Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

The Waters of Darwin’s Warm Pond Now Muddied

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

It seems as though “warmth+clay” does not RNA make. For those interested, just a short update.

“The results are surprising and in some ways disappointing. It seems that hot acidic waters containing clay do not provide the right conditions for chemicals to assemble themselves into ‘pioneer organisms.'”

Professor Deamer said that amino acids and DNA, the “building blocks” for life, and phosphate, another essential ingredient, cling to the surfaces of clay particles in the volcanic pools.

“The reason this is significant is that it has been proposed that clay promotes interesting chemical reactions relating to the origin of life,” he explained.

“However,” he added, “in our experiments, the organic compounds became so strongly held to the clay particles that they could not undergo any further chemical reactions.”

Comments
The only way to deal with Darwimps is to ridicule them. It is great sport. I highly recommend it. Look what it has done for me!!John Davison
February 17, 2006
February
02
Feb
17
17
2006
12:18 PM
12
12
18
PM
PDT
GilDodgen wrote: "One day, in the not-so-far-distant future, contemporary origin-of-life researchers will be looked upon as our generation’s alchemists." Another comparison will be to pre-Copernican, Ptolemaic astronomy. Every time something doesn't fit an ND prediction, no problem, just add another epicycle! .... Ptolemy assumes that everything rotates around the earth and so he found ways to explain the motions of the planets. Ptolemy found that epicycles could explain EVERYTHING (just like multitude of crazy "mechanisms" devised by NDers). His system utilizes at least 80 different epicycles in order to explain the motions of the Sun, Moon, and five known planets TO PRESERVE AT ALL COSTS his a priori assumption. As planets rotated around the earth, they followed not only their orbits around the Earth, called deferents, but they also went about in numbers of smaller orbits, or epicycles, as they went around their larger paths. These smaller epicycles were wonderful! They explained why planets sometimes seemed to slow down, speed up, and even go slightly backward while continuing their larger general rotation about the Earth. Occam's razor slices Neo-Darwinism as neatly as Ptolemian astronomy. ( See http://personal.monm.edu/zmuhrer/R.%20A.%20T.%20M/Homework%20Stuff/DantePaper.htm )Red Reader
February 17, 2006
February
02
Feb
17
17
2006
09:53 AM
9
09
53
AM
PDT
Scordova Absolutely, or as a friend of mine used to say "presuckingficely." He is dead now. Most of my friedds are.John Davison
February 17, 2006
February
02
Feb
17
17
2006
07:28 AM
7
07
28
AM
PDT
John wrote: "There were never any “pioneer organisms.” There were organisms produced full blown with all the features many of them still have today. There were never any precursors to the nuclear membrane, the centriole, the centromere, the flagellum, the ribosome or any other universal cell organelle. Until tney were all present and fully functional there was no organism at all. " Just to clarify, is it fair to say you believe the pre-biotic soup experiments that the OOL researchers are making will probably fail, that pri-mordial chemicals without intelligent guidance will not self-assemble into a cell?scordova
February 17, 2006
February
02
Feb
17
17
2006
06:40 AM
6
06
40
AM
PDT
There were never any "pioneer organisms." There were organisms produced full blown with all the features many of them still have today. There were never any precursors to the nuclear membrane, the centriole, the centromere, the flagellum, the ribosome or any other universal cell organelle. Until tney were all present and fully functional there was no organism at all. Just as Bateson claimed in 1914, evolution may be regarded as: "an unpacking of an original complex which contained within itself the full range of diversity which living things present." Nature 93: 635-642 (1914) "Hence it may be seen that evolution is to a considerable degree PREDETERMINED, that it is in the same degree an UNFOLFDING OR MANIFESTATION OF PRE-EXISTING RUDIMENTS." Leo Berg, Nomogenesis, page 403, (his emphasis) Get used to it folks. William Bateson did, Leo Berg did and so have I. Others can as well if they will simply erase all the nonsense that they have had etched on their cerebral cortices by helpless, "prescribed" ideologues like Dawkins, Provine, Mayr and Gould. We are all victims of a predetermined scenario. Some of us have been more fortunate than others. How do the denizens of Esley Welsberry's "Bar and Grill" like all them revelations from nearly a century ago? They make you squirm don't they. Slip them nooses around your "prescribed" scrawny necks, jump off your slimy bar stools and twist in the wind. Stop torturing yourselves and get it over with. I love it so! "You can lead a man to the literature but you cannot make him comprehend it." John A. DavisonJohn Davison
February 17, 2006
February
02
Feb
17
17
2006
01:37 AM
1
01
37
AM
PDT
One day, in the not-so-far-distant future, contemporary origin-of-life researchers will be looked upon as our generation's alchemists. The alchemists hoped to turn lead into gold through chemistry. What they didn't understand was that chemistry can only influence the interaction of the electrons surrounding the nucleus of the atom, and not the nucleus itself. Their hopes were doomed from the outset because of a basic misunderstanding. The mechanics of living systems are not fundamentally about chemistry; they are about engineering and information processing. But this is just the beginning. There is a long way to go after that to get to the phenomenon of consciousness, and a long way to go after that.GilDodgen
February 16, 2006
February
02
Feb
16
16
2006
07:58 PM
7
07
58
PM
PDT
Here's the link. I included it when preparing to post, but apparently it got lost in cyberspace. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4702336.stmPaV
February 16, 2006
February
02
Feb
16
16
2006
06:14 PM
6
06
14
PM
PDT

Leave a Reply