This too. Buzzard’s challenge is off the mark.
1 Like
Would you say also there is no insurmountable barrier to understanding the origin of the atom or the electromagnetic wave? How do you know there is not an insurmountable barrier when we are currently in the state that the problem is yet to be solved?
1 Like
That’s pretty far off topic. Start a new thread if you like.
1 Like
How is that not analogous to replacing a human organ with an artificial one and saying that you have created something unique and now there is no insurmountable barrier to creating a human from various organs?
You have a lot of faith.
1 Like
Perhaps it is analogous, but is meets the challenge as stated. Replacing human organs is not a question of “can it be done”, but rather “how to do it.” We understand what organs are supposed to do and how they function, building a device that can replace it is a matter of engineering and medical know how. You might recall a recent story in the news about a man who got a heart transplant from a (genetically modified?) pig, an advancement along the line to replacing organs. We have no cause to think that replacing other organs is impossible. Replacing brains is going to be really hard, but we already see stimulation devices for epilepsy and other treatments, and we should expect more progress there too.
If you require assembling life de novo from scratch, that is a matter of assembling the right molecules in the right places, something which we are already pretty good at, and getting better all the time. Would you bet that it cannot be done? (And how much?) Things like putting assembled DNA into a cell to create a cellular factory are already being done. If the components of cells are considered to be “nano-machines” as claimed by some, then we may have achieved this goal already.
The incredulity of saying “It’s impossible” means very little. To have any confidence in this requires a deep understanding of the question. We can construct DNA, and we know DNA can be used to construct living things. Which part of that is impossible?
I do have faith of a sort, but it is based on a long history of problems solved and questions answered. I’ve solved a few VERY MINOR questions myself, and I work in a place* where people are engaged in expanding our knowledge. It doesn’t take much faith to believe in this I see happening every day.
* for a few more days, then I’m switching to an industry job.
3 Likes
I am a bit baffled by this entire line of argument from those who believe abiogenesis can only occur if a god does it. If gods are not necessary for life to exist, why must it be possible for human beings to create life from inanimate chemicals? I do not see the logic. Why can it not be the case that the natural world can produce things that human beings cannot?
2 Likes
And supposing God did create life, why should that make life’s natural origins impossible anyway? Could a God not both create life, and a world in which life can also arise naturally?
2 Likes
It was also a first attempt at a minimal bacterial genome.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aad6253
They did the initial work with transposon mutagenesis to find essential and non-essential genes. Interestingly, removing pairs of non-essential genes (as determined by transposon mutagenesis) were sometimes lethal, pointing to redundant function.
3 Likes
It’s always interesting when a creationist tries to downplay a scientific finding by claiming it takes a lot of faith. It is only second to the creationist claim that scientists are invoking magic to explain abiogenesis.
Hoisting and petards come to mind.
3 Likes
Do you mean redundant genes that are NOT redundant in function?
I wasn’t downplaying a scientific finding. I was trying to point out from my perspective I don’t find anything in the research to trust that humans will one day understand abiogenesis. It does seem impossible to me. I think it takes a great deal of faith to believe it will happen.
But that is what He did.
This really should be the case actually in the mainstream view - so my question always is - why don’t we see it everyday?
I don’t believe that if we even had the capability to gather all those molecules and put them into place just as a living cell would be today, that we would be assembling life. The thing would just be dead. If you take parts of living things, like they are doing now, and swapping them out, you have a rearranged living thing. If you add an artificial part, you have a living thing with an artificial part, as in my organ analogy. If you take non-living things and put them together, you would still have a non-living thing. It isn’t like a specific arrangement somehow creates a living thing - at least that’s where I have faith. 
God gives thing life and orders the world such that life produces more life. But life had a beginning.
We do. Unless you are under the misapprehension that the organisms that are born every day were created by humans.
2 Likes
Of course I disagree. I don’t think you quite follow what is reported in this study.
If you look at abiogenesis as a path or road, beginning with the early earth and ending with the first population of what we would recognize as bacteria, we already know of milestones along this path. One would be the first RNA, that most would agree would be the primordial replicating genetic species. Another milestone would be the full complement of what we can recognize as ribosomal RNAs. The study in question provides us insight into how we get from the first RNA to the ensemble (at least the small and large rRNAs, along with tRNAs) that lies at the very core of life as we know it today. The results in this study do not describe the entire process, but only reveal how the first replicating RNAs might evolve and diversify. I expect that there will be follow-ups that add amino acids to the mix, which very well may identify other milestones along this path (such as the nature and evolution of the amino acid-tRNA association).
I am a bit surprised as to why the authors used the clunky replication system they did, rather than this one. Others are conducting similar experiments along these lines (example - 10.1126/science.aay0688). I for one am optimistic that many other connections will be made, milestones identified. No faith needed, just confidence in what we know about life, the universe, and everything.
.
4 Likes
Okay, but then why do you seem to think it’s impossible - perhaps you misread the sentence quoted?
If you think God created life but also the universe such that life can naturally form in it, why the resistance to research in the latter part?
3 Likes
You seem to be describing vitalism. The idea that life is itself some sort of fundamental substance or essence apart from the physics of interactions of its contituents.
Are you aware that there are cells that biosynthesize their basic building blocks effectively from the ground up. That is, from atmospheric gases like nitrogen and carbondioxide? Are these atoms and molcules somehow still endowed with the essence of life from having once been part of another organism?
Please tell me at what step in the biosynthetic chain the molecules gain the essence of being alive and what observation and experiment allows you to distinguish living from dead - or artificial - molecules.
3 Likes
Can anyone explain how this experiment sheds any light on the origin of life (presumably “RNA World”) when the replication system is taken from an existing organism?
And why does the sub title of the article say “an RNA molecule that replicates” when the replicator is a protein that is translated from the RNA molecule?
The experiment is interesting, but it seems to be overblown hype as far as abiogenesis is concerned.
2 Likes
I mean genes with redundant function. As long as you have one of the genes you still have the function which is why they were considered non-essential when knocked out individually.
3 Likes
Agreed. Vitalism has a long history of retreats.
The RNA world hypothesis only pertains to RNA doing all the things that proteins do now at some point early on, not necessarily at the beginning.
Because the experiment only addressed a part of the process.
If you don’t see time as a major hurdle, please figure out Alzheimer’s disease for us. It only takes decades to happen.
We don’t expect every step to be addressed in a single experiment or paper.
4 Likes
The question where this experiment is relevant conerns the evolution of greater complexity in a putative RNA world. If we are to explain how something approaching the complexity of known living cells evolved, we need to understand what factors lead to the evolution of greater complexity in simpler replicating systems.
It’s right there in the abstract and introduction:
Introduction
An origins-of-life scenario depicts Darwinian evolution from self-replicating molecules, such as RNA, toward complex living systems1,2,3. How molecular replicators could develop complexity by continuously expanding information and functions is a central issue in prebiotic evolution4,5. An expected route for complexification is that novel RNA replicators successively emerged and co-replicated so that increased genetic information can be stored at a population level, before their assembly into a long genome4,5,6,7,8. Although several theoretical studies investigated the possibility of complexification9,10,11 and stable coexistence12,13,14,15,16 of molecular replicators, empirical demonstration has been challenging.
What drives complexification seems to be the thing being studied here.
So it sheds some light on the origin of life by researchers having found conditions under which competition between different lineages of replicating RNA-based systems, had the effect of them evolving to assist each other’s replication.
No single molecule of this system is actually a replicator, so in either case it’s a poor description. The protein alone can’t replicate itself, nor can the RNA polymer encoding it. And the system as a whole used in this experiment also depends on an externally supplied translation system in order to translate the RNA polymerase protein enzyme to replicate the RNA molecule, so of course nobody thinks this setup is prebiotically plausible. However if you think about it, any putative self-replicating molecule will have some sort of dependence on it’s environment, even if that is for nothing but it’s most basic atomic constituents. So until it finds itself in an environment where those exist, it won’t be able to “self-replicate”. In the same way you won’t be able to self-replicate without food(and a mate).
It is taken for granted that a system capable of replication existed in this experiment, so the plausibility of the one they use is not really relevant to the question they are addressing: Greater complexity through competitive selection. That whatever replicating system once existed did not take this particular form is, to the question they are seeking to address, neither here nor there.
5 Likes
The paper is open-access, so anyone can read it. The authors into great detail about the relevance of their results regarding the origins of life, and it is pretty easily understandable (at least to me)
DISCUSSION
An origins-of-life scenario depicts Darwinian evolution from self-replicating molecules, such as RNA, toward complex living systems1,2,3. How molecular replicators could develop complexity by continuously expanding information and functions is a central issue in prebiotic evolution4,5. An expected route for complexification is that novel RNA replicators successively emerged and co-replicated so that increased genetic information can be stored at a population level, before their assembly into a long genome4,5,6,7,8. Although several theoretical studies investigated the possibility of complexification9,10,11 and stable coexistence12,13,14,15,16 of molecular replicators, empirical demonstration has been challenging.
I tend to avoid pop-articles myself, because they are less reliable than the primary source.
However, I don’t think that this title is that misleading. If it were to say “an RNA molecule that replicates ITSELF (without protein)” then you may have a point.
2 Likes