Chemical evolution:

Discussion in 'Biology & Genetics' started by paddoboy, Aug 7, 2020.

  1. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    27,543
    more..............
    https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/

    A New Physics Theory of Life
    An MIT physicist has proposed the provocative idea that life exists because the law of increasing entropy drives matter to acquire lifelike physical properties.


    Jeremy England, a 31-year-old physicist at MIT, thinks he has found the underlying physics driving the origin and evolution of life.

    Why does life exist?

    Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”

    From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

    “You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.

    England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”

    His idea, detailed in a recent paper and further elaborated in a talk he is delivering at universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both.

    more at link........................

    his paper:
    CLOSING REMARKS

    The process of cellular division, even in a creature as ancient and streamlined as a bacterium, is so bewilderingly complex that it may come as some surprise that physics can make any binding pronouncements about how fast it all can happen. The reason this becomes possible is that nonequilibrium processes in constant temperature baths obey general laws that relate forward and reverse transition probabilities to heat production.2 Previously, such laws had been applied successfully in understanding thermodynamics of copying “informational” molecules such as nucleic acids.8 In those cases, however, the information content of the system’s molecular structure could more easily be taken for granted, in light of the clear role played by DNA in the production of RNA and protein. What we have glimpsed here is that the underlying connection between entropy production and transition probability has a much more general applicability, so long as we recognize that “self-replication” is only visible once an observer decides how to classify the “self” in the system: only once a coarse-graining scheme determines how many copies of some object are present for each microstate can we talk in probabilistic terms about the general tendency for that type of object to affect its own reproduction, and the same system’s microstates can be coarse-grained using any number of different schemes. Whatever the scheme, however, the resulting stochastic population dynamics must obey the same general relationship entwining heat, organization, and durability. We may hope that this insight spurs future work that will clarify the general physical constraints obeyed by natural selection in nonequilibrium systems.
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    Sure makes a lot more sense then the biblical inspired nonsense from James Tour and his fanatical fascination with the bible.
     
    Michael 345 likes this.
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  3. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    extract from previous link...................
    "England’s theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation — that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life — that remains unproven. But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab".
     
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  5. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Some more science rather then the dreams of my childish friend...
    Scientists have already observed self-replication in nonliving systems. According to new research led by Philip Marcus of the University of California, Berkeley, and reported at....
    https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.084501

    Three-Dimensional Vortices Generated by Self-Replication in Stably Stratified Rotating Shear Flows:

    ABSTRACT

    A previously unknown instability creates space-filling lattices of 3D vortices in linearly stable, rotating, stratified shear flows. The instability starts from an easily excited critical layer. The layer intensifies by drawing energy from the background shear and rolls up into vortices that excite new critical layers and vortices. The vortices self-similarly replicate to create lattices of turbulent vortices. The vortices persist for all time. This self-replication occurs in stratified Couette flows and in the dead zones of protoplanetary disks where it can destabilize Keplerian flows.
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    Science and reputable science links, guided by the scientific method, certainly "shout louder" then any fool ID/Creationist sympathiser.


     
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  7. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    20,069
    And I responded to it - YOU KNOW THIS

    paddo is free to add any observations he believes are pertinent to the subject.

    But I am still waiting for your response to my reply to your post #62. ......

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  8. Q-reeus Banned Valued Senior Member

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    4,695
    Did you not read what you quoted?
    Non sequitur #2. Proverbs is a collection of so-called wisdom literature common throughout the ancient middle east. Observations of what does and doesn't work re human endeavor and relations. Valid whether of Divine or human origin. I assume human.
     
  9. Q-reeus Banned Valued Senior Member

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    4,695
    This one contains some scary technical details which may put one fanatical promoter of unguided abiogenesis off from even a cursory read. One can only try...
    https://evolutionnews.org/2020/05/on-the-origin-of-life-here-is-my-response-to-jeremy-england/

    Those committed to unguided abiogenesis as 'fact' will likely just ignore the following for them depressing assessments of how non-robust that hypothesis is. Too bad:
    https://evolutionnews.org/2012/12/top_five_probl/
     
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  10. dumbest man on earth Real Eyes Realize Real Lies Valued Senior Member

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    What, if anything, in Post #65 - the reply to my Post #62 - do you think merited any response at all?

    Post #65 :
    In all fairness, Write4U, I gave it the response it deserved - YOU KNOW THIS.
     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2020
  11. dumbest man on earth Real Eyes Realize Real Lies Valued Senior Member

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    3,523
    Sadly, you may well be correct.
     
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  12. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Sure I did! If you fail to comprehend, or if the truth defaults your mythical beliefs, that's your problem.
    Again while there are certainly some wise words and proverbs, on the whole, the mysticism and magic of this obscure book, written in an obscure age, by obscure men, is as far from science as one can get....and of course your adored hero James Tour and his admiration for such nonsense.
     
  13. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    27,543
    It does far more for the science of chemical evolution, Abiogenesis then any biblical inspired nonsense from Tour and his rejection of any future evidence and progress, even before discovered.
     
  14. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    27,543
    Even more sadly, you are wrong...again.
     
  15. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    27,543
    Here's another interesting "scientific" paper, that also talks of universal Abiogenesis, as opposed of course to biblical inspired crap by James Tour......

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-58060-0

    Emergence of life in an inflationary universe:

    Abstract:
    Abiotic emergence of ordered information stored in the form of RNA is an important unresolved problem concerning the origin of life. A polymer longer than 40–100 nucleotides is necessary to expect a self-replicating activity, but the formation of such a long polymer having a correct nucleotide sequence by random reactions seems statistically unlikely. However, our universe, created by a single inflation event, likely includes more than 10100 Sun-like stars. If life can emerge at least once in such a large volume, it is not in contradiction with our observations of life on Earth, even if the expected number of abiogenesis events is negligibly small within the observable universe that contains only 1022 stars. Here, a quantitative relation is derived between the minimum RNA length lmin required to be the first biological polymer, and the universe size necessary to expect the formation of such a long and active RNA by randomly adding monomers. It is then shown that an active RNA can indeed be produced somewhere in an inflationary universe, giving a solution to the abiotic polymerization problem. On the other hand, lmin must be shorter than ~20 nucleotides for the abiogenesis probability close to unity on a terrestrial planet, but a self-replicating activity is not expected for such a short RNA. Therefore, if extraterrestrial organisms of a different origin from those on Earth are discovered in the future, it would imply an unknown mechanism at work to polymerize nucleotides much faster than random statistical processes.

    Conclusions:
    It has been shown that the first RNA polymer with a replicase activity can be abiotically assembled by the most conservative polymerization process, i.e., random Poissonian adding of monomers, if we require that it occurs more than once somewhere in the physical volume of a universe created by an inflation, rather than inside the observable universe for us. This gives a simple solution to the abiotic polymerization problem to initiate the RNA world. Equation 7 relates two quantities on vastly difference scales: lgN* on an astronomical scale and lmin on a biologically microscopic scale, and uncertainties of other parameters are not important because most of them appear logarithmically. This reminds us of an ouroboros.

    The result of this work may also give an explanation for the homochirality of life. Even if activated monomers supplied to the polymerization cycle are a racemic mixture, life emerging from them would be homochiral, if homochirality is a necessary requirement for an RNA polymer to show biological activities. Simply it needs more time or volume for a homochiral polymer to be assembled by random polymerization, with Nnb twice as large as when ignoring chirality. As shown in Fig. 1, change of Nnb by a factor of two does not seriously affect the expected number of abiogenesis events in an inflationary universe.

    On the other hand, the expected number of abiogenesis events is much smaller than unity when we observe a star, a galaxy, or even the whole observable universe. This gives an explanation to the Fermi’s paradox. The observable universe is just a tiny part, whose volume is likely smaller than 1∕1078 of the whole universe created by an inflation, and there is no strong reason to expect more than one abiogenesis event in such a small region. Even if Earth is the only planet that harbors life inside the observable universe, it does not contradict the Copernican principle, because life would have emerged on countless planets in the whole inflationary universe in which we exist.

    In the picture presented here, the probability of finding biosignatures from planets or satellites in the Solar System or from exoplanets is negligibly small, unless we consider interplanetary or interstellar traveling of microorganisms48,49. It should be noted, however, that the case of a high abiogenesis rate (Nlife ≳ 1 for N* = 1) cannot be excluded by this work, because we assumed that abiotic RNA polymerization occurs only by the random Poisson process of adding monomers. Potential roles of much more efficient processes on the origin of life, such as non-linear auto- or cross-catalytic reactions, have been studied theoretically50, though it is highly uncertain whether such processes really worked in realistic prebiotic conditions. If organisms having a different origin from those on Earth are found in future, it would suggest that such a mechanism is working at abiogenesis to reduce lmin. Although this possibility should not be excluded, what is shown by this work is that such a hypothetical process is not necessary if we request abiogenesis events to occur somewhere in an inflationary universe.

    It is also worth pointing out that, in the lgN*-lmin relation for Nlife = 1, lgN* rapidly increases from 0 (a star) to 22 (the observable universe) in a short range of lmin = 21–32. Even if a non-linear process is working at some stages, the initial polymerization is likely statistical and random as considered here. Then it would be an extreme fine tuning if a biological parameter lmin is just close to the value corresponding to Nlife ~ 1 for a star (N* = 1). Rather, Nlife ≫ 1 or Nlife ≪ 1 is much more likely when we observe just one planetary system. As we have argued, the case of Nlife ≪ 1 is not in contradiction with observations, but the opposite case may be in tension with the lack of evidence for multiple abiogenesis events in the history of Earth or in laboratories.

    A fundamental assumption in this work is that an abiotically assembled RNA polymer acquires a self-replicating ability if it is sufficiently long and has a correct nucleotide sequence. This may be rather trivial under the physical laws ruling this universe, because we know that ribozymes are actually working in life and can also be produced by in vitro experiments. This work considered only a single homogeneous region in the universe created by an inflation event, obeying the same physical laws that we observe. However, the multiverse hypothesis51 implies existence of other universes created by different inflation events, in which physical laws may be different from ours. A theoretically intriguing question is whether a chemical RNA-like long polymer is easily formed to contain information and show biological activities eventually leading to higher organisms, when physical laws are arbitrarily made, e.g., by random choices of fundamental physical constants. Perhaps this may be the ultimate mystery regarding the origin of life, which is, of course, far beyond the scope of this work.


     
  16. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Hell no, you haven't answered any question.
     
  17. Q-reeus Banned Valued Senior Member

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    That utter distortion of Tour's position is typical of your unchecked character assassination style that really needs reining in. All Tour has said is IF unguided abiogenesis were to finally add up to a solid verified theory, it would not shatter his faith. What's so bad about that? Many professing Christians believe in the divinity of Christ AND accept unguided abiogenesis and mainstream evolutionary theory. I find that baffling but would never carte blanche launch into accusing such folks of being dishonest charlatans etc. per paddoboy speak. Compartmentalized thinking or even religious syncretism is not per se a crime, believe it or not.
     
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  18. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Actually I wasn't the first to call him a charlatan. exchemist was it not? .In fact if you remember accurately, I did cushion the blow, so to speak by declaring him a well meaning charlatan.

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    So no, not as per paddoboy speak in particular, but admittedly as I have read more about his devotion and literal belief in the bible, I'm getting more and more critical of his fanatical beliefs, evidenced by his manner of conveying his "message"
     
  19. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Interesting to say the least, but again like the Father of the BB, George Lamaitre, obviously put it all down to their unscientific mythical beliefs.
     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2020
  20. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    TIP: Don't get too involved with him as all you will get is distortion of facts and pedantic nonsense in return. Take it from someone familiar with his tirades of nonsense.
     
  21. dumbest man on earth Real Eyes Realize Real Lies Valued Senior Member

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    I explicitly told you in no uncertain terms that I gave your Post #65 the response it deserved.

    Any question you 'asked' in your Post #65, you then immediately answered - see above quoted.

    Again, Write4U, I gave your Post #65 the response it deserved.

    If you really want a definitive Toadies Pop-Science answer to your questions, you know who to ask.
    Like you stated before in your Post #144 :
     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2020
  22. POVphysics2 Registered Member

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    Hand waving.
     
  23. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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