@kellyjay saidNo human activity was involved in the origin of life, so the analogy with the painting of Mona Lisa does not hold in this respect. I would have thought that was so obvious, it did not need to be pointed out. My mistake. The analogy was merely intended to emphasise the silliness of confusing reasons and causes, nothing more.
I think you'd accept any theory to rule out the possibility of God, but that isn't helping the discourse by making that accusation than you saying I want to put God into the equations. What do we see can a mindless process do the things we are looking at or is one required, and I think it's a slam dunk one is required, and an incredibly powerful one at that.
We can look ...[text shortened]... ctivity was ruled out by default and never allowed to be used as a possible reason for the painting.
What do we see can a mindless process do the things we are looking at or is one required, and I think it's a slam dunk one is required, and an incredibly powerful one at that. This contains the same blunder I have been pointing out to you all along, the same blunder your Prof. Tour with all the fancy titles makes, too. There are no requirements for chemicals. There are no goals for chemicals. There are no targets for chemicals. Chemicals don't try. These are all human projections into something which has no reasons, only causes. Reasons (requirements, goals, targets) are invented, by and for humans. Nature has no need of them. Indeed, nature has no needs at all, it is only the human who has needs (for plausible explanations, for goals, for targets, for requirements).
23 May 23
@shallow-blue saidThis is a valid and important point. In reality, chemical reactions are going on everywhere, all the time, continuously. It is completely arbitrary for humans to abstract one small arc out of the booming buzzing confusion and to say that something stopped. Just because one reactive component has been completely consumed and turned into something else, does not mean that nothing else is going on there; of a surety, something is still going on there. (Only at absolute zero temperature does all atomic activity cease.) The continuousness of chemical reactions wrecks Prof. Tour's argument that chemical reactions don't know when to stop, therefore some divine power must have intervened to make them stop at just the optimum target-moment when life could begin without overshooting the target and exhausting the available constituent ingredients for life to continue indefinitely.
Wrong. Sorry, this is just so simplistic it is factually wrong. A chemical reaction will continue until an equilibrium is reached. Since very few chemical reactions, and very nearly none in nature, happen in isolation, this equilibrium is rarely when one reactant is completely used up.
As for "required" and "found", that's just more infantile anthropomorphising.
24 May 23
@shallow-blue saidI don't believe anything I said disagrees with your point until there is nothing more to it will continue.
Wrong. Sorry, this is just so simplistic it is factually wrong. A chemical reaction will continue until an equilibrium is reached. Since very few chemical reactions, and very nearly none in nature, happen in isolation, this equilibrium is rarely when one reactant is completely used up.
As for "required" and "found", that's just more infantile anthropomorphising.
24 May 23
@indonesia-phil saidI can say the same thing about you, rejecting out of hand anything that has the possibility of God being there. My point was what we see is not the product of a mindless process, you are welcome to refute that by showing how mindlessness could do the things we see taking place in life.
Which proves my point; you are unable to conceive of any thought process which does not begin with the existence/non existence of your inherited god, and until you do further discourse is pointless. True science takes no account of your god whatsoever.
Anyway, there it is, the Kellyjay all but indecipherable, rambling post, which ends with:
'Science does not assume anything in or out people do.'
I mean, what?
24 May 23
@moonbus saidAnd yet to build a living cell there is nothing haphazard about that, the products we see in cells are the requirements, and as we reverse engineer this shows us what is needed and we still cannot do it. You act as if any chemical combination without conditions can do it, if that is your mindset, yes you are quite mistaken.
No human activity was involved in the origin of life, so the analogy with the painting of Mona Lisa does not hold in this respect. I would have thought that was so obvious, it did not need to be pointed out. My mistake. The analogy was merely intended to emphasise the silliness of confusing reasons and causes, nothing more.
[b] What do we see can a mindless process do the ...[text shortened]... only the human who has needs (for plausible explanations, for goals, for targets, for requirements).
24 May 23
@kellyjay saidYou're talking nonsense. We still cannot do what?? Build cells? What is this supposed to prove? That only a god could? Believe that if you must, but it's not science. Magic is not an acceptable 'explanation' in science.
And yet to build a living cell there is nothing haphazard about that, the products we see in cells are the requirements, and as we reverse engineer this shows us what is needed and we still cannot do it. You act as if any chemical combination without conditions can do it, if that is your mindset, yes you are quite mistaken.
We do in fact 'build' several kinds of semi-living cell components, in messenger RNA vaccines, for example.
Furthermore, humans have 'engineered' bacteria with synthetic genomes.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23502559/
So you are mistaken that we cannot do this.
Of course not any combination of chemicals without conditions leads to a cell; what a silly thing to say. I certainly did not say that.
@kellyjay saidScience does not reject the possibility of God 'being there.' Many scientists are also theists. What science, and any scientist (including a Christian one) with integrity, rejects is an appeal to God as an explanatory principle in causal chains. There is no evidence of transcendental causality. There is no evidence that anything transcendental to our universe intervenes in chemical reactions which contribute to the origin of life or chromosomal mutations which contribute to the evolution of species. Science rejects these imputations of divine interference in natural processes for the same reason that science rejects the idea that God makes earthquakes and plagues to punish sinners.
I can say the same thing about you, rejecting out of hand anything that has the possibility of God being there. My point was what we see is not the product of a mindless process, you are welcome to refute that by showing how mindlessness could do the things we see taking place in life.
What you see is God everywhere, even in nano-processes, because you don't accept (or sufficiently understand) that complexity comes about through the repeated operation of natural laws. You are entitled to continue to believe that God intervenes in chemical processes and chromosomal mutations if you wish; just don't call that "science" or spam up the Science Forum with your religious dogma. It gets no traction here.
25 May 23
@moonbus saidNo evidence for transcendental causality, then you must have something you can bring to the discussion on where everything came from, or how instructions got into life to direct the processes, the fine-tuning of the universe. If you cannot find answers for why something happened with just what is in a room, then you need to look elsewhere.
Science does not reject the possibility of God 'being there.' Many scientists are also theists. What science, and any scientist (including a Christian one) with integrity, rejects is an appeal to God as an explanatory principle in causal chains. There is no evidence of transcendental causality. There is no evidence that anything transcendental to our universe intervenes in ch ...[text shortened]... all that "science" or spam up the Science Forum with your religious dogma. It gets no traction here.
@kellyjay saidSince biological life depends on self-replicating molecules that codify information, chemical evolution is a prerequisite to biological evolution. That is, self-replicating molecules must have evolved first, and these in time created more complex structures containing hereditary information.
They will continue until the material that is going to react is used up, there isn't a means by which anything will stop once what is required has been found. Unlike sunsets, if you acquire the proper chemical due to a reaction, further reactions will remove what you needed, it isn't a game where once you get what you want, and then you get to keep it indefinitely. Stupid and meaningless is your complaint.
Using fairly simple starting ingredients (nucleotide bases and amino acids), recent laboratory experiments have succeeded, under varying environmental conditions, in eliciting the spontaneous emergence of new self-replicating molecules. Here is a link to one of many papers on the subject:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.9b10796
Spontaneous Emergence of Self-Replicating Molecules Containing Nucleobases and Amino Acids
ABSTRACT
The conditions that led to the formation of the first organisms and the ways that life originates from a lifeless chemical soup are poorly understood. The recent hypothesis of “RNA-peptide coevolution” suggests that the current close relationship between amino acids and nucleobases may well have extended to the origin of life. We now show how the interplay between these compound classes can give rise to new self-replicating molecules using a dynamic combinatorial approach. We report two strategies for the fabrication of chimeric amino acid/nucleobase self-replicating macrocycles capable of exponential growth. The first one relies on mixing nucleobase- and peptide-based building blocks, where the ligation of these two gives rise to highly specific chimeric ring structures. The second one starts from peptide nucleic acid (PNA) building blocks in which nucleobases are already linked to amino acids from the start. While previously reported nucleic acid-based self-replicating systems rely on presynthesis of (short) oligonucleotide sequences, self-replication in the present systems start from units containing only a single nucleobase. Self-replication is accompanied by self-assembly, spontaneously giving rise to an ordered one-dimensional arrangement of nucleobase nanostructures.
INTRODUCTION
Establishing possible pathways through which life can emerge from inanimate matter is one of the grand challenges in today’s science. In addressing this challenge the functional and structural characteristics of present-day life provide important guidance. At the same time, the overwhelming complexity of evolved life makes it challenging to extract its essence and identify pathways for its emergence.
Recently, a systems chemistry view toward the challenges of the origins and synthesis of life is gaining popularity. The facts that many different types of molecules coexisted at the time of life’s origin and that the same applies to present-day life, warrants an exploration of what may emerge upon allowing different compound classes to interact. For example, the notion of peptides and nucleic acids cooperating during the early stages of the emergence of life is becoming increasingly popular and nucleobase-peptide chimera show unique self-assembly behavior and can give rise to remarkably complex foldamers.
Key in the transition of chemistry into biology is the acquisition of function. The core functional characteristics of life are its ability to replicate, to metabolize, and to be spatially segregated from its environment. Where life requires the functional integration of all of these characteristics, most research efforts still focus on one of these aspects in isolation.
Autocatalysis, the ability of systems (molecules, metabolic networks or compartments) to make copies of themselves, is central to all evolutionary scenarios. Systems where autocatalysis is accompanied by information transfer and heredity are said to be self-replicating. Synthetic systems of self-replicators have been pioneered by von Kiedrowski using short DNA strands. Subsequently, self-replicating molecules have been developed that feature most of the other important current biopolymers (i.e., RNA and peptides as well as completely synthetic molecules. A major issue in replicator chemistry is the tendency for self-inhibition through replicator duplex formation. This causes many replicators to exhibit only parabolic growth (i.e., showing a kinetic order in replicator of 1/2) whereas exponential growth (first order in replicator) would be necessary for most scenarios of Darwinian evolution. Another problem in replicator chemistry is the complexity of the structures associated with most self-replicators, which are unlikely to emerge spontaneously from simple starting materials.
We recently introduced a new approach to self-replication that addresses both of these problems simultaneously. This approach relies on (i) the creation of a mixture of molecules that continuously interconvert (a dynamic combinatorial library or DCL) and (ii) a self-assembly process that leads to the sequestration of molecules from this mixture, which subsequently get replenished. The combination of these two features is sufficient for the spontaneous and autocatalytic formation of self-replicating molecules. Given that networks of interconverting molecules and self-assembly processes are likely to have been widespread in prebiotic environments, this mechanism provides a likely path for the spontaneous emergence of replicators. Note that the building blocks that give rise to the network of interconverting molecules can be relatively simple, while the structure of the emerging replicators can be relatively complex, consisting of many different building blocks connected in a way that is not a priori specified. Furthermore, exponential replication is possible upon entering a growth-breakage cycle, in which mechanical energy is utilized to break replicator assemblies exposing more edges from which the assemblies grow.
A systems approach to the emergence of self-replicating molecules, where different compound classes (i.e., amino acids, peptides, and nucleobases) coexist has thus far received only little attention. Efforts directed at PNA-based replicators, in which an amino acid replaces the phosphate-sugar backbone of DNA/RNA, come closest. However, PNA remains very similar to DNA/RNA in architecture and behavior.
We now report the spontaneous emergence of new self-replicating molecules from molecular networks in which nucleobases and amino acids are both present. We show that this leads to chimeric replicators, which rely on the assembly of peptides and nucleobases into fibrous aggregates (but do not rely on base-pairing) resulting in the autocatalytic formation of a one-dimensional arrangement of nucleobases. The two different systems constructed herein allow for a direct comparison between replicator mutations. The peptide-nucleobase system shows that mutations are easily accommodated during replication, while in the PNA system, replicator mutation is impeded as it requires a change in ring size. While the building blocks used were not selected for prebiotic relevance, they do illustrate the potential of the assembly driven replication mechanism that might well extend to other types of molecules.
The bold-faced text in the last paragraph is the upshot. It is worth pointing out, I think, that amino acids have been observed in space, some of which are alien to our biosphere, but others of which are identical to the amino acids found in terrestrial organisms. So one starting ingredient for life on Earth is floating in the hostile environs of outer space, and we should therefore not be surprised if amino acids were pervasive in the "primordial soup" of early Earth.
Are you ready for the next punchline?
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/all-of-the-bases-in-dna-and-rna-have-now-been-found-in-meteorites
Here I'll just give the title of the article and the lede: "All of the bases in DNA and RNA have now been found in meteorites. The discovery adds to evidence that suggests life’s precursors came from space."
Thus we can see that both the nucleotide bases (i.e. nucleobases) and amino acids that the laboratory experiments reported on above used to achieve the spontaneous emergence of self-replicating molecules were in all likelihood pervasive on Earth almost as soon as it formed a crust.
Once self-replicating molecules arise, interactions between them and other molecules may be expected to give rise to new structures, and it is likely that this interplay would often mimic the predator-prey models of biological organisms to some extent. Thus the process of natural selection begins, with the environment as always exerting its own influence on the course of events...
@kellyjay saidNo evidence for transcendental causality, then you must have something you can bring to the discussion on where everything came from,
No evidence for transcendental causality, then you must have something you can bring to the discussion on where everything came from, or how instructions got into life to direct the processes, the fine-tuning of the universe. If you cannot find answers for why something happened with just what is in a room, then you need to look elsewhere.
Negative. It is not necessary to know where everything came from to understand what is here now. That's your Judeo-Christian dogma peeking through again. Out of place in the Science Forum.
or how instructions got into life to direct the processes,
Negative. There are no "instructions directing life", not on a chemical level anyway. You are anthropomorphising again, confusing reasons and causes again.
the fine-tuning of the universe.
Negative. The universe is not fine-tuned. 'Fine-tuning' is a metaphor, mis-applied to nature. The only thing that is fine-tuned is man-made machine. In reality, the universe is an explosion, expanding at near light speed. There is nothing at all fine-tuned about an explosion.
If you cannot find answers for why [sic] something happened with just what is in a room, then you need to look elsewhere.
Negative. You are the one with a compulsive need to find answers elsewhere. Moreover, you persistently confuse 'why' and 'how'. Putative 'why' answers do not answer factual 'how' questions, yet you persist in fobbing off religious answers to scientific questions. 'How' discussions belong here, in the Science Forum; 'why' discussions belong in the Spirituality Forum.
25 May 23
1 edit
@Soothfast
Meteorites, too, eh? Well, that demolishes Prof. Tour's contention that the spontaneous appearance of complex organic molecules is improbable.
I hope I live long enough to learn what data the probe to Enceladus sends back.
25 May 23
@moonbus saidIt isn't necessary to know where everything came from if your only desire is to make up whatever story you want. What a joke.
No evidence for transcendental causality, then you must have something you can bring to the discussion on where everything came from,
Negative. It is not necessary to know where everything came from to understand what is here now. That's your Judeo-Christian dogma peeking through again. Out of place in the Science Forum.
[b]or how instructions got into life to di ...[text shortened]... ' discussions belong here, in the Science Forum; 'why' discussions belong in the Spirituality Forum.
@soothfast saidNothing new, here is an old text that talks about that by one of the chemists who worked on one, and if you take the time you'll be surprised who he worked with while doing it.
Since biological life depends on self-replicating molecules that codify information, chemical evolution is a prerequisite to biological evolution. That is, self-replicating molecules must have evolved first, and these in time created more complex structures containing hereditary information.
Using fairly simple starting ingredients (nucleotide bases and amino acids), re ...[text shortened]... lection begins, with the environment as always exerting its own influence on the course of events...
25 May 23
@moonbus saidYou should look at the details unless like your views on where we come from are applied here too, you just want to make it up as you go.
@Soothfast
Meteorites, too, eh? Well, that demolishes Prof. Tour's contention that the spontaneous appearance of complex organic molecules is improbable.
I hope I live long enough to learn what data the probe to Enceladus sends back.