brought up the Miller-Urey experiment as the base of your rebuttal, as it's a great example of just how difficult it is to abiogenesis to actually happen.
I'll begin my answer with a "even if... but in fact" approach.
First of all, even if you could have produced a gene or a cell with such an experiment, it wouldn't work without other complex structures such as ribosomes, polymerase, helicase, gyrase, single-strand-binding protein and many other proteins. Actually, the average protein is about 300 amino acids long, and most scientists believe the first living organism would have required, at the very least, 20 basic proteins to function. Do the math now, because we'll talk about the experiment's results in a second.
Now, let's see what happened in fact in that experiment. Miller and Urey filled glasses with the gases that, it was speculated, were necessary to form life: methane, ammonia and hydrogen, in water vapour to simulate a boiling ocean. They sparked the gases in the flask with high-voltage bolts, and the mixture was then condensed.
After a week, they examined the results and found no amino acids. Then they tried again. This time, only the simplest forms of amino acids were formed, mostly glycine and alanine. Glycine had a yield of 1.05%, Alanine scored 0.75% and the next common amino acid amounted to 0.026% of the total.
In Miller's own words: "The total yield was small for the energy expended."
We are only scratching at the surface here, though. Let's dig deeper, now why did the scientists start with the assumption that the primitive atmosphere was composed mainly of those gases in Miller-Urey's experiment? Because, as observed often, the a priori assumption that abiogenesis was true was used as the premise of their investigation. They did it because if they had included oxygen in their "primitive atmosphere scenario", it would destroy the very molecules they were trying to produce.
Even though oxygen is necessary for most living beings, it's extremely reactive and corrosive. Aerobic organisms have defenses against its effects, and use their chemical power to their advantage, while, on the other hand, anaerobic bacteria are quickly destroyed when in contact with it.
Read the precautions and specimen collection parts.
Yet, today most scientists believe the Miller-Urey's hypothetical atmosphere was mistaken. The accepted picture of earth's early atmosphere has changed to being oxygen-rich, which would be a very heavy burden for the development of organic molecules. Also, oxygen in the atmosphere is necessary to protect proteins and DNA from ultraviolet radiation. The ozone screen provides such protection, and is derived from oxygen. Thus, a catch-22 appears in the model.
It gets worse. Methane and ammonia, the two most important gases in the Miller spark chamber, could not have been present in large amounts. The ammonia would be dissolved in the oceans, and the methane should be found stuck too deep sedimentary clays.
It gets even worse. The amino acids produced in Miller's apparatus were both right and left-handed, but right-handed amino-acids are poisonous to living organisms. Right-handed amino acids render proteins nonfunctional. Simply one right-handed amino acid inserted into a chain left-handed amino acids would prevent the coiling and folding necessary for proper protein function. What Miller actually produced was a mixture poisons that would destroy any hope for abiogenesis.
It gets worse still. All living organisms are made up of and use proteins to carry out the basic functions of life. But water, which is so crucial to life and central to all the experiments involving abiogenesis, actually prevents amino acids from hooking together to form a protein. Now, no one has ever witnessed a protein molecule form naturally. To combine two amino acids, you have to put energy into that chemical bond. It doesn't want to form, it resists it. But even if somehow, by an incredible strike of luck, and I mean a really incredible one, you did form a polymer, it would immediately react with water and break down.
Now, let's continue. Again, "even so... but in fact".
Even if water did nothing to prevent proteins of forming, the odds of the many amino acids required to form a single protein to suddenly line up in the correct order are, being very optimistic, extremely slim. Yes, because there IS a correct order for them to form. Let's go with a very positive scenario, a protein that's only 100 amino acids long. Even for that example, billions and billions of years would not be enough time to form a SINGLE protein of those 20 required for life.
Since you're specially picky with the authors I quote (and let me say there was nothing wrong with Hoyle's citation, firstly because it wasn't meant as authoritative source, but merely to illustrate the impossibility of abiogenesis, and he stands correct on what he said, and secondly because being partial to ID should not mark him as demeritorious at all, unless one reads such a scientist with partiality), let me pick a quote from Dr. Monroe Strickberger instead, the author of the college textbook Evolution:
"Thus, if we randomly generated a new 100-amino-acid-long sequence each second, we could expect such a given enzyme to appear only once in 4x100*122 years!"
Since you have presented that abiogenesis must have happened 4.4 billion years ago, and that it's shown that it would take MUCH longer to form only ONE enzyme necessary to life, the theory of abiogenesis fails. But Dr. Strickberger continues:
"In terms of the volume necessary to generate all such possibilities, the difficulty appears just as immense: If an entire universe, 10 billion light years in diameter, were densely packed with randomly produced polypeptide... the number of such molecules 10*105 would not equal their 10*130 possibilities".
But in fact... the long ages that you think would help your scenario simply make the problem worse, because there is more time for water’s destructive effects to occur, as we've seen previously. High temperatures, also, would accelerate the breakdown.
As shown, it remains unscientific as long as it's merely a conjecture. A typical prokaryote cell is composed of DNA, proteins, cell membrane and cell wall. NONE of those components have ever been produced in laboratory from a mixture of chemicals. NONE.
Now, you may choose to believe that even STILL, life just arose out of nowhere. But that, my dear friend, is a big leap of faith. A very big one. It goes against probability and against the very nature of life. But choose to believe whatever you prefer.
By the way, going back a bit:
I disagree. But then again, this is another topic.
Administration. Doing research on consumer behavior. But I enjoy other subjects as well.
Undefined
Indefinite Entity
^Holy shit. 
I'm impressed. Both at the magnitude of your intellect and the fact I read the entire post and understood a lot of it (not that there were parts that I didn't understand, they were just REALLY wordy and I sort of lost interest). I wish I could respond to what you wrote with something meaningful but sadly I do not know enough about the subject, and even if I did educate myself it surely wouldn't help because you have a firm grasp on this and anything I would have to offer to the conversation probably wouldn't even stimulate you.
I'm impressed. Both at the magnitude of your intellect and the fact I read the entire post and understood a lot of it (not that there were parts that I didn't understand, they were just REALLY wordy and I sort of lost interest). I wish I could respond to what you wrote with something meaningful but sadly I do not know enough about the subject, and even if I did educate myself it surely wouldn't help because you have a firm grasp on this and anything I would have to offer to the conversation probably wouldn't even stimulate you.
Leandro
¬¬
Read the remark on my last edit.
Not exactly. It's just the most well-known experiment. Several experiments have been done after that, with more fruitful results. They are described in the article I quoted (and in the very fragment I also quoted as well).
The good old clockwork argument. That's the same as saying the human eye would have to be (intelligently) designed, because each of its components is inextrincable. Well, evolution and zoology itself refute this particular claim by showing progressively more complex visual apparata. The analogy is meant to show that there's no reason why the complexity of a primeval cell would be an obstacle for its generation out of simpler structures.
A pretty artificial way to simulate the early earth. And again, the exact composition of the ancient atmosphere is still at debate - as implied by your own word, "speculated". There's much more to an environment than heavy gases, water and sparks. To quote another line from the wikipedia article,
More recent experiments by chemist Jeffrey Bada at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, Calif. were similar to those performed by Miller. However, Bada noted that in current models of early Earth conditions carbon dioxide and nitrogen create nitrites, which destroy amino acids as fast as they form. However, the early Earth may have had significant amounts of iron and carbonate minerals able to neutralize the effects of the nitrites. When Bada performed the Miller-type experiment with the addition of iron and carbonate minerals, the products were rich in amino acids. This suggests the origin of significant amounts of amino acids may have occurred on Earth even with an atmosphere containing carbon dioxide and nitrogen.
About a hundred elements in the periodic table, each might've played a role in this (although most probably there were just a handful). And given the fact that the earth is big enough for several combinations of relative concentrations to exist in different places, it wouldn't be that hard to find one 'just right'.
That particular claim is also answered by the fragment I quoted.
That's wrong. Free oxigen wasn't available in the early atmosphere, as most of it was produced due to photosynthesis - i.e., after autotrophes (which are arguably more complex than heterotrophes and were most likely generated later) populated the planet.
Source: http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~cfjps/1400/atmos_origin.html
Now onto that 'catch-22': that's also a problem rising from over simplification of the conditions in the early earth. Here's an example of how it could've worked out: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/12/061208203049.htm
And some models take ultraviolet light in place of lightning as the energy source for the chemical reactions. From http://www.indopedia.org/Miller-Urey_experiment.html :
Conditions similar to those of the Urey-Miller experiments are present in other regions of the solar system, often substituting ultraviolet light for lightning as the driving force for chemical reactions. On September 28 1969, a meteorite that fell over Murchison, Victoria, Australia was found to contain over 90 different amino acids, nineteen of which are found in Earth life. Comets and other icy outer-solar-system bodies are thought to contain large amounts of complex carbon compounds (such as tholins) formed by these processes, in some cases so much so that the surfaces of these bodies are turned dark red or as black as asphalt. The early Earth was bombarded heavily by comets, possibly providing a large supply of complex organic molecules along with the water and other volatiles they contributed.
Concentration of reactants affects speed of reaction, not whether or not the reaction occurs.
Another issue of oversimplification. Read:
http://www.newscientist.com/channel...righthanded-amino-acids-were-left-behind.html
So a 100:1 mixture of L- and D-serine produces a solution made up almost entirely of L-serine, but so does a 100:99 mixture (Nature, vol 441, p 621).
(It's interesting to note that this is quite similar to the unexplained matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe. But this is another discussion entirely).
Again the clockwork argument. Spontaneous protein generation isn't observed - what we do observe are processes governed by nucleic acids assembling proteins out of existing amino acids. Also note that in the Miller-Urey experiment, lipids (which are hydrophobic) were also formed. Coacervation(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coacervate) is proven to happen spontaneously in certain conditions, providing an appropriate framework for nucleic acids to translate into protein. Also let us remind that:
A peptide bond can be broken by amide hydrolysis (the adding of water). The peptide bonds in proteins are metastable, meaning that in the presence of water they will break spontaneously, releasing about 10 kJ/mol of free energy, but this process is extremely slow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptide_bond
So, water is hardly an issue here.
Clockwork argument. See above.
We're discussing mainly on sources here, as none of us is an expert in biology. Therefore, quoting a physicist to illustrate an alledged 'impossibility' (although that quote didn't prove impossibility. All he said was there was no evidence, which's not correct in any case). Being partial to ID and not being an expert makes his opinion in this discussion pretty much void.
That's the most common misconception about evolution by most creationism defenders. The process is guided by natural selection, so proteins aren't generated 'at random'. The solution space being large doesn't imply in the no-existence of an efficient way to select an optimal solution. In fact, evolution in this way (and the grammar-like structure of proteins and nucleic acids) is very similar to branch-and-bound approximation algorithms used to solve certain computational problems. Problems for which the solution space is extremely large (larger than, for example, combining peptides) can be solved very efficiently in this way.
Read: http://www.skeptics.com.au/articles/dawkins.htm
In particular, read his introduction to information theory and then the section "The Genetic Book of the Dead". The environment feeds information which harness the randomness creationists so dearly hold as an argument to their side.
That's just a version of that joke - you have a swiss cheese, full of holes. The more cheese, the more holes. The more holes, the less cheese. Therefore, the more cheese, the less cheese. Given a larger sample the frequency of the outcome of any event tends to stabilize. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
Clockwork argument *again*?
And let me say this one more time. A laboratory doesn't faithfully replicate the early earth nor the time it took for random events to occur over billions of years.
Well, first: "Life arising out of nowhere" is a pejorative definition which takes the form of a slippery slope fallacy to try to discredit abiogenesis. Secondly, you haven't argued against abiogenesis - you have argued against the evidence and knowledge we (well, biologists) think we have about the processes governing it. Then I can hardly see how it's against probability (you haven't shown that) or "against the very nature of life" (you haven't show that either). The point is that abiogenesis, however it may have occurred, is the only sensible (i.e., not involving ad hoc absolutely non scientific unsupported by evidence and refuted by logic supernatural beings) scientific choice - because it's such a broad term. Even if all the experiments we (biologists) have done turn out to be wrong, and generation of complex molecules in the way we consider most likely couldn't occur at all, they'd have to occur in some way, and unless some really heavy evidence pops out of the blue, it'll have to be abiogenetic - or you're relying entirely on an enormous, like you say, leap of faith.
dawnghost
Borderline
I have, and I still don't agree that believing in something that we know isn't true, whether you call it an informed belief or whatever, is the right option or the best shot. Sorry, but you're just deluding yourself.
Yes, "more fruitful". Still, right-handed amino acids, methane and ammonia, not a single protein, not even CLOSE. My argument stands undefeated.
A dishonest use of analogy to attempt to prove a point you know you can't. Look, if you have the science to back up your claim, just present it and we'll be done with this whole discussion. Show me how a protein is formed from a mixture of chemicals, in a lab. A single one. You can't, so you come up with analogies. Show me how all the other structures needed for life could arise spontaneously from chemicals. I won't hold my breath, of course. More on why your human eye analogy fails when we talk about the genetic code needed to produce proteins.
Straw man. I never even included in my response the difficulty imposed by carbon dioxide and nitrogen. And particularly, I chose the format of "even if... but in fact" for a cause. If it was possible to produce life in the lab, this "just right" condition could be easily demonstrated in the lab, alas it can't, and hasn't. Probability itself is against it, even if all chemical conditions are "just right".
That particular claim was actually just used to explain their experiment. Even so, the fragment you posted does nothing to overcome the burdens I presented with the rest of my argument.
Sorry, but no. In the very link you posted there is another source of oxygen production, which is photochemical dissociation. But even so, as Dimroth and Kimberly explain (Dimroth, E. & Kimberley, M.M., Can. J. Earth Sci. 13 1161, (1976):
'in general, we find no evidence in the sedimentary distributions of carbon, sulfur, uranium or iron, that an oxygen-free atmosphere has existed at any time during the span of geological history recorded in well preserved sedimentary rocks'
(...)
'the sedimentary distributions of carbon, sulfur, uranium, and ferric and ferrous iron depend greatly upon ambient oxygen pressure and should reflect any major change in proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere or hydrosphere. The similar distributions of these elements in sedimentary rocks of all ages are here interpreted to indicate the existence of a Precambrian atmosphere containing much oxygen.'
(...)
'we know of no evidence which proves orders-of-magnitude differences between Middle Archaean and subsequent atmospheric compositions, hydrospheric compositions, or total biomasses.'
Again, this hypothesis that the primitive atmosphere was oxygen-free is just an attempt at producing an environment in which abiogenesis would be more possible. It is the a priori assumption that abiogenesis was true being used as the premise for the theories about the primitive atmosphere.
What? Did you even read what I posted? or did you just Google "oxygen, catch-22" and posted that link? I was writing about proteins and DNA being dismantled by UV, and you post:
"But researchers have long been puzzled as to how the cyanobacteria could make all that oxygen without poisoning themselves. To avoid their DNA getting wrecked by a ******yl radical that naturally occurs in the production of oxygen, the cyanobacteria would have had to evolve protective enzymes."
You are kidding, right? Over simplification? I'm talking about the difficulties of abiogenesis, and you're presenting a scenario with cyanobacteria already developed? And "struggling to evolve" enzymes to protect them from oxygen?? Check this quote from your article:
"This trickle of poison could then drive the evolution of oxygen-protecting enzymes in a variety of microbes, including the cyanobacteria." (emphasis mine, because it is just, again, a silly conjecture).
This answer of yours, along with another I will address soon, has made me abandon this discussion altogether. Sorry, but I don't have time for this.
Again, Straw Man. I never said anything about the energy source for the reactions, and even if UV was used, oxygen would be needed to form the ozone screen and protect proteins and DNA from the radiation. Catch-22.
Surely you wouldn't want to mess with your chances. It's amazing how you're so blindly drawn to believe it must have happened, that no matter what the difficulties, you'll just wave at them, smiling, and turn a blind eye. My point is that those substances are NOT available, one of them is too dissolved to even have a use, and the other is stuck deep down in sedimentary clays and unreachable! But even if you want to believe what you posted, you'd certainly wish the speed of the reaction was the fastest and as plentiful as possible, because those are, again, used just to assemble a simple amino acid, I am not talking about the other, more complex structures needed for life, such as, ahem, a protein.
Argh. It works BOTH WAYS. That's why the article concludes: "Why there was a slight excess to start with is another question."
Again. The chances of producing right and left-handed amino acids are 50:50. As you are well aware, you need a LOT of such amino acid productions if you hope to, someday, produce a single protein. And, the longer you replicate an experiment with a 50:50 chance, the closer you'll get to an equal 50:50 proportion.
It's like playind head or tails. Play it once and you have a 100:0 proportion. Play it four times, maybe 75:25. Play it a billion times, ~50:50. That's a huge problem for you.
Thank you. So you are saying a nucleic acid assembles proteins from amino acids? Now that's something we can agree on. Too bad you forget that in order for that nucleic acid to produce a protein, GENETIC INFORMATION is required in the first place. LOTS of it. If I still had patience for this, I could get home and give you a probability figure of that ever happening spontaneously, but I don't. Anyway, you leap 1000 miles forward to explain how something basic, to begin with, has come to be. Nice try, but at least you admit: "Spontaneous protein generation isn't observed".
Red herring? You haven't provided any scenario for nucleic acids ever translating anything into anything, and you're throwing in coacervation? Also, water is still an issue. As I said earlier, it tends to break not only amino acids, but also proteins. And now you write it yourself. It doesn't matter if the process is slow, as I said, if you need billions of years for the process to happen, they will break.
I wasn't aware everything in abiogenesis, no matter how unproven, could simply be dismissed with "clockwork argument". Hm. It must require lots of faith to believe in it, indeed.
No, your prejudice makes it void. His conclusions are still perfectly valid. You may fret as much as you want, but unless you can replicate the origin of life in a lab, and you can't because chemistry itself is a huge burden, you can't go about telling everyone life just came to be spontaneously. That's bad science.
This is it. To quote Dawkins is... I just don't know what to say. The guy knows ZERO about information theory, and his WEASEL program proves that for anyone that wants to see. The kind of intellectual dishonesty that is required for someone to present that as proof of information-building via natural selection is incredible. It's really incredible. By the way, a little gossip. Did you see Dawkins running from Dinesh when Al-Jazeera invited him for a debate? Turns out Dawkins didn't know who his opponent would be, and when they revealed it to be Dinesh, the poor old man insisted on a format in which he could not be rebutted.
Anyway, we could start a whole new discussion on Information Theory here, which is a subject I actually love and know a bit about, since I also coursed Computer Science, but I won't because it is simply not relevant AT ALL to the subject at hand and I don't have time. Let me just say you are mixing things up really badly here. Natural selection does NOTHING to help with abiogenesis. NOTHING. The problem isn't in "amino acids which are not fit for survival and replication", or proteins, or DNA for that matter. That would actually be quite an absurd proposition. Dismissing everything as a "clockwork argument" leads to this, confusion about the roles of each process in the whole of evolutionary theory. Abiogenesis HAS to be taken as a random process, PERIOD. Every step of it is random, there's no "buts" about it, and this is simply science.
You could start ANOTHER conversation on how GENETIC INFORMATION could be altered by mutations to produce different sets of proteins. That's a WHOLE different story. Don't mix things up. We are talking about abiogenesis. It isn't a guided process at all. It is random. Present how it happened. Replicate it in the lab. It is THAT simple.
Poor analogy. Read it again, it has nothing to do with your semantic paradox. It's not a paradox at all, it's just that water makes it difficult for proteins to form, and you need time and water. It's simple as that.
Just show how it happens. Please. Show us the science:
- DNA
- Proteins
- Cell membrane
- Cell wall
Show us the experiment. Please, where is the science? Should we start calling science "clockworklol"?
An unguided process needs billions of years to occur. Because it's subject to random, uncontrolled events. That's why you need time, not because the chemical reactions itself need time, its because the odds are so overwhelmingly against abiogenesis, that you need all the time you can get for a "miracle" to happen. In a lab, it's different. If it could, it would be replicated.
Don't call it that, if it uneases you. It's not what you call it that discredits it, it's the lack of objective evidence that does the job. Unfortunately it is preached as being something certain and taken for granted, when scientists have absolutely no clue about how it happened. That is the fact. You are waiting for the magic bullet, you need it but it hasn't come. All you have are chemical process that go AGAINST it, so you just cling to faith that "you might be wrong", even though the processes themselves are very well estabilished.
I have, let me repeat it then, the whole of it, even though it's only about proteins:
Since you're specially picky with the authors I quote (and let me say there was nothing wrong with Hoyle's citation, firstly because it wasn't meant as authoritative source, but merely to illustrate the impossibility of abiogenesis, and he stands correct on what he said, and secondly because being partial to ID should not mark him as demeritorious at all, unless one reads such a scientist with partiality), let me pick a quote from Dr. Monroe Strickberger instead, the author of the college textbook Evolution:
"Thus, if we randomly generated a new 100-amino-acid-long sequence each second, we could expect such a given enzyme to appear only once in 4x100*122 years!"
Since you have presented that abiogenesis must have happened 4.4 billion years ago, and that it's shown that it would take MUCH longer to form only ONE enzyme necessary to life, the theory of abiogenesis fails. But Dr. Strickberger continues:
"In terms of the volume necessary to generate all such possibilities, the difficulty appears just as immense: If an entire universe, 10 billion light years in diameter, were densely packed with randomly produced polypeptide... the number of such molecules 10*105 would not equal their 10*130 possibilities".
I have. I've shown the chemical processes that work against the formation of proteins. That alone suffices. If I had to paste that again in here, I'd have to repeat my entire argument.
In bold, your leaps of faith exposed.
I now leave this discussion. Goodbye.
viewerfromnihil
Vein-Marbled Tower
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