Oh look it’s a nucleotide. Where’s the relevance to Craig Venters work that you invoked merely for appearance and will now fail to substantiate the relevance of?
And to answer this I would say if there continued to be no evidence that life did originate naturally, no progress being made in the laboratory and a competiting explanation was a better explanation. Luckily there is evidence it happened, there is progress being made in the lab and there is no competiting explanation. No matter how much you think there is, ID or creationism has no explanation. It has a partial, a very partial one, at best. So we have absolutely no reason at all to throw up our hands and cry miracle
Why do you think there has to be a “random soup” with some mix of the 3 functional groups, instead of some myriad number of other possible ways to get that structure?
By what justification would you assume that has to happen at the origin of life? I question all your premises, and I know none of this has anything to do with work done by Craig Venter’s group.
You’re just making shirt up all day long.
The point is there are many ways the 3 functional groups can be connected and different chiralities to boot. Agree or disagree. The problem is the generation of many isomers of the same configuration, otherwise one doesn’t get a nice little readable railway to for something like helicases and polymerases to trave on. Agree or disagree?
Craig Venter. Why did you invoke him? Relevance?
I said I’ll explain in pieces, but you agree the 3 functional groups can have many isomers right?
Do you agree it would break readable,copyable DNAs to have different isomers of those 3 functional groups at each postion. Do you see the problem yet, and I’ve only scratched the surface.
No, you will proceed to just explain why, now. I have no patience for your distraction.
You see, the problem with making DNAs and RNAs starts with the monomers, RNA world experiments start with purified monomers to begin with, they neglect the formation of uniform isomers. You don’t see that as a problem.
EVEN with uniform monomers, Ventner’s group had to use a Blue-Heron like process to get the DNAs to form up because the monomoers wouldn’t form the uniform bonds. Even then they could get maybe cassettes of 100 nucleotides.
Do you see the problem yet? And this is not even a full step in the stairway to life, and it’s already a non-starter.
That’s the law that says that hurricanes cannot possibly exist.
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I don’t even know whether RNA is strictly relevant to the actual origin of life. I am not a proponent of the RNA world hypothesis(if by RNA world hypothesis you mean life began with RNA, I am quite certain there was some stage of life at which the genetic material was either primarily or entirely made of RNA, but that doesn’t have to be life’s very origin). I simply don’t know at what stage RNA was involved in the originating process. So whatever problems you imagine with the formation of RNA and DNA says nothing about the actual origin of life, since it’s all based on the assumption that RNA and/or DNA was involved, and that it assembled in the manner you are speaking about. All of which are entirely questionable assumptions I simply refrain from making.
I am strictly speaking undecided on the question of RNA’s involvement in the origin of life.
EVEN with uniform monomers, Ventner’s group had to use a Blue-Heron like process to get the DNAs to form up because the monomoers wouldn’t form the uniform bonds. Even then they could get maybe cassettes of 100 nucleotides.
What experiments are you talking about? Please provide references.
Do you see the problem yet? And this is not even a full step in the stairway to life, and it’s already a non-starter.
It’s not clear to be it even IS a step that is required on “the stairway to life”. I am not at all convinced that to reach the living state, DNA or RNA has to be involved. For all I know, these could be the product of later evolution of even more primitive forms of life. Pre-genetic life. Pre-polymer life. I do not have the kinds of information that would allow me to say these things are either absolutely required, or irrelevant. Neither do you.
Here is a color diagram of the black and white diagram in Change Tan’s final book which she gave me permission to use. Box A is a standard connection of Adenine and Cytosine being connected (ok, I used nicknames for dAMP and dCMP), one can see the various connections with different isomers or connections to different positions for box B,C,D:
In fact, the number of possible configurations of these functional groups for a mere adenine and cytosine connection could be in the thousands, if we consider the deoxyribose isomers too, and some other things!
Ventner circumvented some of these problems by having his vendors use pre-existing biological materials made by living organisms. Secondly the lab he used to make the Synthia DNA had to use a Blue Heron like process to make sure the monomers connected to the right locations so as to get the familiar railway like configuration we see in textbooks:
There is then a potential to mis-connect even two monomers in trying to build a readable railway. One could of course build the railway differently, but the issue is enforcing a violation of the law of large numbers.
For example, I can configure 500 fair coins to be 100% heads. I could also configure it to be 100% tails. There is no restriction which configuration I choose, but each railway configuration could be a violation of the law of large numbers. The issue with the railway like configuration is that it is a violation of the law of large numbers on many levels.
First, thanks for telling me about your beliefs, you didn’t have to respond, but I appreciated you sharing…
One way extravagance is measured is how much machinery is added to an organism to go about the process of reproduction. A bacterium can be 300 time smaller than a Eukaryote. Multicellularity and meiosis are extravagant innovations relative to a bacterium.
I don’t think sexual selection is a good explanation for extravagance of peacocks specifically nor for extravagance in general.
This is the law of large numbers, nowhere does it say hurricanes can’t possibly exist.
From wiki:
In probability theory, the law of large numbers ( LLN ) is a theorem that describes the result of performing the same experiment a large number of times. According to the law, the average of the results obtained from a large number of trials should be close to the expected value and will tend to become closer to the expected value as more trials are performed.[1]
The LLN is important because it guarantees stable long-term results for the averages of some random events.[1][2] For example, while a casino may lose money in a single spin of the roulette wheel, its earnings will tend towards a predictable percentage over a large number of spins. Any winning streak by a player will eventually be overcome by the parameters of the game. It is important to remember that the law only applies (as the name indicates) when a large number of observations is considered.
…in doing what, exactly? What was he trying to do?
The problem of making homogenous classes of isomers and homogenous links – which is the opposite tendency in pre-biotic environments.
Build a genome and avoid the problems of having the wrong isomers and the wrong linkages which will be like a train wreck (to use Tan and Stadler’s words). If these requirements aren’t met (homogeneous isomers and links) one gets a train wreck of a wanna-be readable DNA polymer?
The homogenous isomer problem is solved by using isomers from living creatures or man-made facimiles (something not available to an abiogenesis scenario) and then linking them up in a uniform way using enzymes and a carefully orchestrated process (something not available to an abiogenesis scenario).
Here are the steps similar to the the synthesis of Ventner’s Synthia genome:
Also, the following paper also shows the level intelligent human designed needed to make a recipe for a DNA synthesis method. This is not available in a random chemical soup trying to do RNA synthesis ( similar to DNA synthesis in the lab according to Sigma Aldrich).
To summarize: Most paths lead to asphalt, few paths lead to life. Another way of putting it: “wide is the way that leads to destruction and narrow is the way that leads to life.”
What does any of this have to do with the origin of life? What justification do you have for thinking these things are required for something to be alive?
It doesn’t show any of these things are needed to make anything at all. That’s just an assumption you make.
Why do you think life has to originate from a “random chemical soup trying to do RNA synthesis”?
Most paths lead to nothing at all, few lead to actual mountains, and of those only one leads to the Mt Everest. And there it is.
How many paths lead to wishing things into existence with magic? As far I can tell, none at all. How many centuries must I spend praying for a dinosaur to spontaneously appear before me by the will of a divine being before we declare the supernaturalist origination research program to be a failure?
Maybe they’re not required for life (or a replicator, or how ever you define life). The issue isn’t ANY possible life, but the sort of life that isn’t consistent with origin from natural sets of events, because natural sets of events on biological pre-cursors leads to asphalt.
Well if we’re talking about cellular life (textbook biology cellular life), it needs a working DNA.
Of course you can suggest other ways of building a replicator, that’s fine, but life that uses DNA is life that uses something that wouldn’t emerge from a random set of chemicals in random concentrations, nor would it emerge even if you had even the functional groups floating around in solution.
The issue is NOT building any life, the issue is overcoming the things like the law of large numbers to build SYSTEMS like a DNA transription, translation, and a copying system.
There are lots of ways to build time keeping piece, in fact infinite number, but that doesn’t negate the improbability of the design. To quote Paley:
In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. … There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. … Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.
— William Paley, Natural Theology (1802)
Always to asphalt huh? How do you know that?
Life today uses DNA, sure. That could be the product of evolution, not necessarily the process by which something that is alive first came to exist.
Even among the many different contemporary proposals for how life could have originated, I have not heard of even a single one that even remotely posits that life emerged by DNA emerging “from a random set of chemicals in random concentrations”.
I have not come across any proposal that suggests that mechanism either.
You keep bringing up the law of large numbers in a nonsensical way. Please stop. Whatever point you think you’re making is completely meaningless.
What is the probability that of all the ways electrons, protons, and neutrons can interact, we end up with water molecules?
@stcordova You have previously expressed a … let’s call it unusual … understanding of the Law of Large Numbers. In simple terms this is the Law of Averages, and really does not apply in the sense which you use it. Nothing you are trying to say is improved by using the idea incorrectly.
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