NASA finds proof that amino acid components in meteorites originate in space.
This is exciting news. NASA-funded researchers have evidence that some building blocks of DNA, the molecule that carries the genetic instructions for life, found in meteorites were likely created in space. The research gives support to the theory that a “kit” of ready-made parts created in space and delivered to Earth by meteorite and comet impacts assisted the origin of life. We may all be immigrants on Earth.
By Bill Steigerwald
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
NASA-funded researchers have evidence that some building blocks of DNA, the molecule that carries the genetic instructions for life, found in meteorites were likely created in space. The research gives support to the theory that a “kit” of ready-made parts created in space and delivered to Earth by meteorite and comet impacts assisted the origin of life.
“People have been discovering components of DNA in meteorites since the 1960’s, but researchers were unsure whether they were really created in space or if instead they came from contamination by terrestrial life,” said Dr. Michael Callahan of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “For the first time, we have three lines of evidence that together give us confidence these DNA building blocks actually were created in space.” Callahan is lead author of a paper on the discovery appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
The discovery adds to a growing body of evidence that the chemistry inside asteroids and comets is capable of making building blocks of essential biological molecules.
For example, previously, these scientists at the Goddard Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory have found amino acids in samples of comet Wild 2 from NASA’s Stardust mission, and in various carbon-rich meteorites. Amino acids are used to make proteins, the workhorse molecules of life, used in everything from structures like hair to enzymes, the catalysts that speed up or regulate chemical reactions.
In the new work, the Goddard team ground up samples of twelve carbon-rich meteorites, nine of which were recovered from Antarctica. They extracted each sample with a solution of formic acid and ran them through a liquid chromatograph, an instrument that separates a mixture of compounds. They further analyzed the samples with a mass spectrometer, which helps determine the chemical structure of compounds.
The team found adenine and guanine, which are components of DNA called nucleobases, as well as hypoxanthine and xanthine. DNA resembles a spiral ladder; adenine and guanine connect with two other nucleobases to form the rungs of the ladder. They are part of the code that tells the cellular machinery which proteins to make. Hypoxanthine and xanthine are not found in DNA, but are used in other biological processes.
Also, in two of the meteorites, the team discovered for the first time trace amounts of three molecules related to nucleobases: purine, 2,6-diaminopurine, and 6,8-diaminopurine; the latter two almost never used in biology. These compounds have the same core molecule as nucleobases but with a structure added or removed.
It’s these nucleobase-related molecules, called nucleobase analogs, which provide the first piece of evidence that the compounds in the meteorites came from space and not terrestrial contamination. “You would not expect to see these nucleobase analogs if contamination from terrestrial life was the source, because they’re not used in biology, aside from one report of 2,6-diaminopurine occurring in a virus (cyanophage S-2L),” said Callahan. “However, if asteroids are behaving like chemical ‘factories’ cranking out prebiotic material, you would expect them to produce many variants of nucleobases, not just the biological ones, due to the wide variety of ingredients and conditions in each asteroid.”
The second piece of evidence involved research to further rule out the possibility of terrestrial contamination as a source of these molecules. The team also analyzed an eight-kilogram (17.64-pound) sample of ice from Antarctica, where most of the meteorites in the study were found, with the same methods used on the meteorites. The amounts of the two nucleobases, plus hypoxanthine and xanthine, found in the ice were much lower — parts per trillion — than in the meteorites, where they were generally present at several parts per billion. More significantly, none of the nucleobase analogs were detected in the ice sample. One of the meteorites with nucleobase analog molecules fell in Australia, and the team also analyzed a soil sample collected near the fall site. As with the ice sample, the soil sample had none of the nucleobase analog molecules present in the meteorite.
Thirdly, the team found these nucleobases — both the biological and non-biological ones — were produced in a completely non-biological reaction. “In the lab, an identical suite of nucleobases and nucleobase analogs were generated in non-biological chemical reactions containing hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, and water. This provides a plausible mechanism for their synthesis in the asteroid parent bodies, and supports the notion that they are extraterrestrial,” says Callahan.
“In fact, there seems to be a ‘goldilocks’ class of meteorite, the so-called CM2 meteorites, where conditions are just right to make more of these molecules,” adds Callahan.
The team includes Callahan and Drs. Jennifer C. Stern, Daniel P. Glavin, and Jason P. Dworkin of NASA Goddard’s Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory; Ms. Karen E. Smith and Dr. Christopher H. House of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pa.; Dr. H. James Cleaves II of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, DC; and Dr. Josef Ruzicka of Thermo Fisher Scientific, Somerset, N.J. The research was funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute, the Goddard Center for Astrobiology, the NASA Astrobiology: Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program, and the NASA Postdoctoral Program.
Related Link
› Related videos from NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio
Smokey
August 11, 2011 at 4:13 pm
###
I guess I should have been nicer 🙁
Sorry, I skimmed over it. But re-reading, it’s marvelously apropos; thanks for highlighting it:
Those old mythmakers were savvy enough to understand that even The Surveyor may share our humility before the Ultimate Mystery.
/Mr Lynn
Myrrh,
You write:
Ron – as I see it, the ID has come out of the Western Christian tradition via the arguments within that tradition which resulted in the creation of Atheists.
I don’t think this is correct. As I see, the beginnings of ID came from the confirmation of the Big Bang and its leading proponents were Robert Jastrow and his contemporaries, almost all of them agnostic or atheists. More recently, this thinking has been embraced by William Dembski, Michael Behe and others who have brought their own insights to the hypothesis.
This post has provoked massive speculation on the greatest unsolved problem in science, the origin of life… but Anthony, you really should correct the subtitle. The summarized report discusses evidence for extraterrestrial origin of nucleotides, not amino acids.
I don’t have an answer for the great question, but correcting the minor detail at least helps keep the evidence at issue clear.
At 2:13 PM on 11 August, Ron Cram makes a truly egregious error – prompting me (almost) to use the “Al Gore Word” – in writing:
This is, of course, bloody nonsense. I realize that it is common among the illiterate who make a pretense of education to use the Latin tag “ad hominem” when the meaning they’re trying to convey is “insulting,” but the phrase “argumentum ad hominem” has a specific meaning in logic and rhetoric, and to use it as Mr. Cram has done in this instance is a howling idiocy. It’s clear that Mr. Cram wants to convey nothing more than that he is personally cheesed off by my expressions of contempt for the religious whackjobs trying clumsily to peddle their attack on scientific method as “intelligent design,” and that Mr. Cram doesn’t know what the hell “argumentum ad hominem” actually means. He goes on to write:
I am, of course, determined not to deal with liars like the Discovery Institute and Ben Stein particularly, or “intelligent design” peddlers generally, as if they deserve the respect accorded honest participants in “polite society.” They are not “polite” people in that their designs are clearly political, to impose aggressively upon their neighbors the treatment of an absolutely unscientific concept – “intelligent design” – in government schools as part of the science curriculum.
Setting aside for a moment the fact that politically-administered, coercively-funded, compulsory schooling (“public education”) is not a lawful function of government (which is “not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master”), to bleed the innocent taxpayer at gunpoint in order to push this absolutely and undeniably religious assault upon the sciences as if it were – in any way – a legitimate substitute for the consideration of objective evidence reflecting physical phenomena is fundamentally destructive of the legitimate purposes of pedagogy.
Even in our hideously awful government schools. Mr. Cram goes on:
Wrong again, Mr. Cram. It advances my position perfectly. There are absolutely no “facts supporting the argument for Intelligent Design,” and handling the liars pushing this blithering idiocy as what they are – instead of pretending that they’re a part of “polite society” – makes pikestaff-plain that their intentions are clearly perceived and uncompromisingly condemned. To return to Mr. Cram‘s post:
You got it in one, Mr. Cram. To the extent that you predicate assertions based on your peculiar ghostly fixations, you’re not discussing anything “scientific” whatsoever. That’s clear enough from your nonsensical question:
The answer to that one is “no.” The atheist, per se, is not expressing any kind of “faith” at all. In approaching questions addressed in “scientific discussion,” the atheist is coming forward with the sort of “clean slate” which you, Mr. Cram, do not wish honestly to bring. Only to the extent that a “believer” in religious whackjobbery can set aside his “follower” debilitation can he be expected to function as a genuinely rational participant in the sciences.
Lots of religious whackjobs manage that pretty well. They might be ranked as high-functional psychotics if I were interested in getting psychiatric about the matter. But on this “intelligent design” nonsense, we seem to get quickly and ineluctably to the core of their thought disorder and evoke the dysfunctionality To continue with Mr. Cram‘s post:
Well, Mr. Cram, you’re wrong if you’re trying to hold that you’ve presented any “scientific facts” at all. What you have done instead is to commit the logical fallacies of appeal to belief, appeal to authority, and bandwagon, notably in your claim:
The putative quality of the authorities to whom you wish to appeal in your explicit endorsement of “the supernatural” matters not one bloody little bit because neither they nor</b you have "pointed” to any “science” at all.
And “Intelligent Design,” per Dr. Glassman’s appreciation, barely rises to the level at which it can be called a legitimate conjecture, much less a “hypothesis.”
To get a hypothesis, Mr. Cram, you’ve got to have “a novel prediction yet to be validated by facts,” and the moment the word “supernatural” comes in, there is acknowledgement that there are no facts at all to be presented.
To give Dr. Glassman his due yet again: “intelligent design is a threshold question between nonscience and conjectures.”
Some time last year here on WUWT it was divulged that there was news regarding decay rates of certain elements oscillated according to the position of the Sun. The notion of entanglement was raised. It was not laughed out of hand by Leif. He doubted it based on the relatively weak force that Entanglement is. Not that physics forbids it…………..but that it was unlikely.
1. Not so funny When miraculous healings was done by Jesus (for sake of argument lets assume true)–it isn’t quite so funny when we determine that each cell has the plan for every other in the entire body.
2. Not so funny when gospel states Jesus was at dinner…..and then.dissappeared because….. the LHC is going to try to make matter, it’s mass, it’s information, it’s nuclear energy also dissappear. Completely.
3. Not so funny when we realize the flagellelum is designed but can’t agree on the design process(divine? Refine? Divine Refinement?)
4. Not so funny when the opening salvo in the debate:: ‘… In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth Ex-anilho. (……out of nothing)’ and the Big Bang which can be summarized by changing the word ‘God’ to ‘Something’..
5. Not so funny when Peter Jackson of LOTR fame sees a Ghost in his bedroom in NZ and tells his wife later and she finishes his sentence of his description of it because she’d seen it before herself.
6. Not so funny when the Apostle Peter looks you in the eye and says ‘…. and the earth was formed out of water and by water…’ and you say bolox, run to your computer and google ‘water in early earth formation’ only to be shown to NASA and other sites and articles upholding the view that some how, water had a crucial role in the formation of the earth.
7. Not so funny when the historians talk of the first t photographic negative being in what….the late 1800’s. ignoring the Shroud of Turin…..what ever it is….is a photo negative with information of a third dimension dating to 120 AD or so(?).
8. Not so funny when the basics needed for a functional minimal cell was found to be a lot more complex than previously thought. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=11&ved=0CBUQFjAAOAo&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedaily.com%2Freleases%2F2009%2F11%2F091126173027.htm&ei=OadETr3cO8Tk0QGCoeXQBw&usg=AFQjCNEBYj_nCKqII6vJGdFYZV1OD2SQ5A
The horizon of our knowledge of the physical world slides toward the basic notions of a Judeo-Christian defined reality of the of God and it’s nature:
1. Omni-present – Entanglement suggests connectedness.across distance possible
2. Jesus Dissappearence – suggests a local parallel universe (to dissappeare into)
3. Jesus Dissappearence – precedes the LHC experiment to dissappear mass
…………..etc etc etc
At 6:41 PM on 11 August, kuhnkat writes that I supposedly:
Nope. See my botched HTML at 9:10 PM, addressed to Mr. Cram‘s post.
To put it concisely, there have been absolutely no “FACTS” advanced ever to have supported the “Intelligent Design” contention (why all this gormless inappropriate capitals use among True Believers all the frelkin’ time?), and as long as that word “supernatural” keeps creeping in, there never will be.
And who gives a damn whether “Big Bang theory” was first advanced by “a Catholic” or by a Satanist?
Do you have some misconception, kuhncat, that there is any validity in either the sciences particularly or reasoned discourse generally that is specially conferred (or disallowed) by citing a particular attribute of the person to whom an idea is attributed?
At 3:24 PM on 11 August, Eric Anderson claims that in his cited article:
Nope. It’s profoundly dishonest for the religious whackjob “intelligent design” creationists to imply that honest skepticism of their pseudoscience is any kind of “unfortunate deficit” on the part of the critics giving the razzberrry to this Great Sky Pixie yammering.
This “strong aversion” to the creationists’ dereliction of the duty to adhere to scientific method is, in fact, precisely what the scrupulously conscientious person must insist upon – not reflexively but by virtue of hard-wrought discipline – in order to keep the “question” in any way at all “scientific.”
I have to keep repeating that as long as the religious whackjobs operating behind the “intelligent design” false front want to invoke the supernatural in a primum movens substitute for an objectively evidence-validated explanation of the origins of the universe, life, and/or sapience, then they’ve dumped even the least shred of pretense that what they’re attempting is “scientific” and they’re nothing more than a bunch of charlatans.
Better for them to have stuck honestly to the treatment of this notion as an article of faith, and not tried to pretend that their position is in any way “scientific” at all.
That they do not do this appears reliably to be due to their intention not to advance the discipline of science but rather to attack and degrade it, almost certainly because they conceive – mistakenly – that the advances in the various sciences have, especially over the past century, so “invaded” the realms they’d relegated comfortably to the control of their deity that faith itself is threatened.
What good, they think, is the witch doctor if his invocations of the gods are demonstrably less efficacious than the elucidations of tinkerers and theorists who observe aspects of reality accessible to anybody and make them apprehensible to any member of the tribe willing to learn?
It’s nonsense, of course. The witch doctor – or other species of religionist – will continue to be of real value to members of the community as long as there are uncertainties and adversities imposing any emotional load on human beings. There are jobs that can’t (yet?) be accomplished by way of scientific method, and as long as the religious whackjobs don’t engage the coercive machinery of government aggressively to force their ghostly peculiarities upon their neighbors, they might even be doing something beneficial.
Who knows? Laissez-faire.
I recently took some graduate level biochemistry courses ( at a liberal university) and was taught that even if you were able to combine a series of amino acids every pico-second it would take many trillions of times the age of the universe to randomly generate the composition and structure of several mid-size proteins. There simply isn’t enough time for these compounds or the RNA that codes for them to randomly combine or evolve (and how could they evolve since the are chemical compounds, not living organisms). Its interesting that some carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms were linked together into some amino acid structures and other organic compounds on some meteorites, but saying that is equivalent to finding the seeds of life is false. The math just does not support the contention that life could have randomly developed in several billion years even if you were provided with more amino acids than you could fit into all the worlds oceans. I’m more likely to be killed by a meteorite while typing this comment than for multicellular life to have had time to randomly develop from amino acids carried to Earth on meteorites.
“””””
DesertYote says:
August 10, 2011 at 10:48 pm
George E. Smith
August 10, 2011 at 4:25 pm
###
I think you need to ask Dr. Drake regarding his equation and why he formulated it. There is no problem with it. It show just what it was intended to show, the futility of it all. The 10^-20, Is a number I pulled from a very dark place, that was tiny, yet larger then the actual number. That is why I said LESS THEN. As it is, 10^-20 is incredibly small. Do you have any idea how small it is? Its small enough to be zero.
DesertYote says:
August 10, 2011 at 10:57 pm
George E. Smith
August 10, 2011 at 4:25 pm
###
And furthermore, depending on what you are doing, zero*inf is equal to some real number. “””””
You must be an engineer.
zero*inf might be equal to some real number in your scheme of things; but in the clearly understood language of mathematics, zero times infinity is quite indeterminate.
And if you think that 10^-20 is small enough to be zero, then you need a refresher course in modern Physics at least. According to current experimental observations, the upper bound for the dipole electric moment of the electron is not more than 10^-28 e.cm, and may be as small as 10^-35 e.cm
So these days, 10^-20 is a huge number; and it definitely isn’t zero. Indeed all the really interesting things that happened in the history of Physics; the realm of “Archeo-Physics” happened in the first 10^-34 seconds after the big bang. Or was it the first 10^-43 seconds ?
And no I don’t need to talk to Frank Drake about anything. As a Nobel Physics Laureate recently told me; you can make any absurd claim you like about something that can never; even in principle be measured or observed; and who is going to call you on it; or indeed pay any attention to such rantings.
Tucci78:
Well, I’m not sure there is much more worth discussing. It is clear that you are very angry and upset about the idea of intelligent design, seeing an imagined evil religious conspiracy under every rock. Perhaps the discussion can continue when you are ready to address the following simple, legitimate, scientific question: Given that some things are designed and some things are not designed, is it possible to identify artifacts of design in particular physical systems that would allow us to conclude such system was designed?
“”””” Theo Goodwin says:
August 11, 2011 at 5:16 am
RandomReal[] says:
August 11, 2011 at 12:54 am
Your post is very interesting. Thanks for the update. I have no trouble with the science that you describe. I hope that we learn some good things from it. However, you too seem to suffer just a bit from Dawkins’ Platonism, his tendency to reify abstractions, as in the following:
“This is molecular archaeology. With the development of DNA sequence technology and other biochemical and biophysical techniques, we can trace our genetic history back a long way.”
In other words, the real work is still done with arms immersed in vats of chemicals and not with fingers on the keyboards. Here is a mnemonic to help one remember this: Crick and Watson. Crick was the mathematician who made the brilliant leap to the Double Helix, Watson lived with his arms in vats of chemicals. Crick did the math and Watson did everything else.”””””
“”””” Crick was the mathematician who made the brilliant leap to the Double Helix, “””””
Gee, is that a fact. I could have sworn that there was a certain lady X-ray Crystallographer, who really did the donkey work. It was she who in effect had her arms immersed in the vats and pretty much did the keyboard work as well.
Long after the fact, at least one of the two “others” was man enough to admit to her key contributions. Long after they had bathed in the glory denied to her.
“”””” Ron Cram says:
August 10, 2011 at 7:01 pm
George E Smith writes:
“Well ‘The Big Bang’ is simply a possible model that appears to explain certain Astronomical observations. The “evidence” supporting such a model supports nothing additional; especially some ‘big banger’, which is every bit as conjectural as is ‘The Big Bang.’”
George, I encourage you to read the book “God and the Astronomers” by Robert Jastrow, the first head of Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a brilliant astronomer. The book describes not just the rise of the theory of the Big Bang but also observations which led to the theory being confirmed. “””””
Well that is very welcome news; that the big bang has been confirmed. That would be a first for science; that one of its theories would be confirmed.
As to Jastrow’s book; well I do believe in Astronomers; but the rest is just conjecture.
Should we abandon the notion that science is about that which is observable, and testable; and admit any crackpot idea, even though we know a priori that it is not testable ?
Can you describe just one performable experiment, that would confirm the existence of multiple universes; when ALL available observational evidence shows us only one. Maybe that is why we call it the UNI-verse !
Tucci78,
apparently youu have no conception at all of pattern recognition and analyzing complex data for indications of repetitive, non-random, coherent information that is highly unlikely to be created by chance. Patterns of intelligence. I would be willing to bet that you think SETI, (I ran a few boxes processing their data for a while), is gee whillickers whiz bang stuff, but, putting a similar type of processing in conjunction with something that MIGHT be aligned with some religious person somewhere you would curse them and try to run them out of business!!
Nothing like biased hypocrisy.
Ron Cram says:
August 11, 2011 at 8:30 pm
Myrrh,
You write:
Ron – as I see it, the ID has come out of the Western Christian tradition via the arguments within that tradition which resulted in the creation of Atheists.
I don’t think this is correct. As I see, the beginnings of ID came from the confirmation of the Big Bang and its leading proponents were Robert Jastrow and his contemporaries, almost all of them agnostic or atheists. More recently, this thinking has been embraced by William Dembski, Michael Behe and others who have brought their own insights to the hypothesis.
Ah, I thought it was a theory from non-Atheists/Agnostics. OK, here’s what I’ve found and it’s more interesting than that, but still my conclusion holds, I just have to include believers in God (Western tradition as per Augustine) in with the set of other faiths who have embraced this theory. http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/832
My conclusion holds, I think, because my premise is that it came out of the Western Augustinian tradition which created Atheists (as a reaction to its concepts about God, as Dawkins is ever at pains to point out). In doing so Atheists took the opposite extreme to ‘Intelligent Designer’ by subsituting with random chance (which if I recall properly was the concept held by Darwin’s father and the original basis of the theory of evolution). And from this grew all the arguments which pitted ‘believers in God’ against ‘atheists/agnostics’, in the idea that science was against supernatural etc. (So resulting in such responses that those like Newton believed in God and the supernatural and were still scientists, exploring how God’s creation worked, etc.).
Now, for some Christians as I’ve said, there never was an ontological dichotomy between creator and created, nothing to rebel against because intelligence wasn’t ever denied to them as a reality in their beliefs about God. Where Western Augustinians had a God who punished for daring to acquire intelligence, these other Christians held that the concept of being created in image and likeness with free will couldn’t be violated and so did not read into Genesis the Augustinian separation of being and read instead that the injunction not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which is shorthanbd for ‘everything’, was a warning of consequence, knowledge includes knowing life and death. These other Christians say If we have free will God cannot demand we obey him, and therefore a God which does so violates his own being which is Us in creation, so death as a punishment for desiring to aquire intelligence is illogical. These Christians still hold that God cannot ever violate our free will and that the object of life is to realise our ‘godhood’, so they never had a separation between ‘supernatural’ and ‘natural’, it’s all natural. (And the relationship between God the uncreated creator and God the created in image and likeness is synergistic will, i.e. working together the sum is greater than its two parts.)
Perhaps Intelligence Design, as described in the link I’ve given here, is Atheists/Agnostics out of the Augustinian tradition about God, trying to find their way back to this…? Certainly appears from this description to be still the same reaction against the Augustinian God who denied intelligence to mankind, but now disagreeing with the earlier substituted random chance theory.
At 12:43 AM on 12 August, kuhnkat eschews inappropriate capitalization to write of me that:
Considering that “biased hypocrisy” is the essence of the “intelligent design” idiocy, I’d have to agree that there’s not much like it. We find it, of course, in the preposterous bogosity of the AGW fraud, too, as well as in Keynesian economics.
I’m not trained or experienced in the theories of “pattern recognition” per se, but I’ve sure as hell gotten to see lots of “repetitive, non-random, coherent information that is highly unlikely to be created by chance” over the decades.
Under the microscope and in the pathology laboratory particularly, and in clinical medicine generally. And these reliable findings are supposed to be proof of some kind of “Patterns of intelligence” precisely…how?
Re: so called “building blocks” falling from the sky. Well, “what goes up must come down”, yes ? Why look to something being ejected from another source when our own planet is perfectly capable of quite naturally putting rocks (etc) into space ?
Re: the “life appeared out of non life and despite the laws of physics (etc) evolved and there is no greater of more capable intelligence out there than our own” vs “God Did It and He Did It because it is fun to do so”, well I tend to lean towards the notion of “run universe.cmd” … and execution of that particular program wasn’t all that long ago relatively speaking.
Now please excuse me, but it is time for me to enjoy a nice game of “Age of Empires 2” where *I* get to do a version of “run universe.cmd”.
Deem “all your bases are belong to us” included. 😉
regarDS
@Ron Cram
If it seems like natural processes aren’t up to the task, then it means we don’t know enough about them, or there are some we haven’t discovered.
This is a statement of faith in atheism.
No it isn’t. It’s a statement of faith in the scientific method as the best tool to investigate nature. Bringing god into the equation whenever something inexplicable comes up is unscientific, and rejecting that notion is defending science.
It is, however, not a statement about the existence or non-existence of god. God is outside the realm of science, and science makes no statement about him at all.
Even believing Christian (or ) scientists ought not to involve god in their work. That would make them bad scientists, as well as Christians. The latter, because religion is not about god interfering with natural processes. It is about much more fundamental issues outside the realm of science.
@Henry
even if you were able to combine a series of amino acids every pico-second it would take many trillions of times the age of the universe to randomly generate the composition and structure of several mid-size proteins.
The math just does not support the contention that life could have randomly developed in several billion years
This is a very common fallacy. Yes the likelyhood that the very same biochemistry we have on earth should come up again independently is infinitesimally small. But that was never nature’s “job”. It just had to come up with any biochemistry that “works”, of which there are many possible combinations. Any other would have done. And that is not so unlikely.
Your argument is like saying that if a brick falls down from a roof and splinters in thousands of chips and pieces, the breaking up of the brick must have been by design, because the likelihood of the same chips and pieces in their exact shapes and locations forming by chance is microscopically small.
Henry says:
August 11, 2011 at 10:27 pm http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/10/seeds-of-life-on-earth-may-have-originated-in-space/#comment-717326
I recently took some graduate level biochemistry courses ( at a liberal university) and was taught that even if you were able to combine a series of amino acids every pico-second it would take many trillions of times the age of the universe to randomly generate the composition and structure of several mid-size proteins. There simply isn’t enough time for these compounds or the RNA that codes for them to randomly combine or evolve (and how could they evolve since the are chemical compounds, not living organisms).
There are two things here I find interestig. Doesn’t ‘science’ already say that matter can’t be created or destroyed, that doesn’t preclude changing form I take it from the energy = matter, so isn’t the question still to be answered – what is matter?
Not sure about the ‘hasn’t been the time for complex evolution’ – limiting time frame to the length of existence of our ‘uni’ verse is only saying that random is ‘zilch’ within that limit, it can’t say anything about random in time as time is an unknown, isn’t it?. Also, even if all existence came into being with the big bang, somehow, what’s to say that intelligence wasn’t the first thing out of random chance? And, that still leaves the question, ‘what is all possibilities’?
A question for the mathematicians here, or any that know of this, is it still said that only infinite and nothing are infinite? If so, where have all the numbers gone if nothing is infinite?
At 2:34 AM on 12 August, in response to religionist Ron Cram‘s achingly maladroit assertion about “…a statement of faith in atheism,” we have anorak2 writing:
I have to wince at the use of the word “faith” in that sentence, where “confidence” would be more sensible. Anybody who claims to “believe” in the scientific method is behaving about as unscientifically as the fellah who sincerely professes his belief that his crops will grow – or not – insh’Allah. But the rest of anorak2‘s post is pretty good, especially:
It’s the point I’ve been trying to make anent this “intelligent design” hogwash throughout.
At 10:53 PM on 11 August, Eric Anderson had written:
Considering, Mr. Anderson, that you entered this exchange as a partisan of religious creationism masquerading as “intelligent design” and therefore with no intention of honestly focusing on any scientific concepts whatsoever, yeah, I’ve got to agree that you’ve got zilch “worth discussing” at all.
Whether the “religious conspiracy” behind the aggressively coercive political effort to degrade the teaching of scientific method by passing off your Great Sky Pixie hokum as part of the government educationalist gulags’ science curricula is “evil” or not is a wonderfully fit subject for discussion, however. I’ll take the “affirmative” side in that debate, and with gusto.
As for your fumbling grope to couch your continuing assault upon scientific method in the seeming of sweet reason (as a “simple, legitimate, scientific question” that lacks both legitimacy and scientific validity), you and your co-religionists are advancing the proposition that there is in real natural physical phenomena convincing evidence of “intelligent design,” meaning that you’ve got the burden of proof, not me.
Asking me, as a disputant, to define for you the parameters by which it might be “possible to identify artifacts of design in particular physical systems that would allow us to conclude such [a] system was designed” is a tactic of debate so bereft of both principle and art that it is – almost – beneath contempt.
Just what the heck d’you think you know about either scientific method or rhetoric, anyway?
For the sake of clarity, Mr. Anderson, permit me to inform you that you haven’t yet seen me “very angry and upset.”
Scornful, certainly. But my emotional response to you and your fellow religious whackjobs in this forum is rather more that of a man discovering that he’s got to scrape something malodorous off his shoe.
It’s a necessary job, and it needs to be done well lest that crap get tracked all over the place, but it’s hygiene, not hatred.
Jeff Alberts Says:
August 11, 2011 at 8:14 am
“I can’t determine what your point may have been in that rambling mess. Sorry.”
No problem, most of the time I can’t even make straight the rambling mess in my brain. I keep telling myself that is why I should blog, but I got ahead of myself. This is me signing off……….
George E. Smith says:
August 11, 2011 at 10:55 pm
Yes, you are correct. Others were involved.
RandomReal[] says:
August 11, 2011 at 2:30 pm
“So, for me, genes are not an abstraction conferring vague traits but are real, biochemical entities that interact with the cellular environment, conferring subtle and not so subtle phenotypic traits on their hosts.”
You and I have no disagreement. What you wrote about Dawkins identifies what I see as his main error. He removes the concept of gene from its scientific context and waxes philosophical about it. I find your posts helpful and admirable in all ways.
The kind of error that Dawkins makes, not necessarily Dawkins’ version, leads to a lot of BS. I am reminded of the claim that humans and chimpanzees share something like 97% of their genetic structure. When I hear or read this claim, my response is that the 3% of genes in question must be one hell of a powerful and efficacious set of genes. (For those new to this topic, my point here is that the claim that 97% of genetic structure is shared takes the concept of gene out of its scientific context and reifies it, assigning causal power to a snapshot of genetic structure. To avoid such error, we must remind ourselves, constantly, that “genes…are real, biochemical entities that interact with the cellular environment, conferring subtle and not so subtle phenotypic traits on their hosts.” I want to emphasize that they do not exist apart from cellular environments.)
Please do one favor for me. You write:
“The number of changes in their DNA/protein sequence reflect the evolutionary time to the last common ancestor.”
Give me one reference that will help me understand this point as it bears on my claim that the human genome does not contain a record of human evolution. I want to know “how much” of a species’ evolutionary record can be mined through study of these sequences.