What can we know about how life began ?
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1279p50-abiogenesis-is-impossible#5352
Nobody knows for sure. When it comes to historical sciences, nobody was there in the past to see what happened. But upon abductive reasoning, and the growing evidence and knowledge of chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology, cell biology, evolutionary biology, genetics, epigenetics, and developmental biology, amount of knowledge about how life works, how it have might began and diversified, is growing. That permits us more than ever before to make informed inferences. My take on abiogenesis is that we can make safe inferences based on what we DO know. Douglas Futuyma admits as much:
“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” (Futuyma, 1983, p. 197).
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.
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
To go from a bacterium to people is less of a step than to go from a mixture of amino acids to a bacterium. — Lynn Margulis.
Mainstream scientific papers confirm indirectly that cells are irreducibly complex and interdependent. At the paper :
How Many Genes Can Make a Cell: The Minimal-Gene-Set Concept, the author writes :
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2227/
Several theoretical and experimental studies have endeavored to derive the minimal set of genes that are necessary and sufficient to sustain a functioning cell under ideal conditions, that is, in the presence of unlimited amounts of all essential nutrients and in the absence of any adverse factors, including competition. A comparison of the first two completed bacterial genomes, those of the parasites Haemophilus influenzae and Mycoplasma genitalium, produced a version of the minimal gene set consisting of ~250 genes.
That means, a minimal number of genes, proteins, and metabolic network is essential to be there to give life a first go, as to turn the car's engine on. In the same manner, as if you are sitting in a car, and try to turn it on if the pistons in the car are missing, or even if a tiny electric cable is broken and you turn the car key, nothing goes. But life did not have a helping hand to fix the problem, check what part was missing, and pluck a broken cable in. For self-replication to start, a minimal set of proteins was absolutely essential to start self-replication:
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1849-dna-replication-of-prokaryotes?highlight=dna+replication
So if only one protein, as helicase, for example, is missing, nothing goes. But why would a prebiotic soup produce a helicase protein by a lucky accident? Helicase by its own has no function, only when inserted and finely adjusted to do its job in the DNA replication mechanism. Intelligent agents have foresight. Such agents can determine or select functional goals before they are physically instantiated. That's a huge problem for natural mechanisms, where no intelligence is in place.
A minimal metabolic set was also required:
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t2371-how-cellular-enzymatic-and-metabolic-networks-point-to-design
a proeminent proposal, the so often mentioned RNA world, has also unbridgeable flaws, and cannot explain the origin of life adequately:
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t2024-the-rna-world-and-the-origins-of-life
The software/hardware in the cell, that is DNA, mRNA, RNA polymerase, tRNA's, the ribosome, tRNA Synthetases, protein chaperones etc, AND the software, that is the genetic code and translation mechanism, had to emerge fully setup and TOGETHER, since one would have had no use without the other. That's a classic catch22 problem:
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t2221-the-hardware-and-software-of-the-cell-evidence-of-design?highlight=hardware
amongst many other catch22 situations that plague OOL researchers:
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t2059-catch22-chicken-and-egg-problems-in-biology-and-biochemistry
Furthermore, you need homeostasis and a functional signaling network right from the start:
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t2448-howintracellular-calcium-signaling-gradient-and-its-role-as-a-universal-intracellular-regulator-points-to-design?highlight=calcium
the ability of uptake of nutrients and its availability was also essential. That illustrates the tremendous difficulties that abiogenesis research faces. As for example: where did glucose come from?
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t2419-where-did-glucose-come-from-in-a-prebiotic-world?highlight=glucose
Then you need a set of proteins that use in their action centers metal clusters. To make them is an enormous feat and requires whole production lines and irreducible multistep biosynthesis processes:
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t2445-amazing-molecular-assembly-lines-and-non-ribosomal-amino-acid-chain-formation-pathways-come-to-light
Another huge task is to create various cell codes, amongst them prominently the genetic code. The task is to create the code system itself, the director that plays the genetic piano, that is the gene expression network which determines which genes to turn on and off and express, find them in the genome, and express them at the right time, then encoding, transmission, and decoding of the information, and a translation system, where the genetic information is used to get useful proteins, the workhorses in the cell. The genetic code is more robust than one in a million:
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t2363-the-genetic-code-insurmountable-problem-for-non-intelligent-origin
Furthermore, you need error check and repair systems all along the production line: DNA replication errors are reduced 10.000.000.000 times !!
5ʹ => 3ʹ polymerization 1 in 100.000
3ʹ => 5ʹ exonucleolytic proofreading 1 in 100
Strand-directed mismatch repair 1 in 1000
Combined 1 in 10.000.000.000
Maintaining the genetic stability that an organism needs for its survival requires not only an extremely accurate mechanism for replicating DNA but also mechanisms for repairing the many accidental lesions that occur continually in DNA.
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t2043-dna-and-rna-error-checking-and-repair-amazing-evidence-of-design?highlight=error
the cell membrane could not have emerged as a simple vesicle, as Szostak et al try to popularize. Cell membranes are ENORMOUSLY COMPLEX, and membrane proteins for various functions are essential right from the start. Membranes and membrane proteins are interdependent and had to emerge together. I have various topics on the issue:
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/f62-cell-membrane-and-membrane-proteins
Abiogenesis is a huge topic. There are essentially two possibilities. Either life was created, or it was not. If it was not created, all that is left, are random, unguided, lucky events that brought to the most complex self-replicating factory in the universe, full of molecular machines and production lines.
Would you say that it is plausible that a tornado over a junkyard could produce a self-replicating machine, like John von Neumann's Universal Constructor?
Would you say that it is plausible that mindless random chance can write a book like a random letter generator using a computer pseudo-random number generator? 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 on the dune? The cell is far more complex than the most complex machine made by man, and the simplest cell stores as much information as contained in a CD.
There are numerous other topics on the issue, which cannot be mentioned here. But this small resume gives a picture.....
Sorry, I have not enough faith to be an atheist and believe, all this arose from a lucky accident.
Abiogenesis is impossible
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1279-abiogenesis-is-impossible