You’d be 100% more impressive if you could supply the actual supporting evidence instead of just repeating the same unsupported assertion. Just sayin’…
It’s a quantitative claim without evidence nor math.
It’s ludicrous, particularly given your false claim that we’re looking at the same evidence.
Those are all claims that need evidence.
From the article:
“Here’s a science enigma: Try to explain where the neat, even DNA/RNA helix came from. Ha! Easy one! It probably spun around itself long before first life evolved like it did in a lab.”
“But a new study suggests the rotation may have occurred with ease billions of years ago when RNA’s chemical ancestors casually spun into spiraled strands…”
“In the lab, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology were surprised to see them do it under conditions thought to be common on Earth just before first life evolved: in plain water, with no catalysts, and at room temperature.”
“The resulting structure had features that strongly resembled RNA.”
“The spiraling could have had a reinforcing effect. It could have facilitated the molecules getting connected together that have the same chirality (curve) to connect into a common backbone that is compatible with the helical twist.”
“The study’s resulting polymers were not RNA but could be have been an important intermediate step in the early evolution of RNA. For building blocks, the researchers used base molecules referred to as “proto-nucleobases,” highly suspected to be precursors of nucleobases, main components that transport genetic code in today’s RNA.
Nucleobase paradox
The study had to work around a paradox in chemical evolution:
Making RNA or DNA using their actual nucleobases in the lab without the aid of the enzymes of living cells that usually do this job is more than a herculean task. Thus, although RNA and DNA are ubiquitous on Earth now, their evolution on pre-life Earth would appear to have been an anomaly requiring erratic convergences of extreme conditions.
By contrast, the Georgia Tech researchers’ model of chemical evolution holds that precursor nucleobases self-assembled easily to into ancestral prototypes – that were polymer-like and referred to as assemblies – which later evolved into RNA.”
Okay; let’s get our bearings and reassess now. That’s science in action, right?
Let’s see; I’m trying to figure out the Herculean task of prebiotic nucleobase manufacture, and how it made RNA and DNA self-assembly possible…I know what! I’ll just artificially engineer and assemble them, throw them into the selective environment of a lab beaker filled with freshwater (not saltwater or water filled with natural precipitates) at room temperature, protected from all high-energy UV radiation, and tell them that mimics the conditions of the prebiotic earth! And if I get anything even slightly interesting, I can declare that the whole paradox was easily overcome, and propose a hypothetical proof of concept… and no one --not even me, will notice it’s all one giant fudge! Of course, don’t ask me where or how I got those hypothetical enantiopure homochiral components to join up so easily; that was not a part of the experiment we carried out.
Has all the elements of a fantastic “just so” story, and I’m barely even into the paper.
We notice these kinds of things on my ship.
You guys finally realized science, ALL science, is written in tentative langue? Brilliant.
Where are your calculations and evidence demonstrating not enough time for evolution to occur?
What are yours indicating there is? In the name of good science, can you name any of the criticisms above "wrong?"
How in the world do you get “plain water” without high-energy UV radiation on the early earth? There’s a giant fudge, right there. But, you already know that.
We don’t need calculations. We have tons of empirical evidence from the fossil and genetic records as well as corroborating data from sciences like geology and the physics of radiometric dating evolution over deep time has happened.
All you seem to have is ignorance driven personal disbelief.
Good grief. That article is not the evidence, Guy! The evidence is in the paper cited.
You confirm your pathological avoidance of evidence with every post you make.
You’re not even reading the paper!
ScienceDaily is not a scientific journal. The fact that you are unable to distinguish between hearsay and evidence is a perfect demonstration of your lack of familiarity with the evidence.
This is the paper:
Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking in the Formation of Supramolecular Polymers: Implications for the Origin of Biological Homochirality
Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2019, 58, 1453 –1457
Here’s how the authors end the paper:
“That is, homochirality may have evolved from domains of supramolecular polymers where facile exchange of the wrong enantiomer was followed by covalent bond formation. We are exploring this possibility.”
Perfectly modest, completely justified by the evidence (which you completely ignore), and anything but a just-so story.
No. That’s an ignorant conflation of the popular press touting something and science.
Yes, they are amazingly wrong. You didn’t read the actual paper.
The evidence you have so far exceeds your hypothetical explanatory mechanisms, that the whole science industry is still chasing plausibility, but calling it settled and accounted for. We don’t do that on my ship.
I’m neither ignoring the evidence, nor its implications. Math, at best, can attempt to describe the situation; it has not supplied an answer to these basic scientific dilemmas / paradoxes.
When you substitute a ScienceDaily article for the paper on which it is based, you are clearly, and very deliberately, ignoring the evidence.
Another unsupported argument from ignorance. Do you ever do anything but make these unsupported assertions?
Perhaps you haven’t noticed that I have not characterized the findings as false, but have merely criticized their applicability to early earth environments. “Quiet, rain-swept soils” are quite exposed to high-energy UV radiation, for example, which severly undermines the overall amount of such biopolymers remaining available for any hypothetical proto-process. But, you already knew that.
It takes an admirable amount of faith to leap from these findings to seeing them as a “done deal.” I’ll maintain a healthy skepticism regarding the adequacy of the proposed scenario, but will also congratulate the scientists on potentially fruitful scientific endeavor. We try to sail nicely along on my “ignorant” ship; there are already too many pirate ships on the water to unnecessarily antagonize the other ships with insults, no matter what flag they’re flying.
What I’ve noticed is that you haven’t looked at the findings (evidence). How can we be interpreting the same evidence differently if you’re doing textual analysis of a ScienceDaily article instead of examining the actual evidence?
I have not done so. What I find remarkable is that you lack the faith to dig into the evidence. What are you afraid of?
…while making empty assertions and conveniently ignoring all scientific evidence which directly contradicts your fact-free claims. Sounds like the U.S.S. ID-Creationism.
First of all, I didn’t post the original link. I spoke on the basis of how the paper was characterized. If I have made an error in logic in doing so, your beef is at least partially with Science Daily, as the “popularizer” of the paper’s findings. I never claimed to have read the paper, only to have critiqued its proposed scenario. Where have I erred in doing so, in light of the original paper, in your estimation?
What efforts will you make to get Science Daily to more accurately characterize the paper, if so? I have no burden of proof here, and am not paid to be a professional scientist; I am merely handed the ongoing “probem” (or, “mystery”) back to you, and acknowledging that the hypothetical offered does not solve it; but may be a step closer.
Wow; you really DON’T know how to do science, do you? The graphic just might be Science Daily itself, for example.
Ahem…
How do you know that?