The problem goes way beyond that video. It’s a general problem with the Discovery Institute, and James Tour in particular, who seem to think that if they can just criticize the RNA world hypothesis then their work is basically done.
And then they state that he’s downplaying the problems(ignoring what he actually says in his “downplaying” them). And then do no work to show how people in the field are working to solve them. The fact that they bring up the problems without doing any work to show how people in the field are working to solve them is basically to characterize the field as ignoring the problems or are unaware that they exist.
That would be your response. You have offered nothing to counter my statement.
Characterizing the evolving molecules as “malignant” and “devolving” is simply jargon of no value or consequence. Neither of those are meaningful scientific criticisms. Nothing is entailed about evolution by these meaningless subjective characterizations.
A sequence replicating faster isn’t “useless” either. It’s a functional response to selection employed by many actual organisms(and viruses) to survive in their niche. Things don’t have to always and only ever become ever larger and more complex to qualify as evolution.
And the point still stands, selection only for replication speed (which doesn’t actually make it “spiral towards uselessness and malignancy”), but neglecting survival and complex environmental interactions, doesn’t really tell you that there are no conditions under which evolution can favor increases in size and complexity.
I’m sorry but I missed the part of the paper where they attempted to replicate the RNA and found that it was “not available” and was “being protected from replication”. Could you show where in the paper you found this result?
In any case, even if it was true that the RNA temporarily bound to the surface was at that point not available for replication, the idea is that such an effect would be temporary. You understand that adsorption is depending on conditions such as temperature, pH, concentrations of ions and so on, so for example near a hydrothermal pool that goes through fluctuations in these conditions, adsorption on minerals can fluctuate up and down? It’s those damned environmental cycles again.
In the experiment with the recombinase ribozyme (the Azoarcus ribozyme) the shorter RNA fragments are the recombinase ribozyme. It can literally self-assemble through base-pairing among fragments, and this initially non-covalent assembly can then function as a ribozyme recombinase that can catalyze the covalent assembly of more ribozymes from other fragments. They demonstrate that when the fragments are incubated with minerals, they can nevertheless self-assemble into a functional ribozyme that then covalently assembles other active ribozymes from the fragments, and these longer assembled ribozymes can then be adsorbed on the mineral surface.
This is functionally and conceptually closer to a self-replicator than Spiegelman’s system is. The Ribozyme can self-assemble from fragments, and then function as a catalyst for the assembly of more such ribozymes from other fragments.
Actually Spiegelman’s monster is just the piece of RNA being replicated by the RNA polymerase enzyme. In Spiegelman’s experiment they also supplied the enzyme and the RNA being replicated. But putting that aside, that’s completely irrelevant to the point that there are factors that incur length-selection, rather than the opposite.
That isn’t clear at all. Recombination is in fact recognized as a strong evolutionary mechanism, in addition to indels and substitution mutations, for exploration of sequence space and finding novel adaptive variants. It’s why viruses employ recombination in evolution of their proteins, and such evolutionary mechanisms as random joining together of fragments has been shown to result in novel functional molecular complexes, such as irreducibly complex membrane transporters(T-URF13).
The Azoarcus ribozyme system is rather “willy-nilly” (about 17% of products result in it’s own formation, in addition to other random products) in it’s joining together of fragments, but that nevertheless functions well enough for self-assembly to occur, and these in turn can then function as recombinase ribozymes too.
No, I’m not misrepresenting the paper. The paper discusses a solution to this problem offered by the heterogeneous backbone chemistry of 2’-5’ and 3’-5’ linked RNA polymers, where some have backbones that allow replication because they have lower melting temperature, and others with fewer 2’-5’ linkages are capable of folding and catalysis.
Since a sequence being copied many times with a random distribution of backbone linkages, is likely to produce a mix of such products such that some have very few or none, while others have numerous such linkages, this has the effect that one template can effectively still produce sequences that are available as templates, and sequences that can stably fold into catalytic RNAs.
Did you even read the paper?
Who gives a crap that it mysteriously appears somewhere in a footnote for half a second in tiny text form without it’s results or their implications being anywhere discussed?
Yes, that’s an advantage. If it was heritable it would not allow the replicated template to produce a mix of products such that some are available for further templating while others act as catalysts catalytic. The whole point here is that because replication results in a host of products the same sequence can act as both “genotype” and “phenotype”.
I recommend engaging your brain and being reading for comprehension, rather than to peruse papers in this strange apologetics-mode state of thought you all seem incapable of escaping.
Great. Then that is you and Tour making a counterfactual assertion. The 2’-5’ linkages can be replicated. Which you would have known if you had actually read the paper:
The presence of 2′–5′ linkages is not a barrier to subsequent rounds of replication, since Switzer and colleagues have demonstrated that 2′–5′ linked RNA, as well as mixed 2′–5′/3′–5′ RNA, can template primer extension reactions, albeit more slowly than 3′–5′ RNA29.
Works: Not gummed up.
So I’m not misrepresenting Tour. He’s demonstrably an ignoramus about the field of origin of life research, painfully ignorant about molecular biology and evolution more generally, and an overall embarrassment to putatively intellectual Christians.
And your post reads like someone who gets all their science information by being trained by religious apologists like Tour.
It is completely irrelevant which functions ribozymes presently perform in extant life, to the question of how many functions they could perform at the origin of the RNA world. As today most functions are performed by protein enzymes, which doesn’t actually tell us that RNA ribozymes couldn’t also perform them.
But more importantly to my point, the video ASSERTS WITHOUT ACTUALLY KNOWING WHETHER IT IS TRUE, that RNA could not perform all the functions it would be “required” to perform, at the origin of life. One problem with that statement is they do not actually know how many functions it would be required to perform, so it is logically inescapable that they can’t actually claim to know, then, that RNA couldn’t perform those functions. Obviously.
I take it you asking that question concedes that point.
Yes they are supposed problems, because nobody has shown that these problems can’t be overcome. And the video does no work to show that they can’t. It basically just lists them.
Yes, disregarding. Showing a picture of a paper doesn’t, in fact, deal with it’s contents. Does it? No. THINK.
Wow it links it? You mean the citation text flashes on screen for about a second and then the video just moves on without discussing it’s contents? Wow. I mean, just wow. How can the field of abiogenesis research proceed under this cataclysmic bombardment of facts and logic?
Then I’m afraid your reading comprehension skills leave much to be desired.
I suggest you begin by just re-reading it again. The video creates a strawman out of what these papers are presented as “proof of concept of”. They claim these papers are presented as “proof of concept of the origin of life”. That is a lie.
Then having lied, they present the lie as a target to knock down (a straw-man). Because by claiming the research is being presented as something much more grandiose than it actually is, can they then pretend to have levied much more damning criticisms of the entire field, than they actually have.
If we pretend research A is presented as proving a huge claim C, and we show how A doesn’t actually prove C, then we can pretend claim C is rather hopeless and that research A is all exaggeration.
Does that parse meaningfully into English? Do I need to break it down sentence by sentence, word for word?
He thinks they’re challenges the be overcome, yes. Problems for researchers to solve. Nobody is saying they’re not. And there are people actively working to solve them.
Your crap video is designed to leave the impression that these problems are insurmountable and are basically circumvented by researchers exaggerating the results of their experiments without actually solving the problems.
It’s a beautiful and articulate statement of fact. The video belongs in a trashcan. It is both stupid and misleading(as evidenced by the fact that people who like it get dumber and more misinformed by having watched it, I mean we can just read your post for a de facto demonstration), and it has in fact wasted Vincent’s time.