Chemical evolution:

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

  1. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Yep. That's why I emphasize that those unscientific myths are unscientific, keep repeating that they are unscientific, and so forth.

    We have been in perfect agreement on that point for many pages now.

    They are also, of course, accounts of processes of abiogenesis. Unscientific processes of abiogenesis. There are several proposed unscientific processes of abiogenesis circulating out there: Intelligent Design, Guided Evolution, Special Creation, etc.
     
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  3. Q-reeus Banned Valued Senior Member

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    What you term 'universal chemical evolution over the eons' isn't chemical at the quark soup level of cosmogenesis, but overlooking that 'little' slip-up, the odds are hugely improbable even at that initial stage - thanks to the honesty of Roger Penrose rare among his colleagues:
    https://epaper.kek.jp/e06/PAPERS/THESPA01.PDF
    And it just compounds from there on. The odds of the right combo of physical constants conducive to life, a separate issue, are truly miniscule. The official materialist line is to invoke an endless multiplication of universes within a multiverse paradigm. Eschewing a naked examination of the problem of a necessary original single 'seed' universe in that popular scenario. With severe fine-tuning required at the outset to allow a self-perpetuating inflationary multiverse to unfold. Science popularizers avoid an honest appraisal of such matters!
    But this is a digression.
    Tour is not my idol but I suspect not far behind, maybe even on a par with your Lord and God Albert Einstein is Charles Darwin and maybe Karl Marx.
    It's you and ilk that are trying to push excreta against gravity.
     
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  5. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    That isn't true.
    All that is necessary is selection of the lefthanded ones by the replicating entity. The trillions of righthanded ones just get left out.
    Clays and crystals and other things do that now - presumably they did it then. So the necessary substrate for chiral selection is no strange or unlikely thing - chirality is not a major obstacle for Darwinian evolution of replicants.
    - - -
    I can imagine many situations in which scientific investigation demonstrates that living beings originated via some kind of supernatural entity or event - the current situation does not appear to be one of them, but we are still quite ignorant of what happened.

    The point so far is that the supernatural is not necessary - then natural means we know of are sufficient.
     
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  7. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    They are unknown. For all you know they are a dead certainty, existing with probability 1.
    And it doesn't matter. Given enough time even the very improbable happens almost inevitably.
    There is no official materialist line specifying the events of the origin of living beings as we know them. The official materialists are ignorant still, as is freely acknowledged by almost everyone.
    The discussion is of the origin of living beings as we know them.
    Living beings as we know them cannot have originated at the quark soup level of cosmogenesis.
     
  8. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    I agree, but maybe the mathematical laws which govern the dynamical activity of the universal properties and evolutionary processes may have originated at that stage?

    That why the universe is not tuned for life, but life is tuned to the universe.

    AFAIK, Abiogenesis is a probabilistic event. But once it has begun, it is that way......

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  9. Q-reeus Banned Valued Senior Member

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    No what you leave out is the inability of a naked replicating entity to filter the correct enantiomers.
    You keep on ignoring the poor chiral selectivity of the best known 'inorganic catalytic surfaces'. At around 10% bias that figure is totally inadequate.
    You also keep on ignoring that without an integral exquisitely selective membrane the replicator hopefuls will quickly inactivate in any real environment with hostile molecular species eager to out compete the correctly handed chiral ones. But go on in your faith in the miraculousness of Nature.
     
  10. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Oh, I see, it is Science that speaks of "miracles" and ID (spirituality) that speak of "provable fact". How precious....

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    The illogic of that thought pattern is astounding!!!!!!!

    You may want to watch this (god is even mentioned);

     
    Last edited: Dec 24, 2020
  11. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    As usual you are wrong.
    Abiogenesis is the only scientific process for explaining life.
    Please keep your "god of the gaps" [ analogous to some mythical spaghetti monster guiding abiogenesis] in the religious forum where it belongs.
     
  12. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Wrong again....quarks make up protons and neutrons...protons and neutrons make up atomic nuclei...protons,neutrons and electrons make up our elements...elements make up life, roughly speaking of course...all via the process of chemistry.
    No need for any superfluous IDer or deity that stands outside the realms of science...perhaps in your favourite 5th dimension?

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  13. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    But you accept the mythical IDer of choice who stands outside of science as your explanation?
     
  14. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    The hypocrisy of that compared to what you want us to believe is outstanding!!!

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  15. Q-reeus Banned Valued Senior Member

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    No - you are wrong as usual. Check out Wikipedia on chemistry - the very first para in fact:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemistry
    Chemistry only became possible post recombination era - already very low energy regime.
    Your next two posts are as usual responses from incredulity. You can't conceive of an immaterial God so it just can't be. Therefore you have to believe in stupendous miracles of blind Nature instead.
     
  16. Xelasnave.1947 Valued Senior Member

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    Hi Q-reeus just wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas but may I ask...can you conceive that it may be there is no material god ..it would seem that there is no evidence and that all gods have been invented as opposed to being something observable. My point being your suggestion of basically ignorance on the part of Paddo surely could be extended to the way you see it...I mean neither of you know ...there is evidence missing don't you think?I don't wish to get involved here but I must say the things you seem to believe have surprised me and as I like and respect you I thought I would ask nicely.
    I have been studying biology lately..a new interest..I find the way it works at a molecular level extrodinary...particularly how the little proteins seem to walk on little molecular feet...
    Again Merry Christmas.
    Alex
     
  17. Q-reeus Banned Valued Senior Member

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    And best wishes to you Alex over Xmas and on into 2021. Which unfortunately may well be worse than 2020. The rest there I prefer to pass over. You know how at SF in particular such topics go round and round with evidently nothing gained by anyone.
     
  18. Xelasnave.1947 Valued Senior Member

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    Yes and a great year for you also I hope.
    It will be ok where there is life there is hope.
    I am planning it being a great year just have to avoid dieing really.
    Alex
     
  19. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    A nano-world full of dynamic change, information packages being delivered from here to there in accordance to a coded address. A biological "infrastructure" at nano scales.

    Biology
    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology
     
  20. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    And sincere wishes for peace and goodwill to ALL and a New Year filled with interesting discoveries....

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  21. QuarkHead Remedial Math Student Valued Senior Member

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    Then you have me at a disadvantage - I have never literally tasted piss. Maybe because I have the good fortune not to be Australian.

    Have an Xmas pint for me (not piss, your girlie lager)

    PS. Seen written on the side of a lorry delivering red-blooded blokes beer to a local pub: "What are you afraid of lager boy? Afraid you'll taste something?".

    Have a good one all of you
     
    Last edited: Dec 24, 2020
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  22. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    Right, "scientists assume", they don't know. Their assumption that the answer that they seek will be a natural answer discoverable by the means at hand is a working assumption, a heuristic.

    It's certainly one that I personally share (more or less, since some necessary information about the ancient Earth may be unavailable by its nature, and there's the possibility that our current organic and biochemistry isn't advanced enough), but in order to be intellectually honest I have to admit that it's just my assumption at this point.

    And Paddoboy's apparent belief that the scope of natural science is coextensive with the limits of reality itself looks to me to be an article of metaphysical faith.

    As for me, I think that it's entirely possible that there might be aspects of reality that human beings are in no better position than a dog to understand. We might just lack the necessary cognitive capacity. (Albert Einstein seems to have raised this possibility.) Obviously we can never imagine what those unknowable aspects of reality might be, any more than the dog can imagine higher mathematics, molecular genomics, black holes and relativistic singularities.

    Only if one ignores the technical details, in which case the story resembles a myth more than science.

    When one considers the technical details, it gets very complicated very fast. Most of the literature is suitable only for professional researchers and graduate students, but here's a comprensible little 16 page undergraduate level survey from the University of Texas that should be understandable by laymen.

    http://www.as.utexas.edu/astronomy/education/spring05/scalo/lectures/309L-2DOriginLife.pdf

    Cell biology is incredibly complex. There's the genetic code, there's regulation of the genetic code that turns genes on and off in the proper order, there's thousands of proteins, each with its own precise functional shape, including most of the ubiquitous enzymes that catalyze pretty much all of the chemical reactions in the cell, there's cell membranes with their very selective chemical permeabilities and last but certainly not least, there's energy metabolism that powers all of it. Each of those topics, if one pokes into them, is exceedingly complex in its own right.

    Getting from the first crude chemical replicators to the first functioning cells is a tremendous leap, one that much like the origin of the first chemical replicators (see link above) still isn't really understood.

    The current abiogenesis literature consists largely in identifying questions regarding all of this stuff (there's no end of those) and speculating about hypothetical answers.

    I personally expect (but don't know) that humanity might make make considerable progress on these questions. But I don't expect that we will ever reach a final answer. What might be more likely is that many possible pathways will be imagined, different steps in different orders. But absent the invention of time machines (unlikely) that enable researchers to go back and observe (and perhaps contaminate, causing the mother of all grandfather-paradoxes), we might never know which of our abiogenesis hypotheses might be the correct one.
     
    Last edited: Dec 24, 2020
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  23. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    I liked your post, but must disagree with the quoted posit. Abiogenesis is not a metaphysical concept. It is a physical concept.

    Hydrogen, Oxygen, Carbon, Nitrogen are bio-chemical elements and were physically formed soon (at different times) after the initial BB chaos had settled. Thus the major bio-chemical constituents of life bio-chemicals are not all a result of complicated mechanisms needed for probabilistic self-assembly. They were already present from the beginning.
    Abiogenesis was the evolution from simple to complex bio-chemical compounds, acquiring some specialized properties along the way of natural selection.

    For those who question the Universes ability to spontaneously form complex chemical (including biochemical) compounds, allow me to post this :

    Glossary of chemical formulae. Just have a peek!
    This complements alternative listing at inorganic compounds by element. There is no complete list of chemical compounds since by nature the list would be infinite.


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_chemical_formulae

    Does this look nature has a problem forming compound molecules?

    ......No wonder it gets you high!


     
    Last edited: Dec 24, 2020

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