Naturalism does not plausibly explain the origin of life. Creation by an intelligent powerful designer does

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Naturalism does not plausibly explain the origin of life. Creation by an intelligent powerful designer does.

1. Life requires four basic biomolecules ( RNA and DNA, amino acids, phospholipids, and carbohydrates), a genome to store instructional information for assembly and operation of the cell, through the genetic code, with a minimal content of 1,3 Mio bits of information ( P.Ubique). The genetic code is a set of rules, where 64 nucleotide triplets called codons ( genetic words) are assigned to 20 amino acids. It directs the making of amino acid polypeptide chains, which are the basic components of proteins ( the molecular machines, the working horses of the cell ). The proteome is a large team of enzymes, that catalyze the reactions to keep the cell alive, and in special, they produce the four basic building blocks of life in a cooperative manner. The metabolome is a network of integrated and carefully regulated metabolic pathways, where thousands of complex reactions catalyzed by globular proteins, enzymes, occur simultaneously to contribute to the sum of activities that a cell has to perform. The interactome defines all cellular interactions, amongst it, all protein-protein interactions of a cell.
2. To go from primordial goo to a fully free-living, autonomous, self-replicating living cell, the four building blocks of life have to be readily available, and so the genome, metabolome, proteome, interactome, have to be fully set up. Wilhelm Huck chemist, wrote: A working cell is more than the sum of its parts. "A functioning cell must be entirely correct at once, in all its complexity. And Emily Singer, in the article: How Structure Arose in the Primordial Soup, wrote: The cell, the genetic code, and an energy system, ALL THREE of these are ESSENTIAL to life as we know it. And Lynn Margulis: To go from a bacterium to people is less of a step than to go from a mixture of amino acids to a bacterium.
3. Origin of life hypotheses must face and address major hurdles:

a. There was no selection process to sort out the molecules of life from those that are not used in life.
b. There was no primordial process to purify the molecules.
c. Systems, given energy and left to themselves, DEVOLVE to give uselessly complex mixtures, “asphalts”. the literature reports exactly ZERO CONFIRMED OBSERVATIONS where “ living cells emerged spontaneously from a devolving chemical system.
d. Monomers can bond with each other in a large variety of ways and unwanted molecules can interfere with the required purity. Even in a very short DNA of just two nucleotides, there are dozens of incorrect possible arrangements of the components and only one correct arrangement.
e. Proteins are made of chains of amino acids, and nucleic acids are chains of nucleotides. If the chains are placed in water, it attacks the links and eventually breaks them. Robert Shapiro wrote: In carbon chemistry, “water is an enemy to be excluded as rigorously as possible”. RNA requires water to function, but RNA cannot emerge in water and does not persist in water without repair.
f. A minimal genome to start life would have been TOO LONG TO HAVE ARISEN SPONTANEOUSLY and not escaped asphaltic devolution in water.
g. The smallest genome of the simplest free-living bacteria, Pelagibacter unique, is 1,308,759 base pairs and codes for 1,354 proteins. If a chain could link up, the probability that the code letters might by chance be in some order which would be a usable gene, to get the sequence randomly would be 10^722,000. There are 10^80 atoms in the universe.
h. The cell membrane had to emerge fully functional with " gates " that permit the right materials in, and the waste product out.
i. Once the data storage system (DNA) emerged, a language based on a code system had to be established, and the blueprint to store the information to make all parts of the cell had to be stored within it, and DNA replication errors had to be reduced 10.000.000.000 times. It had to be able to check replication errors and minimize them, react to stimuli, and changing environments. That’s is, the ability to adapt to the environment is a must right from the beginning.
j. If just ONE single protein or enzyme - of many - is missing, no life. If topoisomerase II or helicase are missing - no replication - no perpetuation of life.
k. Somehow, that envelope had to create a homeostatic environment, diminishing the calcium concentration in the cell 10000 times below the external environment, to permit signaling. At the same time, a signaling code would have had to be established, and immediately begin to function, with a common agreement between sender and receiver
l. Energy supply would have been a major problem since almost all life forms depend on the supply of glucose, which is a product of complex metabolic pathways, and not readily available on the prebiotic earth. Most proteins require active metal clusters in their reaction centers. These clusters are in most cases ultracomplex, each cluster had to have the right atoms interconnected in the right way, and get the correct 3-dimensional form. They require the complex uptake of the basic materials, like iron and sulfur, molybdenum, and complex biosynthesis processes, and after the correct assembling, the insertion in the right way and form inside the proteins.
m. All cellular processes require energy, in form of ATP, not readily available - since ATP is the product of complex proteins, like ATP synthase - which by themselves depend on a proton gradient.

4. There is simply no feasible viable prebiotic route to go from a random prebiotic soup to the first living self-replicating cell by unguided means. This is not a conclusion by ignorance & incredulity, but it is reasonable to be skeptical, that this irreducibly complex biological system, entire factory complexes composed of myriads of interconnected highly optimized production lines, full of computers and robots could emerge naturally defying known and reasonable principles of the limited range of random unguided events and physical necessity. Cells have a codified description of themselves in digital form stored in genes and have the machinery to transform that blueprint through information transfer into an identical representation in analog 3D form, the physical ‘reality’ of that description. Comparing the two competing hypotheses, unguided random chaotic stochastic lucky events on the prebiotic earth, versus intelligent design, the second is simply by far the more case-adequate, plausible, rational & reasonable explanation.

Abiogenesis is mathematically impossible

The factory maker argument

The cell is irreducibly complex

Essential elements and building blocks for the origin of life

What might be a Cell’s minimal requirement of parts ?

Major metabolic pathways and their inadequacy for origin of life proposals

Prevital unguided origin of the four basic building blocks of life: Impossible !!

The interdependent and irreducible structures required to make proteins

Peptide bonding of amino acids to form proteins and its origins

Forces Stabilizing Proteins - essential for their correct folding

Proteins: how they provide striking evidence of design

Biosynthesis of Iron-sulfur clusters, basic building blocks for life

What are the odds to have a functional interactome for the smallest known living cell?

How intracellular Calcium signaling, gradient and its role as a universal intracellular regulator points to design

DNA and RNA error checking and repair, amazing evidence of design

Error detection and repair during the biogenesis & maturation of the ribosome, tRNA’s, Aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases, and translation: by chance, or design?

ATP: The Energy Currency for the Cell

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What can one say but “cleanup on aisle three”?

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…Life requires five basic biomolecules, RNA, DNA, amino acids — I’ll come in again. But why are RNA and DNA separate from carbohydrates? Isn’t ribose a carbohydrate? Maybe life requires six basic biomolecules: purines, pyrimidines, carbohydrates, amino acids, etc. Or maybe seven, I dunno.

I missed the part where the omnipotent creator explained stuff. We seem to have stopped at the point where the origin of life is impossible.

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Plus ca change…

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All communication with this individual is pointless. I submit as evidence every interaction he ever had with anyone who didn’t share his view. And this:

lots of mutations

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Ah yes. Here is the entire argument.

Number of cells in the human body, and synapses in the human brain

The human brain, due to evolution, or design ?!

Claim:
Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome
01 September 2005
More than a century ago Darwin1 and Huxley2 posited that humans share recent common ancestors with the African great apes. Modern molecular studies have spectacularly confirmed this prediction and have refined the relationships, showing that the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and bonobo (Pan paniscus or pygmy chimpanzee) are our closest living evolutionary relatives. 11

Brain Evolution
Ralph L. Holloway, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, NY
The size of the hominid brain increased from about 450ml at 3.5 million years ago to our current average volume of 1350ml . These changes through time were sometimes gradual but not always.

Differences and similarities between human and chimpanzee neural progenitors during cerebral cortex development Sep 26, 2016 12
The expansion of the neocortex during primate evolution is thought to contribute to the higher cognitive capacity of humans compared to our closest living relatives, the great apes, and notably the chimpanzees

The Human Brain in Numbers: A Linearly Scaled-up Primate Brain
An informal survey with senior neuroscientists that we ran in 2007 showed that most believed that the number of cells in the human brain was indeed already known: that we have about 100 billion neurons

Cellular scaling rules for primate brains
Here we examine the cellular scaling rules for primate brains and show that brain size increases approximately isometrically as a function of cell numbers, such that an 11× larger brain is built with 10× more neurons and ≈12× more nonneuronal cells of relatively constant average size.
https://www.pnas.org/content/104/9/3562

My comment: Now let’s make a little calculation. The human brain has 100 billion neurons. According to the above claim, the hominid brain of our ur-ancestor, 3,5mio years ago, had a brain, a third of the size of homo sapiens today, that is 33 billion neurons approximately. ( chimpanzees have 28 billion ) That means there was an increase of 67 billion brain neurons in 3,5Mio years

Bonobos and chimpanzees reach sexual maturity between 10 and 13 years of age. So let’s suppose the average age to start breeding was 10 years. That means that there would have been 350 thousand generations in 3,5mio years.
That means, there would have had to be an increase of 190450 neurons in each generation,

In computing terms, the brain’s nerve cells, called neurons, are the processors, while synapses, the junctions where neurons meet and transmit information to each other, are analogous to memory. These synapses are not " just so" interconnected. The connections process and store information and must be the correct one… like a computer network.

One neuron can have 100,000 connections.

In each generation, there would have had to be an increase of 19 billion new synapse connections

So how could natural selection, genetic drift, or gene flow have produced the correct 19 billion new synapse connections per generation? The task would be to specify EACH new cell precisely through a master program which, coordinates, instructs, and defines each neuron. Now, there are different kinds of Neurons. Some generate action potentials. Some perfectly good neurons have no processes, some vertebrate neurons do not generate action potentials. There are sensory neurons, motor neurons, interneurons,

Cell in regard of its:

  1. Cell phenotype
  2. Cell size
  3. It’s specific function,
  4. Position and place in the brain. This is crucial.
  5. How it is interconnected with other cells,
  6. What communication it requires to communicate with other neuron cells, and the setup of the communication channels
  7. What specific new regulatory functions it acquires
  8. Precisely predefining how many new neuron cell types must be produced.
  9. Specification of the cell-cell adhesion and which ones will be used in each cell to adhere to the neighbor cells ( there are 4 classes )
  10. Set up its specific nutrition demands

Just a comparison of the processing power of the human brain, compared to the fastest supercomputers made by man:
The brain is a deviously complex biological computing device that even the fastest supercomputers in the world fail to emulate. Well, that’s not entirely true anymore. Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Technology Graduate University in Japan and Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany have managed to simulate a single second of human brain activity in a very, very powerful computer. It took 40 minutes with the combined muscle of 82,944 processors in K computer to get just 1 second of biological brain processing time. 9

The prevalence of low-level function in four such experiments indicates that roughly one in 10^64 signature-consistent sequences forms a working domain. Combined with the estimated prevalence of plausible hydropathic patterns (for any fold) and of relevant folds for particular functions, this implies the overall prevalence of sequences performing a specific function by any domain-sized fold may be as low as 1 in 10^77, adding to the body of evidence that functional folds require highly extraordinary sequences. 10

Does it seem plausible that evolutionary mechanisms had this sort of power to evolve the human brain ?

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How could anyone come to that conclusion? By my own quick estimation even assuming an individual mutation for every added brain cell comes out far smaller.

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Be it 4, 5, 6 whatever. The problem remains the same.

There was no prebiotic selection to get life originating

Synonym for selecting is: choosing, picking, handpicking, sorting out, discriminating, choosing something from among others, and giving preference to something over another.

We know that we, as intelligent beings, do make choices to get the desired outcome all the time - and there is no alternative to conscious intelligent action. Therefore, it is logical and plausible, and probable, that an intelligent creator was in action, choosing the parameters of the laws of physics, the right equations, the right adjustments in the universe, the right building blocks of life, the right machinery to have given life a first go. And he was remarkably good at that.

1. Life requires the use of a limited set of complex biomolecules, a universal convention, and unity which is composed of the four basic building blocks of life ( RNA and DNA’s, amino acids, phospholipids, and carbohydrates). They are of a very specific complex functional composition and made by cells in extremely sophisticated orchestrated metabolic pathways, which were not extant on the early earth. If abiogenesis were true, these biomolecules had to be prebiotically available and naturally occurring ( in non-enzyme-catalyzed ways by natural means ) and then somehow join in an organized way and form the first living cells. They had to be available in big quantities and concentrated at one specific building site.
2. Making things for a specific purpose, for a distant goal, requires goal-directedness. And that’s a big problem for naturalistic explanations of the origin of life. There was a potentially unlimited variety of molecules on the prebiotic earth. Competition and selection among them would never have occurred at all, to promote a separation of those molecules that are used in life, from those that are useless. Selection is a scope and powerless mechanism to explain all of the living order, and even the ability to maintain order in the short term and to explain the emergence, overall organization, and long-term persistence of life from non-living precursors. It is an error of false conceptual reduction to suppose that competition and selection will thereby be the source of explanation for all relevant forms of the living order.
3. We know that a) unguided random purposeless events are unlikely to the extreme to make specific purposeful elementary components to build large integrated macromolecular systems, and b) intelligence has goal-directedness. Bricks do not form from clay by themselves, and then line up to make walls. Someone made them. Phospholipids do not form from glycerol, a phosphate group, and two fatty acid chains by themselves, and line up to make cell membranes. Someone made them. That is God.

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Yes.

The reason human brains are different from chimp brains is the difference in the DNA sequence of our genomes. There are about 35 million SNP’s and 5 million indels that differ between our genomes, so evolution would need to produce those genetic differences in the ~5 million years since we shared a common ancestor.

So does it add up? Let’s say we have a constant population of just 100,000 and a generation time of 25 years. Each human is born with about 50 mutations, so in a population of 100,000 that would be 5 million mutations per generation. With a generation time of 25 years that would be 200,000 generations in 5 million years. 5 million mutations per generation for 200,000 generations would be 1E12, or 1 trillion mutations. That means only 1 in every 25,000 mutations that did occur would need to make it into the modern genome of humans, and that is using the lower end of the estimates for mutations, generation time, and population. If we increase the population to 1 million constant, we would only need to keep 1 out of every 250,000 mutations.

The math looks like it works.

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Well! He sure showed you, didn’t he?

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The waiting time problem in a model hominin population

Behe The edge of evolution 2007 4

The book “edge of evolution” is principally about the probability of new protein-protein binding sites arising by chance and necessity. Experimental evidence (mostly chloroquine resistance) shows such protein-protein binding sites to be difficult to evolve by chance mechanisms. He says the empirical (extrapolation) of the “edge” of evolution is no more than two coordinated protein-protein binding sites could have evolved in a lineage in all the time available on earth. The flagellum has perhaps dozens of such sites.
It is a quantitative argument.

Recall the example of sickle cell disease. The sickle cell mutation is both a life saver and a life destroyer. It fends off malaria, but can lead to sickle cell disease. However,hemoglobin C-Harlem has all the benefits of sickle, but none of its fatal drawbacks. So in western and central Africa, a population of humans that had normal hemoglobin would be worst off, a population that had half normal and half sickle would be better off, and a population that had half normal and half C-Harlem would be best of all. But if that’s the case, why bother with sickle hemoglobin? Why shouldn’t evolution just go from the worst to the best case directly? Why not just produce the C-Harlem mutation straightaway and avoid all the misery of sickle? The problem with going straight from normal hemoglobin to hemoglobin C-Harlem is that, rather than walking smoothly up the stairs, evolution would have to jump a step. C-Harlem differs from normal hemoglobin by two amino acids . In order to go straight from regular hemoglobin to C-Harlem, the right mutations would have to show up simultaneously in positions 6 and 73 of the beta chain of hemoglobin. Why is that so hard? Switching those two amino acids at the same time would be very difficult for the same reason that developing resistance to a cocktail of drugs is difficult for malaria—the odds against getting two needed steps at once are the multiple of the odds for each step happening on its own. What are those odds? Very low. The human genome is composed of over three billion nucleotides. Yet only a hundred million nucleotides seem to be critical, coding for proteins or necessary control features. The mutation rate in humans (and many other species) is around this same number; that is, approximately one in a hundred million nucleotides is changed in a baby compared to its parents (in other words, a total of about thirty changes per generation in the baby’s three-billion-nucleotide genome, one of which might be in coding or control regions). In order to get the sickle mutation, we can’t change just any nucleotide in human DNA; the change has to occur at exactly the right spot. So the probability that one of those mutations will be in the right place is one out of a hundred million. Put another way, only one out of every hundred million babies is born with a new mutation that gives it sickle hemoglobin. Over a hundred generations in a population of a million people, we would expect the mutation to occur once by chance. That’s within the range of what can be done by mutation/selection.

To get hemoglobin C-Harlem, in addition to the sickle mutation we have to get the other mutation in the beta chain, the one at position 73. The odds of getting the second mutation in exactly the right spot are again about one in a hundred million. So the odds of getting both mutations right, to give hemoglobin C Harlem in one generation in an individual whose parents have normal hemoglobin, are about a hundred million times a hundred million (10^16) . On average, then, nature needs about that many babies in order to find just one that has the right double mutation. With a generation time of ten years and an average population size of a million people, on average it should take about a hundred billion years for that particular mutation to arise—more than the age of the universe.

Hemoglobin C-Harlem would be advantageous if it were widespread in Africa, but it isn’t. It was discovered in a single family in the United States, where it doesn’t offer any protection against malaria for the simple reason that malaria has been eradicated in North America. Natural selection, therefore, may not select the mutation, and it may easily disappear by happenstance if the members of the family don’t have children, or if the family’s children don’t inherit a copy of the C-Harlem gene. It’s well known to evolutionary biologists that the majority even of helpful mutations are lost by chance before they get an opportunity to spread in the population. If that happens with C-Harlem, we may have to wait for another hundred million carriers of the sickle gene to be born before another new C-Harlem mutation arises.

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I would note that nothing in the OP comes even remotely close to explaining how this purported intelligent powerful designer created life.

I am always amazed by the mindset of ID, that they cannot see the difference between a bald assertion of an explanation, and an actual explanation itself.

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Wow. And I thought some of the other folks here suffered from logorrhea.

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One couldn’t. It’s asserted, full stop. It is not something one “comes to” as if through a process of rational inquiry. It’s literal garbage. That which is fit only for being discarded and incinerated.

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You don’t have to have both mutations at the same time. One mutation can circulate as a neutral mutation before the other appears. You also have not shown that those are the only two changes that can confer malarial resistance without the side effects of the more common sickle cell allele. To use another example, there are multiple known mutations that confer lactase persistence in humans, as well as changes in melanin production.

This, and other examples, commit the Sharpshooter fallacy. You first assume that evolutionary pathway that was taken is the only possible pathway that was available. You then assume that even within that evolutionary pathway the mutations that did appear are the only possible beneficial mutations. You draw the bullseye around the bullet hole.

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Cells have a codified description of themselves in digital form stored in genes and have the machinery to transform that blueprint through information transfer from genotype to phenotype, into an identical representation in analog 3D form, the physical ‘reality’ of that description. The cause leading to a machine’s and factory’s functionality has only been found in the mind of the engineer and nowhere else.

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I think I know who you may be thinking of. Perhaps you should introduce them to each other!

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Argument by definition followed by an unevidenced assertion. Quite impressive.

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Ok. Give me an empirically demonstrated alternative to intelligence, that constructed machines and factories based on a blueprint, also made by that same said mechanism.

An argument from ignorance asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false. It excludes the possibility that there may have been an insufficient investigation to prove that the proposition is either true or false. In our case, scientific researchers have tried for over 70 years to explain the origin of life by unguided means, and failed. So it’s not that they have not tried. They have, but all attempts led to dead ends. Eliminative induction is sound when there are two competing hypotheses, and one can be shown with high certainty false. Provided the proposition, together with its competitors, forms a mutually exclusive and exhaustive class. Since either there is a God, or not, either one or the other is true. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however not fully comprehensible, but logically possible, must be the truth. Eliminative inductions, in fact, become deductions. Naturalism rests on blind beliefs: Not science. Random events have never been demonstrated to impose, guide, or direct chemical selection to give life the first go.

An ID proponent does not make an assertion as exemplified with Russell’s teapot: There is a teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit around Mars. Because nobody can prove otherwise, it’s true. Nobody believes that, of course. People make wild claims and often get away with them, simply on the fact that the converse cannot otherwise be proven. Not so with Intelligent Design.

Synonym for selecting is: choosing, picking, handpicking, sorting out, discriminating, choosing something from among others, and giving preference to something over another. We know that we, as intelligent beings, do make choices to get the desired outcome all the time - and there is no demonstrated and known alternative to conscious intelligent selection for functional outcomes. Therefore, it is logical and plausible, and probable, that an intelligent agent created the first genome and stored instructional information, created the metabolic pathways to synthesize the building blocks of life, and energy turbines to make ATP. And he was remarkably good at that. So this is an entirely positive case. Not a case of ignorance.

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OK, who said “Otangello” three times?

Except for chemical evolution. Also Dissipative Systems which sidestep the selection process.

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