Doesn’t this experiment require pure right-handed ribose? … built into activated nucleotides? Didn’t it include the translation system from an E. coli? They call these “nutrients.” Isn’t it true that none of those were present on early Earth, as far as we can tell, until after life began? Where did the starting “Host RNA” come from? Wasn’t it manufactured by humans because they already know it works?
In addition the lab environment is pure - no contaminants! How fortunate.
Pure water droplets in pure oil? Where did the pure oil occur on early Earth, agitated just so that the the water droplets interact and stay suspended? “Who” added the nutrient supply at just the right time (more water droplets in oil with more translation systems and more activated nucleotides)?
What a great example of what an intelligent designer can do with a well stocked lab, access to purified chemicals, precise environmental control, and a careful recipe!
We already know RNA and DNA break, so mutations are certain over multiple cycles. The new data may be that the changed RNA also got replicated. Cool! But isn’t that what translation systems do?
This is several tons of meaningless hype around a couple of ounces of an interesting, but not at all surprising, experiment. What is there here that could have actually happened on early Earth?
None of those factors are what this experiment was about. It was about evolution of greater complexity, not the origin of RNA, nor the origin of the translation system, nor even the origin of replication. Yes each of those are interesting questions in and of themselves, and to say the origin of life is solved each of those would need to be solved too, but that isn’t what this experiment was about.
Did you guys read the paper? The Abstract starts with “In prebiotic evolution…” The Introduction starts with “An origins-of-life scenario…” And the pop-sci and this thread headlines, “New Insight Into Possible Origins of Life”.
My argument: this has nothing to do with origins of life. It demonstrates that mutated RNA can replicate in a carefully controlled environment. But we knew that. Just agree with me!
If it’s going to have anything to do with origins of life, it needs to take the early Earth into account. What can be done in a laboratory with carefully curated molecules cannot be assumed to demonstrate anything about early Earth where neither those molecules nor that environment existed.
I agree with @thoughtful that you guys have a lot of faith, and with @colewd that this shows literally nothing about
They need to show this with molecular replicators and an environment that might have actually been present before they make these ridiculous claims. To simply imagine that what works here demonstrates anything meaningful about an utterly different early Earth is not science.
I read even further than that. I read the actual data and looked at the figures too.
It has to do with the gains in the level of complexity through competition, which is definitely part of the problem of the origin of life. To explain the origin of life requires that something approaching the complexity of life is explained, so any research that reveals how greater complexity can evolve is for that reason informative about the origin of life.
Sure but it also demonstrates that there are conditions under which an evolving system of RNA molecules encoding a replicase enzyme can become more complex through competitive selection, and that individual lineages can evolve cooperative replication. Since life as we know it definitely consists many molecules cooperating to replicate a larger entity as a whole, this research is relevant.
Why are creationists so upset by this?
The replicators in this experiment were molecular. Last I checked both RNA, protein enzymes, and the translation system, are all molecules. And replication really did take place in the experiment. And the system did evolve greater complexity over time by multiple distinct lineages of RNA molecules encoding a replicase enzyme, gaining the ability to cooperate to replicate themselves (and a few parasites too).
The conditions aren’t early Earth, but that’s irrelevant because the question being answered is more universal: How does competitive selection between replicators(which in many situations would tend to favor just a single variant to the exclusion of all others) inadvertently produce stably co-existing members that assist each other’s replication?
This article addresses one of the crucial steps that must have occurred in the process of going from non-living chemicals and full living things, so it is absolutely related to origin of life questions and is a significant advance in answering that question.
It’s curious that there are people who are so invested in this line of research failing that they will steadfastly deny any progress that is made.
Saying this again because I love repeating myself…
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.
This study most definitely pertains to the origin of life.
The replication and translation of the RNA molecules (HL0 and its descendants) in the experiments happened in “water-in-oil droplets”. What bulb does this light up in your head?
On the contrary, the findings of this study have provided insight into how RNA molecules in the RNA world could have gained complexity and its pretty cute.
This is conflating the idea of Intelligent Design with the methodology of the Designed Experiment. One assumes a cause, and the other allows basic inference to cause. The controlled experiment allows examination of each step in a process, something which is not possible under “wild”, “natural”, uncontrolled conditions. This is science at its most basic level, determining the when, why, what, and how answers to things we did not understand before. These are the very sorts of questions which ID cannot answer, and claims cannot be answered.
This is what was used to translate the host RNA in the experiment:
Protein biosynthesis proceeds in three steps: initiation, elongation, and termination. In E. coli, the translation factors
responsible for completing these steps are three initiation factors
(IF1, IF2, and IF3), three elongation factors (EF-G, EF-Tu, and EFTs), and three release factors (RF1, RF2, and RF3), as well as RRF for
termination. However, RF2 is not required for the translation of
genes terminating with the codons UAG or UAA. The PURE system
includes 32 components that we purified individually: IF1, IF2, IF3,
EF-G, EF-Tu, EF-Ts, RF1, RF3, RRF, 20 aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases
(ARSs), methionyl-tRNA transformylase (MTF), T7 RNA polymerase, and ribosomes. In addition, the system contains 46 tRNAs,
NTPs, creatine phosphate, 10-formyl-5,6,7,8-tetrahydrofolic acid, 20
amino acids, creatine kinase, myokinase, nucleoside-diphosphate
kinase, and pyrophosphatase.
I can’t see how you can possibly say that the experiment shows that the necessary replication could have occured in a RNA-world scenario or that it deals with the origin of life.
In prebiotic evolution, self-replicating molecules are believed to have evolved into complex living systems by expanding their information and functions open-endedly. Theoretically, such evolutionary complexification could occur through successive appearance of novel replicators that interact with one another to form replication networks. Here we perform long-term evolution experiments of RNA that replicates using a self-encoded RNA replicase.
If the experiment was relevant to “a putative RNA world”, the replication would have to be performed by RNA, not translation components taken from of an existing e.Coli bacteria…
Yes, I read it, which is why I called it overblown hype.
The Law of Reproducible Results : Anything found in nature was Designed, unless it can be reproduced in the lab. Corollary: Anything intentionally done in a lab is not natural; it’s a purposeful result. Therefore, all lab results are evidence of Intelligent Design.
More word salad. How can you say that the arrangement of genes is purposeful? How can you even say it’s functional, which is a step prior to purpose? Sorry, but Ewert doesn’t produce a dependency graph, just a diagram with the same shape as a dependency graph. In order to make it a dependency graph he would actually have to show functional dependency of modules on prior modules. I strongly doubt there is any such dependency; the pattern is purely historical. In passing, one should note that Ewert’s method assumed that gene loss can explain nothing. And none of this has anything to do with Behe’s “method”, such as it is.
He would also need to show the same pattern could not be produced by deletion of intermediate stages/genes - and IRC that is one of the strongest criticisms from a TSZ discussion long ago.
I’m not quite sure what that means, but he would certainly have to show a number of things, for example that the modules themselves each form a functional unit, which they clearly do not. Also, these “dependency diagrams” do not have a time dimension at all, so the idea of loss or transformation is never entertained by the analysis. No wonder the data supposedly fit the dependency diagram better than they fit a tree, given such a model.
