Abiogenesis is impossible
The total lack of any kind of experimental evidence leading to the re-creation of life; not to mention the spontaneous emergence of life… is the most humiliating embarrassment to the proponents of naturalism and the whole so-called “scientific establishment” around it… because it undermines the worldview of who wants naturalism to be true.
By chance? - Not a chance !!
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279-abiogenesis-is-impossible
Single proteins do not have any function on their own unless interconnected correctly in a living cell. In order for life to begin naturally, all essential proteins required for life to start would have had to emerge randomly on a prebiotic earth, protein super-complexes like ribosomes would have had to join the subparts together to get the right protein-protein interactions, like lock and key. A miracle would have had to prevent them to be burned by UV radiation. Then start to interconnect in the correct order to create a functional metabolic network and multi-protein production lines , where the joint venture of several enzymes began to produce functional products, hand them over to carrier mechanisms, tag them in order to be transported to the right locations. Somehow, all this would have had to begin in a protected environment, so a protective envelope would have had to exist. That envelope had to emerge fully functional with " gates " that permit the right materials in, and the waste product out.
Once the data storage system (DNA) emerged, a language based on a code system had to be established, and the blueprint to store the information to make all parts of the cell had to be stored within it, and DNA replication errors had to be reduced 10.000.000.000 times.
Let's suppose that a self-replicating RNA molecule would appear miraculously on early earth. that does not explain the origin of the information to make all life essential parts in the cell.
It is as to go just from a hard drive storage device to a self replicating factory with the ability of self replication of the entire factory once ready, to respond to changing environmental demands and regulate its metabolic pathways, regulate and coordinate all cellular processes, such as molecule and building block biosynthesis according to the cells demands, depending on growth, and other factors.
The ability of uptake of nutrients, to be structured, internally compartmentalized and organized, being able to check replication errors and minimize them, and react to stimuli, and changing environments. That's is, the ability to adapt to the environment is a must right from the beginning.
If just ONE single protein or enzyme - of many - is missing, no life. If topoisomerase II or helicase are missing - no replication - no perpetuation of life.
Somehow, that envelope had to create a homeostatic environment, diminishing the calcium concentration in the cell 10000 times below the external environment, to permit signaling. At the same time, a signaling code would have had to be established, and immediately begin to function, with a common agreement between sender and receiver................energy supply would have been a major problem, since almost all life forms depend on the supply of glucose, which is a product of complex metabolic pathways, and not readily available on a prebiotic earth. Most proteins require active metal clusters in their reaction centers.
These clusters are in most cases ultracomplex, each cluster had to have the right atoms interconnected in the right way, and get the correct 3-dimensional form. They require the complex uptake of the basic materials, like iron and sulfur, molybdenum, and complex biosynthesis processes, and after the correct assembling, the insertion in the right way and form inside the proteins. All these processes require energy, in form of ATP, not readily available - since ATP is the product of complex nano-factories, like ATP synthase - which by themselves depend on a proton gradient. Sorry------- not by chance !!
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If you see a message on a sand dune, like " John loves Sandy ". Would you intuitively and immediately recognize that someone past there a short time ago, and wrote the message on the sand dune? Or would you consider that rain and wind wrote the message randomly entirely through natural events? Even the most basic cell maintaining the most basic functions of life is far more complex than the most complex man-made machine. Would you say that it is plausible that random, unguided, natural events have enough statistical probability to create and give rise to the most sophisticated self-replicating factory of the universe? -
Michael Denton writes in Evolution: A Theory In Crisis:
“To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity.The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle. The cell is a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world.
The cell contains an informational code system and programming languages like our alphabet or a computer code, more versatile than C, Visual Basic, or PHP, and more robust and error-free than any other code system out of 1 million alternatives? - using a communication protocol which wastes far less space than TCP/IP and is more robust than Ethernet? - using furthermore a collection of rules and regularities of information coding for instructional complex texts? - defined by alphabet, grammar, a collection of punctuation marks and regulatory sites, and semantics? and then uses that code system to create a blueprint for a self-replicating factory, which requires about 1500 books, each with 300 pages, 300.000,00 characters per book, each containing the precise complex instructions and information to create this factory, and stored in the smallest storage device possible and known, a trillion times denser than a CD? How is it, that you would recognize immediately, that a simple message on a sand dune required intelligence, but above description of the simplest imaginable biological cell does not require a designer ?!
Objection: Comparing living cells to man-made self-replicating machines, and books is a false analogy
Answer: Talking about life getting together is similar to talking about cars forming themselves, or even basic computer programs making themselves. These things are not just improbable, they are impossible without intelligence.
Marcello Barbieri writes in his book: Code Biology A New Science of Life, page 28
Molecular biology has proved that there is a genetic code in every cell and that genes and proteins are molecular artifacts because they are manufactured by molecular machines. Coding and artifact-making, in other words, take place both in our society and inside the cell, and this does create a parallel between culture and molecular biology.
In other words. Intelligence produces self-replicating machines and books. And so only intelligence can produce life, that depends on coded information, proteins, and molecular machines.
If the analogy of two phenomena are very close and striking while at the same time, the cause of ONE of the phenomenon is very obvious; it becomes scarcely possible to refuse to admit the action of an analogous cause of the other phenomenon, though (the cause of the other phenomenon is) not so obvious in itself"
--- in "Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy", London, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1831, page 149.
When you see that:
the way genetic information encoded in the DNA is exactly the same as what we humans would do to elaborate a blueprint to build a factory, full of complex machines, compartments, production lines, computers, etc;
the way that the nucleus communicates with its ribosome is similar to how we humans have designed computers to communicate with one another,
then one has to AT LEAST stop and wonder whether some intelligent being has designed the genetic code and made the communication system between the nucleus and its ribosomes....
Perry Marshall writes in the book Evolution 2.0:
Although this is not a conclusive proof of the existence of God, it should AT LEAST make one STOP and THINK about the possibility of the existence of God....
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As of 2014, Koonin serves on the advisory editorial board of Trends in Genetics and is co-Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal Biology Direct. He served on the editorial board of Bioinformatics from 1999-2001. Koonin is also an advisory board member in bioinformatics at Faculty of 1000.
Let us see what he writes in regard of the origin of life:
The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution, Eugene V. Koonin, page 351:
The origin of life is the most difficult problem that faces evolutionary biology and, arguably, biology in general. Indeed, the problem is so hard and the current state of the art seems so frustrating that some researchers prefer to dismiss the entire issue as being outside the scientific domain altogether, on the grounds that unique events are not conducive to scientific study.
A succession of exceedingly unlikely steps is essential for the origin of life, from the synthesis and accumulation of nucleotides to the origin of translation; through the multiplication of probabilities, these make the final outcome seem almost like a miracle. The difficulties remain formidable. For all the effort, we do not currently have coherent and plausible models for the path from simple organic molecules to the first life forms. Most damningly, the powerful mechanisms of biological evolution were not available for all the stages preceding the emergence of replicator systems. Given all these major difficulties, it appears prudent to seriously consider radical alternatives for the origin of life
The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution, Eugene V. Koonin page 435:
The requirements for the emergence of a primitive, coupled replication-translation system, which is considered a candidate for the breakthrough stage in this paper, are much greater. At a minimum, spontaneous formation of the following is required:
• Two rRNAs, with a total size of at least 1,000 nucleotides.
• Approximately 10 primitive adaptors of about 30 nucleotides
each, for a total of approximately 300 nucleotides.
• At least one RNA encoding a replicase, about 500 nucleotides (low bound) required. Under the notation used here, n = 1,800, resulting in E <10^1018.
In other words, even in this toy model that assumes a deliberately inflated rate of RNA production, the probability that a coupled translation replication emerges by chance in a single O-region is P < 10^1018. Obviously, this version of the breakthrough stage can be considered only in the context of a universe with an infinite (or, at the very least, extremely vast) number of O-regions ( observable regions ).
The model considered here is not supposed to be realistic, by any account. It only illustrates the difference in the demands on chance for the origin of different versions of the breakthrough system and, hence, the connections between this version and different cosmological models of the universe.
All things considered, my assessment of the current state of the art in the study of the origins of replication and translation is rather somber. Notwithstanding relevant theoretical models and suggestive experimental results, we currently do not have a credible solution to these problems and do not even see with any clarity a path to such a solution. Any even remotely realistic origin of life scenario must incorporate well-defined pre-cellular, abiogenic compartmentalization; inorganic catalysts to catalyze “pre-biochemical” reactions prior to the emergence of bona fide enzymes; thermal and/or electrochemical potential gradients required for the generation of energy in accessible forms; a solution to the extremely difficult problem of the origin of genetic information (see the discussion earlier in this chapter). In general, the early concepts underestimated the dimensions of the origin of life problem and failed to investigate special abiogenic conditions that must have been a prerequisite for the jump-start of biological evolution. Subsequently, several groups of researchers attempted to get away from the concept of the homogeneous primary soup, replacing it with some form of inorganic compartments, and sought to address all the origin of life problems in conjunction by combination of modeling, experiment, and observation in nature. The common idea of these hypotheses is the existence of a single framework that could simultaneously provide compartmentalization, energy gradients, and catalysts.
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Currently, scientists stand no closer to understanding life’s beginning than they did when Stanley Miller conducted his first experiments fifty years ago. Though some scientists assert that the research is in its infancy, significant resources have been brought to bear on the origin-of-life question over the past five decades. To date, no real answers have emerged. Rather, a misguided approach has essentially stalled the research program.
Best-selling author Paul Davies makes this point in his book The Fifth Miracle:
When I set out to write this book, I was convinced that science was close to wrapping up the mystery of life’s origin. . . . Having spent a year or two researching the field, I am now of the
opinion that there remains a huge gulf in our understanding. . . . This gulf in understanding is not merely ignorance about certain technical details; it is a major conceptual lacuna.
Davies’ statements likely surprised most people, including scientists. From popular media reports, one would think researchers have all but finalized the explanation for life’s beginning. But such is not the case.
Davies explains why this mismatch persists between public perception and stark reality:
Many investigators feel uneasy about stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they freely admit that they are baffled. There seem to be two
reasons for their unease. First, they feel it opens the door to religious fundamentalists and their god-of-the-gaps pseudo-explanations. Second, they worry that a frank admission of
ignorance will undermine funding.
Origins of life : biblical and evolutionary models face off / Fazale Rana & Hugh Ross, page 18
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Denton: Evolution, A Theory in Crisis, page 249
We now know not only of the existence of a break between the living and non-living world, but also that it represents the most dramatic and fundamental of all the discontinuities of nature. Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological system, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive.
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Would you say that it is plausible that random, unguided, natural events have enough statistical probability to create and give rise to the most sophisticated self-replicating factory of the universe? - containing an informational code system and programming languages like our alphabet or a computer code, more versatile than C, Visual Basic, or PHP, and more robust and error-free than any other code system out of 1 million alternatives? - using a communication protocol which wastes far less space than human-made ones? - using Furthermore a collection of rules and regularities of information coding for instructional complex texts? - defined by alphabet, grammar, a collection of punctuation marks and regulatory sites, and semantics? and then uses that code system to create a blueprint for a self-replicating factory, which requires about 1500 books, each with 300 pages, 300.000,00 characters per book, each containing the precise complex instructions and information to create this factory, and stored in the smallest storage device possible and known, a trillion times denser than a CD?
Complex factories, containing production lines, interdependent complex machines that produce complex machine parts and subunits that after made, must be and are assembled in the right way - manufacturing machines that work independently of outside input of information, but that were pre-programmed to do their job autonomously like robots, with quality control departments, error check and fix mechanisms to keep the smallest error rate, walls that make a separation of the inside to the outside of the factory for protection, and with gates that permits cargo in and out, recognition mechanisms that let only the right cargo in, and lead it to the right specific sites and production lines, highways and cargo carriers that have tags which recognize where to drop the cargo where it's needed, cleans up waste and has waste bins and sophisticated recycle mechanisms, storage departments, produces its energy and shuttles it to where it's needed, and last not least, does reproduce itself, requires undoubtedly intelligent minds to set it up.
Biological cells meet the description above.
Therefore, the most rational inference is that biological cells, and life, had an intelligent source as its cause and origin.
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The cell requires numerous molecular machines and instructional information, precise energy supply, and a complex metabolic network to support life. It is quite clear that there is a minimal number of genes required to permit cells to become alive, an extremely tiny possibility that this self-replicating factory would emerge - for the support of complex life. A frequent argument is given in response that one shouldn't be surprised to live existing because the origin of life happened, the chance is 1 - not at all surprising. However, this argument is like a situation where a man is standing before a firing squad of 1000 men with rifles who take aim and fire - - but they all miss him. According to the above logic, this man should not be at all surprised to still be alive because, if they hadn't missed him, he wouldn't be alive. The nonsense of this line of reasoning is obvious. Surprise at the unfathomable complexity of the cell, given the hypothesis of chance producing it, is only to be expected - in the extreme.
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Mycoplasma genitalium
The simplest known free-living organism, Mycoplasma genitalium, has 470 genes that code for 470 proteins that average 347 amino acids in length. The odds against just one specified protein of that length are 1:10^451.
The estimated number of elementary particles in the universe is 10^80. The most rapid events occur at an amazing 10^45 per second. Thirty billion years contains only 10^18 seconds. By totaling those, we find that the maximum elementary particle events in 30 billion years could only be 10^143.
The simplest known free-living organism, Mycoplasma genitalium, has 470 genes that code for 470 proteins that average 347 amino acids in length. The odds against just one specified protein of that length are 1:10^451.
According to Borel's law, any occurrence with a chance of happening that is less than one chance out of 10^50, is an occurrence with such a slim a probability that is, in general, statistically considered to be zero. (10^50 is the number 1 with 50 zeros after it, and it is spoken: "10 to the 50th power")
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One of the classic arguments is given in response to the argument that life is improbable is that one shouldn't be surprised to find complex life because if there were no complex life, we wouldn't exist. Therefore, the fact that we exist means that such complexity exists should only be expected by the mere fact of our own existence - not at all surprising. However, this argument is like a situation where a man is standing before a firing squad of 10000 men with rifles who take aim and fire - - but they all miss him. According to the above logic, this man should not be at all surprised to still be alive because, if they hadn't missed him, he wouldn't be alive. The nonsense of this line of reasoning is obvious. Surprise at the extreme complexity of life, given the hypothesis of a mindless origin, is only to be expected - in the extreme.
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Paul Davies, the fifth miracle, page 54:
Life as we know it requires hundreds of thousands of specialist proteins, not to mention the nucleic acids. The odds against producing just the proteins by pure chance are something like 1O^40000 to 1.
There are indeed a lot of stars—at least ten billion billion in the observable universe. But this number, gigantic as it may appear to us, is nevertheless trivially small compared with the gigantic odds against the random assembly of even a single protein molecule. Though the universe is big, if life formed solely by random agitation in a molecular junkyard, there is scant chance it has happened twice.
‘Making a protein simply by injecting energy is rather like exploding a stick of dynamite under a pile of bricks and expecting it to form a house. You may liberate enough energy to raise the bricks, but without coupling the energy to the bricks in a controlled and ordered way, there is little hope of producing anything other than a chaotic mess.’ It is one thing to produce bricks; it is an entirely different thing to organize the building of a house or factory. If you had to, you could build a house using stones that you found lying around, in all the shapes and sizes in which they came due to natural causes. However, the organization of the building requires something that is not contained in the stones. It requires the intelligence of the architect and the skill of the builder. It is the same with the building blocks of life. Blind chance just will not do the job of putting them together in a specific way. Organic chemist and molecular biologist A.G. Cairns-Smith puts it this way: ‘Blind chance… is very limited… he can produce exceedingly easily the equivalent of letters and small words, but he becomes very quickly incompetent as a number of organization increases. Very soon indeed long waiting periods and massive material resources become irrelevant.’
The cell is like a factory, that has various computer like hierarchically organized systems of hardware and software, various language based informational systems, a translation system, huge amounts of precise instructional/specified, complex information stored and extract systems to make all parts needed to produce the factory and replicate itself, the scaffold structure, that permits the build of the indispensable protection wall, form and size of its building, walls with gates that permits cargo in and out, recognition mechanisms that let only the right cargo in, has specific sites and production lines, "employees", busy and instructed to produce all kind of necessary products, parts and subparts with the right form and size through the right materials, others which mount the parts together in the right order, on the right place, in the right sequence, at the right time, which has sophisticated check and error detection mechanisms all along the production process, the ability to compare correctly produced parts to faulty ones and discard the faulty ones, and repeat the process to make the correct ones; highways and cargo carriers that have tags which recognize where to drop the cargo where it's needed, cleans up waste and has waste bins and sophisticated recycle mechanisms, storage departments, produces its energy and shuttles it to where it's needed, and last not least, does reproduce itself.
The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a dance of exquisite fidelity, orchestrated with breathtaking precision. Vastly more elaborate than the most complicated ballet, the dance of life encompasses countless molecular performers in synergetic coordination. Yet this is a dance with no sign of a choreographer. No intelligent supervisor, no mystic force, no conscious controlling agency swings the molecules into place at the right time, chooses the appropriate players, closes the links, uncouples the partners, moves them on. The dance of life is spontaneous, self-sustaining, and self-creating.
Newman, 1967, p. 662:
How did something so immensely complicated, so finessed, so exquisitely clever, come into being all on its own? How can mindless molecules, capable only of pushing and pulling their immediate neighbors, cooperate to form and sustain something as ingenious as a living organism?
Alberts, 1992, pp. xii, xiv
Before the explosive growth of our knowledge of the cell during the last 30 years, it was known that "the simplest bacteria are extremely complex, and the chances of their arising directly from inorganic materials, with no steps in between, are too remote to consider seriously. A typical eukaryote cell consists of an estimated 40,000 different protein molecules and is so complex that to acknowledge that the "cells exist at all is a marvel… even the simplest of the living cells is far more fascinating than any human-made object.
Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory In Crisis, 1986, page 250:
“The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.”
“To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell, we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity.”
…veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world
Bernd Rosslenbroich, On the Origin of Autonomy, page 41:
We know virtually nothing about the first stages of life. Most of what textbooks usually try to suggest to students in their respective chapters is more wishful thinking than fact based on scientific evidence (Conway Morris 2003 ; Shapiro 1987 ).
…veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world (Denton, 1986, p. 250).
Klaus Dose, the president of the Institute of Biochemistry at the University of Johannes Gutenberg, said :
“ it has become abundantly clear that the power of self-organization inherent in macromolecules synthesized in cells is based on extremely subtle physical and chemical, and particularly stereochemical, properties [that] have never been observed in this highly organized form in pre-biotic molecules.… It appears that the field has now reached a stage of stalemate”
(“The Origin of Life: More Questions Than Answers,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 13 [1988]: 348–49).
Jeffrey Bada, "Life's Crucible," Earth, February 1998, p. 40.
Today, as we leave the twentieth century, we still face the biggest unsolved problem that we had when we entered the twentieth century: How did life originate on Earth?
Paul Davies, Goldilocks enigma:
Biological organisms are immensely complex—far more complex than Paley could have realized. To a physicist, they look nothing short of miraculous. The many and diverse components function together in a coherent and amazingly orchestrated manner. The living cell contains minuscule pumps, levers, motors, rotors, turbines, propellers, scissors, and many other instruments familiar from a human workshop, all of them exquisite examples of nanotechnology. The entire assemblage runs itself with great efficiency, sometimes autonomously, sometimes in collaboration with other cells through a sophisticated network of intercellular communication based on chemical signaling. The command and control functions of the cell are encoded in its DNA database, which implements instructions through intermediary molecules using an optimal mathematical code to convert software instructions into hardware products with customized functionality. And this is just one cell. In a larger organism, vastly many cells get together and cooperate to form organs such as eyes, ears, brains, livers, and kidneys, many of them immensely elaborate in their structure and function. The human brain alone has more cells than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. So it all adds up to a package of marvels that boggles the mind.
The total lack of any kind of experimental evidence leading to the re-creation of life; not to mention the spontaneous emergence of life… is the most humiliating embarrassment to the proponents of naturalism and the whole so-called “scientific establishment” around it… because it undermines the worldview of who wants naturalism to be true.
Bill Faint
life in any form is a very serious enigma and conundrum. It does something, whatever the biochemical pathway, machinery, enzymes etc. are involved, that should not and honestly could not ever "get off the ground". It SPONTANEOUSLY recruits Gibbs free energy from its environment so as to reduce its own entropy. That is tantamount to a rock continuously recruiting the wand to roll it up the hill, or a rusty nail "figuring out" how to spontaneously rust and add layers of galvanizing zinc on itself to fight corrosion. Unintelligent simple chemicals can't self-organize into instructions for building solar farms (photosystems 1 and 2), hydroelectric dams (ATP synthase), propulsion (motor proteins) , self repair (p53 tumor suppressor proteins) or self-destruct (caspases) in the event that these instructions become too damaged by the way the universe USUALLY operates. Abiogenesis is not an issue that scientists simply need more time to figure out but a fundamental problem with materialism
Chemist Wilhelm Huck, professor at Radboud University Nijmegen
A working cell is more than the sum of its parts. "A functioning cell must be entirely correct at once, in all its complexity,"
Lynn Margulis:
To go from a bacterium to people is less of a step than to go from a mixture of amino acids to a bacterium.
Douglas Futuyma, a prominent American biologist admits as much:(1983, p. 197).
“Organisms either appeared on the earth fully developed or they did not. If they did not, they must have developed from preexisting species by some process of modification. If they did appear in a fully developed state, they must indeed have been created by some omnipotent intelligence”
In fact, Futuyma’s words underline a very important truth. He writes that when we look at life on Earth, if we see that life emerges all of a sudden, in its complete and perfect forms, then we have to admit that life was created, and is not a result of chance. As soon as naturalistic explanations are proven to be invalid, then creation is the only explanation left.
Neither Evolution nor physical necessity is a driving force prior DNA replication :The origin of the first cell, cannot be explained by natural selection (Ann N Y Acad, 2000) DNA replication had to be previously, before life began, fully setup, working, and fully operating, in order for evolution to act upon the resulting mutations. The remaining possible mechanisms are chemical reactions acting upon unguided random events ( luck, chance), or physical necessity. It could not be physical necessity because that would constrain the possible gene sequences, but they are free and unconstrained; any of the bases can be interlinked into any sequence. If design or physical necessity is excluded, the only remaining possible mechanism for the origin of life is chance/luck.
Hoyle:
The possibility that life might have emerged through unguided, aleatory, random chemical reactions is comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein. It's as well extremely unlikely that chance/luck can write a book, or produce instructional complex information. Nor will unguided, random events produce cells that are more complex than a 747, and contain more information than an encyclopedia Britannica. Life as we know it is, among other things, dependent on at least 2000 different enzymes. How could the blind forces of the primal sea manage to put together the correct chemical elements to build enzymes?
George Wald, Harvard University biochemist and Nobel Laureate, stated in 1954:
"One has to only contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet we are here as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation. However improbable we regard this event [evolution], or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once… Time is in fact the hero of the plot… Given so much time, the ‘impossible’ becomes possible, the possible probable, the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait; time itself performs the miracles.”
Steven A. Benner, Ph.D. Chemistry, Harvard, prominent origin-of-life researcher, said:
"We have failed in any continuous way to provide a recipe that gets from the simple molecules that we know were present on early Earth to RNA." "The first paradox is the tendency of organic matter to devolve and to give tar. If you can avoid that, you can start to try to assemble things that are not tarry, but then you encounter the water problem, which is related to the fact that every interesting bond that you want to make is unstable, thermodynamically, with respect to water. If you can solve that problem, you have the problem of entropy, that any of the building blocks are going to be present in a low concentration; therefore, to assemble a large number of those building blocks, you get a gene-like RNA -- 100 nucleotides long -- that fights entropy. And the fourth problem is that even if you can solve the entropy problem, you have a paradox that RNA enzymes, which are maybe catalytically active, are more likely to be active in the sense that destroys RNA rather than creates RNA."
P. L. Luisi, research biologist In preparation for a 2014 conference in Japan :
The scientific question about the origin of life is still unanswered: it is still one of the great mysteries that science is facing… Which conceptual progress have we made…? It is too much to say that we didn’t really make any, if we look at data under really and honest prebiotic conditions? Adding that this situation is not due to shortage of means and finances in the field—but to a real lack of difficulty to conceive conceptually how this nonliving-living passage really took place?
Karl Popper:
‘What makes the origin of life and of the genetic code a disturbing riddle is this: the genetic code is without any biological function unless it is translated; that is, unless it leads to the synthesis of the proteins whose structure is laid down by the code. But … the machinery by which the cell (at least the non-primitive cell, which is the only one we know) translates the code consists of at least fifty macromolecular components which are themselves coded in the DNA. Thus the code can not be translated except by using certain products of its translation. This constitutes a baffling circle; a really vicious circle, it seems, for any attempt to form a model or theory of the genesis of the genetic code.
John Lennox:
We have only to see a few letters of the alphabet spelling our name in the sand to recognize at once the work of an intelligent agent. How much more likely, then is the existence of an intelligent Creator behind human DNA, the colossal biological database that contains no fewer than 3.5 billion "letters" - the longest "word" yet discovered?
If we consider as the most complex machine ever built by man and take as a parameter :
then the Large Hadron Collider is the most expensive and complex scientific machine ever built. It took 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries, as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.
As another example, the Airbus A380. Huge airliners are incredibly complex. The A380 has about 4 million parts, with 2.5 million part numbers produced by 1,500 companies from 30 countries around the world, including 800 companies from the United States. compared to this, the most simple cell is still far more complex. Advocates of naturalism often try to sidestep and state either that a) evolution explains the feat, or b) " we don't know yet how life emerged, but one day science will know ", as if natural mechanisms would explain life's origin, no matter what. That's a classic example of " evolution of the gaps ". We don't know yet, therefore evolution.
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Biological Life did not exist at some point back in time.
Biological Life exists now.
Life at some point came from non-biological matter
Life emerged either to the action of a creative intelligent agency, or
Life emerged by natural, non-guided, non-intelligence-envolving random lucky events.
Life cannot emerge randomly
Therefore, Life was created by an intelligent agency.
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The argument of the cell
1. At least 200 genes and 239 proteins are required as building blocks for the simplest living cell to come into existence.
2a. Proteins are highly complex structures that are very difficult for scientists to create.
2b. The proteins of the minimal proteome of the first cell, each had to have a minimal size and length, to become biologically active. So they are irreducibly complex.
Which scientists created nature’s proteins which human scientists find so difficult to imitate or recreate.
3a. The probability of random creation of complex proteins, the assemblage of the needed 239 in one place in nature without any control is less than 10^50 or impossible.
3b. A question is also: “Who moves the proteins and the building blocks of the proteins into creating and assembling”.
3c. The proteins must be interconnected in a complex web, the metabolome, which is also minimally complex if the threshold is reached, it's not functional.
3d. If you leave all the atoms of such structures in an isolated place nothing will happen. If you make nature’s forces working then we must say that you make the gods working, since no force is ever reported to work without thinking, feeling, willing, which is the work of a person, according to the dictionary.
4. Such impossibility of chance indicates the necessity of an intelligent designer.
5. That expert designer all men call God.
6. God most probably exists.
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Argument by information
1. There is matter or energy.
2. It is useless or inactive to direct the origin and make of complex life forms without information and consciousness.
3. DNA stores huge quantities of coded, specified/instructional, complex information. Many DNA strands have 100 million, or even billions of segments (one segment is called a nucleotide. Nucleotides are the building blocks, namely purines: adenine, guanine; and pyrimidines: cytosine, thymine, and uracil).
4. The simplest known free-living organism, Mycoplasma genitalium, has 470 genes that code for 470 proteins that average 347 amino acids in length. The odds against just one specified protein of that length to emerge without guiding specifying intelligence are 1:10^451.
5. Proponents of materialism have no answer to the question what generated the first DNA strands, and the information stored in it.
6. Intelligent agents act frequently with an end goal in mind, inventing complex machines using many sub-parts that are specified in size, fit, materials, to integrate into a functional whole using a blueprint to build the object.
7. Therefore, the best causal-adequate answer to explain the origin of the DNA blueprint required for making an organism is an intelligent agency
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The origin of life was either due to:
a) unguided, random, aleatory chemical reactions
b) physical necessity
c) creation through an intelligent agency
Unguided coincidental chemical reactions have not the creative action to make the most detailed and concentrated organizational structure known to humanity.
Chemical reactions and bonds can show bonding preference of one substrate to the other, but that does not explain the specific instructional arrangement of nucleotides.
Evolution is not a driving force prior to DNA replication. Intelligent design remains, therefore, the best explanation as the causal agent of the origin of life.
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The protein that enables a firefly to glow, and also reproduce (as its illuminated abdomen also serves as a visible mating call), is a protein made up of a chain of 1,000 amino acids. The full range of possible proteins that can be coded with such a chain is 17 times the number of atoms in the visible universe. This number also represents the odds against the RANDOM coding of such a protein. Yet, DNA effortlessly assembles that protein, in the exactly correct, and absolutely necessary sequence and a number of amino acids for the humble firefly. What are we to say of the 25,000 individual, highly specialized, absolutely necessary, and exactly correctly coded proteins in the human body? King David, perhaps, said it best: "We are fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalms 139:14). "Time and Chance," as an explanation (read: cover story) for Life without a Creator, has all the scientific merit of the phrase, "Once Upon A Time."
Origin and evolution of the genetic code: the universal enigma
In our opinion, despite extensive and, in many cases, elaborate attempts to model code optimization, ingenious theorizing along the lines of the coevolution theory, and considerable experimentation, very little definitive progress has been made. Summarizing the state of the art in the study of the code evolution, we cannot escape considerable skepticism. It seems that the two-pronged fundamental question: “why is the genetic code the way it is and how did it come to be?”, that was asked over 50 years ago, at the dawn of molecular biology, might remain pertinent even in another 50 years. Our consolation is that we cannot think of a more fundamental problem in biology.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3293468/
On the origin of the translation system and the genetic code in the RNA world by means of natural selection, exaptation, and subfunctionalization
The origin of the translation system is, arguably, the central and the hardest problem in the study of the origin of life, and one of the hardest in all evolutionary biology. The problem has a clear catch-22 aspect: high translation fidelity hardly can be achieved without a complex, highly evolved set of RNAs and proteins but an elaborate protein machinery could not evolve without an accurate translation system. The origin of the genetic code and whether it evolved on the basis of a stereochemical correspondence between amino acids and their cognate codons (or anticodons), through selectional optimization of the code vocabulary, as a "frozen accident" or via a combination of all these routes is another wide open problem despite extensive theoretical and experimental studies.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1894784/
The Mystery of Life’s Origin
A number of researchers have concluded that the spontaneous origin of life cannot be explained by known laws of physics and chemistry. Many seek “new” laws which can account for life’s origin. Why are so many unwilling to simply accept what the evidence points to: that the theory of evolution itself is fundamentally implausible? Dean Kenyon answers, “Perhaps these scientists fear that acceptance of this conclusion would leave open the possibility (or the necessity) of a supernatural origin of life” (p.viii).
https://cogmessenger.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Mystery_of_Life_Origin.pdf
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Objection: Organic chemicals are everywhere in the cosmos. Life is probably a fair ordinary development. Complex organic chemicals are regularly detected in nebulae. Organic chemistry is everywhere. The bridge from organic chemicals to self-replicating molecules is small.
Answer: That's like saying that magnetic medium is widespread in the universe, so musical recordings or software must be ubiquitous. Information, extremely complex and highly ordered information, cannot be explained by the existence of the medium that contains it.
Objection: Arguments from Incredulity and Arguments from Ignorance are useless. Anyway, the scientific community doesn't see a problem with the development of life. If they did, it would be a major news story in scientific journals. It isn't.
Answer: "Self-replicating" is not the same thing as information creation
The origin of life emerged as a scientific problem with Louis Pasteur’s demonstration of the apparent implausibility of spontaneous generation of life forms. By an uncanny coincidence, the experiment was reported in 1859, the same year Darwin published The Origin of Species, which among other seminal ideas, included the proposition on LUCA.
Objection: creationists simply present an example of a situation where adding energy to a system does not give rise to complexity. And: Arguing that abiogenesis is akin to jumbo jets appearing in a storm-stricken junkyard is a straw man, oversimplifying a complex theory.
Answer: The analogy points towards the fact that unguided random events are the only alternative to intelligent design, and fall short of constituting a potent, capable cause
to explain the coded Information which is complex and instructional/specified found in epigenetic systems and genes, and irreducible, interdependent molecular machines and biosynthetic and metabolic pathways in biological systems, which point to a intelligent agent as the best explanation of their setup and origins.
Objection: There are literally billions of stars, with billions of planets in positions that would support life, there are countless scenarios on said planets happening, even right now, that could lead to life and that has been happening for 13.7 billion years on billions upon billions of planets.
Answer: Paul Davies, the fifth miracle page 53:
There are indeed a lot of stars—at least ten billion in the observable universe. But this number, gigantic as it may appear to us, is nevertheless trivially small compared with the gigantic odds against the random assembly of even a single protein molecule. Though the universe is big, if life formed solely by random agitation in a molecular junkyard, there is scant chance it has happened twice.
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The logical order in which life developed is hypothesized to include the following basic major stages:
Stage 1
Certain simple molecules underwent spontaneous, random chemical reactions until after about half-a-billion years complex organic molecules were produced.
Stage 2
Molecules that could replicate eventually were formed (the most common guess is nucleic acid molecules), along with enzymes and nutrient molecules that were surrounded by membraned cells.
Stage 3
Cells eventually somehow “learned” how to reproduce by copying a DNA molecule (which contains a complete set of instructions for building a next generation of cells). During the reproduction process, the mutations changed the DNA code and produced cells that differed from the originals.
Stage 4
The variety of cells generated by this process eventually developed the machinery required to do all that was necessary to survive, reproduce, and create the next generation of cells in their likeness. Those cells that were better able to survive became more numerous in the population
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The transition of a system from the inanimate state to the animate is envisioned as an increase in ‘aliveness’ over time. We (and others29) prefer to consider this transition as a series of steps, rather than a single step, following the prelude of prebiotic chemistry1. Equilibrium is death, which means some sort of coupling of energy dissipation to maintain the system continuously out of equilibrium throughout the transition is envisaged, but when we first started contemplating this, we could not see a way in which this might be achieved, hence the somewhat nebulous picture. Also shown is the necessity–contingency boundary beyond which material limitations prevent full exploration of the sequence space of macromolecules assembled from different monomeric building blocks; therefore, chemical determinism can no longer be relied on as a source of innovation, and further improvements have to be chanced upon instead.
Opinion: Studies on the origin of life — the end of the beginning
Abiogenesis is impossible
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279-abiogenesis-is-impossible
The possible mechanisms to explain the origin of life
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2515-the-possible-mechanisms-to-explain-the-origin-of-life
Calculations of life beginning through unguided, natural, random events
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2508-calculations-of-life-beginning-through-unguided-natural-random-events
The cell is irreducibly complex
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1299-the-cell-is-irreducibly-complex
The irreducible, code-instructed process to make cell factories and machines points to intelligent design
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2364-the-irreducible-code-instructed-process-to-make-cell-factories-and-machines-points-to-intelligent-design
Coded information comes always from a mind
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1312-coded-information-comes-always-from-a-mind
All cellular functions are irreducibly complex
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2179-the-cell-is-a-interdependent-irreducible-complex-system
The Cell membrane, irreducible complexity
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2128-membrane-structure#3798
The Interdependency of Lipid Membranes and Membrane Proteins
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2397-the-interdependency-of-lipid-membranes-and-membrane-proteins
Factory and machine planning and design, and what it tells us about cell factories and molecular machines
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2245-factory-and-machine-planning-and-design-and-what-it-tells-us-about-cell-factories-and-molecular-machines
Genome information, protein synthesis, the biosynthesis pathways in biology, and the analogy of human programming, engineering, and factory robotic assembly lines
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1987-information-biosynthesis-analogy-with-human-programming-engeneering-and-factory-robotic-assembly-lines
What might be a Cell’s minimal requirement of parts?
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2110-what-might-be-a-protocells-minimal-requirement-of-parts
How Cellular Enzymatic and Metabolic networks point to design
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2371-how-cellular-enzymatic-and-metabolic-networks-point-to-design
Amazing molecular assembly lines and nonribosomal amino-acid chain formation pathways come to light
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2445-new-amazing-molecular-assembly-lines-and-non-ribosomal-amino-acid-chain-formation-pathways-come-to-light
1. http://www.ichthus.info/Evolution/information.html
2. Kerkut, G.A., Implications of Evolution, Pergamon, Oxford, p. 157, 1960. He continued: ‘the evidence which supports this is not sufficiently strong to allow us to consider it as anything more than a working hypothesis.’
3. http://worldview3.50webs.com/mathproofcreat.html
4. http://pubs.acs.org.sci-hub.cc/doi/abs/10.1021/ar200332w
5. Earth Evolution of a Habitable World, Second edition, page 156
6. ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF EARTH, RESEARCH QUESTIONS FOR A CHANGING PLANET page 27
Further readings:
http://creation.com/origin-of-life
Opinion: Studies on the origin of life — the end of the beginning
http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/hoyles-fallacy-i-think-not/
The total lack of any kind of experimental evidence leading to the re-creation of life; not to mention the spontaneous emergence of life… is the most humiliating embarrassment to the proponents of naturalism and the whole so-called “scientific establishment” around it… because it undermines the worldview of who wants naturalism to be true.
By chance? - Not a chance !!
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279-abiogenesis-is-impossible
Single proteins do not have any function on their own unless interconnected correctly in a living cell. In order for life to begin naturally, all essential proteins required for life to start would have had to emerge randomly on a prebiotic earth, protein super-complexes like ribosomes would have had to join the subparts together to get the right protein-protein interactions, like lock and key. A miracle would have had to prevent them to be burned by UV radiation. Then start to interconnect in the correct order to create a functional metabolic network and multi-protein production lines , where the joint venture of several enzymes began to produce functional products, hand them over to carrier mechanisms, tag them in order to be transported to the right locations. Somehow, all this would have had to begin in a protected environment, so a protective envelope would have had to exist. That envelope had to emerge fully functional with " gates " that permit the right materials in, and the waste product out.
Once the data storage system (DNA) emerged, a language based on a code system had to be established, and the blueprint to store the information to make all parts of the cell had to be stored within it, and DNA replication errors had to be reduced 10.000.000.000 times.
Let's suppose that a self-replicating RNA molecule would appear miraculously on early earth. that does not explain the origin of the information to make all life essential parts in the cell.
It is as to go just from a hard drive storage device to a self replicating factory with the ability of self replication of the entire factory once ready, to respond to changing environmental demands and regulate its metabolic pathways, regulate and coordinate all cellular processes, such as molecule and building block biosynthesis according to the cells demands, depending on growth, and other factors.
The ability of uptake of nutrients, to be structured, internally compartmentalized and organized, being able to check replication errors and minimize them, and react to stimuli, and changing environments. That's is, the ability to adapt to the environment is a must right from the beginning.
If just ONE single protein or enzyme - of many - is missing, no life. If topoisomerase II or helicase are missing - no replication - no perpetuation of life.
Somehow, that envelope had to create a homeostatic environment, diminishing the calcium concentration in the cell 10000 times below the external environment, to permit signaling. At the same time, a signaling code would have had to be established, and immediately begin to function, with a common agreement between sender and receiver................energy supply would have been a major problem, since almost all life forms depend on the supply of glucose, which is a product of complex metabolic pathways, and not readily available on a prebiotic earth. Most proteins require active metal clusters in their reaction centers.
These clusters are in most cases ultracomplex, each cluster had to have the right atoms interconnected in the right way, and get the correct 3-dimensional form. They require the complex uptake of the basic materials, like iron and sulfur, molybdenum, and complex biosynthesis processes, and after the correct assembling, the insertion in the right way and form inside the proteins. All these processes require energy, in form of ATP, not readily available - since ATP is the product of complex nano-factories, like ATP synthase - which by themselves depend on a proton gradient. Sorry------- not by chance !!
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If you see a message on a sand dune, like " John loves Sandy ". Would you intuitively and immediately recognize that someone past there a short time ago, and wrote the message on the sand dune? Or would you consider that rain and wind wrote the message randomly entirely through natural events? Even the most basic cell maintaining the most basic functions of life is far more complex than the most complex man-made machine. Would you say that it is plausible that random, unguided, natural events have enough statistical probability to create and give rise to the most sophisticated self-replicating factory of the universe? -
Michael Denton writes in Evolution: A Theory In Crisis:
“To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity.The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle. The cell is a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world.
The cell contains an informational code system and programming languages like our alphabet or a computer code, more versatile than C, Visual Basic, or PHP, and more robust and error-free than any other code system out of 1 million alternatives? - using a communication protocol which wastes far less space than TCP/IP and is more robust than Ethernet? - using furthermore a collection of rules and regularities of information coding for instructional complex texts? - defined by alphabet, grammar, a collection of punctuation marks and regulatory sites, and semantics? and then uses that code system to create a blueprint for a self-replicating factory, which requires about 1500 books, each with 300 pages, 300.000,00 characters per book, each containing the precise complex instructions and information to create this factory, and stored in the smallest storage device possible and known, a trillion times denser than a CD? How is it, that you would recognize immediately, that a simple message on a sand dune required intelligence, but above description of the simplest imaginable biological cell does not require a designer ?!
Objection: Comparing living cells to man-made self-replicating machines, and books is a false analogy
Answer: Talking about life getting together is similar to talking about cars forming themselves, or even basic computer programs making themselves. These things are not just improbable, they are impossible without intelligence.
Marcello Barbieri writes in his book: Code Biology A New Science of Life, page 28
Molecular biology has proved that there is a genetic code in every cell and that genes and proteins are molecular artifacts because they are manufactured by molecular machines. Coding and artifact-making, in other words, take place both in our society and inside the cell, and this does create a parallel between culture and molecular biology.
In other words. Intelligence produces self-replicating machines and books. And so only intelligence can produce life, that depends on coded information, proteins, and molecular machines.
If the analogy of two phenomena are very close and striking while at the same time, the cause of ONE of the phenomenon is very obvious; it becomes scarcely possible to refuse to admit the action of an analogous cause of the other phenomenon, though (the cause of the other phenomenon is) not so obvious in itself"
--- in "Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy", London, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1831, page 149.
When you see that:
the way genetic information encoded in the DNA is exactly the same as what we humans would do to elaborate a blueprint to build a factory, full of complex machines, compartments, production lines, computers, etc;
the way that the nucleus communicates with its ribosome is similar to how we humans have designed computers to communicate with one another,
then one has to AT LEAST stop and wonder whether some intelligent being has designed the genetic code and made the communication system between the nucleus and its ribosomes....
Perry Marshall writes in the book Evolution 2.0:
Although this is not a conclusive proof of the existence of God, it should AT LEAST make one STOP and THINK about the possibility of the existence of God....
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As of 2014, Koonin serves on the advisory editorial board of Trends in Genetics and is co-Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal Biology Direct. He served on the editorial board of Bioinformatics from 1999-2001. Koonin is also an advisory board member in bioinformatics at Faculty of 1000.
Let us see what he writes in regard of the origin of life:
The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution, Eugene V. Koonin, page 351:
The origin of life is the most difficult problem that faces evolutionary biology and, arguably, biology in general. Indeed, the problem is so hard and the current state of the art seems so frustrating that some researchers prefer to dismiss the entire issue as being outside the scientific domain altogether, on the grounds that unique events are not conducive to scientific study.
A succession of exceedingly unlikely steps is essential for the origin of life, from the synthesis and accumulation of nucleotides to the origin of translation; through the multiplication of probabilities, these make the final outcome seem almost like a miracle. The difficulties remain formidable. For all the effort, we do not currently have coherent and plausible models for the path from simple organic molecules to the first life forms. Most damningly, the powerful mechanisms of biological evolution were not available for all the stages preceding the emergence of replicator systems. Given all these major difficulties, it appears prudent to seriously consider radical alternatives for the origin of life
The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution, Eugene V. Koonin page 435:
The requirements for the emergence of a primitive, coupled replication-translation system, which is considered a candidate for the breakthrough stage in this paper, are much greater. At a minimum, spontaneous formation of the following is required:
• Two rRNAs, with a total size of at least 1,000 nucleotides.
• Approximately 10 primitive adaptors of about 30 nucleotides
each, for a total of approximately 300 nucleotides.
• At least one RNA encoding a replicase, about 500 nucleotides (low bound) required. Under the notation used here, n = 1,800, resulting in E <10^1018.
In other words, even in this toy model that assumes a deliberately inflated rate of RNA production, the probability that a coupled translation replication emerges by chance in a single O-region is P < 10^1018. Obviously, this version of the breakthrough stage can be considered only in the context of a universe with an infinite (or, at the very least, extremely vast) number of O-regions ( observable regions ).
The model considered here is not supposed to be realistic, by any account. It only illustrates the difference in the demands on chance for the origin of different versions of the breakthrough system and, hence, the connections between this version and different cosmological models of the universe.
All things considered, my assessment of the current state of the art in the study of the origins of replication and translation is rather somber. Notwithstanding relevant theoretical models and suggestive experimental results, we currently do not have a credible solution to these problems and do not even see with any clarity a path to such a solution. Any even remotely realistic origin of life scenario must incorporate well-defined pre-cellular, abiogenic compartmentalization; inorganic catalysts to catalyze “pre-biochemical” reactions prior to the emergence of bona fide enzymes; thermal and/or electrochemical potential gradients required for the generation of energy in accessible forms; a solution to the extremely difficult problem of the origin of genetic information (see the discussion earlier in this chapter). In general, the early concepts underestimated the dimensions of the origin of life problem and failed to investigate special abiogenic conditions that must have been a prerequisite for the jump-start of biological evolution. Subsequently, several groups of researchers attempted to get away from the concept of the homogeneous primary soup, replacing it with some form of inorganic compartments, and sought to address all the origin of life problems in conjunction by combination of modeling, experiment, and observation in nature. The common idea of these hypotheses is the existence of a single framework that could simultaneously provide compartmentalization, energy gradients, and catalysts.
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Currently, scientists stand no closer to understanding life’s beginning than they did when Stanley Miller conducted his first experiments fifty years ago. Though some scientists assert that the research is in its infancy, significant resources have been brought to bear on the origin-of-life question over the past five decades. To date, no real answers have emerged. Rather, a misguided approach has essentially stalled the research program.
Best-selling author Paul Davies makes this point in his book The Fifth Miracle:
When I set out to write this book, I was convinced that science was close to wrapping up the mystery of life’s origin. . . . Having spent a year or two researching the field, I am now of the
opinion that there remains a huge gulf in our understanding. . . . This gulf in understanding is not merely ignorance about certain technical details; it is a major conceptual lacuna.
Davies’ statements likely surprised most people, including scientists. From popular media reports, one would think researchers have all but finalized the explanation for life’s beginning. But such is not the case.
Davies explains why this mismatch persists between public perception and stark reality:
Many investigators feel uneasy about stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they freely admit that they are baffled. There seem to be two
reasons for their unease. First, they feel it opens the door to religious fundamentalists and their god-of-the-gaps pseudo-explanations. Second, they worry that a frank admission of
ignorance will undermine funding.
Origins of life : biblical and evolutionary models face off / Fazale Rana & Hugh Ross, page 18
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Denton: Evolution, A Theory in Crisis, page 249
We now know not only of the existence of a break between the living and non-living world, but also that it represents the most dramatic and fundamental of all the discontinuities of nature. Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological system, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive.
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Would you say that it is plausible that random, unguided, natural events have enough statistical probability to create and give rise to the most sophisticated self-replicating factory of the universe? - containing an informational code system and programming languages like our alphabet or a computer code, more versatile than C, Visual Basic, or PHP, and more robust and error-free than any other code system out of 1 million alternatives? - using a communication protocol which wastes far less space than human-made ones? - using Furthermore a collection of rules and regularities of information coding for instructional complex texts? - defined by alphabet, grammar, a collection of punctuation marks and regulatory sites, and semantics? and then uses that code system to create a blueprint for a self-replicating factory, which requires about 1500 books, each with 300 pages, 300.000,00 characters per book, each containing the precise complex instructions and information to create this factory, and stored in the smallest storage device possible and known, a trillion times denser than a CD?
Complex factories, containing production lines, interdependent complex machines that produce complex machine parts and subunits that after made, must be and are assembled in the right way - manufacturing machines that work independently of outside input of information, but that were pre-programmed to do their job autonomously like robots, with quality control departments, error check and fix mechanisms to keep the smallest error rate, walls that make a separation of the inside to the outside of the factory for protection, and with gates that permits cargo in and out, recognition mechanisms that let only the right cargo in, and lead it to the right specific sites and production lines, highways and cargo carriers that have tags which recognize where to drop the cargo where it's needed, cleans up waste and has waste bins and sophisticated recycle mechanisms, storage departments, produces its energy and shuttles it to where it's needed, and last not least, does reproduce itself, requires undoubtedly intelligent minds to set it up.
Biological cells meet the description above.
Therefore, the most rational inference is that biological cells, and life, had an intelligent source as its cause and origin.
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The cell requires numerous molecular machines and instructional information, precise energy supply, and a complex metabolic network to support life. It is quite clear that there is a minimal number of genes required to permit cells to become alive, an extremely tiny possibility that this self-replicating factory would emerge - for the support of complex life. A frequent argument is given in response that one shouldn't be surprised to live existing because the origin of life happened, the chance is 1 - not at all surprising. However, this argument is like a situation where a man is standing before a firing squad of 1000 men with rifles who take aim and fire - - but they all miss him. According to the above logic, this man should not be at all surprised to still be alive because, if they hadn't missed him, he wouldn't be alive. The nonsense of this line of reasoning is obvious. Surprise at the unfathomable complexity of the cell, given the hypothesis of chance producing it, is only to be expected - in the extreme.
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Mycoplasma genitalium
The simplest known free-living organism, Mycoplasma genitalium, has 470 genes that code for 470 proteins that average 347 amino acids in length. The odds against just one specified protein of that length are 1:10^451.
The estimated number of elementary particles in the universe is 10^80. The most rapid events occur at an amazing 10^45 per second. Thirty billion years contains only 10^18 seconds. By totaling those, we find that the maximum elementary particle events in 30 billion years could only be 10^143.
The simplest known free-living organism, Mycoplasma genitalium, has 470 genes that code for 470 proteins that average 347 amino acids in length. The odds against just one specified protein of that length are 1:10^451.
According to Borel's law, any occurrence with a chance of happening that is less than one chance out of 10^50, is an occurrence with such a slim a probability that is, in general, statistically considered to be zero. (10^50 is the number 1 with 50 zeros after it, and it is spoken: "10 to the 50th power")
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One of the classic arguments is given in response to the argument that life is improbable is that one shouldn't be surprised to find complex life because if there were no complex life, we wouldn't exist. Therefore, the fact that we exist means that such complexity exists should only be expected by the mere fact of our own existence - not at all surprising. However, this argument is like a situation where a man is standing before a firing squad of 10000 men with rifles who take aim and fire - - but they all miss him. According to the above logic, this man should not be at all surprised to still be alive because, if they hadn't missed him, he wouldn't be alive. The nonsense of this line of reasoning is obvious. Surprise at the extreme complexity of life, given the hypothesis of a mindless origin, is only to be expected - in the extreme.
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Paul Davies, the fifth miracle, page 54:
Life as we know it requires hundreds of thousands of specialist proteins, not to mention the nucleic acids. The odds against producing just the proteins by pure chance are something like 1O^40000 to 1.
There are indeed a lot of stars—at least ten billion billion in the observable universe. But this number, gigantic as it may appear to us, is nevertheless trivially small compared with the gigantic odds against the random assembly of even a single protein molecule. Though the universe is big, if life formed solely by random agitation in a molecular junkyard, there is scant chance it has happened twice.
‘Making a protein simply by injecting energy is rather like exploding a stick of dynamite under a pile of bricks and expecting it to form a house. You may liberate enough energy to raise the bricks, but without coupling the energy to the bricks in a controlled and ordered way, there is little hope of producing anything other than a chaotic mess.’ It is one thing to produce bricks; it is an entirely different thing to organize the building of a house or factory. If you had to, you could build a house using stones that you found lying around, in all the shapes and sizes in which they came due to natural causes. However, the organization of the building requires something that is not contained in the stones. It requires the intelligence of the architect and the skill of the builder. It is the same with the building blocks of life. Blind chance just will not do the job of putting them together in a specific way. Organic chemist and molecular biologist A.G. Cairns-Smith puts it this way: ‘Blind chance… is very limited… he can produce exceedingly easily the equivalent of letters and small words, but he becomes very quickly incompetent as a number of organization increases. Very soon indeed long waiting periods and massive material resources become irrelevant.’
The cell is like a factory, that has various computer like hierarchically organized systems of hardware and software, various language based informational systems, a translation system, huge amounts of precise instructional/specified, complex information stored and extract systems to make all parts needed to produce the factory and replicate itself, the scaffold structure, that permits the build of the indispensable protection wall, form and size of its building, walls with gates that permits cargo in and out, recognition mechanisms that let only the right cargo in, has specific sites and production lines, "employees", busy and instructed to produce all kind of necessary products, parts and subparts with the right form and size through the right materials, others which mount the parts together in the right order, on the right place, in the right sequence, at the right time, which has sophisticated check and error detection mechanisms all along the production process, the ability to compare correctly produced parts to faulty ones and discard the faulty ones, and repeat the process to make the correct ones; highways and cargo carriers that have tags which recognize where to drop the cargo where it's needed, cleans up waste and has waste bins and sophisticated recycle mechanisms, storage departments, produces its energy and shuttles it to where it's needed, and last not least, does reproduce itself.
The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a dance of exquisite fidelity, orchestrated with breathtaking precision. Vastly more elaborate than the most complicated ballet, the dance of life encompasses countless molecular performers in synergetic coordination. Yet this is a dance with no sign of a choreographer. No intelligent supervisor, no mystic force, no conscious controlling agency swings the molecules into place at the right time, chooses the appropriate players, closes the links, uncouples the partners, moves them on. The dance of life is spontaneous, self-sustaining, and self-creating.
Newman, 1967, p. 662:
How did something so immensely complicated, so finessed, so exquisitely clever, come into being all on its own? How can mindless molecules, capable only of pushing and pulling their immediate neighbors, cooperate to form and sustain something as ingenious as a living organism?
Alberts, 1992, pp. xii, xiv
Before the explosive growth of our knowledge of the cell during the last 30 years, it was known that "the simplest bacteria are extremely complex, and the chances of their arising directly from inorganic materials, with no steps in between, are too remote to consider seriously. A typical eukaryote cell consists of an estimated 40,000 different protein molecules and is so complex that to acknowledge that the "cells exist at all is a marvel… even the simplest of the living cells is far more fascinating than any human-made object.
Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory In Crisis, 1986, page 250:
“The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.”
“To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell, we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity.”
…veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world
Bernd Rosslenbroich, On the Origin of Autonomy, page 41:
We know virtually nothing about the first stages of life. Most of what textbooks usually try to suggest to students in their respective chapters is more wishful thinking than fact based on scientific evidence (Conway Morris 2003 ; Shapiro 1987 ).
…veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world (Denton, 1986, p. 250).
Klaus Dose, the president of the Institute of Biochemistry at the University of Johannes Gutenberg, said :
“ it has become abundantly clear that the power of self-organization inherent in macromolecules synthesized in cells is based on extremely subtle physical and chemical, and particularly stereochemical, properties [that] have never been observed in this highly organized form in pre-biotic molecules.… It appears that the field has now reached a stage of stalemate”
(“The Origin of Life: More Questions Than Answers,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 13 [1988]: 348–49).
Jeffrey Bada, "Life's Crucible," Earth, February 1998, p. 40.
Today, as we leave the twentieth century, we still face the biggest unsolved problem that we had when we entered the twentieth century: How did life originate on Earth?
Paul Davies, Goldilocks enigma:
Biological organisms are immensely complex—far more complex than Paley could have realized. To a physicist, they look nothing short of miraculous. The many and diverse components function together in a coherent and amazingly orchestrated manner. The living cell contains minuscule pumps, levers, motors, rotors, turbines, propellers, scissors, and many other instruments familiar from a human workshop, all of them exquisite examples of nanotechnology. The entire assemblage runs itself with great efficiency, sometimes autonomously, sometimes in collaboration with other cells through a sophisticated network of intercellular communication based on chemical signaling. The command and control functions of the cell are encoded in its DNA database, which implements instructions through intermediary molecules using an optimal mathematical code to convert software instructions into hardware products with customized functionality. And this is just one cell. In a larger organism, vastly many cells get together and cooperate to form organs such as eyes, ears, brains, livers, and kidneys, many of them immensely elaborate in their structure and function. The human brain alone has more cells than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. So it all adds up to a package of marvels that boggles the mind.
The total lack of any kind of experimental evidence leading to the re-creation of life; not to mention the spontaneous emergence of life… is the most humiliating embarrassment to the proponents of naturalism and the whole so-called “scientific establishment” around it… because it undermines the worldview of who wants naturalism to be true.
Bill Faint
life in any form is a very serious enigma and conundrum. It does something, whatever the biochemical pathway, machinery, enzymes etc. are involved, that should not and honestly could not ever "get off the ground". It SPONTANEOUSLY recruits Gibbs free energy from its environment so as to reduce its own entropy. That is tantamount to a rock continuously recruiting the wand to roll it up the hill, or a rusty nail "figuring out" how to spontaneously rust and add layers of galvanizing zinc on itself to fight corrosion. Unintelligent simple chemicals can't self-organize into instructions for building solar farms (photosystems 1 and 2), hydroelectric dams (ATP synthase), propulsion (motor proteins) , self repair (p53 tumor suppressor proteins) or self-destruct (caspases) in the event that these instructions become too damaged by the way the universe USUALLY operates. Abiogenesis is not an issue that scientists simply need more time to figure out but a fundamental problem with materialism
Chemist Wilhelm Huck, professor at Radboud University Nijmegen
A working cell is more than the sum of its parts. "A functioning cell must be entirely correct at once, in all its complexity,"
Lynn Margulis:
To go from a bacterium to people is less of a step than to go from a mixture of amino acids to a bacterium.
Douglas Futuyma, a prominent American biologist admits as much:(1983, p. 197).
“Organisms either appeared on the earth fully developed or they did not. If they did not, they must have developed from preexisting species by some process of modification. If they did appear in a fully developed state, they must indeed have been created by some omnipotent intelligence”
In fact, Futuyma’s words underline a very important truth. He writes that when we look at life on Earth, if we see that life emerges all of a sudden, in its complete and perfect forms, then we have to admit that life was created, and is not a result of chance. As soon as naturalistic explanations are proven to be invalid, then creation is the only explanation left.
Neither Evolution nor physical necessity is a driving force prior DNA replication :The origin of the first cell, cannot be explained by natural selection (Ann N Y Acad, 2000) DNA replication had to be previously, before life began, fully setup, working, and fully operating, in order for evolution to act upon the resulting mutations. The remaining possible mechanisms are chemical reactions acting upon unguided random events ( luck, chance), or physical necessity. It could not be physical necessity because that would constrain the possible gene sequences, but they are free and unconstrained; any of the bases can be interlinked into any sequence. If design or physical necessity is excluded, the only remaining possible mechanism for the origin of life is chance/luck.
Hoyle:
The possibility that life might have emerged through unguided, aleatory, random chemical reactions is comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein. It's as well extremely unlikely that chance/luck can write a book, or produce instructional complex information. Nor will unguided, random events produce cells that are more complex than a 747, and contain more information than an encyclopedia Britannica. Life as we know it is, among other things, dependent on at least 2000 different enzymes. How could the blind forces of the primal sea manage to put together the correct chemical elements to build enzymes?
George Wald, Harvard University biochemist and Nobel Laureate, stated in 1954:
"One has to only contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet we are here as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation. However improbable we regard this event [evolution], or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once… Time is in fact the hero of the plot… Given so much time, the ‘impossible’ becomes possible, the possible probable, the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait; time itself performs the miracles.”
Steven A. Benner, Ph.D. Chemistry, Harvard, prominent origin-of-life researcher, said:
"We have failed in any continuous way to provide a recipe that gets from the simple molecules that we know were present on early Earth to RNA." "The first paradox is the tendency of organic matter to devolve and to give tar. If you can avoid that, you can start to try to assemble things that are not tarry, but then you encounter the water problem, which is related to the fact that every interesting bond that you want to make is unstable, thermodynamically, with respect to water. If you can solve that problem, you have the problem of entropy, that any of the building blocks are going to be present in a low concentration; therefore, to assemble a large number of those building blocks, you get a gene-like RNA -- 100 nucleotides long -- that fights entropy. And the fourth problem is that even if you can solve the entropy problem, you have a paradox that RNA enzymes, which are maybe catalytically active, are more likely to be active in the sense that destroys RNA rather than creates RNA."
P. L. Luisi, research biologist In preparation for a 2014 conference in Japan :
The scientific question about the origin of life is still unanswered: it is still one of the great mysteries that science is facing… Which conceptual progress have we made…? It is too much to say that we didn’t really make any, if we look at data under really and honest prebiotic conditions? Adding that this situation is not due to shortage of means and finances in the field—but to a real lack of difficulty to conceive conceptually how this nonliving-living passage really took place?
Karl Popper:
‘What makes the origin of life and of the genetic code a disturbing riddle is this: the genetic code is without any biological function unless it is translated; that is, unless it leads to the synthesis of the proteins whose structure is laid down by the code. But … the machinery by which the cell (at least the non-primitive cell, which is the only one we know) translates the code consists of at least fifty macromolecular components which are themselves coded in the DNA. Thus the code can not be translated except by using certain products of its translation. This constitutes a baffling circle; a really vicious circle, it seems, for any attempt to form a model or theory of the genesis of the genetic code.
John Lennox:
We have only to see a few letters of the alphabet spelling our name in the sand to recognize at once the work of an intelligent agent. How much more likely, then is the existence of an intelligent Creator behind human DNA, the colossal biological database that contains no fewer than 3.5 billion "letters" - the longest "word" yet discovered?
If we consider as the most complex machine ever built by man and take as a parameter :
then the Large Hadron Collider is the most expensive and complex scientific machine ever built. It took 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries, as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.
As another example, the Airbus A380. Huge airliners are incredibly complex. The A380 has about 4 million parts, with 2.5 million part numbers produced by 1,500 companies from 30 countries around the world, including 800 companies from the United States. compared to this, the most simple cell is still far more complex. Advocates of naturalism often try to sidestep and state either that a) evolution explains the feat, or b) " we don't know yet how life emerged, but one day science will know ", as if natural mechanisms would explain life's origin, no matter what. That's a classic example of " evolution of the gaps ". We don't know yet, therefore evolution.
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Biological Life did not exist at some point back in time.
Biological Life exists now.
Life at some point came from non-biological matter
Life emerged either to the action of a creative intelligent agency, or
Life emerged by natural, non-guided, non-intelligence-envolving random lucky events.
Life cannot emerge randomly
Therefore, Life was created by an intelligent agency.
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The argument of the cell
1. At least 200 genes and 239 proteins are required as building blocks for the simplest living cell to come into existence.
2a. Proteins are highly complex structures that are very difficult for scientists to create.
2b. The proteins of the minimal proteome of the first cell, each had to have a minimal size and length, to become biologically active. So they are irreducibly complex.
Which scientists created nature’s proteins which human scientists find so difficult to imitate or recreate.
3a. The probability of random creation of complex proteins, the assemblage of the needed 239 in one place in nature without any control is less than 10^50 or impossible.
3b. A question is also: “Who moves the proteins and the building blocks of the proteins into creating and assembling”.
3c. The proteins must be interconnected in a complex web, the metabolome, which is also minimally complex if the threshold is reached, it's not functional.
3d. If you leave all the atoms of such structures in an isolated place nothing will happen. If you make nature’s forces working then we must say that you make the gods working, since no force is ever reported to work without thinking, feeling, willing, which is the work of a person, according to the dictionary.
4. Such impossibility of chance indicates the necessity of an intelligent designer.
5. That expert designer all men call God.
6. God most probably exists.
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Argument by information
1. There is matter or energy.
2. It is useless or inactive to direct the origin and make of complex life forms without information and consciousness.
3. DNA stores huge quantities of coded, specified/instructional, complex information. Many DNA strands have 100 million, or even billions of segments (one segment is called a nucleotide. Nucleotides are the building blocks, namely purines: adenine, guanine; and pyrimidines: cytosine, thymine, and uracil).
4. The simplest known free-living organism, Mycoplasma genitalium, has 470 genes that code for 470 proteins that average 347 amino acids in length. The odds against just one specified protein of that length to emerge without guiding specifying intelligence are 1:10^451.
5. Proponents of materialism have no answer to the question what generated the first DNA strands, and the information stored in it.
6. Intelligent agents act frequently with an end goal in mind, inventing complex machines using many sub-parts that are specified in size, fit, materials, to integrate into a functional whole using a blueprint to build the object.
7. Therefore, the best causal-adequate answer to explain the origin of the DNA blueprint required for making an organism is an intelligent agency
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The origin of life was either due to:
a) unguided, random, aleatory chemical reactions
b) physical necessity
c) creation through an intelligent agency
Unguided coincidental chemical reactions have not the creative action to make the most detailed and concentrated organizational structure known to humanity.
Chemical reactions and bonds can show bonding preference of one substrate to the other, but that does not explain the specific instructional arrangement of nucleotides.
Evolution is not a driving force prior to DNA replication. Intelligent design remains, therefore, the best explanation as the causal agent of the origin of life.
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The protein that enables a firefly to glow, and also reproduce (as its illuminated abdomen also serves as a visible mating call), is a protein made up of a chain of 1,000 amino acids. The full range of possible proteins that can be coded with such a chain is 17 times the number of atoms in the visible universe. This number also represents the odds against the RANDOM coding of such a protein. Yet, DNA effortlessly assembles that protein, in the exactly correct, and absolutely necessary sequence and a number of amino acids for the humble firefly. What are we to say of the 25,000 individual, highly specialized, absolutely necessary, and exactly correctly coded proteins in the human body? King David, perhaps, said it best: "We are fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalms 139:14). "Time and Chance," as an explanation (read: cover story) for Life without a Creator, has all the scientific merit of the phrase, "Once Upon A Time."
Origin and evolution of the genetic code: the universal enigma
In our opinion, despite extensive and, in many cases, elaborate attempts to model code optimization, ingenious theorizing along the lines of the coevolution theory, and considerable experimentation, very little definitive progress has been made. Summarizing the state of the art in the study of the code evolution, we cannot escape considerable skepticism. It seems that the two-pronged fundamental question: “why is the genetic code the way it is and how did it come to be?”, that was asked over 50 years ago, at the dawn of molecular biology, might remain pertinent even in another 50 years. Our consolation is that we cannot think of a more fundamental problem in biology.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3293468/
On the origin of the translation system and the genetic code in the RNA world by means of natural selection, exaptation, and subfunctionalization
The origin of the translation system is, arguably, the central and the hardest problem in the study of the origin of life, and one of the hardest in all evolutionary biology. The problem has a clear catch-22 aspect: high translation fidelity hardly can be achieved without a complex, highly evolved set of RNAs and proteins but an elaborate protein machinery could not evolve without an accurate translation system. The origin of the genetic code and whether it evolved on the basis of a stereochemical correspondence between amino acids and their cognate codons (or anticodons), through selectional optimization of the code vocabulary, as a "frozen accident" or via a combination of all these routes is another wide open problem despite extensive theoretical and experimental studies.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1894784/
The Mystery of Life’s Origin
A number of researchers have concluded that the spontaneous origin of life cannot be explained by known laws of physics and chemistry. Many seek “new” laws which can account for life’s origin. Why are so many unwilling to simply accept what the evidence points to: that the theory of evolution itself is fundamentally implausible? Dean Kenyon answers, “Perhaps these scientists fear that acceptance of this conclusion would leave open the possibility (or the necessity) of a supernatural origin of life” (p.viii).
https://cogmessenger.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Mystery_of_Life_Origin.pdf
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Objection: Organic chemicals are everywhere in the cosmos. Life is probably a fair ordinary development. Complex organic chemicals are regularly detected in nebulae. Organic chemistry is everywhere. The bridge from organic chemicals to self-replicating molecules is small.
Answer: That's like saying that magnetic medium is widespread in the universe, so musical recordings or software must be ubiquitous. Information, extremely complex and highly ordered information, cannot be explained by the existence of the medium that contains it.
Objection: Arguments from Incredulity and Arguments from Ignorance are useless. Anyway, the scientific community doesn't see a problem with the development of life. If they did, it would be a major news story in scientific journals. It isn't.
Answer: "Self-replicating" is not the same thing as information creation
The origin of life emerged as a scientific problem with Louis Pasteur’s demonstration of the apparent implausibility of spontaneous generation of life forms. By an uncanny coincidence, the experiment was reported in 1859, the same year Darwin published The Origin of Species, which among other seminal ideas, included the proposition on LUCA.
Objection: creationists simply present an example of a situation where adding energy to a system does not give rise to complexity. And: Arguing that abiogenesis is akin to jumbo jets appearing in a storm-stricken junkyard is a straw man, oversimplifying a complex theory.
Answer: The analogy points towards the fact that unguided random events are the only alternative to intelligent design, and fall short of constituting a potent, capable cause
to explain the coded Information which is complex and instructional/specified found in epigenetic systems and genes, and irreducible, interdependent molecular machines and biosynthetic and metabolic pathways in biological systems, which point to a intelligent agent as the best explanation of their setup and origins.
Objection: There are literally billions of stars, with billions of planets in positions that would support life, there are countless scenarios on said planets happening, even right now, that could lead to life and that has been happening for 13.7 billion years on billions upon billions of planets.
Answer: Paul Davies, the fifth miracle page 53:
There are indeed a lot of stars—at least ten billion in the observable universe. But this number, gigantic as it may appear to us, is nevertheless trivially small compared with the gigantic odds against the random assembly of even a single protein molecule. Though the universe is big, if life formed solely by random agitation in a molecular junkyard, there is scant chance it has happened twice.
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The logical order in which life developed is hypothesized to include the following basic major stages:
Stage 1
Certain simple molecules underwent spontaneous, random chemical reactions until after about half-a-billion years complex organic molecules were produced.
Stage 2
Molecules that could replicate eventually were formed (the most common guess is nucleic acid molecules), along with enzymes and nutrient molecules that were surrounded by membraned cells.
Stage 3
Cells eventually somehow “learned” how to reproduce by copying a DNA molecule (which contains a complete set of instructions for building a next generation of cells). During the reproduction process, the mutations changed the DNA code and produced cells that differed from the originals.
Stage 4
The variety of cells generated by this process eventually developed the machinery required to do all that was necessary to survive, reproduce, and create the next generation of cells in their likeness. Those cells that were better able to survive became more numerous in the population
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The transition of a system from the inanimate state to the animate is envisioned as an increase in ‘aliveness’ over time. We (and others29) prefer to consider this transition as a series of steps, rather than a single step, following the prelude of prebiotic chemistry1. Equilibrium is death, which means some sort of coupling of energy dissipation to maintain the system continuously out of equilibrium throughout the transition is envisaged, but when we first started contemplating this, we could not see a way in which this might be achieved, hence the somewhat nebulous picture. Also shown is the necessity–contingency boundary beyond which material limitations prevent full exploration of the sequence space of macromolecules assembled from different monomeric building blocks; therefore, chemical determinism can no longer be relied on as a source of innovation, and further improvements have to be chanced upon instead.
Opinion: Studies on the origin of life — the end of the beginning
Abiogenesis is impossible
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279-abiogenesis-is-impossible
The possible mechanisms to explain the origin of life
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2515-the-possible-mechanisms-to-explain-the-origin-of-life
Calculations of life beginning through unguided, natural, random events
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2508-calculations-of-life-beginning-through-unguided-natural-random-events
The cell is irreducibly complex
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1299-the-cell-is-irreducibly-complex
The irreducible, code-instructed process to make cell factories and machines points to intelligent design
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2364-the-irreducible-code-instructed-process-to-make-cell-factories-and-machines-points-to-intelligent-design
Coded information comes always from a mind
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1312-coded-information-comes-always-from-a-mind
All cellular functions are irreducibly complex
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2179-the-cell-is-a-interdependent-irreducible-complex-system
The Cell membrane, irreducible complexity
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2128-membrane-structure#3798
The Interdependency of Lipid Membranes and Membrane Proteins
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2397-the-interdependency-of-lipid-membranes-and-membrane-proteins
Factory and machine planning and design, and what it tells us about cell factories and molecular machines
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2245-factory-and-machine-planning-and-design-and-what-it-tells-us-about-cell-factories-and-molecular-machines
Genome information, protein synthesis, the biosynthesis pathways in biology, and the analogy of human programming, engineering, and factory robotic assembly lines
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1987-information-biosynthesis-analogy-with-human-programming-engeneering-and-factory-robotic-assembly-lines
What might be a Cell’s minimal requirement of parts?
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2110-what-might-be-a-protocells-minimal-requirement-of-parts
How Cellular Enzymatic and Metabolic networks point to design
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2371-how-cellular-enzymatic-and-metabolic-networks-point-to-design
Amazing molecular assembly lines and nonribosomal amino-acid chain formation pathways come to light
http://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2445-new-amazing-molecular-assembly-lines-and-non-ribosomal-amino-acid-chain-formation-pathways-come-to-light
1. http://www.ichthus.info/Evolution/information.html
2. Kerkut, G.A., Implications of Evolution, Pergamon, Oxford, p. 157, 1960. He continued: ‘the evidence which supports this is not sufficiently strong to allow us to consider it as anything more than a working hypothesis.’
3. http://worldview3.50webs.com/mathproofcreat.html
4. http://pubs.acs.org.sci-hub.cc/doi/abs/10.1021/ar200332w
5. Earth Evolution of a Habitable World, Second edition, page 156
6. ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF EARTH, RESEARCH QUESTIONS FOR A CHANGING PLANET page 27
Further readings:
http://creation.com/origin-of-life
Opinion: Studies on the origin of life — the end of the beginning
http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/hoyles-fallacy-i-think-not/
Last edited by Admin on Tue Mar 27, 2018 1:28 pm; edited 255 times in total
