My point still stands, this is not what people will think you mean when you say ATP is being used, is functioning in a protocell. I don’t need to keep digging, you need to respond…
Was what I said unclear? Or irrelevant? Important functions are not optional, and I provided a reference saying homochirality provides important function.
It is.
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Having arms are important. Yet the worm lives fine without them. They therefore are, in fact, optional depending on context.
Please prove that there cannot be a lifeform, or an intermediate stage between life and non-life, without homochirality.
Yet it has been accomplished, so it cannot really be all that hard.
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Further to my comment in another discussion:
We have this:
That’s right. When asked for quotes from OOL scientists confirming what Tour claimed they had said, Lee instead posts Tour repeating the same baseless claim. In an interview with Tucker Carlson.
It beggars belief.
And, yet again:
If you started your at bat at home plate and ended up on second base that is progress. Or do you need us to explain baseball to you, as well?
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Does the cell continue to live and reproduce? There is your answer.
This might be worth discussing.
I am aware of the very large number of potential traits that may arise, but I don’t think it means what you think it means. There is potential for new traits arising from some combination of new parts - but the usual ID claim is that such combinations are incredibly unlikely to generate any function at all.
In other words, Tour’s demand about the Interactome contradicts a common claim from ID about the likelihood of function arising by chance.
So before I go any further, answer me this: Are new functions that need an interactome likely to arise, or are they incredibly unlikely to arise? Which is it?
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The authors Tour cites state that, based on their rhetorical question (as it were), “the cell does not organize by random collisions of its interacting constituents”. In other words, the number Tour cites is not a realistic estimate that is based on the known properties of proteins, or of the interaction networks we see in living cells.
This paper discusses ways to overcome this seeming paradox. It is notable that Tour completely ignores the meat of the cited study, and that he in fact misrepresents the authors’ ideas concerning protein-protein interactions. (The number Tour cites is the number one would get is we assumed all proteins can engage, with equal affinities, in pair-wise interactions with any other protein. This is an absurd assumption, one the authors of the paper reject.)
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The number of interactions in my bowl of soup is staggering. Since a litre of soup would contain approximately 1025 molecules, and every one can interact with every other molecule in at least three different ways, I estimate it to be 1052 interactions at least.
Clearly soup is impossible.
Rarely have I read such nonsense. First of all, 1 in 1079 billion is a fraction, not a total number.
Second, the number of total potential interactions is completely irrelevant since the vast majority will never actually occur. The paper Tour references basically just describes Levinthal’s paradox but expanded to the entire proteome of a typical yeast cell. This is a question about how proteins fold, which is completely irrelevant to evolution and the origin of life. Evolution doesn’t have to somehow “invent” protein folding. It’s an intrinsic property of particular amino acid sequences in a specific environment. Literally unavoidable with the right sequence.
Among the dumbest of Tour’s points, which says a lot because the competetion is strong.
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It’s precisely the same. The hydrolysis provides energy.
No, it’s nothing like that at all. You’ve actually just tested and falsified your design hypothesis, in addition to flunking high-school molecular biology yet again.
By the way, since you’re so big on challenges, here’s one of the many you’ve ignored:
For some context, I definitely wouldn’t take any antibiotic tested so lamely myself. I wouldn’t even buy it to use in my lab!
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I realized the absurdity when I first worked out the math, which is why I am careful to describe it as “potential new traits”. There must be limiting factors, but I can’t say what those factors would be. Even with strong limits on the number of factors that can combine, the total still very large.
What Tour and others fail to see is, this is a strength of evolution, not a weakness.
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There will unavoidably occur innumerable non-productive (in the sense of having no effect on fitness) interactions between all the molecules that make up a cell, and one could try to give some sort of estimate of how many of such potential interactions that don’t matter. This isn’t something that has to be designed, searched-for, invented, or anything like it, any more than one has to design the unfathomable quintillions of interactions that will occur when you toss the cooking ingredients into your bowl of soup.
An “interactome” that includes all the non-productive interactions (all those that occur as an unavoidable byproduct of the attraction and repulsion of electrons and protons that make up all the atoms of the cell) is a completely meaningles concept.
The only “interactome” that matters here are the productive (fitness-affecting) interactions, and all of those are either a product of natural selection and/or genetic drift. This isn’t something that can be meaningfully disputed nor invoked as a problem for evolution.
This is how the entire interactome evolved simultaneously with the process that gave rise to the first cells: Add another biomolecule to the emerging cell; if it negatively affects fitness it will be purged from the population, if it doesn’t it will drift to loss or fixation, if it positively affects fitness it will be selected for. That’s it. Done. Case closed.
There can be no dispute of this not borne of sheer ignorance and stupidity.
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Agreed, in the context of evolution.
Anyone who has purified a protein knows that they are so sticky, even to themselves, that with rare exceptions they are only soluble at very low concentrations.
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I can’t prove anything 100%, I gave you evidence, that’s how people should evaluate conclusions. And worms are not a valid analogy, arms are not important like homochirality is important, worms don’t have problems like disturbances in electron transport, or have problems like overheating, because they don’t have arms.
When I say it’s indefensible, I’m requiring a defense, if you want to disprove this. How has this been accomplished?
All right, if thinking properly involves making such challenges, then show me one OOL researcher that Tour mentioned who replied that they never made such a prediction at this conference. That’s certainly what I would do. I do that a lot here! People ascribe to me things I never said, and I speak up and say I didn’t say that.
Nope, I said you rounded the bases (so you claimed you were done), and you got sent back to second base, that’s not making progress, that’s going backwards from where you said you were, after your claimed home run. Speaking of thinking properly.
So now I need to know how we can be assured that the cell lives and reproduces, after the interactions that just happen to start up, do so.
??? You just said that the ID claim was that function was unlikely from such combinations, I agree. Then it seems you contradict this, but Tour’s demand about the interactome is precisely this, that it’s unlikely, and he gives the extreme number of combinations as evidence.
I think they are incredibly unlikely, for two reasons: First varying the interactome typically results in diseases, so interactomes have some fragility. Second, why are researchers not researching paths to interactomes, if it’s such a slam dunk as you say? Tour says he hasn’t seen any, can you find any? Researchers are not eager, foundations aren’t very willing to pay for research that will be unlikely to produce results, is the likely cause here, was Tour’s conclusion.
Certainly, but that’s all we’ve got in OOL, when the first interactome is needed, you have random collisions. You don’t start with an interactome from a living cell.
Certainly it is impossible, if soup needs to reproduce. Just counting up interactions is not being done here.
Good grief, I think you know which number I meant. Yes, the whole thing is a fraction.
That’s fine, Tour was extracting their estimate of the number of potential interactions, is that not allowed?