Can life arise from basic molecules?
| February 21, 2010 | Posted by idnet.com.au under Intelligent Design |
“SAN DIEGO: Can life arise from nothing but a chaotic assortment of basic molecules? The answer is a lot closer following a series of ingenious experiments that have shown evolution at work in non-living molecules. For the first time, scientists have synthesized RNA enzymes – ribonucleic acid enzymes also known as ribozymes – that can replicate themselves without the help of any proteins or other cellular components. What’s more, these simple nucleic acids can act as catalysts and continue the process indefinitely. “There’s nothing in biology in this system: no proteins, no cells, no biological matter. We just provide them with the building blocks,” said molecular biologist Gerald Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego.
The researchers began with ribozymes known to occur naturally, and put these in a growth medium, heated them and allowed the ribozymes to replicate.”
Dr. Robert Shapiro, a self-declared agnostic and opponent of ID theories, wrote the following in his book Planetary Dreams (page 102) in 1999 regarding the future engineering of self sustained RNA systems:
“When that event takes place, the media probably will announce it as the demonstration of a crucial step in the origin of life. I would agree with one modification. The concept that the scientists are illustrating is one of Intelligent Design. No better term can be applied to a quest in which chemists are attempting to prepare a living system in the laboratory, using all the ingenuity and technical resources at their disposal…the search for ribozymes invokes the same feeling of achievement and beauty in me that I get when I see a skilled golfer playing a difficult course at well under par. To imagine that related events could take place on their own appears as likely as the idea that the golf ball could play its own way around the course without the golfer.”
On 1/26/2010, Dr. Shapiro posted the following comment to an article by Carl Zimmer on the SCIENCE Magazine website under the heading “Origins, a history of begnnings”. “Despite the clarity of his prose, Carl Zimmer has fallen into a trap that has impeded progress in the origin of life field for the last half century. He has confused the process of total organic synthesis with the abiotic chemical reactions that may have taken place on the early Earth. Total synthesis involves the preparation by skilled chemists in laboratories of substances that we isolate from biology. The late Nobel Laureate Robert Burns Woodward was a master of this endeavor… On the early earth, however, there were neither chemists nor laboratories. No driving force has been demonstrated that would direct complex mixtures of organic chemicals of modest size to assemble themselves into a functional RNA. According to Gerald Joyce and the late Leslie Orgel, such an event would constitute a near miracle…
Scientific American has a free access paper here
34 Responses to Can life arise from basic molecules?
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Toronto: “When that cloud passes by, you and I both may have different ideas of what information we get from viewing it. I realize I’m going to get my garden watered and you realize your baseball game is going to be cancelled.
We can decide to tell each other what that cloud means to us. To do that, we use language. If we don’t exchange information in a message, that information still exists for both of us.
If we didn’t have a common language, it would make it harder to communicate, if at all, but the info is still there in each of us.
A language is strictly an agreed upon protocol for communication.”
Very good Toronto. But I think you missed something. The real power of language itself can be expressed through many different mediums. We can use sign language, English, Swahili, or German. We can use computer code… etc.
Those are the surface mediums you are focused on. As you say, we can choose any of them, but there is the common language they are all founded upon that cannot be choosen. That is the real language.
It is simply necessary. And we all use it. You were using it above, but appearently, without even comprehending it.
And it is this language that so many appear to be in rebellion against.
It is called reason, and logic. That is the universal language upon which the cosmos and all order was formed. Without it, there is no such thing as form.
It reminds me of a student asking a speaker, “are not logic and coherence just more Western ideas we try and force upon the rest of the world?”
To which the speaker replied, “would you like my answer to your question to be coherent”?
Lock @31,
I see now that our definition of language is not the same. You seem to be implying that German or Swahili are different mediums of language while I think that saying German IS a language is more in line with the term. That is the traditional way of defining what a language is, .i.e, a set of rules for the transfer of information, not the information itself.
TCP/IP and x.25 are both protocols for the exchange of information. They are completely separate from the data, (the information), that they pass on to the receiver, to the point of being able to say, “This data packet has no information in it”.
We are in danger here of re-defining commonly accepted terms like language, into a much more metaphorical usage.
For instance, saying “Music is the language of love” is a metaphor that shouldn’t be seen as equating certain notes with a standardized way of expressing your feelings for someone.
Toronto: “I see now that our definition of language is not the same. You seem to be implying that German or Swahili are different mediums of language while I think that saying German IS a language is more in line with the term. That is the traditional way of defining what a language is, .i.e, a set of rules for the transfer of information, not the information itself.”
I am well aware, and am not trying to redefine that usage of the term.
Forget traditional usage. We can accept that and move on. I was asking you to look deeper into the information itself.
Let me try again…
If you presented me with imput that was not logical, you could use any language you wish. Obviously you would be better off using one upon which we both speak. The fact remains that I would probably reject it if it were semi-intelligible, but just shrug my shoulders or nod politely if it were utterly nonsensicle.
My point was that the real communication is made only by way of reason.
I was trying here to support Upright in #21, because I did not think you grasped it.
Hoever, it is late here, and I am not sure I grasp it any more either. And if that is the case, then surely no communication is taking place in spite of all this ‘language’. Ironically, that makes my point.
If only I could remember why I thought my point was relevant to the discussion…
Toronto @23
The fact that we perceive things differently has no bearing on the issue.
We certainly use language to exchange our perceptions of reality, but that is hardly the beginning of semiotic systems – again, you do not have a cloud in your head, you have a representation of a cloud. We may not understand the rules by which that representation functions, but it is most assuredly there, and it most assuredly must operate within the rules of a semiotic system in order for the perception to even take place (or be available for recall).
Without the input of rules it would be impossible. If I wanted to communicate “cook the fish” and I ran around in circles to mean “cook”, and I threw a stone to mean “the”, and I scratched out a square on a flat rock to mean “fish”…how long will it take you to understand me if all I can do is repeat myself?
Bingo.
The question, returning to the topic of the thread, is the origin of life. At the very center of all living things is information being communicated within the organism by means of semiotic coordination (chemical protocols). Transcription, DNA proofreading, trans-membrane receptors, feedback regulation circuits, exported signals, cellular surface signals, epigenetic regulation, logic gates, exo-genetic transfer, checkpoints, regulatory RNA, etc, etc, etc. One thing means (ie. stands for, results in) another, but only because of context-specific rules providing the necessary coordination for function.
There is absolutely nothing whatsoever about Adenine that means Lysine. Lysine is not the product or byproduct of Adenine, no matter what you do to it. Only in the context of living tissue do the two have anything whatsoever to do with each other. Place three Adenine nucleobases in a genetic sequence and that arrangement will be decoded with Lysine being added to a polypeptide chain. That same phenomenon will happen every time an organism has three Adenine nucleobases being transcribed, and there is not a shred of evidence that it has ever been any different. Likewise, there is nothing about cAMP that has anything whatsoever to do with Glucose. Yet, the elevated presence of one is a representative signal indicating the available level of the other. But it signals this only within an organism where such an association has been established.
What is required is coordination (the protocol you mention) at an unfathomable level in order to perform the work of living systems, i.e. metabolism, replication, repair, and growth. And there is the rub. The functionality of living organisms is inextricably based upon the use of information. The use of information is inextricably dependent upon context. How did that, which is necessary for function, precede it in order to create it?
Foregoing an appropriate dash of humility, this is a question we are not likely to improve upon until we stop making up ideological stories about how you can most certainly in due time figure out that a square scratched out on a flat rock means “fish”.
And by the way (giving suitable heed to the power of chance) if you should by chance coordinate the meaning of a square-on-a-rock with “fish”, you’ll only have a few others to coordinate in order to equal, as a example, that of the smallest bacteria genome known to exist.
Something on the order of 150,000 base pairs, 180 proteins, and the various regulation networks necessary for function.
Of course, the ideologues would counter that such elementary thought excercises are both stupid and meaningless; the first life forms were incredibly simple and driven without purpose by purely physically-dependent chemical forces.
Driven? Driven to what? Driven to complex functionality? Driven to import and convert energy and expel waste? Driven to coordinate information for heredity? Driven to outperform other organisms? Driven to survive?
- – - – - – - – - -
Perhaps one day, when we are finally able to create de novo life by programming the information and chemical protocols necessary for function, the one thing occuring in nature that has been removed from the conversation by the materialists will suddenly reappear as being the essential element in the eventual success.
Perhaps we will find what ID proponents of all stripes have come to expect by means of the evidence. Life was never in the matter itself; it was in the action of a purposeful agent.