God and Abiogenesis

[Appolinaria]

Comments like these are not helpful in a rational discussion between mature people. If you can't handle blunt criticism of your position, then go away, but don't lash out at me personally, please.

 

Oh.. man.. that is just a knee slapper.. whew

 

I like the self deprecating sarcasm, iNow

 

Appolinaria, you are quite mistaken and i am disappointed in your line of argument here. I've seen you do quite a bit better in these discussions. You seem to be insisting on clinging to things that are simply not true, strawmen at best. And these hypotheses about the origin of life have been discussed in other threads in great detail.

 

First of all there is no spark of life, the idea of some sort of special thing called "spark of life" was discredited centuries ago. There is nothing special about life that cannot be explained by chemistry.

 

50 years ago you could have accurately said that the beginning of life was mysterious but even then we had some pretty good hypothesis. Now we have some very good science that describes what we think the beginning of life was and how it happened. This idea that Science has no idea about the beginning of life is absolutely false. The beginning of life cannot be described as accurately as the diversification of life has been explained but the beginning of life is no longer even close to being a complete mystery.

 

I don't want to throw this thread of topic but saying that the beginning of life is somehow a huge impenetrable mystery is simply not true...

 

Can you please it explain it then? It would answer a lot of questions

 

Especially the bit here; "There is nothing special about life that cannot be explained by chemistry. "

 

I must be really missing out on a lot more than I thought I was.

[Moontanman]

Oh.. man.. that is just a knee slapper.. whew

 

I like the self deprecating sarcasm, iNow

 

 

 

Can you please it explain it then? It would answer a lot of questions

 

 

i am getting read to go to a movie and dinner with my wife but when i get back I'll be glad to provide you with some really good science around the origin of life...

 

Oh.. man.. that is just a knee slapper.. whew

 

I like the self deprecating sarcasm, iNow

 

 

 

Can you please it explain it then? It would answer a lot of questions

 

Especially the bit here; "There is nothing special about life that cannot be explained by chemistry. "

 

I must be really missing out on a lot more than I thought I was.

 

Lets not derail iNow's thread any more than we have already , start an origin of life thread and we can discuss this when I get back.

[iNow]

Origin of life hypotheses... Their own thread? Please.

 

Oh.. man.. that is just a knee slapper.. whew

 

I like the self deprecating sarcasm, iNow

Listen. I know you don't really like me, and frankly I don't care. The point is that if you want to make an argument that will convince anyone about the merit of your position, you're going to have to do more than suggest I'm an arrogant jerk. Okay?

Edited June 2, 2012 by iNow

[Appolinaria]

I do happen to like you quite a bit, actually. Anyway, yes, new thread.

[iNow]

New thread for the abiogenesis questions, sure... Thank you, I agree... but what about the other challenges and criticisms of your position? Shall we ignore those and move on? Are you conceding that you cannot address them with anything more than condescending barbs about me thinking I'm perfect?

 

Do you agree that the challenges people have put to your posts are valid, and if not, why not?

[Prometheus]

The reason I lump all the religions together is that there only seems to be one universe.

It can have had no more than one creator.

Whatever name and other features you ascribe to the hypothetical creator doesn't really matter since there's no evidence He exists anyway.

 

Just a technical note: not all religions postulate a creator being(s).

[iNow]

Just a technical note: not all religions postulate a creator being(s).

Theists and deists, do, though. The thread focuses on belief in god(s) more than practice of religion, per se.

[Appolinaria]

New thread for the abiogenesis questions, sure... Thank you, I agree... but what about the other challenges and criticisms of your position? Shall we ignore those and move on? Are you conceding that you cannot address them with anything more than condescending barbs about me thinking I'm perfect?

 

Do you agree that the challenges people have put to your posts are valid, and if not, why not?

 

 

What in particular do you want me to respond to? I keep repeating myself.

[iNow]

What in particular do you want me to respond to? I keep repeating myself.

Honestly, that's part of the problem. Those points you continue to repeat have been refuted, shown fallacious, and/or unsupportive of your central position. Below are some questions to which I didn't see you offer a decent response, so we can start there, but ultimately I wonder if the counter points being made have had any effect on your thinking.

 

Are you comprehending what people are sharing with you and adjusting your position accordingly, or are you ignoring the counterpoints because they conflict with what you *want* to believe?

 

 

Well, of course, if you completely redefine words and use them differently than everyone else, you can make practically any point you want. That's a bit silly, though, wouldn't you say?

<...>

Another point is that there is already language used to describe those prebiotic life you mentioned... You used clear and precise terms to describe to all of us what you meant. You used accepted terms with clear meaning like DNA and molecule and asteroid, things we all can agree upon and measure and test... Calling them "god" instead, however, adds no value... It actually decreases the quality of the information you're conveying to others. It makes what you're saying less clear, more confusing, and totally arbitrary... and for what? All so you can make some odd "out in left field" point that certain natural outcomes of physics and chemistry are seen by you as some unique version of a god or deity?

 

God exists because I describe this pillow as god, and the pillow is clearly in front of me, so there? Really? You think that holds any water whatsoever?

Do you have an example of a theistic concept that's not based on faith in unobservable deities?

Isn't the distinction between deism and theism that a theistic deity stays involved to rule and a deistic one did the early work and is now off elsewhere, not pulling the strings? If so, I'd say your statement is wrong.

 

Again, though... Where I'm most curious is whether or not you are comprehending what people are sharing with you and adjusting your position accordingly, or if you ignoring the counterpoints because they conflict with what you *want* to believe?

 

I ask, because it appears from the outside to be the latter of those two... Which would be itself... broken.

[Appolinaria]

 

 

Again, though... Where I'm most curious is whether or not you are comprehending what people are sharing with you and adjusting your position accordingly, or if you ignoring the counterpoints because they conflict with what you *want* to believe?

 

 

No I've changed my mind. I skimmed some article on clay bubbles and nucleotides and some kind of RNA molecules and now I believe the ancestors of DNA sprouted nowhere else than here on Earth.

 

This further pushes me into belief that there is no magic. The last bit of magic I have is the pure love I've felt once and perhaps a curiosity for beautiful things on this planet but my genes have been merely selected for to like those things.

 

The truth that I can't escape is that there is no deeper meaning. My dull life is much duller now. But it's okay. I will continue distracting myself with stupid things and probably live out some mundane boring life and die.

[iNow]

Fascinating.

 

"It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it."

~Sagan

[Moontanman]

Oh.. man.. that is just a knee slapper.. whew

 

I like the self deprecating sarcasm, iNow

 

 

 

Can you please it explain it then? It would answer a lot of questions

 

Especially the bit here; "There is nothing special about life that cannot be explained by chemistry. "

 

I must be really missing out on a lot more than I thought I was.

 

 

Do you still want to discuss abiogenesis or is this just sarcasm? If you want I can provide some really good videos by some very knowledgeable people, scientists even, or I can go with links to articles and papers on the subject. here is a good place to start,

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

 

"Primordial soup" theory

 

 

Alexander Oparin (right) at the laboratory.

Further information: Miller–Urey experiment

No new notable research or theory on the subject appeared until 1924, when Alexander Oparin reasoned that atmospheric oxygen prevents the synthesis of certain organic compounds that are necessary building blocks for the evolution of life. In his The Origin of Life,[17][18] Oparin proposed that the "spontaneous generation of life" that had been attacked by Louis Pasteur did in fact occur once, but was now impossible because the conditions found on the early Earth had changed, and preexisting organisms would immediately consume any spontaneously generated organism. Oparin argued that a "primeval soup" of organic molecules could be created in an oxygenless atmosphere through the action of sunlight. These would combine in evermore complex ways until they formed coacervate droplets. These droplets would "grow" by fusion with other droplets, and "reproduce" through fission into daughter droplets, and so have a primitive metabolism in which those factors which promote "cell integrity" survive, and those that do not become extinct. Many modern theories of the origin of life still take Oparin's ideas as a starting point.

 

Complex biological molecules and protocells

Sidney W. Fox also experimented with abiogenesis and the primordial soup theory. In one of his experiments, he allowed amino acids to dry out as if puddled in a warm, dry spot in prebiotic conditions. He found that, as they dried, the amino acids formed long, often cross-linked, thread-like, submicroscopic molecules now named "proteinoids".

In another experiment using a similar method to set suitable conditions for life to form, Fox collected volcanic material from a cinder cone in Hawaii. He discovered that the temperature was over 100 degrees Celsius just four inches beneath the surface of the cinder cone, and suggested that this might have been the environment in which life was created—molecules could have formed and then been washed through the loose volcanic ash and into the sea. He placed lumps of lava over amino acids derived from methane, ammonia and water, sterilized all materials, and baked the lava over the amino acids for a few hours in a glass oven. A brown, sticky substance formed over the surface and when the lava was drenched in sterilized water a thick, brown liquid leached out. It turned out that the amino acids had combined to form proteinoids, and the proteinoids had combined to form small, cell-like spheres. Fox called these "microspheres", a name that subsequently was displaced by the more informative term protobionts. His protobionts were not cells, although they formed clumps and chains reminiscent of cyanobacteria. They contained no functional nucleic acids, but split asexually and formed within double membranes that had some attributes suggestive of cell membranes. Professor Colin S. Pittendrigh stated in December 1967 that "laboratories will be creating a living cell within ten years" a remark that reflected the typical contemporary levels of innocence of the complexity of cell structures.[22]

 

Current models

 

There is no truly "standard model" of the origin of life. Most currently accepted models draw at least some elements from the framework laid out by the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis. Under that umbrella, however, are a wide array of disparate discoveries and conjectures such as the following, listed in a rough order of postulated emergence:

Some theorists suggest that the atmosphere of the early Earth may have been chemically reducing in nature, composed primarily of methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), water (H2O), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), carbon dioxide (CO2) or carbon monoxide (CO), and phosphate (PO43-), with molecular oxygen (O2) and ozone (O3) either rare or absent.

In such a reducing atmosphere, electrical activity can catalyze the creation of certain basic small molecules (monomers) of life, such as amino acids. This was demonstrated in the Miller–Urey experiment by Stanley L. Miller and Harold C. Urey in 1953.

Phospholipids (of an appropriate length) can form lipid bilayers, a basic component of the cell membrane.

A fundamental question is about the nature of the first self-replicating molecule. Since replication is accomplished in modern cells through the cooperative action of proteins and nucleic acids, the major schools of thought about how the process originated can be broadly classified as "proteins first" and "nucleic acids first".

The principal thrust of the "nucleic acids first" argument is as follows:

The polymerization of nucleotides into random RNA molecules might have resulted in self-replicating ribozymes (RNA world hypothesis)

Selection pressures for catalytic efficiency and diversity might have resulted in ribozymes which catalyse peptidyl transfer (hence formation of small proteins), since oligopeptides complex with RNA to form better catalysts. The first ribosome might have been created by such a process, resulting in more prevalent protein synthesis.

Synthesized proteins might then outcompete ribozymes in catalytic ability, and therefore become the dominant biopolymer, relegating nucleic acids to their modern use, predominantly as a carrier of genomic information.

No one has yet synthesized a "protocell" using basic components which would have the necessary properties of life (the so-called "bottom-up-approach"). Without such a proof-of-principle, explanations have tended to be focussed on chemosynthesis of polymers. However, some researchers are working in this field, notably Steen Rasmussen at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Jack Szostak at Harvard University. Others have argued that a "top-down approach" is more feasible. One such approach, successfully attempted by Craig Venter and others at The Institute for Genomic Research, involves engineering existing prokaryotic cells with progressively fewer genes, attempting to discern at which point the most minimal requirements for life were reached.[37][38] The biologist John Desmond Bernal coined the term biopoiesis for this process,[39] and suggested that there were a number of clearly defined "stages" that could be recognised in explaining the origin of life.

Stage 1: The origin of biological monomers

Stage 2: The origin of biological polymers

Stage 3: The evolution from molecules to cell

Bernal suggested that evolution may have commenced early, some time between Stage 1 and 2.[40]

 

Personally i think it was almost certainly a synergy of more than one process that became life as we know it....

 

Let me know if you want to go forward with this, I am intensely interested in this and I have lots of information to share.

[the asinine cretin]

Do you still want to discuss abiogenesis

 

...

 

I am intensely interested in this and I have lots of information to share.

 

I am also intensely interested in the origin of life. I'd be interested in book and/or paper recommendations; particularly recent sources that give a sense of the current state of things. Anything you've got would be welcome.

Edited June 4, 2012 by the asinine cretin

[Moontanman]

Some current work

 

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/ribonucleotides/

 

Sutherland’s team took a different approach in what Harvard molecular biologist Jack Szostak called a “synthetic tour de force” in an accompanying commentary in Nature.

 

This great video is made by this guy (bold name) who commented on the above research in Nature... There is some creationist stuff they deal with in the beginning but this video is well worth watching.

 

 

More info

 

http://exploringorigins.org/

[the asinine cretin]

Thanks, man. I'm familiar to some extent with Szostak's work and I've perused his website. I posted these lectures in another thread several months ago. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

 

http://ibioseminar.hhmi.org/lectures/chemicalbiologybiophysics/jack-szostak.html

[Moontanman]

have you heard of potholer54?

 

 

[the asinine cretin]

have you heard of potholer54?

 

Yeah, I've watched some of his stuff. I'm subscribed to way too many channels on YT so I have a hard time keeping up. His recent drama with "Lord" Monckton via Anthony Watts was pretty amusing.

 

 

P.S. I enjoyed this recent talk from the Santa Fe Institute. Kind of a metabolism first point of view.

 

 

EDIT:

 

P.S. This one isn't technical, it's a TEDx talk, but it's pretty short and enjoyable.

 

 

 

Bombs away. . .

 

The following is a partial list of solid youtube vids on the subject from one of my private playlists.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

N. Mason: The Origin of Life

 

 

Origin of Life: self-Assembly, polymerization and replication

 

 

 

 

And yet those three Szostak lectures are likely my fave so I'll post the link again for completeness.

 

Jack Szostak: The Origin of Cellular Life on Earth

Edited June 4, 2012 by the asinine cretin

[Moontanman]

Great links dude, i was gonna go slow and see how many people were really interested but you have blown me away! Lots more information on Abiogenesis than most people think. Every time some one claims that science has no clue as to how life got started i get my dander up. This idea that god did it is the only explanation of how life started is such a dead rotten strawman...

[Ophiolite]

The truth that I can't escape is that there is no deeper meaning. My dull life is much duller now. But it's okay. I will continue distracting myself with stupid things and probably live out some mundane boring life and die.

There is the cliche of viewing a glass as half empty or half full. You seem to view it as spilt on the sidewalk or laced with cyanide.

 

I am at a loss to see how one cannot be overawed and inspired by the emergence of stars and planets, galaxies and clusters from a score of fundamental particles, a handfull of forces and a smattering of constants. For these same basics to be responsible for the emergence not only of life, but of conscious life, is astounding.

 

You are a part of the universe that is able to contemplate the universe! And yet you say this is not a deep meaning. That this is dull!! The universe exploring itself through your consciousness is dull!!! Give me frigging break!

[the asinine cretin]

Great links dude, i was gonna go slow and see how many people were really interested but you have blown me away! Lots more information on Abiogenesis than most people think. Every time some one claims that science has no clue as to how life got started i get my dander up. This idea that god did it is the only explanation of how life started is such a dead rotten strawman...

 

I'm really looking forward to the next couple decades of research. Hopefully I survive long enough to learn something amazing. I do find it odd that it is not a much bigger field of research. I've read screeds against it by people who seem to think that only immediate practical applicability matters. Pure research and highly significant questions don't matter? But anyway. . .

Edited June 4, 2012 by the asinine cretin

[the asinine cretin]

Moontanman,

 

 

I've only scratched the surface on these talks, but there is some amazing stuff here. Geoff Marcy, Jack Szostak, Roger Summons et al...

 

NASA Astrobiology Institute: Seminars

 

 

And if that's not enough, there's this.

 

Astrobiology Science Conference 2012

 

 

This last one is a bit off-topic, itpertains to exoplanet research, but I've got to mention it. They were nice enough to stream the presentations online and then pretty promptly put them up on this page. I will admit that a few of these presentations made me sleepy, but they were just too specialized and technical for me, given that I'm not a planetary scientist (although I wish I were!). In my defense I think most people would get tired after many hours of talks.

 

Kepler Science Conference

[Appolinaria]

There is the cliche of viewing a glass as half empty or half full. You seem to view it as spilt on the sidewalk or laced with cyanide.

 

I am at a loss to see how one cannot be overawed and inspired by the emergence of stars and planets, galaxies and clusters from a score of fundamental particles, a handfull of forces and a smattering of constants. For these same basics to be responsible for the emergence not only of life, but of conscious life, is astounding.

 

 

That to me isn't awe inspiring. It's just reality.

 

 

You are a part of the universe that is able to contemplate the universe! And yet you say this is not a deep meaning. That this is dull!! The universe exploring itself through your consciousness is dull!!! Give me frigging break!

 

 

I don't know what that means.

[Ophiolite]

Appolinaria, perhaps you need to get laid. The inability to be inspired by the emergence of complexity from simple rules, to be amazed by the fact that there are simple rules, that these rules produce aware beings who can discover and contemplate the rules, this inablilty on your part is remarkable. If you find it to be 'just reality' then I can see why you would be bored and depressed by it all. So, once again, get laid, get drunk and stop thinking. It clearly doesn't do anything to enhance your life.

[the asinine cretin]

Yipes!

[iNow]

Ophiolite actually uses that line with all the ladies. Oddly, it tends to be more successful of an approach in South American than Australia, from what I understand.

 

 

"It's a good thing for you that I've arrived. My passion sabre is the only thing that's able to alleviate your type of pain. Oh, what's that? You don't believe me? Let me explain the benefits of empiricism when drawing our conclusions, then."

 

Cue really awful 70s music...